So, they create traffic blockages as a sort of civic disobedience? How is this helping anyone? I guess they get to feel the thrill of outrage culture for a bit. And brag to their friends "I made a thousand people late for work!"
The fact that a single car can even cause this much harm is a sign of a much larger problem: car centric transportation is NOT scalable.
They are testing this crap in TX and the roads here are shit, worse after/during rain events. Have seen multiple times where a traffic light goes out or the lines are not legible and the “autonomous” vehicle just sits there with its hazard lights on.
> The fact that a single car can even cause this much harm is a sign of a much larger problem: car centric transportation is NOT scalable.
This is an interesting to me. From the perspective of an internet builder, systems vulnerable to shutdown from individual bad actors are obviously insecure and "not scalable". But too much time in this environment can make us forget that the actual world is about a zillion times less hostile than the internet.
As an educator, I worked with a computer security savvy 13 year old who knew my software background and would occasionally disclose vulnerabilities in the district's systems to me. He was incredulous that the network could be so insecure.
I asked about the security systems governing walking around in the hallway - was there any physical impediment preventing one person from punching, kicking, throwing a rock at another? Of course not - the security is socially constructed. Norms, consequences, etc, that on balance seemed to work out pretty effectively. I tried to make a case that security inside a local network of the size and scope of our school board was also ~90% social construction, but the student really struggled with it. There was a strong belief that because it was computers, you were expected to exploit it if it were vulnerable.
First paragraph is about the IT security mindset bleeding into real life, third is about the IT adversarial mindset corrupting our disposition toward technical equipment generally.
Given how immersed current generations are / have been in the adversarial landscape of the web, should we expect an uptick in the level of generalized adversarialism? Will xyst's (and my student's) assessments of these systems become true? Have they already and I'm just a knob?
We're seeing a lot of this in modern society. Social media, guns, politics . . . lots of areas where individual bad actors are overturning "social construction," norms, and trust because they can. Not realizing that a lot of those norms they're pissing all over are vital to having any kind of a society worth living in, which is why seeing them brazenly violated freaks a lot of people TF out. I don't want to live in the ultimate low-trust society because it seems it'd suck for any number of crappy reasons.
Why not have systems be as resilient and robust as possible though? For example, with the implementation of crypto, now you can massively lower trust necessary for finance to function.
That doesn't mean we purposely try to lower trust. But in the rare event it happens, I feel like it's a good safeguard. Strong foundations in many ways can often enable greater trust too I think.
Why are you talking about cryptocurrency as if it was a new technology? It's 15 years old now and it's already pretty clear that it's not very useful for ordinary people.
> Why not have systems be as resilient and robust as possible though?
Because walking around wearing medieval armors to protect from strangers randomly "punching, kicking, throwing a rock at another" would be so annoying.
> Given how immersed current generations are / have been in the adversarial landscape of the web, should we expect an uptick in the level of generalized adversarialism?
I'm really interested by this question. My initial thought is that most teens and young adults (like previous generations) aren't savvy about computer security and Student XYZ is the exception rather than the norm.
IME, the IRL adversarialism is driven by political/ religious fanaticism rather than a hacker mentality -- they're not tech savvy, they're just determined.
That said, the reality is often less important than the perception of reality, particularly _fear_. Businesses and government are reacting to fears which are outsized to the reality, like Terrorism and School Shootings. They're adopting an adversarial mindset as defenders, even in the absence of an uptick in generalized adversarialism.
To be fair, public transport often has similar issues. If a subway/train car is stuck, nothing else can get by on the same track and thousands of people could be delayed. It happens in NYC all the time. At least with the road system there are typically ways to get around stopped cars.
> The fact that a single car can even cause this much harm is a sign of a much larger problem: car centric transportation is NOT scalable.
I don't particularly love US car culture, but this is an absurd take. A single broken-down train will block all trains behind it on the same track. Unexpected damage to a runway can choke an airport.
So are we to believe that the only "scalable" form of transportation is bicycles, because it's easy and fast to move a broken or crashed bicycle out of the right of way? Yeah, right.
“When intentionally broken, this transport doesn’t work. So it is not scalable.”
There are many ways to scale car-centric transportation that have been done successfully in countries other than the US. Public transit is one example.
