Naturally I wand a car I can summon from the pub that will drive me the 20km, over country roads, to my house while I mix cocktails or have a nap.
That may never happen, current technology does not seem up to it.
Then what? Modern cruise control, that keeps my car a constant distance form the car in front (unless it roars off at a speed higher that what I am comfortable with) is great. Helpful, especially in city driving.
I would appreciate "automated rumble strips" that warns me gently if I veer out of my lane.
Stopping at a parking spot, push a button, and park my car for me, less useful but still worth it.
But unless I have L5, and can turn my back on the road as I drink my vodka drink, (would that be L6? The impossible dream....) I am not interested in anything that lets me take my hands off the when whilst driving on any road. It seems too dangerous.
As a computer programmer I make my living building complex machines, and I have a very deep distrust of machines built by my comrades, at Tesla or Mercedes.
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I want public transportation infrastructure and far, far, FAR fewer cars. I think the US should strive to reduce car ownership by 75% over the next 20 years, at least in cities over a certain population size. I don't want any more money invested in self-driving cars. But I'm also a grown-up of a certain age and realize the bright-eyed 20-somethings don't understand the meaning of the word "consequences".
Self driving cars are much more likely to be public transport than individually owned. It's also extremely likely that it requires ride-sharing to be viable, which will substantially reduce traffic as well as car ownership (I suspect there may be enough cost pressure that most self-driving vehicles are more like minibuses than cars, which would also help a lot with pollution and congestion, but this may require regulatory pressure). Every conversation about the transition to EVs should be caveated with 'assuming car ownership stays the same because self-driving doesn't work (and that most of the world still does not manage to provide traditional public transport options good enough to replace cars)'.
(And yes, all of this means that Tesla and most other traditional automotive company's stated commercial strategy for self driving makes little sense)
"Self driving cars are much more likely to be public transport than individually owened"
I've only seen this as a 'just so' greenwash pr story from the automotive industry to offset the projected 300% increase in total road miles driven anually. Please explain why peole would be compelled to ditch their multidude of private cars just because they now come with a 24/7 free driver included?
Indeed, that's the elephant in the room. Self driving cars by virtue of being self driving can be sent on trips by themselves without requiring the driver to be present. The presence of a driver is a limiting factor, once that one drops away there will be many more trips. Suddenly kids can use the car and all kinds of pick up and delivery jobs become cost effective in a way that they are not today.
Ah yes! Would love to know how the crowd that protests better public transit, pedestrian paths and bike lanes as “taking away space from cars” will respond to roads being further clogged with… empty cars?
We’re really going to spend billions and billions on further car infrastructure, more reduction in space-constrained cities towards pedestrian and bike infrastructure, and even the displacement of existing homes and communities for… empty cars?! If it weren’t so depressing, it’s a perfect indictment of the US’s car culture taken full circle.
The problem everybody is ignoring with self-driving cars is that roads already are too expensive to maintain. Self driving cars will require tighter upkeep because they have lower margins for error, ballooning already ludicrous budgets to maintain the six million mile roadway network. Humans can drive drunk on wet gravel in the dark, but a computer needs full GPS, lidar, radar, and motion sensing cameras just to follow well painted paved roads. When there is no downtime and roads are constantly being used they will wear down faster and the computers will cause more crashes. Drains and manholes sink, paint fades, shoulders crumble, curbs deform, and bridges crack. Accelerate this by three, maybe four times and the entire nation will go bankrupt within a decade trying to pay to keep everything running just so autonomous cars can stay the default.
Presumably the car is going to pick someone up. That means it isn't parked being useless. If this starts working at scale, supply and demand will pull ridesharing costs down in a way that reduces ownership.
- regarding my city (Paris) most sides are literally full of parked empty cars. I don't have the data but anywhere you go - apart the biggest boulevards and walkable very-inner-center - you'll see way more parked cars than driving ones. Indeed, 50% of space is allocated to cars while they represent 13% of the commutes [1].
- Vehicle occupancy was 1.5 in 2019 and is declining (US) [0].
Because owning a car is expensive. And owning a self-driving car is likely to be even more expensive. If you can still get the same convenience for a far lower cost by just using a taxi, why would you continue to own a car? (Also, this is something the automotive industry does not want, as it will reduce their sales substantially. This is something that is claimed by self-driving companies which are not also automotive companies, and most people who analyse the economics of self-driving, especially looking at which technologies which are more likely to succeed).
rcxdude 22 hours ago | parent | context | flag | on: Mercedes beats Tesla to autonomous driving in Cali...
"Because owning a car is expensive."
That hasn't stopped families from getting multiple cars thus far, so why should that change?
"And owning a self-driving car is likely to be even more expensive."
I sincerely doubt that. Just think of all the potential for selling services and preload deals on what is basically a rolling networked computer with the user literally captured inside. You might have to pay more if you want the non-add supported version or the one without the bundled subscriptions.
1. Renting a car will become much more convenient. I can summon a car instead of having to search one 3 blocks away.
2. Selling a car with an L5-autopilot will have to include a manufacturer warranty/insurance in cases of crashes resulting from a fault of the autopilot. Tesla is already charging 10k (or 15k?) for their shitty self-driving-gimmick without a warranty. I expect L5-autopilots to cost much more and even come at a yearly subscription (which basically offsets the insurance and the required continued development). I don't expect the average person will (be able to) pay that subscription, when the far more reasonable solution is to rent a car.
Autonomous driving is just another safety and convenience feature, like cruise control or anti-lock brakes. It won't fundamentally change anything. I see no reason to give up owning my own cars even if they can drive themselves. The biggest reason is that I use my cars like a rolling storage locker or mobile base of operations when I'm out doing stuff. There's no way I'm going to deal with the hassle of shared vehicles.
You may not want to deal with the hassle but I wouldn’t assume that applies to everyone.
A fully autonomous car (however unrealistic it may be) would be a game changer simply for the economics alone. Not paying full tax, insurance etc for a vehicle while retaining all of the transport possibility would be incredibly tempting to anyone on a budget. Not having to build housing with parking included could do great things for housing availability.
I’m not saying any of this will happen but fully autonomous cars definitely would open the door to a lot of opportunities.
The economics won't work outside some small niches. Any sort of car sharing service means a business is managing that service and charging high fees for it, in addition to passing on tax and insurance expenses to customers. The taxes and insurance on my own cars are cheap.
Car sharing (short term rental) services already exist and can be a great option for childless young people who live in a dense city and seldom leave it. We don't need autonomous vehicles to make such services work. But they're totally unsuitable for how most Americans actually live. Like am I supposed to summon a shared vehicle every time I need to take one of my children to sports practices or games and hope it actually shows up promptly? And what if I need to evacuate the family in a natural disaster? The whole concept is just totally impractical regardless of the economics.
What often gets forgotten is that demand is not equally distributed throughout the day, week, month or year.
Everyone needs to go to school or sports practice at about the same time, everyone wants to go out on Friday nights and not Monday nights, everyone needs a car for monthly shopping at around the end of the month and everyone takes their vacation at around the same time each year due to school vacations.
When demand goes up, not only will it cost more, but there is no guarantee that you'll even get a car on time.
Uber and suchlike work currently because almost everyone uses them rarely, not four times a day.
I would expect self driving car to have much higher utilization most of the time. In addition you have people who can't/don't want to drive and would be able to use the service.
> practices or games and hope it actually shows up promptly?
Effectively it would be a much cheaper (supposedly) Uber/Lyft/etc. alternative.
