[HN Gopher] Dashcam footage shows driverless cars clogging San F...
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Dashcam footage shows driverless cars clogging San Francisco
Author : gorbachev
Score : 175 points
Date : 2023-04-10 11:11 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wired.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com)
| SanderNL wrote:
| I'm not quite sure driverless cars solve an actual problem. I
| mean it's cool, but it feels like a massive, near AGI level
| effort to reach what, driving a car? What else can it do?
|
| It seems so limited. If I had to bet I'd say we solve general AI
| first and then driverless cars are somewhat of a byproduct. Like
| many oldskool specialty AI's get owned by general purpose LLM's
| nowadays.
| post_break wrote:
| I don't understand why they don't have a big red STOP button on
| the roof or something to immediately call for either a driver or
| why don't these have remote control take over so they can be
| quickly moved out of the way? Imagine if one of these parks
| itself in front of an ambulance or fire truck?
| whalesalad wrote:
| I'm surprised by this too. If I were running an operation like
| this I would definitely have a team of remote operators in
| racing sim setups (steering wheel, pedals) who could "jump" to
| a car and take control in one of these situations.
|
| Slack notification comes in: a car is stuck. Click link, get
| jacked-in and take manual control to move it to a safe location
| for further debugging.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| They call home when this happens, one of the reports mentions a
| Waymo employee showed up after less than a a minute.
|
| What they seem to be missing is a "get out of the way" path-
| planning mode when it doesn't know how to proceed.
| mrweasel wrote:
| I was thinking the same thing. The car on the tarm/light-rail
| track clearly don't have any concept of being in the way. It
| seems to be the same case with the car blocking the bus in
| the first example. Neither of those systems seem to have a
| notion of reversing or pulling over to make space.
|
| The ability to "read the road" seem to leave a lot to be
| desired.
| opportune wrote:
| I believe they actually do have that kind of mode. When you
| are riding in one of these cars commercially they have an
| "end ride" button that cancels the route and gets the vehicle
| to pull over.
|
| I think most clogs are when cars are mapping so I'm not sure
| if they either don't have enough data to offer that when they
| get stuck (depends on how much they depend on mapping to
| implement the feature). It could also just be that they
| figure a stuck car is too messed up to reliably pull over
| without causing more problems, so to err on the side of
| caution they don't use that feature.
| biztos wrote:
| I'm sure I'm not the only one who would be tempted to hit that
| button every time the Corporate Robocopmobile stops at a light.
| londgine wrote:
| Drivered cars are causing the majority of the clog. I don't see
| more of a problem with driverless cars. Externalities are already
| taxed in the form of gas tax, but if they want to target electric
| vehicles as well, they can make every road a toll (with today's
| cameras it's not hard to do, without even requiring drivers to
| stop and pay).
| jaberabdullah wrote:
| [flagged]
| jeffrallen wrote:
| Does SF Mini have a zero tolerance, "you block us, we tow you"
| policy? Tow companies are super eager to answer calls, because
| they get a cut of the impound fees. The free market at work! :)
|
| I think after a few times bailing their cars out of impound,
| these companies would find a way to "return to profitability".
| ncr100 wrote:
| No.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The cost to send a person out there to rescue the car is
| already expensive and towing fees would be a rounding error
| compared to the vast amounts of money being spent on
| engineering/development right now.
| zecken wrote:
| I've been held up longer by side shows at intersections than
| driverless cars here. Not that SF is the lawless hellscape the
| media pretends is the case, but I do think it's a bit rich that
| city officials are pointing fingers at fairly remarkable services
| using paid permits that work well 99% of the time while failing
| to enforce laws that are broken more frequently.
| noworld wrote:
| I think this gets at the point I was going to make - Wired
| probably spent untold hours combing through video requests to
| find incidents involving driverless vehicles, but tossed out
| every incident they found where an offending vehicle had a
| driver. Then they wrote an article about their cherry picked
| results. I would be curious to see both sets of data.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| According to the article, the transportation authority
| started recording incidents involving driverless vehicles, so
| Wired didn't have to comb through videos at all. They just
| requested videos for incidents with driverless vehicles.
|
| As to how many such incidents there were, it wasn't a lot.
| Quote from the article:
|
| > Agency logs show 12 "driverless" reports from September
| 2022 through March 8, 2023
| DeRock wrote:
| In a similar vein, the driverless cars are actually useful to
| me biking, since they have predictable and safe behavior. When
| I see one, I take the lane, and it will follow at a reasonable
| distance, and block other cars behind from aggressively
| squeezing past.
| hezralig wrote:
| I have never, not once, been held up by a side-show in San
| Francisco. I did have to wait 5 minutes to cross the street to
| get to the farmer's market at the Embarcadero while a
| motorcycle brigade zoomed up the street.
|
| The only side-shows I have seen have been in Oakland and even
| further into the East Bay.
|
| With that being said, I have witnessed Cruise cars lovingly
| tapping j-walking pedestrians and traffic abiding cyclists
| around the lower Haight. I have also seen self-driving cars
| block buses and the street car.
| zecken wrote:
| I wasn't trying to be hyperbolic, I've only been delayed by a
| side show once in my neighborhood by the Chase center -- I've
| never been blocked by a self driving car. I'm sure everyone
| has different experiences, but the characterization the
| article tries to make that these vehicles are a menace to
| society strike me as overblown and contradictory to many
| people's lived experiences here. At least these folks are
| paying money to treat the city like a playground. I haven't
| seen anyone get love tapped by one of the self-driving cars,
| but if that's happening regularly it seems like a pretty
| serious problem.
| hezralig wrote:
| I moved out of the state during the pandemic when I bought
| a house in the PNW, however, I am mostly surprised to hear
| there are sideshows happening in SF after living there for
| over a decade.
|
| As for the Cruise cars, I believe they were still being
| trained so were not carrying passengers yet. They might
| have ironed out the kinks.
| opportune wrote:
| Same. As a pedestrian in SF I very frequently get put in danger
| by impatient human drivers at 4 way stop signs. No self driving
| car has ever put me in danger, and I interact with them quite
| frequently.
|
| The national media of course wants to produce content
| confirming the biases of people who are (in the back of their
| minds) anxious about the prospect of SDC but don't have
| exposure to them. I have a lot of exposure to them - not as an
| employee though - and think Cruise, Waymo, and Zoox are all
| doing a great job at being cautious and respectful with their
| testing programs. Sure they do get stuck sometimes, but human
| drivers disrupt traffic too, and honestly SDC are already
| better at being safe drivers around pedestrians and other
| vehicles than humans IME. It's just that they are so cautious
| sometimes they just stop and create situations like this.
|
| Most people who haven't been living with SDC for years like we
| have in SF want to hand wring about them based on articles like
| this, but the reality is quite different. You'll note you don't
| hear much about the cars injuring people or getting in
| accidents despite the appetite for negative SDC media coverage.
| WeylandYutani wrote:
| Do they have pedestrians or bicycles in San Francisco?
| RajT88 wrote:
| I am guessing you've never been there. It's like any other
| big American city in that regard.
|
| On top of that they have a bunch of electric scooters and
| electric skateboards and such.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Most big American cities have no pedestrians and minimal
| biking.
| addisonl wrote:
| Source?
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| I tried walking around sun belt cities. Would not
| recommend. Just looked at the top 20 american cities by
| population. I would consider 6 walkable or bikeable.
| Maybe 7 I've never been to columbus.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > It's like any other big American city in that regard.
|
| If so, then the answer is "largely no".
| RajT88 wrote:
| Huh? Most big American cities have _a lot_ of pedestrians
| and cyclists.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Do they? Excepting for New York and "last mile"
| pedestrians, I haven't noticed that tendency much.
|
| Although I also haven't been to any major cities in the
| southeast, so can't speak to them, and I haven't done any
| studies, so my impression could very well be mistaken.
|
| Big cities I've been to in Europe, though, tend to have a
| lot of pedestrians and bicyclists.
| dysfunction wrote:
| SF proper is more like New York in that respect, it's
| much more dense and walkable than the average US city.
| The other bay area cities not so much.
| ghaff wrote:
| You can argue how many cyclists and related vehicles
| there are in the grand scheme of things but there are a
| fair number of pedestrians at least during the day in
| (most?) US cities--that are meaningfully cities and not
| effectively suburbs that have a mayor.
| eric-hu wrote:
| For others like me who didn't know the term:
|
| > Sideshows entail street stunts in which parties perform
| "doughnuts," or high-speed circles, burn-outs and other risky
| maneuvers.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Thank you! I hadn't heard the term before and made a guess as
| to what it meant. I guessed wrong.