Autonomous buses could solve a lot of the car issues in the US. Not if we keep putting cones in front of them though.
This is a shitty take. Guess how much harm a single derailed train can cause to the New York subway? Guess how much harm a single plane crashed on a runway causes?
Every form of mass transit suffers from single outsized impacts of failures.
When the Korean airline airplane crashed into the end of the SFO runway it disrupted 10s of thousands flying into the Bay Area.
My commute on the M&E line is often (~1/month) cancelled or delayed by normal every day things (tree fall, branches, etc). All trains into New York Penn from my line get stopped.
That’s stupid. You could park a golf cart on the train tracks and it would shut down all train transport for hours. You could cut out a piece of the rail very easily (with an angle grinder) and it would cause dozens of deaths and shut down the line for weeks.
The right course of action is to make messing with automated cars like this a crime just like it is with the railways.
Railways are a little different - for the most part (except at level crossings) they are operating on dedicated rights-of-way, and someone has to go out of their way to interfere with them.
A car on a public street is mixing it up with everyone else, and the dividing line for what constitutes "messing with" them is not clear at all. What if I wear a shirt that confuses their algorithms? Shine a light that does it? Drive, bike, or walk in a pattern that does it?
> ...the dividing line for what constitutes "messing with" them is not clear at all.
Putting cones out for no other purpose beyond stopping them moving seems to me unambiguously "messing with" them (though I don't think we need additional laws to address it.)
This is not wearing a shirt though. This is people deliberately causing disruptions by putting a traffic cone, universally recognized as a traffic warning, in front of the vehicles. A lot of regular people would think twice about what to do if they came back to their parked car with traffic cones around it.
In fact, there's a "prankster" operating in Poland right now, who is sending the "stop immediately" radio signal to trains. All trains receiving it will automatically start braking. They were able to stop 20+ trains yesterday. Also, when they're not sending that signal, they're broadcasting the Russian national anthem on the emergency braking radio frequency...
>Poland's national transportation agency has stated its intention to upgrade Poland's railway systems by 2025 to use almost exclusively GSM cellular radios, which do have encryption and authentication. But until then, it will continue to use the relatively unprotected VHF 150 MHz system that allows the “radio-stop” commands to be spoofed.
It would take only a few moments to weld a metal traffic cone to a train track. Focusing on the exact timing to disturb the mode of transit is not relevant. There are always optimizations.
> Also your linked video is splitting along the length of the rail instead of cutting directly across it which would take minutes if not seconds.
Watch how long it takes to cut the top of that rail. You must not have ever used an angle grinder before if you think you’re cutting train tracks in seconds.
It took me at least a minute to cut through a single leaf spring for a truck if not longer.
What’s your point though? You’re picking an arbitrary cutoff time based on what? The intention is still disruption.
Thirty minutes is nothing. We don’t classify severity of crimes based on how long they take to accomplish. A murder is a murder whether you shot a person once or spent hours carving them up.
I have used an angle grinder and it takes me about 10 seconds to cut through rebar. I would assume a rail is like 25 pieces of rebar put together so my naive assumption would be under five minutes.
There's a big difference in both material and size between rebar and rail track, but that's just an aside.
I believe the point being made is the difference in level of intent required and the known (or hoped for) outcome from the action.
Grabbing a traffic cone from a nearby construction zone and chucking it in front of an autonomous car at a traffic light is harmless to the health of everyone involved, but is a pain in the rear for many. Meanwhile, it makes a statement, and some chunk of everyone's annoyance gets directed at the autonomous car company.
On the other hand, cutting a section of railroad takes concerted effort and a lot of premeditation if the individual hopes to get away with it. More importantly - the person cutting the track hopes/expects to cause death and destruction.
The two actions are wildly different, and should be treated as such.
Some would view disabling the cars which are interfering with emergency services as “get that taken care of”, and attempts to roll out additional cars without fixing the bug as “intentionally make things worse”.
That’s completely fair. Let’s work on that, with the required many times increase in efficiency for public transportation to work in cities made for cars, instead of blocking traffic. One approach for the increase in efficiency is automation. I would like to know what their approach is. As this, and interviews have shown, they have no approach or real goal.