> sports practices or games and hope it actually shows up promptly? And
That's a bit of corner case and generally I would expect it would reduce the number of households which have more than 1 car rather than a full replacement for car ownership.
You're really missing the point. It won't actually be cheaper except for the few customers who rely mostly on public transportation.
Driving children to activities is hardly a "corner case". It's bizarre how disconnected many HN users are from how regular middle class Americans live. Very few married couples with children would be able to manage with one car; they often need to go different places.
> And what if I need to evacuate the family in a natural disaster?
When I said it's a corner case but pasted the wrong sentence.
> You're really missing the point. It won't actually be cheaper except for the few customers who rely mostly on public transportation.
Am I? Why would you not expect it to become cheaper overtime? Uber/etc. needs human drivers who need to be paid and car sharing is inefficient because because most cars end up somewhere where none needs them unless there is continuous bidirectional traffic which is pretty rare. Self driving in theory would solve both these issues.
> Very few married couples with children would be able to manage with one car; they often need to go different places.
Yes well they could in theory get two separate self-driving taxis they don't have to always stay in the same car together.
> Am I? Why would you not expect it to become cheaper overtime?
Ride sharing services are amenable to network affects. I.e. they tend to end in monopoly. And monopolies are not known for reducing costs for the customer. If some effective regulation could counter the network effect, i.e. make it easier and cheaper to switch between different sevices, then a monopoly could be avoided.
> Not having to build housing with parking included could do great things for housing availability.
This is a purely political decision that does not depend on the availability of autonomous vehicles. It won't happen because it would reduce property prices.
Wait what, garages are required by low in US houses?! Doesn’t that piss off people that don’t own one? Do they cheat, like building without the garage but saying daughter’s room is the reconverted garage?
Autonomous driving would reduce car ownership but it almost would certainly make traffic worse. The cost to get driven around or have things delivered would be less while demand would stay the same.
Autopilots immediately get rid of that so I would disagree and argue the less humans the better. Have fun playing around with the "politeness" lever for example:
Sure, but that's just one part of the traffic congestion problem. Add more cars, and whatever efficiency gains you gained from eliminating weird and inefficient human behavior rippling outward and causing random traffic jams will be more than outweighed by the presence of additional cars. Each additional car takes up ~15 feet plus the distance to the next car.
That adds up very quickly, and when you consider the presence of intersections and traffic lights, you aren't dealing with an isolated roadway where cars just...drive. There are very real limits on how many cars you can stuff in a given stretch of road without radically redesigning roads in a way that makes them entirely unusable for pedestrians and cyclists (i.e. replacing traffic lights with slot-based intersections[0]), meaning there's an upper limit to how much self-driving cars can limit congestion under the most optimistic scenarios.
When self-driving cars eventually manage to take hold, no one reasonably expects car traffic not to increase. Right now, you park your car and do things. There's no real opportunity cost, because you can't be two places at once. When your car can drive around on its own, there's now a real opportunity cost. If it can earn money for you with no human present, there's going to be a massive incentive to let it do so. Stores will use self-driving delivery vehicles--either their own or as part of their own delivery sharing services--for deliveries.
Will there hopefully be big improvements in pedestrian safety and decreased accidents? I think so, though they certainly won't eliminate either. But there will be an incredible amount of increased traffic that goes along with it.
3x as many cars using infrastructure not made for that type of increase in demand will cause traffic jams. No matter what the auto-pilot friendly meter is set at.
Traffic lights are a bitch, changing lanes is inevitable, incidents are inevitable.
Self driving fleets will be driving around to avoid parking while staying in the high use areas, and contributing a lot to traffic, perhaps more than if everyone just had their own car.
This isn’t a weird thing if you live in a place with lots of taxis. Beijing, for example, 25% of the cars are taxis, and if it isn’t really busy, you’ll be able to get one just by raising your hand on a minorly busy street.
Taxis are too expensive in most of the developed world to be that ubiquitous. But they aren’t uncommon in countries where labor is cheaper, which makes me wonder if robo-taxis in the developed world will be as common as human taxis in the developing world.
Yes, there are a some things that will push towards higher traffic, including induced demand as it becomes cheaper and easier to move around. This would need to be offset by ride-sharing (and perhaps to some extend by the reduced demand for parking, though I don't think this can really increase throughput much). Like I said, I think ride-sharing, especially with higher capacity vehicles, can offset this significantly, but it may require regulatory pressure to get everyone to play ball on it.
Ride-sharing isn't going to solve these problems. At most, you fit up to five people in a single car. Most will carry fewer people, perhaps only one or two.
If you try to scale up ride sharing vehicles so they carry more people, you now have to build specialized vehicles that make multi-stop trips where you pick up multiple parties on-demand and drop them off at their individual locations. You've now eliminated the advantages of ride-sharing or taxis--they pick you up where you want and take you directly where you want to go--and managed to recreate a smaller bus. Let's call it a small, self-driving minibus that's not a bus system but a ride share system.
Only it's much worse than a bus, because bus routes are optimized in a way that vehicles picking up and dropping off passengers at what amounts to random locations on-demand never can be. Plus, you're adding even more vehicles to the road in addition to all the other self-driving cars that are running around making deliveries, looking for parking or running off to the outskirts of the city to kill some time as they wait for their human passenger to summon them again, or hustling to try to pick up passengers to make some money for their owners.
Heck, you can't even have them drive on access-limited busways or bus lanes because, by their very nature, they can't stick to dedicated routes.
Consider this: the Siemens S700 streetcar carries over two-hundred people in its usual configuration[0] with a length of just under 95 feet, or the equivalent of around ~6 cars that are almost bumper-to-bumper and trams can be built to be autonomous.
Self-driving cars have their benefits, but they're not an alternative to actual public transport solutions no matter how we try to dress them up. In the end, and as others have pointed out elsewhere in recent years, every new transit idea eventually boils down to a train. Or, in this case, an actual bus.
As someone who feels the same way, I’ve lost all hope for the US in this regard. SUV/truck sales have continued increasing with absolutely zero mainstream discussion about preventing pedestrian deaths. It’s legal to have push bars and tow hitches (thus inhibiting crumple zones) with no purpose other than “protecting” your vehicle at the expense of lives.
Even ostensibly pedestrian friendly cities don’t have sufficient political willpower to hand street space over to other modes of transit at anything resembling a fast enough rate. Everything needs to sit in a “pilot” for two years before action is taken.
I think they mean hitches that people leave on their vehicles when not towing. I agree that people should stow their hitches if not actively towing for a variety of reasons.
Yeah, I’m not referring to useful ones being actively used for towing. I’m referring to people that leave them in while driving around not towing anything. Some are designed to extend upward as well with no practical towing purpose. Look up pictures of collisions after someone has a tow hitch in and you’ll see what I mean.
This ship sailed like 60 years ago (blame your parents, speaking of consequences). At this point, autonomous driving is the best we can do in places like Los Angeles or San Diego.
Cities like San Antonio, TX with its Riverwalk and Atlanta with its Beltline not only show every other city a path towards walkable and sustainable future but also how a city can invest tens of millions in walkable infrastructure that yields billions in economic investment and development.
Also, I don't have a car so I've been taking bus, train, plane, and occasional car rental to travel between towns and cities. Recently I've started taking buses. What I've discovered is that I can get on the bus in the morning, plug in my phone and laptop to AC power, and using my mobile hot spot work all day while on the bus. The buses travel on interstate highways which have excellent continuous mobile service. Amtrak trains are awful for working because lack of stable internet connection.
