San Francisco may soon get 24/7 driverless cabs. City leaders are fuming(washingtonpost.com) |
San Francisco may soon get 24/7 driverless cabs. City leaders are fuming(washingtonpost.com) |
But we don't know how to make human drivers any better, and self-driving cars are steadily improving (even if that's slowing down a little).
Maybe. But human drivers already do this way more than I would expect. I’ve seen emergency vehicles stopped and blocked by human drivers who are either paralyzed with uncertainty of what to do or selfishness (no way of knowing what’s going through their minds).
From a European perspective I would say that in a city the real alternative is a functioning public transport system. Trams, light rail etc are infinitely safer and far cheaper than any form of car based system.
If I'm short on time, going to the airport, or my eyes are dilated from going to the optometrist or something, I'll use Lyft or Uber. This is like a once a month or less occurrence, (as you might guess since dilated eyes are one of my main reasons for using a car... I don't go to the optometrist that often.)
So I'm a world where few people own care, you might expect something like this. The car costs are up front per trip, not sunk as they are when you own the car, so you should see people thinking more rationally about their trip planning.
Also, every parked car is one that isn't being used. So if there is lots of parked cars, that means you would need a lot fewer driverless cabs to replace them.
I, for one, don’t want to live in a world where my ability to go anywhere is decided by Google and Uber.
Big Tech has way, way too much power already. Please don’t give them any more of it.
Seems like a red herring. I think it’s safe to assume that you will be able to own your own SDC, and the faster Google gets this tech scaled, the sooner you can affordably purchase one.
- You require a car manufacturer like Ford or Toyota to manufacture and sell you a vehicle.
- You require an insurance company to cover your liability.
- The government must issue you a license, which it may take away at any time for not abiding by its traffic laws.
Just reducing it to only the people who choose to drive will make a big difference.
Great news! If you join the tens of thousands of people who die from driving related deaths every year in the US, you won’t have to.
We need to get rid of cars altogether, with exceptions for emergency services etc.
Where I live, it gets so brutally hot and humid in the summer that people literally collapse and die if they do anything much outdoors.
The main difficulty is making sure the self driving transit vehicles are safe enough that people feel comfortable taking them instead of individual cars. Even though you are statistically speaking less likely to get shot on Philly public transit than you are to die in a car crash on a Philly highway, many people still choose to drive because there's a shooting on transit every few months or so and other less serious disorder on a more regular basis. I assume the same is also true in other cities like San Francisco or New York.
I'm strongly in favor of walkable cities and public transit but most people are going to choose cars and suburban sprawl if it means not having to deal with rampant crime. So anybody who wants to get rid of cars and car dependent suburbs needs to be in favor of both locking up the criminals (in a manner that respects their rights to due process of course) and addressing the root causes of crime (i.e. poverty, bad schools, drugs, etc.) so we don't end up with another generation of hardened criminals.
Cars moving over the next 15 years to be much safer for pedestrians/cyclists could be a big shortcut on this path.
Do you suggest biking?
If the prospect of this happening was somehow grounded in reality, that is.
All it would take is 4 thugs to surround the vehicle and you would have to give up all your belongings. In the current world, you’d just run one of them over but that’s not an option in SDC’s.
This combined with the fact that the cars are easily identifiable and trackable via the app seems like a disaster waiting to happen. I'm not sure what you could do other than arming vehicles.
- can’t own a car because expensive, no parking, will get broken into
- can’t use a bike because roads are dangerous for bikers and bike will get stolen if parked outside
- can’t use uber/lyft because expensive, companies abuse drivers
- can’t use public transport, because it doesn’t cover enough of the city, timetable unpredictable, can be dangerous or unpleasant
- can’t use self-driving cars, because they occasionally interfere with public services, are run by big tech
I have a car which I take to anywhere I can park easily (which is a lot of places in the city if you avoid downtown).
I don't own a bike but I know many who do, and just take it inside with them. Roads are dangerous for bikers but not moreso than every other city in the country.