Protest is a political tool. If blocking traffic raises awareness (as it has done here) then I think that counts as working on it. We're not going to get cars off the road by writing letters to our senator or donating a few hundred dollars to a political campaign (we've been trying for decades). Maybe aggravating the general public into realizing the fragility and selfishness of the tech industry's "solution" will get people to reevaluate funding for public transportation. I doubt it, because I've become deeply cynical about human nature, but I also see that the roots of progress often comes from surprising places. Like refusing to ride at the back of the bus. Or dumping tea into a harbor. Or putting a traffic cone on a robot. Keep it simple, don't hurt anyone, make your point. We can argue about the efficacy of their tactics but at the end of the day they're trying something.
> protest against the city being used as a testing ground for this emerging technology.
What awareness are they raising, exactly? Are you/they suggesting that people in the Bay Area don't know that these driverless cars exist? Or is it that they're fragile/not complete yet? This is a genuine question, because I, obviously, don't understand.
I see this similar to someone laying in the road, blocking human drivers, and saying they're raising awareness of the fact that drivers can be blocking if someone put effort into blocking them. I don't get it. Help me.
From where I sit, there's a general perception that driverless cars ("tech") will reduce traffic accidents and fatalities and be an overall significant positive improvement in transportation (source: partner is lifer at city DOT and is pro-driverless cars). There's a corresponding trust that companies/process/regulations wouldn't allow the deployment of driverless vehicles unless they're a safe and mature technology. And a similar lack of understanding of how mature the technology actually is (given mainstream hype from Musk etc). So a demonstration that extreme anti-social behavior will currently result, not from edge-case conditions that would be dangerous even for a human to be driving in, but from a simple hack that literally any miscreant could pull off in seconds and successfully run away from without any risk to themselves, might be sufficient to raise awareness that we can't trust creators of these vehicles or the larger system to do adequate testing before deployment, and that in fact the vehicles are already deployed widely enough to inflict transportation blockages with a minimum of miscreants and effort by same.
> but from a simple hack that literally any miscreant could pull off in seconds and successfully run away from without any risk to themselves
Without any risk to themselves, or anyone else.
I don't think anyone will see this point of "not enough testing", when a car should not continue with a stop sign, road cone, or human on the hood, under any condition. I think most everyone will see this as expected and desired behavior, with a clear demonstration of safe handling of a dumb situation caused by some angry idiots.
Here's a question for anyone with this perspective: What should a fully tested, fully qualified, car do in this situation?
I see the "correct" answer as: immediately disable automation, and prompt a human for remote control.
What's your "correct" answer?
This is all opinion that could only be settled be a poll of those who became aware of this situation. I'm having trouble finding any, but this one from NY [1].
> Here's a question for anyone with this perspective: What should a fully tested, fully qualified, car do in this situation?
Okay, fine: it should deploy an embedded all-purpose maintenance drone to exit the vehicle and move the cone to a safe and out-of-the-way location.
It's a good thought experiment, and I think goes to show that we can't really have Level 5 Autonomous Vehicles without an embedded all-purpose maintenance drone. I mean the dream is for humanless robotaxis to drive themselves to their next fare, right? They shouldn't need a human to come out in order to remove a harmless 5-pound object. I mean how about any number of other things that might happen onto its hood? A plastic bag, or a half-eaten happy meal? These are routine urban annoyances that require 15 seconds of attention and an eyeroll at most.
They are very different grades of steel. Track is over twice the yield strength of rebar from your home center and through-hardened. Rebar is mild steel and can't be hardened (maybe case-hardened). It's the difference between cutting water and ice :-).
> And brag to their friends "I made a thousand people late for work!"
Seems like the protestors are not required for this to happen:
> The city’s transportation agencies documented several incidents where driverless cars disrupted Muni service. During the night of Sept. 23, five Cruise cars blocked traffic lanes on Mission Street in Bernal Heights, stalling a Muni bus for 45 minutes. On at least three different occasions, Cruise cars stopped on Muni light-rail tracks, halting service.
Meanwhile, these additional things are happening:
> San Francisco firefighters were battling a two-alarm apartment blaze on the corner of Hayes and Divisadero streets during a recent Sunday morning when a driverless Cruise car entered the active firefighting scene and nearly ran over fire hoses on the street.