San Antonio barely has a functional downtown, there's a grim shell of tourist oriented restaurants and hotels immediately around the river walk but really struggles to be a center of business. There are few condo buildings downtown. Unlike Dallas and Austin San Antonio hasn't really seen a resurgence of it's downtown region.
Furthermore the river walk was built in the 1930s as a way to improve property values, and remodeled a handful of times over the decades, that's not a recent innovation
The San Antonio river walk has been extended 15 miles along the San Antonio river north and south of the downtown area. It has spurred billions in investment along its banks. This is exactly what my point is, there isn't a resurgence in the downtown region because new development is happening north and south along the river.
The ship hasn't sailed at all, very few things in life are really set in stone (for example fossils).
Doesn't mean a transition is easy or cheap. Nor will it be quick. After spending years and years both in the US and Western Europe, I wish for a healthy mix of cars and public transport. As it stands, this means significantly and heavily reducing cars in high density settlements where public transport is already sufficient or generally viable in the future.
I absolutely love cars and driving but I despise them in city centers. So much property could be regained to improve the daily lives of millions of people in various ways. There is a multitude of projects which have shown how successful this approach is.
One such project is the ban of cars from the Jungfernstieg area in Hamburg. 5 years ago you would walk along Jungernstieg and hundreds of cars would pass by, especially young men showing off their shitty, loud, tuned Mercedes CLAs to everyone. Then the city reduced access for cars there upon popular request and repurposed some lanes for plants and bicycles.
It took a while until people understood [1] but eventually they did. All sources in German.
In the 70's, the city of Utrecht in the Netherlands was renovated from car central to bike central.
That only took a few years, bike paths aren't that expensive.
I guess you don't know anyone that makes under $50k/yr. in the US. I'm guessing you probably just associate with other high-paid techies who can't understand why commoners just can't "eat cake". Trust me: when a bus route is shut down because rich people sniffle at a 0.2% tax for something they'd be too embarrassed to use, thousands suffer. If you've never had to switch from a 30 minute bus ride to a 1hr bus ride because of this, you will not understand any of this debate or its consequences, as I stated.
I was merely saying that for public transportation to be viable again in these cities, someone has to act - either by lobbying loudly and/or by putting their money where their mouth is.
Proposing that autonomous driving is the only way forward sounds pretty sad to me as it doesn't solve the main issue with cars: their environmental impact.
I didn't mean it would be easy to do, nor that it is decently doable to use public transportation in these cities' current state. Sorry if it came out that way.
You should look at Dutch cities, for example Utrecht got rid of a huge chunk of hideous highway in the center of the city and in its stead is now a beautiful canal with one the busiest bike-traffic streets in all of Europe.
The housing stock of a city rebuilds itself over a 30-60 year timeframe though. So starting now doesn't preclude us getting ahead of things for the future. We need some gutsy Robert Moses type figures, utilizing modern knowledge and less racism.
This will never, and I mean absolutely never, happen in the United States, for three reasons:
(1) Weak Federal Government. The US is more a close collection of small nation states than a single country. The kind of infrastructure you’re talking about takes the kind of planning and funding that only a strong federal government can demand.
(2) Strong respect for property rights. In the US, it takes a lot to take away someone’s private property in order re-allocate it to a public good. By now, all of the cities have vested interests speaking for every square inch of viable property.
(3) Weak labor protections. This is a big one. Labor protections are so weak in the private sector that no one in their right mind would depend on public transport if they could help it. Most Americans are one illness away from being bankrupt, fired, and foreclosed on. To make it in America, by any definition, for a vast majority of Americans (and that includes people not traditionally called Americans, like undocumented immigrants) you must have access to a private vehicle because your work place could change in a heartbeat. You could have to move because your town no longer has any jobs for you. You could have to move into your car because of divorce/eviction/foreclosure etc…
People make fun of the F150 drivers with spotless beds because they’re used as glorified, cramped minivans but the truth is every one of those drivers has made that investment because they’re acutely aware of how precariously close they are having to use that truck to do hard labor.
> I want public transportation infrastructure and far, far, FAR fewer cars.
I also want this, but I grew up in LA and thus realize that there are places where this won't happen.
> I don't want any more money invested in self-driving cars.
I would take money invested in self-driving cars over money "invested" in public transit in wildly inefficient ways that's less investment and more waste.
The problem with the position that money should go to transit instead of self-driving cars is that transit is a largely intractable problem because it's a political one, where self-driving cars are very much not an intractable problem because they're a technical one.
40,000+ people die every year in the US in car accidents. Self-driving cars have the potential to stop many of those deaths (and the injuries not counted in that). Investment in public transit, when you consider the practical realities, largely doesn't. I understand why folks prefer public transit as a solution, but self-driving cars will be a lifesaving technology, and on that basis they seem clearly worthy of investment.
And this is all doubly true since this isn't government money - it's VCs and private companies putting their cash towards solving a problem that's beneficial towards society. Why hold up public transit as the alternative to self-driving investment when there is absolutely no chance that these dollars would ever go to public transit?
Investing in public transportation is a much more means tested way of reducing traffic accidents. Countries with good public transportation infrastructure have much less traffic deaths per 100k than car focused countries.
Why? Well it makes sense. Public transportation is much more safe all around as you are greatly reducing the amount of people in charge of machines capable of easily killing others.
So when you say "investing in self driving cars is investing in saving lives" you are right. It's just a much more inefficient way of doing it. Funny that you would consider public transportation a waste of money when looking at the actual data shows it's the most efficient way of moving people.
> Investing in public transportation is a much more means tested way of reducing traffic accidents.
Selection bias. By definition, you're looking at public transportation that exists. How many traffic accidents have been reduced by the bullet train in CA that has had $80 billion in investment so far? Zero.
> So when you say "investing in self driving cars is investing in saving lives" you are right. It's just a much more inefficient way of doing it.
In the cases in which money can be efficiently deployed, you are correct. But has the $80 billion (let's say that again - $80,000,000,000) spent on the CA bullet been more efficient than $80 billion of spending on self-driving cars? Clearly not.
The problem is that there are limits to how much money you can deploy towards public transit at any reasonable level of efficiency. This is true because of geography, and it's true because of politics. In those places where you can use money well on transit, I fully support it, but once you've exhausted those, you're still going to be left with five figures of traffic deaths a year that can be saved by self driving cars.
Also, you ignored my last paragraph - the comparison of spending money on transit vs. self-driving is not one that makes sense, because the money comes from two different places. VCs don't invest in public transit. Google doesn't invest in public transit.
Self-driving cars are something that will provide a huge societal benefit at no cost to taxpayers. If you're a member of the general public, spending money on public transit is infinitely more inefficient than spending money on self-driving cars, because that transit money could be used to benefit you in other ways, whereas the private funding to self-driving cars would probably just be returned to shareholders or invested in other tech companies if it weren't spent there.
Personally, I don't even think the two are in conflict. Many of the comments on this article vastly underestimate self-driving's impact. Self-driving creates motives to use transit because it allows the economics of automobile fleets to consolidate around shared use instead of ownership - the pull of "the robotaxi service is cheap", which can be pulled off with a regular, modest YoY cost reduction, will ultimately make people give up the car, and if they give up the car, they will then save a few more pennies by using the bus on occasion - the bus will be more frequent if it goes self-driving too, because it's the labor cost of drivers that determines a lot of the operational economics of transit fleets. Take out that cost and you can run a lot of tiny vehicles as well as huge trains, meaning transit, deliveries and taxis will blur together as modalities, no longer needing to provision for what pencils out with a human driver or to adopt an ownership model where the user has to buy for their largest use-case and eat the associated cost. They can go smaller without much issue and rent larger as needed. It's a different vocabulary of "what transit is" once you add that dynamic.