| sberens wrote:
| > Autonomous cars in San Francisco made 92 unplanned stops
| between May and December 2022
|
| So about one unplanned stop every 3 days? Seems a bit of a
| stretch to call it "clogging" San Francisco.
| neonate wrote:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20230410130758/https://www.wired....
|
| https://archive.ph/PAhqM
| strstr wrote:
| This article is making a mountain out of a molehill.
|
| The crux of the article seems to be "wow! If you block traffic it
| really adds up to wasting people's time!". Duh. Lots of things do
| this, many less valuable than driverless cars.
|
| As an example, Seattle's drawbridges sound like much more of a
| disaster than whatever time is being wasted by Cruise vehicles.
| Sailboats can't even make it under the Fremont bridge, so every
| rich dude with a boat blocks traffic (including multiple bus
| lines) for 10 min when they sail by.
| advisedwang wrote:
| > As an example, Seattle's drawbridges ...
|
| Those bridges don't open 7-9AM and 4-6PM, which shows that we
| have and should continue to regulate to mitigate disruptions!
| dpkirchner wrote:
| > Sailboats can't even make it under the Fremont bridge, so
| every rich dude with a boat blocks traffic (including multiple
| bus lines) for 10 min when they sail by.
|
| I've dreamt of a reverse-toll system where those folks end up
| paying drivers, pedestrians, and bus passengers some token
| amount for the delay (not enough to encourage lolligagging but
| enough to encourage boats to find better travel times or
| coordinate to spread the tolls.
| bombcar wrote:
| Amusingly in almost all jurisdictions, based on ancient law,
| the boats have right-of-way over the bridge.
|
| Special laws sometimes are passed to have "boat times" so the
| boat has to wait until the top of the hour or similar.
| akira2501 wrote:
| Substitute "bus" for "ambulance" and maybe the problem becomes
| more apparent. The fact you can't issue a "reckless driving"
| ticket to a corporation is going to become a problem. There
| isn't a mechanism to force them to address the problems they
| create.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Does the article compare these incidents with similar cases of
| disabled cars that did have drivers? No? Then nothing to learn
| here.
| Overtonwindow wrote:
| I feel like San Francisco is NOT a good city to test autonomous
| vehicles. Flat, grid cities would make better test grounds,
| preferably without streetcars.
| dbcurtis wrote:
| What? No. Please tell me this is not how you test your own code
| -- only cases for "happy path", ignore exceptions, no corner
| case coverage. Line coverage goals of 10% or so.
|
| Waymo has a lot of miles in quiet suburbs with broad streets
| and light traffic. How has that helped them when they get to
| SF?
| tanseydavid wrote:
| "Happy Path" gets all of the love.
| dbcurtis wrote:
| But... does it? :) Why would you assume there is only on
| logic flow :) Testers must be evil-minded white-hats.
| uoaei wrote:
| If subjects aren't passing tests, the solution is to make the
| tests easier?
|
| (Remember this the next time someone says "teachers are the
| reason our kids are dumb".)
| jonas21 wrote:
| Didn't Waymo start testing without backup drivers in Phoenix,
| which is exactly as you describe (and also has clear weather
| nearly every day)? I think they only moved on to SF after
| deciding things worked well enough there.
| ra7 wrote:
| The self driving taxi companies will be very happy that minor
| traffic inconveniences are the only thing people are complaining
| about at this point.
| classified wrote:
| Ah, the great American tradition of having the public play guinea
| pigs for those looking to make money.
| codyb wrote:
| I'd imagine that's the world's tradition for thousands of years
| and any thing different is a recent development and rather
| exclusive
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I've always wondered about a hypothetical South Park episode
| where it feels 100% South Park and yet they play the entire thing
| straight with no exaggeration.
|
| This could be that.
| jmole wrote:
| this is incredibly frustrating.
|
| look at the dashcam footage. What's taking up space?
|
| The driverless car, or the long lines of parked cars on each side
| of the road?
| chkaloon wrote:
| I'll probably be downvoted, but city infrastructure needs to be a
| partner in this. I've always thought driverless vehicles are a
| losing proposition unless road infrastructure engineering and
| transit is upgraded along with it. If SF is just ignoring it
| until it causes problems, well they're part of the problem.
| uoaei wrote:
| My dream long-term would be completely separated infra for
| cars+buses and for bikes+scooters. Human-driven cars will be
| pointless except on backwoods trails or racetracks in any case.
| scottLobster wrote:
| We better start on another baby boom then. Mass transit of
| any sort requires a certain population density to be viable.
| Unless you define any given suburb as "backwoods".
| iamerroragent wrote:
| Suburbs only exist in America because white people don't
| like living next to black people.
|
| I really doubt you're going to convince middle to upper-
| middle income white people to commute via the bus with
| people they see as undesirable.
|
| That's an American problem not necessarily true for outside
| of the states.
|
| Your point on population density is good. I suspect
| population density may see some shrinking with the rise of
| remote work.
|
| I know for myself if I could make big city job salary but
| work and live in a small town rural area with cheaper cost
| of living I would. I bet a lot of middle income people are
| thinking the same thing.
| scottLobster wrote:
| It's anecdotal, but as an upper middle class, gun-owning,
| formerly (pre-Trump) Republican-voting American white guy
| raised in a largely white upper middle class suburb, I've
| ridden my adopted city's bus many times and it's fine.
| I'd happily take it to work and save on gas if it went
| straight there, as it stands taking the bus turns a 30
| minute commute into an hour+ commute. Also my kid's
| doctor and dentist are completely inaccessible by bus,
| never mind other activities.
|
| Whatever the original motivations for suburbs, I've yet
| to meet anyone who moved to a suburb to get away from
| <insert ethnicity>, and I've had enough unasked for
| conversations with racists to know I don't immediately
| alienate them for whatever reason. Commute, crime, space
| and schools are usually at the top of the list of reasons
| for moving to a suburb. Sure you can argue
| institutionalized racism and such is somewhat integrated
| into those things, but very few people (with the possible
| exception of the less educated regions of the
| South/Midwest) are consciously turning down properties
| solely because a black family lives next door.
|
| At any rate, those people are bitter losers and idiots
| who's opinion grows less relevant each passing year.
| There are plenty of more rational people who could be
| convinced if mass transit was made practical
| iamerroragent wrote:
| "American white guy raised in a largely white upper
| middle class suburb, I've ridden my adopted city's bus
| many times and it's fine."
|
| Yeah, that will be the majority of people's experiences
| riding the bus. Other than sexual harassment. Or watching
| the driver have to refuse someone on the bus because they
| wanted to call the driver a derogatory slur.
|
| Regardless I digress. People absolutely move out of the
| City to the Suburbs "for the schools".
|
| They won't say it outright but no, white people don't
| want to live near black people in America. Otherwise,
| since rent is still pretty affordable in predominantly
| black neighborhoods you would think they (white people)
| would choose to live there instead of moving outside of
| the city and having longer commutes and bigger mortgages.
| kneebonian wrote:
| > "Otherwise, since rent is still pretty affordable in
| predominantly black neighborhoods you would think they
| (white people) would choose to live there instead of
| moving outside of the city and having longer commutes and
| bigger mortgages."
|
| This is one of the most blatant cases of selective
| omission I've ever seen. Pray tell why is rent in Detroit
| or Chicago so cheap? I mean I spent two years doing
| humanitarian work across north Ohio in some of the cities
| that have incredibly "low rent" there's a reason for
| that, and anyone who can chooses to leave when they can
| for very obvious reasons if you go and visit those areas.
| iamerroragent wrote:
| Idk, I grew up in a white middle class neighborhood but
| the cost of housing is pretty considerably lower in the
| neighborhoods to the other side of the freeway/railroad
| tracks that happens to also be predominantly black. (This
| is Ohio btw)
|
| Note those neighborhoods were built in similar times with
| similar sizes of lots and quality of houses.
|
| The only noticable differences between the two locations
| is racial makeup of the community.
|
| So if two areas are equally nice to live in but one is
| cheaper to live in than the other then why are people
| electing to live in a more expensive area over the
| cheaper one? Assuming everything else is equal.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| > The only noticable differences between the two
| locations is racial makeup of the community.
|
| > So if two areas are equally nice to live in but one is
| cheaper to live in than the other then why are people
| electing to live in a more expensive area over the
| cheaper one? Assuming everything else is equal.
|
| I strongly doubt that "housing is considerably lower"
| while having no "noticable differences" besides race.
| Name the communities, so one can research the actual
| differences, otherwise this is imaginary. I hope you
| can't mean Cleveland.
| colanderman wrote:
| I don't disagree with the sentiment, but --
|
| > Otherwise, since rent is still pretty affordable in
| predominantly black neighborhoods you would think they
| (white people) would choose to live there
|
| This is almost the definition of gentrification, which is
| pretty common where I live (Boston area).