I use uber/lyft only when I know I'm not going to be sober, which isn't that often (once a weekish).
Plenty of people I know use public transit, though only some routes are useful/safe.
Self driving cars are still very early days and I'm sure they'll work out the technical issues. The fact that they're owned by big tech isn't a problem for me and most other people.
Im not against driverless cars, but I am against unbalanced treatment of road users, legal persons and natural alike.
> Im not against driverless cars, but I am against unbalanced treatment of road users, legal persons and natural alike.
OK, well, ... surely we need to have some kind of not-exactly-equal treatment. If I commit 4 traffic offenses in a year, I'll get a suspended license. If Google commits 4 traffic offenses in a year across, say, 5,000 cars and 50,000 vehicle hours, they probably should not have operations suspended.
Sure, wet should strive for bettering the situation with automated technology, but it’s not like this is worsening the status quo.
It's just inherently energy- and space efficient to haul around a two ton piece of junk per 80kg person. Cities don't have the space, the planet doesn't have the energy to support it. We need to ban cars from cities in the longer term, both human- and AI-driven. For now, we need to take steps to get there. Reduce car lanes, increase bike lanes. Build out public transit.
https://historydaily.org/america-streets-before-cars
We can undo the damage.
If not, what happens if an accident occurs and the cab keeps on driving due to a software bug ?
* you could say the same thing about human motor vehicle operators
While this one is unique afaik, there are plenty of other odd ball ones.
There are overseers who are remotely monitoring vehicle telemetry. If there is an accident, the company will know before anyone else and will respond accordingly.
If some accident or bug occurs, they currently just stop completely until a person comes out
Google is not beholden to any democratic process and can summarily deny my request to go somewhere.
But surely I can’t be the only one concerned about companies that already own my digital lives now also encroaching upon my physical life?
A single professional driver cannot drive hundreds of thousands of hours in a year.
Because if I make a mistake every 3000 hours of driving, that's a mistake every 5-10 years. I am allowed to continue driving by the law.
If Waymo makes a mistake every 6000 hours of driving, and drives 50,000 hours per year, that's 8 per year. Said system would be twice as safe as me but would pretty much immediately get suspended if it's treated as "one driver."
Which pretty much means that in this future, you will have no choice but to use a self-driving car. Which gives disproportionate power to automobile/SDC companies.
If the only motorized way to move from point A to B was Amtrak, I would be worried about the power Amtrak has over my physical movement too.
How so? We hear about the self-driving car incidents because they're required to write up reports whenever something happens (and it also makes for a good news story). That's not the case with human drivers.
It's also the least structured portion with the least clear rules than any other part of the driving task, so it stands to reason it would be worse.
My point is: even the bicycle capitals of the world (Amsterdam, etc) have equal car and bike trips per day, and it's taken a long time to get there.
My solution, would be to have free or low-cost self-driving (to keep the cost down) buses and ban cars including taxis. That should move a lot of people and clear out the streets.
The reason it gets so hot in cities is because it's a concrete wasteland that traps heat because of, guess what, cars.
Here's an experiment to show said effect - same city, same day, very different street layouts: https://doemee.leiden.nl/uploads/55aa69e8-fb15-4ccc-8335-9b6...
I don’t think the self driving car cheerleaders have thought this out.
The tech to do this is getting easier each year.
Why would this be any different with SDCs? The tech might be getting easier, but current market forces make it far easier for the big players to monopolize the market.
With Google (and big tech) squeezing more and more for profits, some here even proclaiming it the new IBM, I don't see this ending with consumers winning.
It doesn’t seem to me like there’s a big competitive moat other than $xxb in R&D costs, so if there is unmet consumer demand for self-owned SDC, it’s probably safe to assume someone will cough up the R&D costs.
Then again, they haven't always done well with that in supplier selection. You might be right, they might end up largely tying themselves to a few suppliers.
OTOH, the network effects shouldn't be as strong. It isn't hard to imagine FOSS options like OpenPilot continuing to exist.