The political element follows directly from that: if you aren't a car owner, but you are a bus and taxi user, you stop caring about parking and the specifics of your commute route. The robocar service will lobby the city for their own efficiency in your place - and what benefits their efficiency also benefits the users. So in one stroke you end up with an urban population that is aligned to empty out huge swathes of road space and garages for other uses such as bus lanes, bike parking, etc. People will feel safer on a bike because the cars will drive safely, and this is found in studies to be the main bottleneck to bicycle usage, so investment in dedicated bike infra could flatline in a self-driving environment, and bike usage will still rise!
It's hard to find an angle where there is truly a downside - the doomer response is kneejerk.
What about the inside? I live in NYC and its metro and bus system is amazing, and even then it's still worse than what I experienced in Asia, we're for example in Seoul, I did not have to walk more than five minutes to be able to get on a train or bus and when I got off, I similarly did not have to walk more than five minutes to get to my end destination.
Then I guess it's their loss. Unless they're unable to use public transport, I shouldn't have to have the externalities of them using cars, such as carbon emissions, parking space that would otherwise be used, noise and light pollution, etc.
subways, trams and buses. good systems can easily be faster than cars dinner thru don't have traffic and you don't need to find parking. for short distances, bikes are also great.
If the rail isn’t faster than the car then it won’t ever see wide scale adoption. It’s not even remotely difficult to clear this bar when the political will exists. Why slow down when there’s no actual need to?
Well sure. We can’t get high speed rail in the country or even in California. I’ve heard the arguments & it is all weak sauce.
The major industrial countries have it. Here is is automakers who fight this, nowadays it is Elon Musk, who distracts with BS single file tunnels (Boring Company pushing Teslas in a tunnel) or hyperloop nonsense.
This needs to be a federal infrastructure along the lines of the federal highway system.
This country lacks the national drive and will, which is impeded by Corporate & affiliates like NADA your local 1% in every county in the US.
Just off the cuff saying things like this makes it seem you are the one that doesn’t understand consequences. The American economy is unfortunately driven by car ownership. So unless you also have a way to change almost every facet of American life in the next 20 years, you’re just blowing smoke.
That being said, I would love it if car reliance was drastically reduced. But it’s not going to happen.
If the US wanted to become less car dependent and a world leader in public transport, it could and would. It won’t be easy, it will take decades, but it can certainly happen.
And without a doubt the economy would be just fine in the long run.
It’s survived a depression, WW2, bailing out Europe, Cold War, Vietnam, Iraq, 9/11, Afghanistan and the 2008 crash after all.
Sure, not arguing that, but it would take an overhaul of almost everything, that will not happen in a span of 20 years. But at the end of the day, the US doesn’t want this, at either the policy or the civilian level. We like going into 60k of debt to drive our big SUVs just a little too much.
I live in the UK and public transport is actually very unreliable. Cancellations and delays are frequent, strikes happen a dozen times a year, many services have an hour between trains... public transport will take you much linger to get anywhere and you'll be able to transport much less. The car has been a blessing when shopping.
> I want public transportation infrastructure and far, far, FAR fewer cars. I think the US should strive to reduce car ownership by 75% over the next 20 years, at least in cities over a certain population size.
Do you want to limit the cars people own or do you want to limit how much cars are used?
I could reduce the number of my cars to 1 and wouldn't be driving any less. Or I could buy more cars and still would not be driving more than I do today (but might be able to choose a smaller more efficient one for a trip).
What about a taxi? What about a private bus company? I'd argue that even if you don't like or trust your government there are environmental, economic, and infrastructure issues affecting the whole world that result from an overreliance on private cars. Surely you can find a way to maintain your liberty without having a car sitting in your driveway all day.
Sorry cities are much more efficient than any other form of human living [0]. It is suburbs and rural sprawl that creates the energy waste. Population drift towards the latter may cause the hollowing of cities which lead to crime and transport inefficiency.
It doesn't matter if you use half as much energy per capita if the thing you created results in 50x more people. When I say destroy the cities I mean to include the populations in them. Through policy you make their lives so miserable that they are not replaced generationally. A similar thing was done to rural areas, their people were systematically destroyed through policy.
Most of the people on HN seem to be city-dwelling pro centralization and centralized control. It seems to be jarring for them to see their own policies of openly promoting the destruction of others lives and way of living directed back at them.
I don't know what battle you're trying to fight but HN is not the place for it. The flamebait you repeatedly posted in this thread was beyond the pale. If you keep posting this sort of comment, we'll end up having to ban you. We've had to warn you about this kind of thing many times before:
I explicitly stated we'd create government policies which would result in cratering their population just like we did in rural areas. Are you imagining rural areas in the US were "mass exterminated?"
"Cities are more efficient, suburbs and rural sprawl are inefficient and bad" depends on:
A: the design of the suburb
B: the underlying economy they're built in
C: cultural factors.
When the US contained major manufacturing, it was efficient to have large suburban sprawl - you could build spread out industrial hubs on the outskirts of town.
When the cities were not safe, it did not matter what you said - people left.
"Efficiency" is not a magic word, it has to apply to a particular resource, and does have to consider all costs. Cities are in fact, more efficient in terms of transit costs (of all types).
How could you possibly imagine the average city resident uses more energy when dwellings are smaller, newer on average (more energy efficient), and residents are less likely to own a car?
I do not use a washing machine, but that's not the point. Do I need to have some sort of primitive lifestyle to dare say a lot of what we have shouldn't be a guarantee? Don't understand why you need to get aggressive.
I didn't even mention these which are likely far from the priority or realistic, what about one day shipping?
Do you realize that the denser something is, the more efficient it is? Same is true of transistors and cities, and for the same reason: space unused is wasted.
I don't think there's a productive conversation here anymore, clearly you have some personal vendetta against cities based on some rural experiences you've had.
Are you imagining rural towns were the victims of mass murder?
People talk about the goal of destroying rural and suburban life through policy all the time. If you found it jarring for someone to openly advocate for the destruction of your way of living, maybe take that into consideration.
What policies "destroy[ed] rural and suburban life?" Do you think people moved away from rural areas into cities because of some policy to destroy them, rather than wanting to find work through jobs located in cities? Without specific examples I really find it difficult to understand your philosophy.
> If you found it jarring for someone to openly promote the destruction of your way of living, maybe take that into consideration.
No because you are advocating for an equivalence which, to my knowledge, does not exist.
Dismantle public transportation, create trade policy which destroys their jobs, force their children into schools which promote lifestyles they abhor and promote childlessness, subsidize voluntary sterilization and market it to the kids in the schools, etc. These are all corollaries to what was done in rural areas.
Recently I was reading that in Europe, most cars sold don't even have automatic transmission, yet the drivers there are much safer than than people in the US or Australia.
There was some speculation that because they shift gears manually, they have to pay more attention to the road and can't do things like drink coffees while driving. They also enjoy driving a lot more than we do.
I wonder if other technology would have a similar effect of ultimately making driving less safe and enjoyable. I've never driven a super-modern car, but I do know that I zone out a bit when cruise control is on...