| iamerroragent wrote:
| Gentrification is pushing people out of their environment
| due to high rent prices which happens because white
| people 'feel' comfortable to live there now.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentrification
|
| I'm saying that our neighborhoods should reflect more or
| less the ratio of diversity in the population but it
| doesn't does it?
|
| Presumably there's more poor white people than poor black
| people in America, right? So if price of rent was the
| main determining factor for where someone lives
| presumably lower income communities ought to be pretty
| mixed then, right?
|
| That is white people ought to feel comfortable enough to
| have black neighbors and lower rent and mortgages before
| the gentrification happens.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| > those people are bitter losers and idiots who's opinion
| grows less relevant each passing year
|
| Their racist opinions have grown relevant enough in the
| past several years to drive you, a presumably non-racist
| Republican, away from voting for your own political
| party. Racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, white
| supremacy, and bigotry in general are all on a sharp
| rise, thanks to Trump's normalization and weaponization
| of bigotry, and to everyone who supports him, and
| especially to people who privately dislike him but
| publicly support him (most of the Republican party).
|
| Thanks for not voting for him yourself, but don't blind
| yourself to the problem with America and your Republican
| party, which owns Trump now and forever.
| uoaei wrote:
| In the techno-utopian view which has become the default for
| self-driving vehicles' integration into society, suburbs
| are also served by self-driving cars. What is your point
| exactly?
| lom wrote:
| You're not going to be downvoted if that's also the conclusion
| the article has.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Are the manufacturers going to pay for that? Or is it going to
| be a regressive transfer from the rest of the taxpayers?
| throwaway9980 wrote:
| Are bike manufacturers going to pay for bike lanes? Or is it
| going to be a regressive transfer?
|
| What about Big Walking Shoe, are they going to pay for these
| sidewalks or are we going to continue to subsidize their
| profits?
| Akronymus wrote:
| > Are bike manufacturers going to pay for bike lanes? Or is
| it going to be a regressive transfer?
|
| The fact that there are less cars on the road already is a
| HUGE benefit to them. Less cars => less parking lots and
| less noise pollution => less maintenance costs => savings
| for tax payers.
| ghaff wrote:
| What on earth makes you think that autonomous driving
| that alleviates a driver from having to drive (and park)
| in some of the least pleasant to drive in conditions will
| result in fewer cars? Having to drive into the city
| that's about an hour away is a major consideration for me
| not doing it more frequently.
| Akronymus wrote:
| I was writing about why bike paths are a net positive for
| everyone, rather than a regressive transfer. Even if just
| by reducing the amount of cars.
| briandear wrote:
| They aren't a net positive for everyone when valuable
| transportation lanes are lost for bicycles. I'm not
| taking my four kids to the doctor on a bicycle. In an
| emergency, I'm not going to pedal my way to the emergency
| room. When it's pouring rain, or baking hot, I'm not
| going to ride a bicycle. If I'm buying groceries for a
| family of six, I'm not going to carry a week's worth of
| groceries in a backpack. A bicycle trip of 15 miles takes
| a whole lot longer than a car trip of the same distance.
| How about transporting young babies on a bike? Bikes are
| far more unsafe than cars.
| dalke wrote:
| It's only valuable lanes you're concerned with, right?
|
| That is, you are okay with giving up low-value car
| transportation lanes for valuable bicycle lanes, yes?
|
| You may be interested in Braess's paradox.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox describe
| it as "the observation that adding one or more roads to a
| road network can slow down overall traffic flow through
| it."
|
| That Wikipedia entry gives a few examples where closing
| roads helped automobile throughput, and links to
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand for more
| details about how building more highways fails to reduce
| congestion. ("the more highways were built to alleviate
| congestion, the more automobiles would pour into them and
| congest them and thus force the building of more highways
| - which would generate more traffic and become congested
| in their turn in an ever-widening spiral that contained
| far-reaching implications for the future of New York and
| of all urban areas").
|
| Thus feels very much like there are net-negative
| transportation lanes which can be replaced by bicycle
| lanes _and_ improve your transit rates.
|
| Are you against removing those lanes? Are you against
| experiments to determine where those lanes might be?
|
| As for the rest of your comment, you live in an area
| designed for cars, so of course cars are essential for
| your daily life. If you don't know what you're missing,
| it's easy to overlook how other solutions exist.
|
| I happen to live in a walkable part of my city. Our
| health care center is 4 blocks away. The urgent care
| center is about a mile away. Both are walkable, even with
| two stroller-age kids, which we've done.
|
| When we've needed to get to the hospital in a hurry,
| we've used a taxi. The savings in not having a car more
| than pays for both a bus pass and the occasional taxi.
|
| We've got a good bus system, so when the weather is
| horrible, people switch from walking or bikes to buses
| when going to work.
|
| We get our groceries delivered - again, the cost of
| delivery is less than the cost of owning a car.
|
| And since we live in a walkable area of the city, we used
| strollers to move babies around, including on the bus,
| and to get to preschool. (We had several choices within
| walking distance.)
|
| The big box store is about 10 minutes away by bus, and
| it's 5 minutes to the bus stop. When we've bought
| something big, we pay for delivery and removal of the old
| item, but car/truck rentals are also possible.
|
| Nor must one be without a car to live here. We have
| several neighbors with a car, parked in the parking
| garage on our block. Instead, we've made the choice to
| not have a car.
|
| While you don't have that choice. You are stuck, just
| like most people in the US. It's no wonder you interpret
| any talk about opening other possibilities as a
| diminishment of your life.
|
| But on the other hand, having everyone's life organized
| around the way you personally want it diminishes the
| ability for people who want a car free life, and for
| those who for whatever reason cannot drive.
|
| Consider that in a few years your kids will need you or
| another adult to drive them to all the places they want
| to go. The proverbial soccer mom is an unpaid chauffeur,
| and likely needs an extra vehicle for that purpose.
|
| While my kids will be able to walk, bike, or take a bus,
| on their own, even as 10 year olds. I'll be able to send
| them to the store to pick up a missing ingredient for
| dinner. If they get bored they can walk 6 blocks to the
| library, or to a park to play, or to the local youth arts
| and culture center, or the swimming pool, or visit
| friends.
|
| What will your kids be able to do?
| ProfessorLayton wrote:
| It's worth noting that public transportation exists, not
| just bikes and cars. Designing city less oriented around
| cars would mean that you _could_ take your kids to the
| doctor on a train /bus/walk, and that your grocery store
| wouldn't be 15mi away, and not need to buy a week's worth
| of groceries at a time.
|
| Of course you could choose to drive anyway, but as long
| as people have the _option_ to rely less on their cars it
| 's a net win.
| ghaff wrote:
| Except that bike lanes often cut into lanes for
| auto/truck/bus traffic. Traffic has gotten worse over the
| past few years since a lot of bike lanes were put in.
| Maybe that's a reasonable tradeoff (probably), but bike
| lanes almost certainly didn't make things better for
| drivers. (ADDED: Around where I live I suspect bike lanes
| serve more as an alternative to walking and public
| transit than they do cars. Again, they're probably for
| the best but they don't really help drivers.)
| cozzyd wrote:
| Bike and bus lanes have only improved traffic for me. But
| I don't have a car...
| xracy wrote:
| Citation needed for "Traffic has gotten worse over the
| past few years since a lot of bike lanes were put in."
| For one thing, it's not even a causal statement, but
| you're implying it is.
|
| For another bikes take up ~half the space of a car going
| in the same direction. So the inclusion of bike lanes and
| their usage would only _improve_ traffic because it
| removes the actual cause of traffic (cars) from the road.
| ghaff wrote:
| I was speaking of a specific city that has added
| extensive bike lanes. No idea of causality. Maybe a lot
| more people have decided to drive in and out all of a
| sudden.
|
| I was mostly objecting to the comment up-thread implying
| that bike lanes are inherently win win. They can be a
| good idea on net while increasing driving times.
| xracy wrote:
| Yeah, your trying to hide your argument in specificity
| makes it an "anecdote" and not anything meaningfully
| contributing to the conversation. So you can either find
| specific sources that demonstrate more than that "you
| feel like traffic has gone up due to bike lanes in city
| X", and that would be an interesting content/addition to
| the discussion _or_ you can mark it more clearly as an
| opinion, and people will be more likely to ignore it...