> Firefighters at the scene stood in front of the car to try to get it to stop, but the autonomous vehicle came to a halt only after one of them smashed the Cruise car’s front window amid the chaotic effort to put out a fire that displaced 25 people, according to city transportation officials.
> A Cruise vehicle came to a stop after nearly colliding with a Muni N-Judah train at the intersection of Carl and Cole streets. The Cruise car blocked light-rail tracks in both directions for close to seven minutes.
> A passenger in a driverless Cruise vehicle suffered injuries on Thursday after the vehicle was struck by a San Francisco fire truck that was responding to an emergency call.
> Now, the California Department of Motor Vehicles has requested the autonomous vehicle company cut its San Francisco fleet in half, following this latest incident. Cruise told KTVU the company will comply with that request.
There have been three human-driven car crashes on my busy street within a 10 second walk from my front door just in the last year. A multi car collision woke me up last night at 4 am. All three crashes completely closed the road for several hours. I've even seen a human driver trying to outrun the police, ignoring their instructions to stop.
Clearly, the rollout of human drivers isn't working and we should start blocking roads until the government bans them.
Let me know how that works out over the next 5-10 days, after the food runs out, and you realize you can’t get food, or even hope to flee your urban anarcho-hellscape after the train system fails for lack of maintenance workers or parts.
There are a whole lot more human driven vehicles on the streets than autonomous.
For how small these autonomous fleets are we shouldn't be hearing about any such events if they were actually superior to human drivers. This tech clearly isn't ready, and the cities they're operating in are being used as training grounds while putting everyone there at risk.
Unless the public and media is biased and swayed by hysteria. But of course it can’t be exaggerated, just like terrorism, child kidnapping and the threat of white techies getting murdered by street people.
Cruise has been in my hood for years. I’ll take them anyday over humans.
It used to be fairly common that some idiot would drive their car into a Muni tunnel and put that part of the system out of service for hours. For some reason I haven't heard of something like that in quite a few years, though.
I have my issues with this "live testing" that Cruise et al. are doing, but let's not pretend that these sorts of things are any worse than what human drivers have done, and continue to do.
Being inconvenienced by a protest is your responsibility as a citizen of a democratic republic. If you don’t engage with democracy, democracy engages with you.
I won't be held hostage by asocial freaks who piss and moan when they don't get their way. Let's democratic republic these people into the prison they so yearn for, you may join them if you want.
What is the point of peaceful assembly if not to protest something?
If you're counting peaceful assembly as a tool of democracy, you might as well be saying peaceful protest, of which merely blocking traffic is included, since inconveniencing people is not violent.
There are many cases of people dying from blocked emergency vehicles, with these sort of obstructions.
I’m certain if you were in an ambulance, dying if a heart attack, you would look out your window to see the non violent protest, give a thumbs up, easily make peace with leaving you family behind, and breathe your last breath with a smile, knowing you were part of “democracy”.
My point was that it was peaceful/non-violent. Again, obstructing traffic is not violent. If people die because emergency vehicles couldn't pass, that still isn't violent.
Cool scenario, they have trolleys and switches in SF too. Do you feel the same about people driving to work who cause ordinary traffic that happens to cause an ambulance to arrive too late? Breathe your last breath with a smile, knowing you were part of “capitalism.”
> Protests are not democracy. Voting, freedom of speech, and peaceful assembly, sure, in the US at least.
If not "peaceful assembly", how are you defining "protests"?
Stopping a lawful vehicle with a traffic cone isn't protest. Harassment is not protest. Vandalism is not protest. Halting traffic for 60 seconds might be protest; halting traffic for 60 minutes definitely isn't.
Even civil disobedience, where someone deliberately violates the law, is predicated on being _peaceful_. (And IMO also on the willingness, if not the desire, to accept the legal consequences.)
IMO, media outlets have pushed this idea that violence is protest, but that's pretty new (and of course limited to issues where they agree).
The point of the protests is to bring attention to the fact corps are running dangerous automated vehicles into the middle of active fire scenes and stuff. Were you aware of that without the protests? Maybe they work.
One could argue it's utilizing a set of free people to create a Chaos Monkey-esque environment to train cars.