After a recent 3 week driving trip through Europe, I can anecdotally back this up. It’s not even the manual transmission, but also the much smaller roads with no shoulder where at times you meet a car, have to slam on the brakes, and decide in the moment whether you or the other car will back up to a turn out. You have to pay constant attention and there’s little room for looking at phones, eating, etc. In the US we have such large roads and shoulders that you can zone out and are more easily tempted to take your eyes off the road.
This is backed by infrastructure studies. It's called traffic calming and it's done on purpose in places with advanced infrastructure such as the Netherlands.
In the same vein, I encourage neighbors to park their cars on the street rather than in their garage or driveway so the neighborhood street becomes narrower for traffic due to a row of parked cars on each side of the street. Works better than posted speed limit.
Demonstrably incorrect on my street, which has hotly contested on-street parking that narrows the roadway to a single lane. Cars have to stop and reverse into parking spaces to pass each other. Yet children play ball games in the street, and stop to move out of the way of the cars, with the cars barely needing to brake.
Children are not mindless suicide machines; they learn at a tremendous rate from their environment. The children you see around you might not survive on my street, but that's because they haven't lived there for all of their lives.
Lead footing is a phenomenon exclusive to automatics. Basically, you are on a 35mph road maybe, you lead foot some, the car shifts from third to the overdrive gear, now you are going like 45 or 50mph with the engine barely making any noise, you thinking this is just fine. On a manual, you'd know if you were in third and went to 50mph—the engine would be howling at another couple thousand rpm depending on the car. Going into your overdrive gear would require a conscious effort to shift into it.
That‘s just silly - I drive my (manually shifted) car basically solely in the highest gear in non-city traffic and have the same effect. Nothing to do with automatic, but with powerful cars.
The driver test is super hard and expensive in France. Never got it for this reason even after spending 1k euro on it. Came to the US and got the driver license in a week for like 200$ including lessons lol
> Never got it for this reason even after spending 1k euro on it.
Really? In order to pass the test you have to pass the theory test which is just about knowing the rules of the road. Yes many experienced drivers wouldn't always pass it first time, especially when it has been a long time they got their license and laws have changed but you get it quite easily by just ready the "rulebook" and do trial tests at your driving schools until you pass tests. It is no different than passing any easy test as a student.
As for the practice, you get something like mandatory 20 to 30hours with an instructor. And most of it is just about applying the rules you already know by having passed the test above. It takes less than a handful of hours to master clutch and gearbox, same for parallel parking, rest is applying the priority rules and showing the instructor...and then the examiner that you apply them and give a quick look in all directions and your blind zone whenever you change lane or direction. It is more about feeling comfortable and confident on the car than learning really.
Me and a bunch of friends failed the test the first time, and then I had to wait 6 months to pass it again. If you try to pass it without going through a school it’s the same wait time.
The booklet is also pretty big, and the trial tests are pretty hard with hard questions.
In the US I just went there and passed it on the spot. Super easy. No way anyone with half a brain could fail it. The code book is so small, there are barely any rules compared to France. Worse than that you’re barely supervised. Some lady yelled “no phones allowed” to a girl passing the test on the computer with her family around her lol.
Then I just drove with my gf who already had the driver license (legal in the US). Took 2 hours of lessons. 2 weeks later I was passing the driving test. Super easy as well.
> There was some speculation that because they shift gears manually, they have to pay more attention to the road and can't do things like drink coffees while driving.
I am highly skeptical of this. I am sure auto insurers in the US have looked at the statistics, and if it were true, they would be charging higher premiums for automatics than manuals.
I doubt it. There are so many vehicles, especially historically, from Toyota Tacomas, Jeep Wranglers, Honda Civics, to yes, Porsche 911s that are available with both AT and MT. Considering the number of vehicles insured in the US, and the fact that you can do paired comparisons like this, if there is a meaningful difference, insurers would see it.
Studies haven't really shown which transmission type is safer. Automatic and CVT transmissions do allow you to keep both hands on the wheel at all times, while manual transmissions may require more attentive driving. Your driving habits will play a large role in your safety. Safety features available for both automatic and manual vehicles can make a difference, too.
I’m still skeptical there’s enough data to distinguish from the obvious selection effects. The difference in safety between manual and automatic 911s probably tells you essentially nothing about whether a random driver would be safer driving a random automatic or a random manual.
It is hard to distinguish indeed, since there is no noticeable difference.
Jokes aside, as a data scientist of a long career, I don’t share your skepticism. It would be a hilariously easy task to extract this information from the data with the variables involved and the records insurance companies are able to keep.
As an American who drove a manual car in Chicago for a few years, trust me, there are ways to eat and drink while rowing your own gears.
Most European countries have far higher barriers to entry for driver's licenses compared to the USA. A German driver's license costs around $2000 to obtain. I spent $2000 on my first car (in 2018). Combine high financial barrier with competent public transit, and people who would be bad drivers just don't drive at all.
UK here. I have driven both autos and manual cars.
It barely takes any mental energy to drive manual. After you learn it it's just not a big deal.
I drink coffee whilst driving.
Main difference is that American roads are big, grid layout, traffic light to runway to traffic light style things. UK roads weave inbetween buildings. It requires more attention.
> in Europe, most cars sold don't even have automatic transmission
Something like 60% to 80% of new cars in European countries are now sold with automatic transmission. And this figure is growing year to year. It will take a decade or two for the old manual cars to get replaced, though.
This is a very recent phenomenon driven by hybridization and fuel regulation (auto get better mileage because they have more gear). But you are right, they sell a lot more auto nowaday than they used to.
I'm from EU, and i've been driving both manual and automatic transmission. I can testify that auto transmission is safer, your hands are 100% at the steering wheel. Most people cannot turn and change gear at the same time.
I've also spend quite a bit time in US driving. EU is safer as narrower streets/lanes and smaller number of lanes (on highways), closer parked cars and pedestrians/bicycles forces you to pay much more attention.
Sweden has very strict tests for the drivers license, and afaik you can easily pass those without ever turning (more than a fairly small bit) and changing the gear at the same time. With the planning you are supposed to learn this is kind of a natural consequence.
There a loads of cars with automatic transmission in Europe - especially the newer, medium to premium level cars. But it definitely isn‘t as prevalent as in the US.
It is no problem at all to drink coffee or even eat while driving a manual car, so no idea where this comes from ;)
Hehe that has nothing to do with having to watch the road because of stick shifting, that's the result of road safety design and setting very high demands on driver's permit. Where I'm from, it takes an average of 40 hours of driving lessons in which they drill you an driving safely, before you're able to pass the driver's license exam.
I'm sure it has more to do with the fact that roads are well-designed in Europe. While in the US it's not at all uncommon to have 4-6 lane roads in front of houses meaning drivers have to watch every house for a possible car pulling out of their driveway.
Americans should look outward with humility to policies which are proven to be effective. However, that may be bridge too far, given the inward looking hubris which has bedeviled road safety in America.
Hmmm, being from Europe and having driven on a holiday in the US, I'd say that people are more careful and respect rules better in the US than in Europe (certainly than Southern Europe, but even in parts of the North). Driving in US reminded me of driving in the UK.
Of course, US is a big country and my perception could be not very typical. Extrapolating from one data point is dangerous. It's like comparing driving in Naples and Amsterdam. Both are Europe, but the driving experience is fairly dissimilar.