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Depends. If 90% of the traffic is still cars, bike lanes
| make it possible for the 10% that is bikes. But the 90%
| now have fewer lanes.
|
| You sound like you're assuming that, given more bike
| lanes, 50% of the traffic will ditch their cars and ride
| bikes. (At least, your logic doesn't work without that
| assumption.) I don't think that's a valid assumption.
| trgn wrote:
| I guess it depends on the location. More lanes don't
| equal better traffic. In my city, every road is pretty
| much a 2-3 lane highway for cars, and it seems like a
| huge waste of space. Invites speeding, crashes.
|
| There's been road diets, where they've been reduced to
| single lane, and these had had no effect on travel time.
| Did reduce crashes a lot, less of that aggressive
| jostling for position, just cars chugging along calmly in
| single file.
|
| There's been years long construction on a few big
| buildings, blocking whole lanes, forcing cars into single
| file; absolutely zero effect on travel times.
|
| When there's snowfall, only middle lanes are cleared.
| Zero effect on traffic flow.
|
| Imho traffic flow is pretty much determined by number of
| cars and number of intersections, and very little by
| number of parallel lanes. So much room for dedicated bike
| or bus lanes, it's really AND/AND, really everybody wins,
| and it's such a tragedy that my city just doesn't seem to
| understand that. All it takes is paint and bollards.
| gibolt wrote:
| Not 1/2, closer to 1/10 (for the exact space of the car).
| Cars also need far more buffer space, parking space,
| overall road area for maneuvering around a city. If
| completely replaced, infrastructure area could probably
| be reduced by ~20-100x
| xracy wrote:
| I'm being real generous here that on a 4 lane road, if
| you want to add bikes I would just take away 1 lane of
| car traffic, and that would allow for bikes to be
| insulated from the cars in both directions.
|
| But I definitely agree with you that we could probably
| 1/100th the size of roads (and open up a whole lot of
| space for property development), if everyone biked
| everywhere. (Not useful as a goal, just useful as an idea
| for space requirements.)
| briandear wrote:
| Do bikers pay usage taxes or registration fees?
| eesmith wrote:
| Flipping things around, do drivers pay enough in usage
| taxes and registration fees to cover the cost of the road
| they use?
|
| No. Usage taxes and registration fees only cover ~37% of
| the cost of the roads.
|
| "In 2020, state and local motor fuel tax revenue ($53
| billion) accounted for 26 percent of highway and road
| spending, while toll facilities and other street
| construction and repair fees ($22 billion) provided
| another 11 percent. The majority of funding for highway
| and road spending came from state and local general funds
| and federal funds." - https://www.urban.org/policy-
| centers/cross-center-initiative...
|
| The remaining ~63% comes from other sources, including
| property taxes, sales taxes, and income taxes which
| bikers pay either directly or indirectly (eg, through
| rent).
| [deleted]
| UncleEntity wrote:
| > Are bike manufacturers going to pay for bike lanes?
|
| Are bike manufacturers operating the bicycles for profit?
|
| > What about Big Walking Shoe...
|
| Are they operating the shoes for profit?
|
| Or is it the citizens, taxpayers if you will, operating the
| shoes and bikes as part of their "social contract" with the
| city?
|
| Now, are the citizens of SF owning and operating robocars
| as part of this social bargain or is it for-profit entities
| 100% doing it to extract income from the citizens?
|
| Not that I'm saying profit as an incentive is wrong but you
| do see the difference in these two things, right?
| gatlin wrote:
| Is this a sincere reply? I would use a throwaway too if
| asking something this inane.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| I don't necessarily agree with it, but it's not inane. It
| was the government that paid for roads and highways,
| after all, not Ford or GM.
| treis wrote:
| I feel like I've stumbled into bizarro world. Self
| driving cars would be a massive boon to quality of life
| in every American city with perhaps a few exceptions. I
| couldn't care less if my city spent a billion dollars a
| year making them work. Way better than that billion going
| to the current public transit system that sucks out loud.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| Many people think that money could be better spent on
| improving transit so that it no longer sucks.
| treis wrote:
| We tried that about 7 years ago. Zero projects from that
| tax increase have been delivered and the one actually
| under construction is mostly pointless.
| xracy wrote:
| I don't know if you've ever been to a walkable city, but
| they pay for themselves. Because people don't spend all of
| their time driving to and from the place they want to be,
| they get to spend extra time shopping and growing local
| businesses that pay taxes for infrastructure to stick
| around.
|
| Car lanes are paying money for people to skip those places
| and only go to one place at a time without drawing them to
| other places in the same area. If I'm driving to the store,
| I'm driving... To the store. I'm not going to walk around
| outside of the store after I'm done. This has no benefits
| for adjacent businesses.
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| Source? I can easily make the other argument.
|
| Car lanes bring more customers from far away locations
| etc. etc.
| xracy wrote:
| I believe this is the video I was going off of to extract
| the info from.
|
| You can make the other argument... but can you bring the
| other data for it?
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI&ab_channe
| l=NotJu...
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| Can you? You just linked a StrongTowns video.
|
| (I was 100% expecting that lol).
|
| Let me spell it out. I was looking for peer-reviewed
| publications. I am not going through an ad-infested
| StrongTowns video to hunt for references.
|
| He has links to his Patreon, paid-subs on Nebula, and
| donations but zero links to any peer-reviewed articles.
| That says a lot.
| xracy wrote:
| Oh, cool, still more evidence than you've provided. And
| honestly, you can Google for peer-reviewed publications
| just as well as I can if you're just going to complain
| about my sources.
|
| Where are your "peer-reviewed publications" that prove
| I'm wrong. How about let's see that first, since you've
| provided nothing (not even an argument) for why I'm
| wrong. You just stated you _could_ make the argument, and
| you yada yada yada 'd your way through the rest of the
| point:
|
| > Car lanes bring more customers from far away locations
| etc. etc.
|
| How about you fill out the etc's with some peer-reviewed
| publications?
| killjoywashere wrote:
| Pedestrians (aka everyone) pushed for sidewalks, long
| before cars. Cyclists (a much smaller voting block), pushed
| for bike lanes, and it took them much longer. What voting
| block is going to push for infrastructure improvements
| needed by self-driving cars?
| phpisthebest wrote:
| >>Pedestrians (aka everyone)
|
| False, everyone is not a Pedestrian, I moved into my
| current home specifically because there are no sidewalks
| (and no HOA), and I resist any movement to add them to my
| street.
|
| >>What voting block is going to push for infrastructure
| improvements needed by self-driving cars?
|
| People that want to use and benefit from Self Driving
| cars, just like people that vote for sidewalks.
|
| I have a feeling the number of people that want the dream
| of being able to have a car that just drives itself is
| FAR FAR FAR FAR higher than the number of people that
| utilize sidewalks. At least for my Geographic region...
| low_key wrote:
| The dream of a "car that just drives itself" works for
| everyone. It serves both goals of letting people such as
| yourself take your car (optionally paying attention),
| while also making sure that car doesn't run over
| pedestrians, cyclists, and the like.
|
| Your geographic region doesn't really matter.
| cozzyd wrote:
| You're talking to someone who thinks PHP is the best.
| _dain_ wrote:
| _> False, everyone is not a Pedestrian, I moved into my
| current home specifically because there are no sidewalks
| (and no HOA), and I resist any movement to add them to my
| street._
|
| What the fuck!? Why don't you want a sidewalk? Why would
| any street even be built without a sidewalk, like how is
| that even an option. How is anyone meant to walk safely?
|
| _> I have a feeling the number of people that want the
| dream of being able to have a car that just drives itself
| is FAR FAR FAR FAR higher than the number of people that
| utilize sidewalks. At least for my Geographic region... _
|
| Where are you from, Mars? Cause you may as well be
| speaking Martian, I can't comprehend your mindset at all.
|
| How does anyone go for a morning run? Walk their dog? How
| do kids get to their friends' houses? Even in a low
| density suburb people do these things.
|
| "The number of people who use sidewalks" is like ... 99%.
| Everyone uses them at least a little, unless you're
| literally bedridden or something. Or out in the middle of
| nowhere.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| > How is anyone meant to walk safely?
|
| Only the poors walk and they drag down the property
| values by their mere presence.
|
| And kids? Nasty little creatures.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| >>How does anyone go for a morning run? Walk their dog?
| How do kids get to their friends' houses?
|
| on the road, there is like zero traffic on my road, and I
| spend my entire child hood playing in the street.
|
| >>Where are you from, Mars?
|
| No the midwest... probably mars to you...
|
| >>Why don't you want a sidewalk?
|
| Because I do not want to maintain them, shovel them, or
| accept the liability of someone is injured on them.
|
| >>Everyone uses them at least a little, unless you're
| literally bedridden or something.
|
| Not bed Ridden, do not use sidewalks.