This increases resilience and speeds up the timeline for driverless cars. Which of course decreases alcohol-related fatalities.
It's that last part that is tough to argue against.
Of course, there is the stress of creating an identity politics cultural clash in a city of millions. These are people who we now face on an incredible divide. It takes work, and it costs stress, to bridge that.
Over two decades ago, after the first dot-com crash, I remember one of the last statements from a SF resident before I left. That it was my fault, or the people like me, that the city ended up the way it did. That stung. A lot.
But, you cant argue we're not saving lives from drunk drivers. That's something that will help on both coasts and the middle.
I think this particular protest is counterproductive. AVs will make public transit work a lot better and reduce traffic, make pedestrians safer, etc. But protest isn't meant to be convenient.
> AVs will make public transit work a lot better and reduce traffic, make pedestrians safer, etc
Highly doubt it.
1. if you have a regular car you get from point A to B, park, do sth, go from B to A. If you use AV it has to go from point X to A, take you to B, go do sth else at Y, you do your thing, it has to go back from Z to B and take you to A. Instead of using the road from A to B and back you're using the road from X to A, from A to B and back and from Z to B (going from B to Y counts for the other customer so I don't add it). It uses road LONGER per passanger - so traffic will be WORSE and it will use MORE fuel. It will save some parking space tho.
Basicaly AVs (and taxis/ubers etc.) trade parking space for road space and fuel. You can't reduce traffic by driving more :)
2. it will only make pedestrians safer if it drives conservatively, but from what I've seen by AV advocacy is people want AV cars to interface with each other and use that to cut the safety margin for efficiency. That's an inherently American idea that assumes people don't walk so you can just change cars and everything will be fine :)
It would make pedestrians inherently less safe (because AVs become a train basically - you cannot suddenly stop 1 AV because other are behind it and they assume it won't suddenly stop).
If you want a city in which every street is effectively a rail track and every pedestrian crossing is a train crossing with all the disruption to pedestrians and others - do this. Otherwise just use public transport and bikes, please - all the benefits and more, for fraction of cost, and it's healthier. Moving individual people in huge cars just doesn't scale, no matter who drives them.
As someone who lives far enough out of the nearest major city that I don't really pop in casually for a meal or drink. (It's very doable but I end up being on the road for a good two hours total around whatever activity I'm doing.)
An AV wouldn't be free to travel that distance but I would absolutely do that and other activities requiring 1+ hour drives each way more frequently if I didn't need to do the driving myself.
I lived in a small village 40 minutes from a big city half my life. There are buses going every 30 minutes each way between around 06:00 and 20:00. They cost under 1 USD per trip. Lots of people use them - kids going to schools, people commuting for work, grandmas who don't have driving licence. I probably used them over 1000 times through my life.
That city isn't even that big - 350 000 people. And the buses are profitable. Why can't cities over million people afford public transport is beyond me.
BTW notice how old people who can't drive still might want to go to a cinema/theater/doctor/whatever without asking their family or paying for a taxi. It's a huge benefit to everybody that these buses are available. I doubt you can get AV profitable transporting 1 person where buses transport 10-20 people.
Public transit has been run at barebone levels in the US for so long that hardly anyone even thinks of it as something that should, or even can, function well. For a route in my city, a 14 minute drive in a car is 83 minutes on public transit. The three buses come every 30 minutes, 40 minutes, and 60 minutes respectively. There are no bus lanes, because drivers are a powerful and greedy constituency. There's no political will to convert one lane on each road to bus-only, to add traffic signal prioritization, or to buy enough buses and hire enough drivers to have 10-15 minute headways.
Even if we did, we're fighting uphill against 70 years of suburbanization and the general pattern of very sparse and sprawling development. The level of taxation necessary to make transit work well in many areas would be far more than is politically feasible. Plus there's the perception of public transit being dangerous, for criminals and drug addicts, etc.
The only public transit option for me is commuter rail which would require me to drive to and park at the (relatively) nearby station. (I'm well outside the city's local bus and subway transit system.) It takes 60-90 minutes to go the 50 miles depending upon whether I need to connect to the subway at my destination or not. It runs no more frequently than hourly and the last couple of trains at night are more like 90+ minutes apart. It's utterly impractical to take in for an evening event.