I agree, driving in the US (only went to Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia) is more relaxed than in Germany and driving is less aggressive (yeah, there is the occasional nutjob in Atlanta). I like the four-way stops in the US, which forces people to communicate with each other.
> There was some speculation that because they shift gears manually, they have to pay more attention to the road and can't do things like drink coffees while driving.
I don't think its the gears, Its a combination of education. You have to pass a reasonably intense exam that requires coaching and also pass written test (unless you're Belgium, although that might have changed)
Moreover road laws tend to be much more strictly enforced. And not just parking laws.
> Recently I was reading that in Europe, most cars sold don't even have automatic transmission
I don't have any numbers regarding sales, but after renting 10s of cars in Europe during the last decade, it seems like they almost never have any manual cars anymore. In some countries, the entire fleet doesn't even include any manual ones anymore, I was told the last time I wanted to rent a car.
That’s true for rentals, they don’t want idiots screwing up their gearboxes. But, most cars on the streets are manuals, and you can’t get a driver’s license if you don’t know how to drive one.
That is only true in poorer European countries with older, cheaper vehicle fleets. Most new car sales in more affluent countries no longer have manual transmissions. Modern automatics with 8+ forward gears or CVTs are more fuel efficient than manuals and easier to integrate as part of hybrid systems. And of course EV sales are growing rapidly: they don't use conventional transmissions at all.
New car sales - of course, but average car age even in Germany is around 10 years, it gets better only in wealthy small countries like Switzerland or Luxembourg.
I seriously doubt there’s a majority of automatic in
Germans and French’s individual buyers. In fact most people that don’t rent cars don’t are very hesitant when required to drive one (if that ever happen)
I don't know, anecdotally, all my friends (besides me, if I count as a friend of mine) drive automatic.
> and you can’t get a driver’s license if you don’t know how to drive one.
This is definitely not true in a bunch of countries, where you get to chose if to take a license for manual or automatic, where if you chose manual you can drive both and if you chose automatic, you obviously only get to drive automatic ones.
Just now I went to Avis.com , set pick up in Rome tomorrow, drop off in Rome the day after, and it said there are 6 types of cars available, and 5 of those types have manual transmissions.
I was really shocked in italy by the standard of driving. I was fully expecting full on car honking road rage in cities and uber fast driving on the motorways/highways.
Florence was incredibly calm, respectful and considerate driving. The Motorways everyone was doing just under the speed limit.
My italian friends said that its not the case in the north.
Call them instead and ask. Multiple times they have manual available on the website, but after choosing it and going there to pick it up, it turns out they don't even have manuals in their fleet! Incredible
Completely anecdotal but I have never been the -source- of an accident in 30 years of driving. I have been hit 4 times by people being careless. I have always driven stick because I prefer the control of gearing and it kind of gives me something to do. If there comes a day I can't get a stick shift in a new car I will likely just keep fixing up older cars. The only I would replace that feeling if I can completely trust AI in cars to get me to work/destination without paying any attention at all.
> I would appreciate "automated rumble strips" that warns me gently if I veer out of my lane.
Lane departure warning systems do exactly that. My mazda does this and basically between smart cruise, lane departure warnings, and big old alarms when someone in front of me suddenly hits the break, driving is SO MUCH MENTALLY EASIER. And don't get me started about blindspot alerts and HUDs oh man so amaze.
I still think Level 2 assist is worse than no assist. But level 1 assist is fucking amazing.
I agree about the parking thing. Its such a novelty thing like "hey hey hey bro check it out" and press a button. "ooooh! Aaaaah" meanwhile I can do the same maneuver in say 10 seconds flat since I've been doing it so long. Honestly maybe in 10 years the feature will be so smooth people will question how to even park without it, like rear cameras.
I rented a car with that kind of assistance yesterday and I found it annoying that the steering wheel give you some resistance when you want to go back to the main lane after overtaking a car on the opposite one!
You need to use turn signals. Using those the algos know what line crossings to expect. My dad went through this because it forced him to start signalling. This is also probably why I'm seen more and more BMWs use turn signals... maybe it wasn't faulty turn signal wiring after all (/s)
Thanks for that. I definitely use turn signals when changing lane to overtake but indeed I don't necessarily do it when returning to the main lane because it is implicit. I am not supposed to drive on the opposite lane indifinetely once the overtake is complete and I am faster than the other car so no warning is needed.
Yeah, its a good habit to have anyways that you turn, you signal at least 3 seconds ahead of time, that way drivers around you can react. Predictability is king on the road.
If you live in a high traffic area having your car drive you through the stop and go is currently possible and a huge quality of life increase. Stop and go traffic is 100% the worst experience when driving, having that automated is awesome.
You reminded me of the biggest annoyance I have with the systems that work in stop-and-go traffic that I've tried -- they often leave too much space before they 'go' and where I live, that's just an invitation to have someone from the next lane over jump in. So the car waits too long, takes off quickly to fill the gap, and then has to brake suddenly because someone else already took that gap. You end up being yanked around, and if the driver behind you is a bit of a leadfoot can result in you getting rear ended. I've seen it happen a few times when I still commuted.
Frankly? I want another 10-15 years of independence for my dad. His eyesight is failing due to a mix of wonky genetics, he's fine driving in daylight, but already has started being much more cautious driving around dusk.
I want an AR display that will highlight the road and objects in it. I was LiDAR sensors hitting the brakes if it detects catastrophe. I want the car to augment and extend his ability to use it.
That's the big sell of self driving cars. Not "push a button and be whisked away," but having your own abilities enhanced by machine input that would otherwise be inaccessible to you.
I was impressed with my grandma's foresight when she moved house to within walking distance of a station, so a few years later she could give up the car and maintain her independence and health (from exercise).
That currently seems the safer bet than hoping for AI driving/aids, but isn't an option in much of the USA.
I mean that's a bus or Bus Rapid Transit, because a train requires dedicated infrastructure and is a fixed route. A bus can route around problems where a train cannot.
In Boston they're trying to connect North Station and South Station, a distance of about 5 miles. The cost is at least $10 billion.
A bus is still limited to highway speeds for any significant distance. It solves the issue of not needing to drive, but it doesn’t provide a sufficiently faster alternative.
According to labor union association AFL-CIO, the highest CEO compensation in 2021 was $835 million[1], less than a tenth the cost of the $10 billion estimate for the North-South connector.
Also, I would expect at least a few cost overruns.
Yeah, the highest paid single individual person on that list gets only a measly 8% of the total estimate per year, therefore we shouldn't tax the rich.
The extreme mental gymnastics some people will go to to rationalize the current state of the world absolutely blows my mind.
They were pointing out that you jumped from the CEO compensation in general they mentioned, to just pointing at one person, which does not reflect the state of CEO remuneration (and the wealthy in general, which they also referenced), at all.
You don't get the economies of scale needed to justify high-quality, regular rail service along the more quiet routes.
Look at China's high speed rail network. Only a small minority of routes manage to break even, and the rest of them are a huge financial burden that the CCP just accepts because achieving a huge engineering feat creates a sense of national pride.
It also doesn't have to be profitable. Transportation is a service that's critical to economic function. There's no reason not to shift the cost of taxpayer funded vehicle infrastructure to transit infrastructure.
What those utilizing the transportation network are willing and able to pay to use the network will be directly proportional to how critical the usage of that transportation network is to economic function.
So there is never any economic need to transfer the cost of using the transportation network from those using it, to taxpayers at large. In fact, socializing costs of transportation is what can cause economically non-viable transportation services to grow in usage, and in doing so, burden the economy with loss-making transportation.