|
| My vehicle goes from my drive to a parking lot, I walk
| from the inside of my home to the vehicle and then from
| the vehicle to the inside of a business on the tarmac of
| the parking lot. No sidewalks
| _dain_ wrote:
| _> on the road, there is like zero traffic on my road,
| and I spend my entire child hood playing in the street._
|
| Same in my childhood, but there were sidewalks
| (pavements) everywhere. A street without one is simply
| defective, like if it didn't have lampposts or adequate
| drainage. Cars go down the middle, pedestrians go on the
| sides, that's just how it works.
|
| _> No the midwest... probably mars to you..._
|
| I don't know what that's supposed to mean.
|
| _> Because I do not want to maintain them, shovel them,
| or accept the liability of someone is injured on them._
|
| Why on earth would it be your responsibility to maintain
| the sidewalk? It's not yours! It's publicly owned and
| it's maintained at public expense, exactly like the road
| surface. I've never personally had to maintain any
| sidewalk outside my house, they're in adequately good
| repair because it comes out of my taxes. Does your
| council expect you to mix your own concrete to patch up
| cracks, or something? Like the backyard steel mills in
| Maoist China? Are you expected to fill potholes in the
| road too? And why would you have any liability if someone
| is injured? That's not how torts work, again cause it's
| not your pavement. You're just making up nonsensical
| reasons.
|
| _> My vehicle goes from my drive to a parking lot, I
| walk from the inside of my home to the vehicle and then
| from the vehicle to the inside of a business on the
| tarmac of the parking lot. No sidewalks _
|
| So every single little errand you have to do requires
| getting in a car and driving to a new destination? And
| you expect everyone else to live this way on your street?
| Again, how do kids or anyone who doesn't have access to a
| car at that particular moment manage to do anything?
|
| Your entire world amounts to your house, your car,
| parking lots, and the inside of shops and offices. That's
| unimaginably sad to me. I could never live like that. Do
| you really never use the two legs God gave you, and never
| let your lungs breathe natural air, and never let your
| eyes see the beauty of the world unimpeded by a
| plexiglass windshield?
| phpisthebest wrote:
| > A street without one is simply defective, like if it
| didn't have lampposts or adequate drainage.
|
| My street has lights, drains, everything but sidewalks...
|
| >I don't know what that's supposed to mean.
|
| I suspected (and still do) you either live outside the
| US, or on one of the coasts.
|
| >>Why on earth would it be your responsibility to
| maintain the sidewalk? It's not yours, it's publicly
| owned and it's maintained at public expense.
|
| No, not it is not. Not anywhere I have ever lived. They
| are "easements" that are privately owned, and have to
| maintained by the home owner, at the home owners expense,
| and you will be fined if they are not maintained,
| shoveled, etc.
|
| In some cases the city my pay for the initial creation of
| the sidewalks, but after that it is on the homeowner to
| maintain them.
|
| >Does your council expect you to mix your own concrete to
| patch up cracks, or something?
|
| Yes?... Or hire a contractor to replace them if they are
| disrepair.. Often times it is HOA that is responsible as
| well which comes out of the HOA dues you would pay.
| Rarely is it the city in area of single family home
| neighborhoods.
|
| Example This is not my city, but my city is simliar...
| Peoria, IL ARTICLE VII. > DIVISION 1. > Sec. 26-231. -
| Declaration of disrepair; notice. [1]
|
| >> " . The notice shall advise the owner that he must
| repair or contract for repairs of the sidewalk in need of
| repair within 30 days of the date of the mailing of the
| notice. The notice shall describe with particularity the
| location of the sidewalk in need of repair."
|
| Now in Peoria, IL they do cover upto 80% of the bill but
| the owner still has to find, contract, and schedule the
| contractor, and the city can reject any bill they soley
| claim is "excessive" in costs and only reimburse what
| they fill is not excessive, Some / Many cities do not
| offer any reimbursement at all or offer a lower rate...
|
| In either case it is still property that is owned by the
| home owner, the public has the right of access via an
| easement. Liability in those states and cities is on the
| homeowner.
|
| [1] https://library.municode.com/il/peoria/codes/code_of_
| ordinan...
|
| >So every single little errand you have to do requires
| getting in a car and driving to a new destination?
|
| Most people in my city already do... I am the norm.
|
| >Do you really never use the two legs God gave you, and
| never let your lungs breathe natural air,
|
| Sure that is what Parks, Camping, Trails, etc are for.
| Not sidewalks on my street
| cozzyd wrote:
| It's too bad homeowners aren't responsible for
| maintaining the street in front of their home too.
|
| (but I'm fine with streets with no sidewalks, as long as
| the speed limit is appropriately reduced to 10 mph or so
| to make walking safe. Otherwise how are kids to walk to
| school and back?).
| _dain_ wrote:
| _> My street has lights, drains, everything but
| sidewalks..._
|
| Then it's defective.
|
| _> No, not it is not. Not anywhere I have ever lived.
| They are "easements" that are privately owned, and have
| to maintained by the home owner, at the home owners
| expense, and you will be fined if they are not
| maintained, shoveled, etc._
|
| _> Yes?... Or hire a contractor to replace them if they
| are disrepair.. Often times it is HOA that is responsible
| as well which comes out of the HOA dues you would pay.
| Rarely is it the city in area of single family home
| neighborhoods._
|
| _> Now in Peoria, IL they do cover upto 80% of the bill
| but the owner still has to find, contract, and schedule
| the contractor, and the city can reject any bill they
| soley claim is "excessive" in costs and only reimburse
| what they fill is not excessive, Some / Many cities do
| not offer any reimbursement at all or offer a lower
| rate..._
|
| _> In either case it is still property that is owned by
| the home owner, the public has the right of access via an
| easement. Liability in those states and cities is on the
| homeowner._
|
| That's insane. Stark raving mad. Completely, utterly
| barmy.
|
| Such a byzantine, litigious system would deter one from
| wanting a sidewalk next to one's house. It is obviously
| broken. It should be reformed so that people's incentives
| are not aligned against basic standards of civilization,
| by taking sidewalks into proper public ownership (not
| this "easement" frippery) and allowing for coordination
| and economies of scale in their maintenance. Imagine if
| roads worked this way! A patchwork of (ir)responsibility,
| individualism pursued to a farcical extreme.
|
| _> Most people in my city already do... I am the norm._
|
| How do people go places and get things done if they can't
| drive? Like being under 18, or elderly, or poor, or with
| vision disabilities, or mentally retarded, or their
| spouse needed the car for something else, or being drunk
| at that particular moment, or the car is in for repairs,
| or they had their license suspended, or any number of
| other reasons? It would seem one is utterly dependent on
| an expensive machine, a prisoner in your own home without
| it, having to pay an enormous ante just for basic
| participation in society.
|
| _> Sure that is what Parks, Camping, Trails, etc are
| for. Not sidewalks on my street _
|
| Those things I listed aren't special treats that you save
| for a holiday. They're supposed to be a normal everyday
| part of human existence. Your body needs a baseline level
| of exertion to maintain cardiovascular health. What
| you're describing isn't normal at all.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| >> you save for a holiday.
|
| UK or EU?
|
| >> their spouse needed the car for something else
|
| Most have a second car.... or even 3... hell for most of
| my adult life I had both a Car and Truck, I was single. I
| dont today just a truck but I have thought about getting
| an EV Car, It would not however replace my Truck but in
| addition to it.
|
| Uber / Lyft has gone a long way for me not having that
| 2nd vehicle
|
| >How do people go places and get things done if they
| can't drive? Like being under 18, or elderly, or poor, or
| with vision disabilities, or mentally retarded
|
| Bike, Bus, etc.. But I am unclear why you think people
| under 18, the poor, or the elderly do not also have cars?
| People can drive here as young as 15, many poor people
| have cars... hell if you drive through some of the
| government funded housing / income restricted housing
| (i.e housing for poor people) some of them have newer
| cars than I do.
|
| and the elderly drive all the time though I would like
| them to stop as they drive to f'in slow....
|
| >> litigious system would deter one from wanting a
| sidewalk next to one's house.
|
| and we have come full circle. see my first post in this
| subject.
|
| >>by taking sidewalks into proper public ownership (not
| this "easement" frippery) and allowing for coordination
| and economies of scale in their maintenance.
|
| I dont know if that is a good case either, the roads in
| many area;s or pretty shitty, and low traffic residential
| streets often never get replaced until you can no longer
| tell if the road as paved or is gravel, and there are soo
| many pot holes that looks like a photo from a bombing run
| in war zone.
|
| "Economies of Scale" is not a thing with government
| project. No Bid Contraction to government preferred
| contractors aka corruption is ....
|
| Most studies show governments massively over pay for road
| projects compared to if a private citizen were to simply
| hire the same company to do the same job. Companies
| charge the government MORE not less.
| scottLobster wrote:
| Since money is speech, and this is SF, just a few rich
| VCs.