(And it's about $30 round-trip with parking; I do take it in the rare times when I'm going in for the day to work because driving in and back at rush hour is awful.)
The commuter rail is "fine" but its schedule doesn't really work outside of commuting hours--and even that is significantly worse than pre-COVID.
Yeah for me it was like 500 meter walk to the bus stop :) And bus stops were every 2 km or so :)
I'm wondering why there are no such buses where you live? It it a matter of population density, different road network architecture (here most villages are build along the roads so you can put bus stops every 1-2 km and you'll get enoguh passangers to get by), or just a chicken-and-egg problem of customers not being used to it so it's not profitable if you create it?
There is a small regional transit system that covers the grocery store, Walmart, train station, and I'm not sure what else. My sense from seeing it at the grocery store is that it's mostly for seniors and others who can't drive. It covers the nearby ~40K population pair of cities.
The surrounding towns--one of which I live in--are pretty rural, or at least exurban, with a very limited commercial tax base and generally don't even have sidewalks outside of the town centers. We'd have neither the density/demand or the budget to have a public transit system.
Comparing your experience of the service for ~40k people vs an urban setting intended to serve ~400k people or more seems at least irrelevant and at most intentionally misleading.
That sounds pretty accurate for most of the country which isn't in an ultra high COL area.[0] One doesn't "just" take public transit to a city center from most of America.
[0] Which can be fairly accurately described as regions within an acceptable commute of the aforementioned centers. (Or non city job centers a la silicon valley).
Do they? Or is it the only game in town because of decisions made sixty years ago and housing pressures and cost structures mean that if you want to live at an affordable level in that area a car is functionally required?
I live where I live specifically because I dont want density or a bunch of public transport options. Financially I could afford to move 25 miles and be in areas that are more walkable with public transportation but the downsides (crime, homeless, traffic, crowds, smaller living spaces, privacy concerns) outweigh the benefits for me and my family.
Those decision made 60 years ago was buying cars and moving out of the dense cities into car-oriented housing. Then they continued to move more and more into car oriented housing and voting for more car oriented housing. It's not like suburbs just appeared one day against everyone's wishes.
I'm not suggesting it's the only choice, or it being a good choice, or anything like that. I'm just pushing back against the narrative that people didn't freely choose this. Popularly elected leaders chose the city planning. Local elections and people leaving the cities by choice created the suburbs. If most the people in the cities wanted the change it would happen.
And hey look, you're doing it too. "Zoning laws" just magically happened with zero input and somehow radically changed the world without anyone noticing. How did the zoning laws get there? Popularly elected people chosen by the people who live there who made it happen year over year over year. If people didn't like the zoning, they'd vote to change it. That's how it happened in the Netherlands, people elected people who wanted the change.
It was a mess of utopian central planning, good intentions, private capture, bad science, corruption, bad incentives, and never looking back and fixing it. At very few points did people had a say in how this turned out.
> At very few points did people had a say in how this turned out.
This is an incorrect take from this though. Those parking minimums coud be changed tomorrow. They could have been changed any time these last 60 years. It doesn't take a federal constitutional amendment. It doesn't take 60 votes in the US senate. Those parking minimums and car centric developments continue to be policy because people continue choosing it. Local elections don't take that many votes to swing! Lots of positions run unopposed every year! They didn't change because the people there didn't care to change it.
Acting like zoning laws are something people can't change and that people don't want is to ignore reality. Zoning laws exist because people choose to have them!
I'm all for cities removing parking minimums. They're often really bad policy. I agree with a lot of things pushed by NotJustBikes and StrongTowns and what not. But acting like nobody wants these policies just isn't reality. Go see the town halls full of people complaing against density, complaining against bike lanes, complaining against transit, complaining against traffic soothing and then tell me nobody wants zoning laws.
> Those parking minimums and car centric developments continue to be policy because people continue choosing it
This is unambiguously true, but at the same time it's not an answer. There's a deeper problem here that I don't think you can dismiss with "well, people vote for it". Yeah. And people voted for redlining, and people voted for school segregation.