> So there is never any economic need to transfer the cost of using the transportation network from those using it, to taxpayers at large.
Like most things in a thriving, functioning society, socializing the costs is what makes it work. Let me reframe your statement:
> So there is never any economic need to transfer the cost of using the education system from those using it, to taxpayers at large. In fact, socializing costs of education is what can cause economically non-viable education services to consume greater amounts of resources, and in doing so, burden the economy.
Yet this same education system is what has produced a society capable of enormous economic output over the relatively short history of public education.
Your argument is the most basic of libertarian nonsense that would argue that in past decades would argue that tax dollars collected in UT shouldn't fund interstate highways in CA.
>Like most things in a thriving, functioning society, socializing the costs is what makes it work.
What is it about transportation wherein socializing the costs of using it would make it work?
Toll roads work all around the world, and better than the routes where the costs are socialized.
>Yet this same education system is what has produced a society capable of enormous economic output over the relatively short history of public education.
The modern education system arose largely in the 1930' "high school movement", which was almost all locally funded and controlled, and thus subject to very little socializing of costs.
As the costs of providing education have become increasingly socialized, the spending efficiency has decreased as rent-seeking institutions like teachers unions have taken over:
>Your argument is the most basic of libertarian nonsense that would argue that in past decades would argue that tax dollars collected in UT shouldn't fund interstate highways in CA.
I never made a libertarian argument. I made an appeal to basic economics. That triggered your anti-libertarian ideological defense mechanism, which has been instilled in the populace by the rent-seeking institutions that rely on centralized control:
> As the costs of providing education have become increasingly socialized, the spending efficiency has decreased as rent-seeking institutions like teachers unions have taken over:
I have nothing else to say but to point at this comment and say that calling a teacher's union a 'rent-seeking institution' is nonsense. As a libertarian you should be cheering for unions because they are the natural consequence of workers using their power in a free market to come together and negotiate as a block.
>calling a teacher's union a 'rent-seeking institution' is nonsense.
The evidence, an example of that which I provided, shows that they are.
May I ask if you or your relatives are in a union? If so it may be hard for you to be objective about this.
>As a libertarian you should be cheering for unions because they are the natural consequence of workers using their power in a free market to come together and negotiate as a block.
The unions that exist today are not operating in a free market. They leverage laws that mandate the employer - which in the case of the public sector, is the government - to engage in collective bargaining with them, to the exclusion of all other parties.
This provides them with an extreme barrier to competition from other workers, which in turn allows them to extract economic rent.
No, I nor are any of my relatives are in a union. That will not be an avenue of argument for you.
Second, the businesses that exist today are not operating in a free market. They leverage laws that allow them to prevent employees from leveraging their ability in engage in collective action. Additionally teachers are not required to join a union; the fact that teachers join the union and engage in collective bargaining is a result of their natural collective power. If there is a refusal to engage in collective bargaining then they can strike, both of which are natural consequences of free market unionization.
I am still not seeing where you are claiming there is 'economic rent' other than the fact that unions exist and you seem to dislike that. Given your post history, that seems to be where you actually lie.
>>No, I nor are any of my relatives are in a union.
That's a relief. When someone has a financial conflict of interest in how the public perceives a particular political issue, then it becomes very hard to appeal to their reason and objectivity.
>>That will not be an avenue of argument for you.
I'm not looking for an avenue of argument. I'm looking to reach a consensus based on the evidence.
>>Second, the businesses that exist today are not operating in a free market. They leverage laws that allow them to prevent employees from leveraging their ability in engage in collective action
None of that is true. There are no laws that allow them to suppress their employees' ability to engage in collective action. Employees are free to quit, boycott a company, make collective bargaining a condition for their employment, etc. There is no law that deprives them of any of their contracting rights for the benefit of the employer.
I am open to seeing arguments/evidence demonstrating otherwise.
>If there is a refusal to engage in collective bargaining then they can strike, both of which are natural consequences of free market unionization.
1. The law prohibits a company from negotiating with anyone but a union if a majority of a work unit vote to unionize. This prohibition extends to workers who did not vote to unionize, as well as applicants outside of the company's workforce who did not participate in the vote. This law, which the political left celebrates, is a blatant violation of contract liberty.
2. The law prohibits companies from requiring, as a condition of employment, to not unionize. By prohibiting these so-called Yellow Dog contracts, the law also blatantly violates contract liberty.
3. The law prohibits a company from firing workers who strike: if a company hires replacement workers and the strike ends, the company is not only required by law to employ the workers who ended the strike, but to continue employing the replacement workers.
Being restricted from engaging in hiring replacement workers without conditions restricts the company's free market rights, in order to make it as difficult as possible for companies to disassociate themselves from unions. In a free market, one would be free to disassociate themselves from a union.
>I am still not seeing where you are claiming there is 'economic rent' other than the fact that unions exist and you seem to dislike that.
Unions are able to derive above-market wages by restricting the contracting rights of the employer to negotiate with parties other than themselves. I've already explained that and you seemingly totally ignored me, which is concerning, given it make the prospects of a rational discussion quite dim.
Unions extracting economic rents is a very widely studied and well understood phenomenon:
Libertarianism has been exposed as bullshit over and over again. To dismiss these well-documented concerns as "ideological defense mechanisms" is just sad.
FWIW homeopaths and chiropractors use the same sad defense.
Not everything needs to be done for purely economic purposes - that includes the creation and maintenance of transportation networks. Societies are free to have broader sets of objectives.
Of course. I was pushing back against the claim in the original post, which argued for socializing transportation costs on economic grounds:
>Transportation is a service that's critical to economic function.
Transportation is not amongst the subset of goods/services where having individual market actors pay for its production leads to economically sub-optimal under-production.
Whether transportation should be subsidized for other reasons is an entirely different subject.
I am a bit less convinced about the "optimalities" in practice, because differences in funding costs, risk preferences etc. can lead to inefficiencies in the real world that a state actor could bridge.
For example: corporations have a lot of secondary objectives beyond profit such as limited volatility of profits that can suppress beneficial activities. State actors can take different risks and absorb such volatility by funding activities and then recovering via taxes (simplistically). In the financial markets this gets often arbitraged away, but in slow and high cost markets, those arbitrageurs aren't necessarily forming.
Similarly, time preferences can stop long-term beneficial activities by corporate actors.
In the end, it is about bridging different preferences. There are also issues of resource pooling and coordination, but those are easier to overcome.
Yes, market friction like what you note is possible. But in theory, those points of friction and inefficiency can be overcome by the market with innovations in financial instruments.
Like many people, I cross a train track on my commute. There even used to be a commuter rail line that stopped there. Now it is all freight.
Like many freight lines, it carries a lot of "bomb trains" running oil between the fields and the refineries.
Eventually -- not tomorrow, probably more in the 30-50 year range -- those bomb trains are going to stop running.
That is going to leave a lot of track underutilized, and adding passenger rail back to these lines is one way to keep it cost effective to keep them open for freight. You have some overhead to re-add minimal stations -- concrete pads for disembarking, roofs optional -- but the tracks already existing covers a lot of the cost and complications.
I’ve been using self-driving cars for a while in SF. I just order one in the app, it comes, drives me to where I want to go. It’s like uber except that it’s for free (for now) and no driver.
> I would appreciate "automated rumble strips" that warns me gently if I veer out of my lane.