| hermannj314 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the garbage truck in a single weekly trip
| does more damage on my street than all the bikes and cars
| combined for that same period of time.
|
| Time and weight consume road and sidewalk infrastructure.
| Akronymus wrote:
| The huge amount of cars makes it seem attractive to widen
| roads and such. Which, more road surface leads to more
| maintenance. Along with that, widening also induces more
| demand and such.
| hermannj314 wrote:
| There is a great YouTuber [1] that talks about city
| planning. They have a lot of content, but a theme is tax
| revenue per square foot, and the mathematical reality of
| a sustainable city being unattainable because collective
| expectations regarding road infrastructure are so
| expensive.
|
| [1] - Not Just Bikes
| jodrellblank wrote:
| If that's what you've taken away from it, you need to
| rewatch it; the financial theme is not "sustainable
| cities are impossible" the theme is " _American sprawling
| car dependent suburbia_ is insolvent because it doesn 't
| generate enough tax revenue to pay for the sprawling
| roads/water/sewage/garbage disposal/other services that
| it uses", and it's like a Ponzi scheme where the
| construction and sale of a new chunk of suburbs pays for
| the maintenance work on the previous one.
|
| Denser inner-city areas generate much more tax revenue
| with less cost of services because they have to cover a
| smaller area, and this can be solvent and subsidises the
| suburbs.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI "Suburbs are
| subsidized: Here's the Math"
|
| NB. the last time I linked this on HN someone dismissed
| it as "Strong towns propaganda" claiming that if suburbs
| didn't exist, everyone would starve. They completely
| failed to respond to followup questions about cities
| which are not sprawling suburbs and are not starving.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35238666
| sokoloff wrote:
| There is a vast majority of suburban towns around Boston
| which are both quite old and quite solvent, contrary to
| the Strong Towns predictions.
|
| I've written about them before:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34599508
|
| For convenience, they include: Arlington (1635), Belmont
| (1849), Waltham (1884), Watertown (1630), Lincoln (1754),
| Wellesley (1881), Newton (1688 town, 1874 city) among
| others.
| hermannj314 wrote:
| I 100% agree with you and that was my takeaway as well
| from watching the series, I clearly was not very good at
| communicating my point.
| treis wrote:
| > about city planning. They have a lot of content, but a
| theme is tax revenue per square foot
|
| Sounds more like SimCity metric than what a real life
| city should care about.
| [deleted]
| spike021 wrote:
| A few days ago, my mom told me how a day or two before she was
| driving in the city (San Francisco) and a Waymo pulled up in the
| next lane to her. It started merging into her lane right beside
| her, and she thought she was going to be hit by it. Fortunately
| not, but afterward she attempted to get the driver's attention
| and realized there was none.
|
| Not sure what you do in that situation, honestly.
| zht wrote:
| you get hit and sue
| sixQuarks wrote:
| The article says there was 83 minutes of disruption caused by
| autonomous vehicles.
|
| I wonder what amount of disruption was caused by homeless and
| mentally ill people during the same period.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| The homeless and mentally ill don't pretend that they're
| solving society's transportation woes.
| tanseydavid wrote:
| On 6th street in SF they do.
| sixQuarks wrote:
| Do you honestly believe the world WILL NOT transition to
| autonomous vehicles in the future, even if that future is far
| down the road?
| pookha wrote:
| I only see this taking over if it's force fed down the
| publics throat by authoritarian regimes (China style). The
| public at-large doesn't want an algorithm to completely
| remove the steering wheel...Needs to be a fluid mixture of
| human and algorithm with these self-driving designs (Tesla
| style). Sorry.
| rsync wrote:
| Yes I believe that and I will actively work toward a future
| that does not contain (most) autonomous vehicles.
|
| Pick any date in the future and I will wager that my 16yo
| son can more intelligently navigate a tricky driving
| scenario and deal more effectively with tough edge cases.
|
| In addition to our human superiority at driving we also
| _owe it to each other_ to enter these driving transactions
| with literal _skin in the game_. I need to know that your
| driving strategies are backed up with "... or else I will
| be dead".
|
| The solution to our societal woes is not the further over-
| production of personal autos and autonomous driving - it is
| the investment in _real_ mass transit (the kind that runs
| on rails).
| woodruffw wrote:
| Do SF and other municipalities collect fees that compensate the
| public for these kinds of externalities? It seems absurd that
| companies performing driverless research can hobble public
| services and infrastructure without providing some form of
| compensation, ideally directed towards improving those services.
| vuln wrote:
| Fines? For stopping traffic? Hahahahhahaha.
|
| You can steal ~899$ worth of shit and the cops don't show up.
| Open air drug markets, people shitting in the streets,
| thousands of homeless people. But yeah let's pontificate about
| fines for someone disrupting traffic.
|
| You gonna fine the person that runs out of gas, causes an
| accident or just mechanically breaks down?
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| >You gonna fine the person that runs out of gas, causes an
| accident or just mechanically breaks down?
|
| I'm much more interested in fining the crap out of the people
| who don't have an "excuse" for their bad traffic performance.
| [deleted]
| grandmczeb wrote:
| The Traffic Congestion Mitigation Tax is designed for exactly
| this purpose.
|
| https://sftreasurer.org/business/taxes-fees/traffic-congesti...
|
| https://www.sfcta.org/funding/tnc-tax
| michaelt wrote:
| In any other locality, the compensation would be a bunch of
| highly paid tech jobs, paying fat stacks of tax and pulling
| money from all over the world into the local economy - both
| from the jobs directly working on the cars' software, and by
| bootstrapping a technology hub.
|
| Of course, in the case of SF you could argue they have far more
| highly paid tech jobs than the city can support already, and no
| need to bootstrap a technology hub....
| woodruffw wrote:
| This isn't a strong argument for externalities: no
| municipality in the world would (should?) accept toxic waste
| being dumped in its water supply just because a small
| fraction of its tax base is paid handsomely to do so.
|
| Put another way: the value proposition for SF (and other tech
| cities) exists above and prior to these companies being
| allowed to treat the city's streets as a testing ground.
| michaelt wrote:
| Cities allow road users to mess up traffic all the time.
|
| Got a large vehicle that blocks multiple lanes while
| turning? No problem. Heavy 18-wheelers that fuck up the
| road surface? We're pro-business. Trash collectors need to
| stop to collect trash? Of course they do. Customers trying
| to parallel park block a complete lane of traffic, in
| addition to the lane of on-street parking? No worries.
| Taxis want to stop traffic to pick up customers? Sure
| thing. Delivery drivers want to double park? Well, you
| gotta deliver somehow, just make it quick. Parked vehicles
| blocking the cycle lane? Well you'll just have to go
| around. Slow cyclist in a narrow street? They've got every
| right to be there. Hire scooters all over the sidewalk?
| Yeah, that happens.
|
| I'm not sure the comparison to _toxic waste dumping_ is
| really warranted.
| woodruffw wrote:
| At least in NYC, nearly all of these have corresponding
| taxes, levies, or outright bans. For example, the city
| charges additional taxes against both taxi operators and
| riders to compensate the public for the congestion they
| induce[1].
|
| Similarly, 53' trailers are outright illegal in NYC
| (because they destroy the road surface, as you mentioned,
| and can't navigate the city safety). Enforcement is
| currently poor, however.
|
| The point is this: using city streets to trial-run
| experimental technology is something _new and distinct_ ,
| and it isn't immediately clear to me why the public
| shouldn't be compensated for the bother.
|
| [1]: https://www.tax.ny.gov/bus/cs/csidx.htm
| firstlink wrote:
| [flagged]
| i80and wrote:
| I know you're being inflammatory to make a point, but calling
| this "fascistic" is really out of line and dilutes the
| concept.
| chihuahua wrote:
| That horse left the barn a long time ago. Over the past
| several years, the word "fascistic" (and "fascist",
| obviously) has become so overused that now it just means
| "something I don't like." Just like "awesome" now means
| "pretty good."
| Fatnino wrote:
| Because the government then uses those fees to build or
| upkeep a public good and the public is spared from having to
| pay the taxes to do so.
| kjksf wrote:
| When exactly did that imaginary, completely made up
| "sparing of taxes" ever happened?
|
| This is San Francisco. The only thing I ever hear from
| politicians is an additional tax, on top of all the other
| taxes.
|
| But prove me wrong: when in the last 10 years did San
| Francisco "spared" or lowered taxes?
|
| San Francisco has a budget of $14 billion dollars.
|
| Paris, France: EUR4.4 billion euro.