It is very hard not to see (growing up in such places and visiting occasionally still) a deep-seated kind of racism driving a whole lot of that separation, much more than "I want cars". You see elsewhere in the thread the predictable dog-whistles of "crime"--but rural crime is prevalent, too! It's just crime perpetuated by...well...people who look like those worried about crime. You see right-wing influencers on YouTube getting strapped to go to cities or even to Subway restaurants and it's not because of actual incidents--one's more likely to commit suicide with a firearm than to have to "defend oneself". It's just saying the quiet part loud.
At some point we're going to need a societal unfucking, and this is symptomatic (but not causative) of why we need it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to be dismissive as a "well, people vote for it" kind of way. I'm just trying to point out its not just that these things appeared or happened without the majority's consent which is what people seem to continue to suggest over and over. These policies exist because they're popular at least with those who actually get out and vote in local elections, that's all I'm trying to say. And we won't successfully get rid of these policies in a lot of the country until we change the culture, which is challenging.
I definitely agree that there's strong overlaps with those demanding far flung remote suburbs, car-centric infrastructure, gun culture, and right-wing ideology. These people want their castles and their tanks to drive around. I do agree this is probably an overall unhealthy culture for our society and do vote against it. In those town halls people argue against densification because "the wrong people" will come into their town, that adding busses will only lead to increased crime rates, etc. I continue to proselytize to those around me about better transit, traffic soothing, right-sizing vehicle choices with realistic needs, pushing for sensible densification, better mixing of zoning, etc. and continue voting for policies to move the needle.
They are strictly private enterprises and aren't subsidized. There was a national transport company that was subsidized, but it was slowly losing customers after communism fell in 1989 because it was inflexible and used big 40-person buses instead of small 20-person vans on every route. Now the national one was privatized and only runs very few long-distance routes in some parts of the country, most routes are handled by small companies that have a few vans each.
The city buses going inside the big cities are centralized and often subsidized tho.
> School Busses, not public transport,
School buses are a form of public transport, we have them too, but kids go to various schools - some to the nearest one, some to a bigger city further away (I commuted to a primary school 5 km away and then high school 40 minutes away - and mostly used regular buses) - it wouldn't make sense to restrict these buses to kids only and then have separate buses for other people. Why drive 10 people when you have 20 seats and enough potential customers to fill them?
> Nope, never. I prefer not to spat on, robbed, or other ways harassed.
Why is this accepted? If people spit at others in a mall or a cinema would you just accept that it's a thing, or would the society do sth to stop it? It's not rocket science - the driver just has to call police and drive to meet them at nearest stop. In 90s we had huge problems with crime (20% unemployment at one point so you can imagine) yet public transport wasn't any less safe than a mall or cinema - what was unsafe was walking in the wrong hood after dark ;)
>>They are strictly private enterprises and aren't subsidized.
I guess this is a deviation of definition, "public transport" in the US is government run, regulated, and subsidized by government. There are no private "public transport" in the form of local buses, trains, etc. They are either quasi government run (amtrak) or directly government run "Transportation Authority" often run by city or state governments.
Airlines are private though at this point HEAVILY subsidized as most airports are government run, and they get bailouts all the time...
I can not think of a single mass transportation system in the US that is not either directly owned by the government or HEAVILY subsidized by government
>There are no private "public transport" in the form of local buses, trains, etc.
That isn't strictly true. A number of (predominantly ethnic minority) communities are served by entirely privately-operated bus services, created mainly to fill gaps in publicly-subsidised services.
None of the universities with in a 100 mi of me have their own shuttle busses, they all utilize the local City Owned public buses they do not have their own bus network. they might rent some during a sporting event but it not "public transport" it would be ticketed event holders... Further almost if not all of the universities are "public" and should be consider quasi government as they have their own police dept's, and are heavily subsidized by the government
>>shuttles to industrial parks, megachurch parking shuttles, theme park transit.
none of these are public transportation, they may be "mass transportation" but they are not generally open to the general public, they are for the use of people going to or in those private properties, further most do not even travel on the public road system or pickup from "public" places, they are moving people from parking lots to entrances.
The state university I grew up near in NYS was serviced by a private bus system for more than a decade. I don't remember much about it other than the busses being painted blue and being full of college students.