The Toyota CH-R my wife had did that. Above 50 km/h / 30mph the steering wheel would gently "shake" if you tried to switch lanes without using your blinker.
Several brands/models offer that, sadly sometimes as an extra (FWIW I think it should be illegal to offer that as an extra: it should either come stock or not be offered at all... Safety features shouldn't be something you need to pay for).
It's not at all self-driving though.
I also enjoyed the side mirrors indicating (using some kind of yellow LED) when there was a vehicle in the blind spot.
Safety features cost money; it doesn’t bother me for them to be optional, especially since the alternative for novel ones is more likely “not offered” or “everyone is forced to buy them” rather than “given away for no charge”.
You can (and we have mandated some). Most of those that are now mandated followed a pattern of being developed as an optional, premium-charge feature, which is unsurprising and probably drives much of the development of new safety features.
Modern cruise control, that keeps my car a constant distance form the car in front (unless it roars off at a speed higher that what I am comfortable with) is great. Helpful, especially in city driving.
I would appreciate "automated rumble strips" that warns me gently if I veer out of my lane.
Stopping at a parking spot, push a button, and park my car for me, less useful but still worth it.
The decision making technology is definitely possible, not this year or next but in a decade? Sure, plausible.
However removing all the sensors, reducing redundancy, from a high speed moving car to save manufacturing costs and increase profits is in direct conflict with safe driving for the passenger and other people on the road.
Many more sensors, much more redundancy, roads that give feedback, networked cars that give feedback, satellites for near realtime external updates, all will make cars eventually drive themselves better than humans.
But certainly not "just cameras" that cannot even handle weather without severely compromised guessing. You don't do that in a physical world requiring safety.
I want the technology to prevent others from driving dangerously.
And myself, by extension. We all have human moments.
Running red lights, mounting pavements to cut corners, brake-checking, dangerous overtaking, inadequate stopping distances, distractions, micro sleeps, accidently accelerating into shop fronts, and just generally phasing out because you are human.
I personally hate anti-social driving behaviour.
Brake Checking is the stupidest thing I have ever witnesses. It feels like it's becoming a trend here in Australia. Did it originate as aggressive behaviour in the US, or Russia maybe for insurance?
I drive every day in Australia, thankfully not in peak hour but hundreds of km per week and I have never seen brake checking, didn't know it was a thing, had to Google the term to find out what it means.
I have noticed a lot of people failing to keep a safe distance from the car in front (tailgating), though, which is far stupider to me. Maybe the two are related?
I don't think I've ever once been "break-checked" in 15 years of driving. Is that something that only happens to people who habitually drive too close to the car in front of them? (Tailgating as we call it here.)
> I am not interested in anything that lets me take my hands off the when whilst driving on any road. It seems too dangerous.
Hyundai has a lane-keeping assist that centers your car in the lane. It is _very_ good, although of course I am nearly always ready to take over if needed.
IMO, smart cruise control + lane assist gets you a great deal of convenience for both day-to-day city traffic, and long-distance trips. The automation is good enough that it is helpful and makes driving much easier, but not so good that your mind switches completely off, so that you're always ready to take over if needed.
I would say, drive me long distances on the high way. The rest (last mile, city country side) I can do myself. It also aligns with the fact that it is easier to make autonomous driving work for high ways than inside cities etc.
This would make taking an airplane less tempting and as my car can fit the whole family we do not need to fill up 4-5 seats in an airplane and we use much less CO2 per passenger.
I reckon a "drive 1-2kms on a designed route and park" capability alone would be pretty useful for city planning. Imagine if instead of needing to put parking spaces everywhere, planners could just plan robust routes that any car could use to go and park itself. You could could achieve it today by telling people to just walk from a car garage, but the uproar whenever there isn't enough parking right next to the exact place they want to stop is too huge for it to ever happen
I’ve been very impressed with some openpilot forks. In some instances I managed to drive 70 miles on the highway without having to make a single correction. It’s about what I want from self driving - keep me in my lane, and keep me from rear-ending the car in front of me. I would never trust tech to let me take a nap while driving.
I want a car that will drive the hours of boring ride on the Autobahn. It should take over once I am on the Autobahn, then drive by itself while I am sleeping/working/playing, and then drive to a special "cool-down" parking lot, where it will take a few minutes mandatory break to make sure the driver has time to wake up. From there I will take over again.
Why buy "self-drive", when you can already pay a human to drive for a tiny fraction of the price?
I haven't driven a car for over ten years, and I don't miss a thing. No traffic misery. No parking misery. No government misery (tickets etc). No spending on never-ending this and that. No getting angry about roadworks or other people cutting me off and other nonsense.
> Then what? Modern cruise control, that keeps my car a constant distance form the car in front (unless it roars off at a speed higher that what I am comfortable with) is great. Helpful, especially in city driving.
> I would appreciate "automated rumble strips" that warns me gently if I veer out of my lane.
Honda already does both of these, since 2020 at least iirc
My 2017/18 civic (not sure which one was the production year) already has all these systems, i.e. adaptive cruise control keeping distance, auto braking before impact, automatic lane-keeping > 70 km/h and rumble warnings.
> I would appreciate "automated rumble strips" that warns me gently if I veer out of my lane.
Our Bronco Sport has this (steering wheel vibration) in addition to lane assist. I don't like the latter, so I appreciate that I can enable/disable the two modes independently.
> Our Bronco Sport has this (steering wheel vibration) in addition to lane assist. I don't like the latter, so I appreciate that I can enable/disable the two modes independently.
I know it's way more stuff for them to test, but being able to enable/disable individual features is so huge. My blind-spot warning on my Mazda is super sensitive (plus I drive mostly in traffic so any time I put my turn signal on there is a car next to me). I want to be able to turn it off, but since it uses the same sensors as my RCTA, they can only be enabled/disable together. I love the RCTA, so I just have learned to ignore the beeping that invariably happens every time I signal...
>Naturally I wand a car I can summon from the pub that will drive me the 20km, over country roads, to my house while I mix cocktails or have a nap.
You're kind of joking, but this is more practical/safe than it sounds.
Most people drive to eat and drink out. You know how they all get home? By driving back. That's driving after drinking however many bottles of beer and glasses of wine. Every night they go out to eat and drink.
To put it simply, everyone breaks the law any time we feel like going out. The police everywhere know this, and the only reason they don't camp out at restaurants to arrest everyone is because they themselves are also guilty of the same.
I can easily imagine that multimodal GPT-style LMs running in real-time could do all the common sense thinking that seems to be lacking in modern self driving. That future could be just a 100x optimization away.
Edit: multimodal. Does no one remember the vision + language version of GPT4 that microsoft demoed?
Naturally I wand a car I can summon from the pub that will drive me the 20km, over country roads, to my house while I mix cocktails or have a nap.
That may never happen, current technology does not seem up to it.
Then what? Modern cruise control, that keeps my car a constant distance form the car in front (unless it roars off at a speed higher that what I am comfortable with) is great. Helpful, especially in city driving.
I would appreciate "automated rumble strips" that warns me gently if I veer out of my lane.
Stopping at a parking spot, push a button, and park my car for me, less useful but still worth it.
But unless I have L5, and can turn my back on the road as I drink my vodka drink, (would that be L6? The impossible dream....) I am not interested in anything that lets me take my hands off the when whilst driving on any road. It seems too dangerous.
As a computer programmer I make my living building complex machines, and I have a very deep distrust of machines built by my comrades, at Tesla or Mercedes.