|
| The issue is not lack of money but mind boggling,
| ineffective, corrupt spending of the money.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| The idea of fining the companies involved is proposed near the
| end of the article:
|
| > As driverless cars keep racking up the miles, San Francisco
| transit advocates propose a variety of measures to lessen their
| impact. Jaime Viloria of Equity on Public Transit, a grassroots
| group of riders in the Tenderloin neighborhood, says companies
| operating autonomous vehicles should be fined for causing
| delays.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Seems fair. If a manually driven car were to block a
| streetcar like that surely that would result in a fine? This
| shouldn't require any sort of special treatment for self
| driving cars one way or the other.
| bradleybuda wrote:
| Haha, not in San Francisco, no. We've stopped enforcing
| traffic laws.
|
| https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/bayarea/heatherknight/articl
| e...
| vuln wrote:
| What if a manually operated car mechanically breaks down,
| runs out of gas, or causes an accident are you going to
| give them a "traffic delay" fine?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Whether we do or not, it doesn't have to be tied to the
| same law.
|
| If the driver just _stops driving_ of their own volition,
| while in the way, that can be its own kind of ticket.
| stingrae wrote:
| that is an edge case.
| vuln wrote:
| Not really. In the Tidewater area of Virginia, the area
| with the most per capita tunnels, AT LEAST once a day
| someone runs out of gas or breaks down in one of the 7
| tunnels causing 30 minute -hour delay. Definitely not an
| edge case.
| kube-system wrote:
| Driving is an exercise in line following, until it isn't. This
| problem isn't solvable until AGI is invented, or we (again) limit
| automated vehicles to closed circuits where exceptions are less
| likely to cause cascading faliures.
| ridgered4 wrote:
| Anyone ever think about what a nightmare driverless cars will be
| if they actually work? Right now our crumbling infrastructure is
| loaded with traffic. Imagine if the max amount of driving a human
| can endure is removed entirely as a final constraint on the total
| utilization rate of this infrastructure and is replaced with a
| relentless driving machine that never tires or gets frustrated
| and has no fear of death.
|
| People would commute up to 4 hours one way, napping in their
| cars, maybe even longer. Delivery vehicles running all hours of
| the night, perhaps with no one ever in them at all. People
| sending the cars to go pick things up or people that they
| otherwise wouldn't have time in their day to do.
|
| Even if you don't want to live in your car that the pressure will
| still be exerted on you because you'll be competing with people
| that do. Cars instructed to circle the block in areas with no
| parking clogging the streets. You'll need a self driving car
| yourself to even get a spot since you'll never defeat all the
| robot vultures.
|
| People will forget how to drive entirely of course so there will
| be no going back. The whole thing will feed on itself, people
| will need more self driving cars to get back the time stolen by
| other self driving cars.
| mindvirus wrote:
| Of course, like anything there will be major societal changes.
| But consider a few brighter possibilities:
|
| * Cars are all electric, since the one downside major downside
| (a long time to charge versus gas) is reduced if they can go
| charge themselves. So less pollution and noise.
|
| * The number of cars may increase, but so will the capacity of
| roads due to faster speeds and higher density. So a city could
| possibly only have a couple of car accessible roads.
|
| * Parking can also get denser, as cars can presumably park
| themselves and coordinate. So you could build a few massive
| parking garages (for example) to serve thousands of cars, or
| require them to park outside of the city.
| gpm wrote:
| > Cars are all electric [...] So less [...] noise
|
| Tire noise dominates at speeds above roughly 30 kph (20 mph),
| so on reasonably fast roads not really.
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Propulsion-noise-the-
| tyr...
|
| Of course, self driving cars might also mean slower cars,
| because the drivers are less impatient, and if that is true
| then noise would go down. On the flip side, self driving cars
| might end up meaning faster cars because they can coordinate
| better, increasing noise levels.
| mejutoco wrote:
| I honestly cannot imagine self-driving cars until trains
| never crash and trucks are automated.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > The number of cars may increase, but so will the capacity
| of roads due to faster speeds and higher density.
|
| As someone who enjoys walking and biking, this strikes me a
| serious negative, not a positive.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| I suspect a lot of people won't want to own self-driving cars,
| especially if you're right and people forget how to drive
| themselves. We could drastically reduce the amount of parking
| we need, at least within cities, meaning there probably won't
| be many cars idly circling blocks.
|
| Personally, I'd be down for a driverless Uber-like service.
| runnerup wrote:
| This also implies that some nontrivial amount of the driving
| on roads will be cars with no humans in them, which may also
| be worse than the status quo.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| It's possible.
|
| I wonder if we would see as many idle/empty self-driving
| cars as we do idle/empty human-driven cabs and Ubers/etc. I
| could see a self-driving system being a lot more efficient
| because it doesn't have to keep a car on the road for a
| driver's entire shift.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I think we will see more. If just keeping them running
| circles around blocks with most expected demand is nearly
| same cost it will happen. Specially if they are EVs with
| automatic charging.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Damn. I never thought of SDCs as being particularly
| dystopic, but this would be squarely in that area.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > I suspect a lot of people won't want to own self-driving
| cars
|
| If it involves the car having a data link to someone else's
| server, then I have no interest whatsoever in self-driving
| vehicles.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| This view will have a negligible effect on the market. You
| and the dozens like you can still have cars and a lot of
| other people can use the self driving ubers
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _You and the dozens like you can still have cars_
|
| Until they don't, because of prohibitive insurance
| premiums or some accelerated phase-out of HDC bill.
| That's the blessing and the curse of the technology
| market: you don't get to keep your old toys if most of
| the market has moved on.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I'm always curious when these "your preference is
| irrelevant" comments pop up.
|
| Yes, you're probably right. So what? I wasn't even
| remotely asserting otherwise.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Well, the conversation is mostly about the impact of new
| technology on large-scale trends. When someone makes a
| prediction about how "a lot of people" will react to new
| technology, it's understandable that a reply of "I won't
| react like that" could be seen as irrelevant.
|
| Like if someone says "a lot of people will buy the new
| iPhone" and someone replies "I will never own a cellular
| phone or even a cordless landline phone" I can understand
| why that could seem irrelevant to the conversation.
| JohnFen wrote:
| In this case, I was replying to a speculation that a lot
| of people won't want to own self-driving cars by saying
| I'm one of those people, and why. My response was on-
| topic and relevant.
|
| Replies to comments such as mine saying "you don't
| matter" strike me as interesting because they come off as
| overly defensive, is all.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I'd say it's an important reminder, especially that even
| here, people still cling to the view that you can "vote
| with your wallet".
|
| Also, it's more than just having "a negligible effect on
| the market" - if your preferences diverge too much from
| the main trend, they'll simply not be met _at all_. In
| this context, it means that with large enough self-
| driving car adoption, you won 't get to keep a regular
| car - they'll eventually stop being sold, but by that
| time you won't be allowed to legally drive one anyway.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| So it doesn't matter if a small number of people defect
| from self driving ride share. Enough people will use it
| to decrease parking needs.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Maybe.
|
| On the other hand, ride sharing could mean less cars overall
| and less car ownership. Electric cars mean fewer or no
| emissions. Totally automated traffic management could enable
| vastly higher throughput, and otherwise congested roads could
| have dynamic tolls applied so people won't use them unless they
| really need to. Delivery vehicles can batch shopping pickups
| and dropoffs to use _less_ vehicles than currently.
|
| If problems arise, they can be fixed through policy and
| incentives. Otherwise, traditional economic incentives for
| efficiency continue to apply.
| rrradical wrote:
| Tires emit a fair amount of micro plastics. There's no such
| thing as zero emission cars.