AV cars could be programmed to never stop in bike lanes or bus lanes or do anything else to disrupt transit. They could automatically get out of the way of buses. AV buses and AV cars could coordinate to move people around faster making the public transit more efficient. And all the emotional stress and conflict between buses and cars could be eliminated.
> AVs will make public transit work a lot better and reduce traffic
Or will reduce use of public transit & make traffic worse because the negative effects of traffic will be less felt & the cost of private transit via an AV will be lower
No, AVs will increase traffic. The only thing that holds traffic back from yet another explosion is that it requires a licensed driver to operate a vehicle. If that requirement goes away there will be much more traffic than there is today. Kids, packages, empty cars sent from one spouse to another...
> AVs will make public transit work a lot better and reduce traffic
AV adoption will probably be comparable to the effect of Uber. It'll create more traffic on the roads at the expense of gutting the public transit infrastructure and probably create significantly problems than it solves.
Once cars can drive themselves, parking lots no longer need to surround businesses since everyone will have a free valet that can drop you off and park your car in a distant lot. The parking lot surrounding the business can be redeveloped into more commercial or residential space. Ironically, self-driving cars may make commercial areas denser and more walkable.
The parking lots for self-driving vehicles can also be significantly more dense than lots for normal vehicles. Current parking lots must reserve half the overall lot for aisles, since every car must be able to leave without any other vehicle moving. A parking lot for autonomous vehicles won't be limited by that restriction and can achieve a higher utilization of the space by filling the aisles with more vehicles.
However, some people will probably decide to commute much longer distances when they no longer need to drive themselves and residential areas will probably end up sprawling even more than they do already.
Car ownership in the US today is really high (recently was over 90% [1])
Why would 90% of people forego paying approximately $1~$5 to travel a dozen miles in their already payed for car vs paying a taxi-cab like fare for an AV? I'm not sure how much it costs to go 10 miles in an AV taxi, but I'm guessing it's $20-$30.
The effect of AVs with respect to strip malls and commercial spaces seems like it'll be a pretty low traffic flow.
Asked another way, how many people take conventional taxis (being Uber/Lyft, or a legit taxi) today to go such places? It seems like the prices are similar, why then would the lack of a human driver make an AV taxi that much more attractive (like, to the point where the 90% of car owners decided to stop driving their own car, which is far cheaper - and then this pattern plays out for long enough that the parking lot situation changes!
Nothing I described requires giving up ownership of the vehicle. All that is needed is for it to be able to navigate to and from the parking lot by itself, and to move spots when requested by the parking lot's computer.
There are sharp limits on the development you're describing. Cars still need to be parked nearby because nobody wants to have to wait for 40 minutes, or 15 minutes, for their car to come get them after they've decided they're done shopping.
If everyone keeps their private vehicle, and that is still at over 90%, why would any part of society change due to AI cars? The parent post described a situation where strip malls would be redone in the image of AI cars. I'm not sure how that happens when the future continues to be like the present with overwhelming majorities owning a personal car.
The US car fleet is also unusually old. If transit worked better, using AVs or not, it's a pretty good hypothesis that people keeping old cars on the road would find using better transit saves them money.
The goal of AVs is to undermine high-density public transportation in favor of privately owned low-density transportation. The approach is to beta-test murder-capable robots amid unwilling living humans. That will neither reduce traffic nor make pedestrians safer.
Counterpoint: pedestrians may be made safer by blockading the roads with unwitting AVs.
AVs, like Uber, will give the affluent class in cities an alternative to public transit (and inconvenient personal car ownership), thereby reducing the pressure from this politically influential segment of society to keep mass transit clean and safe, and with good schedules and routes. Mass transit quality drops to the detriment of the majority, further reinforcing the affluent class's reliance on cars, creating a vicious cycle of destruction.
? The size of the pipe does not change, the substance in it does not get much more denser or faster.. I just don't see it. Maybe in combination with a turn towards public transport as ride & drive..
Sure and so is speeding, double parking, not stopping at stop signs and failing to signal, but the cars still have to deal with that.
I'm not condoning the protestors but failure to deal with this (and other similar things... Minor mechanical trouble, birds shitting on sensors, brushing snow off windshield) is a real problem for autonomous cars.