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/11/car-
| tire...
| apendleton wrote:
| All the more reason to shift to a pay-per-use model rather
| than the high-fixed-cost model of car ownership, which
| incentivizes uses your car for as many trips as possible
| once you've made the initial expenditure to buy the thing.
| If these get good enough and cheap enough that significant
| numbers of people can get away with ditching their cars,
| those people will probably end up in a situation where
| transit (including kinds with no tires) will be cheaper on
| a per-trip basis where it's practical, and robocars will
| make sense for the remainder.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| All the more reason Americans should just try learn and
| adapt to public transport.
| hnav wrote:
| public transport as implemented in Asia and Europe,
| especially for last (couple) mile sort of uses is an
| antiquated idea in a world of self-driving. In a city
| like San Francisco you could literally ban cars in
| downtown and have the local transit authority run
| something like Uber pool of cars that fit 4 passengers
| comfortably and do point 2 point transit with optimized
| routing 24/7. The reason buses/trains are so large is to
| amortize a bunch of things, not the least of which is the
| driver.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| Your body needing to go anywhere might become an antique
| idea very soon... the only reason roads exist is so you
| can go do work and pay taxes and make wealthy people more
| wealthy.
|
| After that isn't important, let's see how much priority
| roads will get.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I'm definitely not disputing that, although I think
| "emissions" are generally understood to be airborne. Micro
| plastics that run off the road into storm water are
| pollution for sure, but "emissions" seems misleading.
|
| And obviously fewer/no emissions is also referring just to
| operation, not manufacture or disposal or power plants
| either.
| cozzyd wrote:
| I mean, driverless buses (or perhaps minibuses or vans,
| depending on density) are the way to go.
|
| But... there's another dimension here. Would you share a car
| with a random stranger with no "trusted" third-party (i.e.
| the driver) present?
| hnav wrote:
| I would if the "bus" was small, traveled more like an uber
| pool (to my destination rather than along a corridor with
| 30 useless stops a block apart), and if the identity of
| those strangers was known to a system that could then
| remove their ability to hail future rides if anything went
| down.
| californical wrote:
| But what about the dystopian flip side? You commit a
| crime once and suddenly you aren't allowed to travel,
| otherwise the other passengers would feel unsafe? Or your
| transportation costs increase by 5x to account for you
| needing private-only accommodation?
|
| Sounds like a great way to isolate someone and make sure
| there is no chance of rehabilitation, being shunned by
| the car swarm and isolated away
| shredprez wrote:
| And thus the motor vehicle takes his rightful place at the top
| of the food chain: King of the concrete jungle. May he reign
| forever, tire never, and render his enemies unto the road.
| agumonkey wrote:
| It was supposed to improve allocation (less people trying to
| find a parking spot etc) but I guess it may trigger the usual
| perverse effect.
| astrange wrote:
| The "usual perverse effect" of policies (aka "risk
| compensation") almost never happens, people just say it's
| going to happen and then it doesn't.
|
| This is a disease of the soul caused by reading Freakanomics
| which makes you think everything that's counterintuitive must
| actually be true.
| q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote:
| > Imagine if the max amount of driving a human can endure is
| removed entirely as a final constraint on the total utilization
| rate of this infrastructure and is replaced with a relentless
| driving machine that never tires or gets frustrated and has no
| fear of death.
|
| Sure!
|
| An entire class of accidents and injuries will be entirely
| gone, saving countless lives. Insurance will get cheaper for
| everyone. Cities will be able to adapt and grow more quickly,
| since traffic management can finally happen in realtime and at
| scale. Pollution will plummet.
|
| Cars can get smaller and smaller, focusing only on having a
| safe space for passengers and eliminating all the extra
| "driver" nonsense. With so many cars on the road, you'd always
| be able to catch a ride, anywhere, anytime.
|
| Each car could have a delicious sandwich compartment, so that
| it's always doing double-duty for carrying both passengers
| _and_ sandwiches. (Every car would have a couple drones it
| could dispatch to pick up and deliver sandwiches, so that
| passenger trips can go on uninterrupted.)
|
| People will forget how to drive entirely, of course, so there
| will be no going back. The whole thing will feed on itself, and
| we'll enter a golden era of cheap transportation and ever-
| faster sandwich delivery.
| baloki wrote:
| Honestly I think by that point owning one won't even be a
| thing. You'll rent it from the manufacturer on demand or via a
| subscription with your subset of features enabled just for your
| trip.
|
| They won't park, they'll just move from one job to the next
| (like taxis and ubers).
| ajcp wrote:
| I completely agree they can change our relationship with
| vehicles. Let's look beyond a subscription service though and
| think how it can be part of a stand-alone auto insurance
| policy, or offered by your apartment complex as part of your
| monthly rent, or the HOA and paid for as part of your dues
| the same as landscaping is. SDCs will be services that are
| offered as part of a larger relationship/service.
| isquaredr wrote:
| Interesting take. Would my HOA be controlling utilization
| and maintenance? If the car has a flat tire or my neighbor
| monopolizes the usage, would the larger
| relationship/service be responsible for fixing the issue?
| ajcp wrote:
| Sure it would, just as any other service provided for by
| your condo/HOA fees or what have you. BTW I think having
| a HOA do anything beyond landscaping is probably more of
| a headache than it's worth, but still...
|
| I think the possibility is more around SDCs becoming not
| simply a business to individual customer service or
| subscription, but rather SDCs being offered by
| organizations the individual customer is already a member
| of as part of that organizational offering. This can
| begin at large and wealthy retirement communities first
| (like Sun City Grand in Phoenix), but there's no reason
| why it couldn't be implemented elsewhere or why an
| organization that is already setup to handle customer and
| vehicle relationships can't offer it as well. Think AARP
| or your auto insurance company.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| I think that's naiive. There's a reason why taxis aren't
| couriers. There will certainly be specialization. There will
| still be buses, with AI drivers instead of humans, to get a
| lot of people from A to B, there will be delivery vans, with
| maybe delivery robots, maybe there will be taxi's, long haul,
| etc.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| Once you buy the self driving car, you will want it to be on
| the road as much as possible, you want return on investment.
|
| What will happen is:
|
| Companies will buy fleets of self driving cars.
|
| The best self driving cars will be too expensive for most
| people to buy.
|
| People will just pay one of those companies for transportation
| services.
|
| The transportation - serving companies who will use the cars in
| the most efficient way will survive. They will use AI to
| optimize the usage of the fleets.
|
| Regulators (governments) will tax the companies per km / time
| interval / peak hours.
|
| People will pay more if they want to travel alone or want to
| travel in a straight line. They will pay more if they want more
| exact timing.
|
| Roads will be safer because they will communicate with the cars
| and the cars will communicate with other cars.
|
| There will be manned vehicles that will help relieve any
| obstructions.
|
| In other words, given proper tax rules, transportation will
| regulate itself in effective and efficient ways.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > Once you buy the self driving car, you will want it to be
| on the road as much as possible, you want return on
| investment.
|
| I don't really follow the argument. I don't think of my car
| as an "investment." In fact quite the opposite, I think of it
| as an extremely depreciatory purchase that is partly a
| necessary cost of living (commuting for work, shopping) and
| partly for leisure (visiting friends and family, going out on
| the town, road trips). It makes very little sense to me to
| "want to be on the road as much as possible," especially
| considering that most of the depreciation for when I
| eventually sell it or trade it in is likely going to be based
| on the odometer rather than the calendar.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _I don 't really follow the argument. I don't think of my
| car as an "investment." In fact quite the opposite, I think
| of it as an extremely depreciatory purchase that is partly
| a necessary cost of living (...)_
|
| This means you'll end up not owning a car at all. Like with
| housing, those who look at it as investment game outcompete
| and drive up prices for those who just want a place to live
| in and call their own.
| thexumaker wrote:
| Except there needs to be natural demand and short enough
| supply. You're viewing them like its early 2020 where
| people were buying up cars and selling them used at a
| marked up price somehow. People really be trying to treat
| everything as a profit nowadays
| bombcar wrote:
| > Once you buy the self driving car, you will want it to be
| on the road as much as possible, you want return on
| investment.
|
| This is not necessarily a given; after all, most Americans
| have other little-utilized equipment that nobody bothers to
| try to "rent out" to maximize usage. Think - washing
| machines, dish washers, lawn mowers, snow blowers, etc. In
| fact, there's an entire industry built around storing little-
| used equipment (storage units).
|
| And we have high-usage vehicles transport already, they're
| called taxis and they're at use in most major cities; the AI
| cannot save MORE than the cost of the driver without some
| magical accounting.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Most of those things are dirt-cheap compared to a car. A
| better analogy would be a boat or an RV in a northern
| climate. Even those tend to be priced roughly in line with
| a higher end car (where you're more likely to find full
| self driving).
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Shortly after we get self-driving cars widely available, most
| municipalities will have trolly busses that run the grid so
| that the most you need to wait is like 2 minutes. At which
| point, a substantial amount of people aren't going to pay $20
| to get from A to B when you can get there slightly slower for
| $2.
| zdragnar wrote:
| The wages of the driver are hardly the limiting factor of
| busses right now. We could easily have many more in
| operation, but we don't, because running an empty bus is
| very expensive.
| bps4484 wrote:
| Is this true?
|
| That's a legitimate question I haven't done the research
| on this. It would seem though that usually it's a
| municipal employee, probably a union job, so probably
| paid pretty well (relative to say an uber driver). Also
| that cost for the driver would be double if you half the
| size of the bus and run them twice as much which would be
| a better experience for passengers. It would seem like
| the cost of drivers could be a real impact but this is me
| being handwavy I haven't crunched any numbers.
| opportune wrote:
| Yeah, I think a lot of people don't recognize that SDC
| technology can eventually be applied to busses or smaller
| transit vans. You can get fancy with dynamic routing (with
| my fleet of busses and customers asking me to take them
| from A to B, how do I route the busses to serve the most
| customers the fastest?) but even just running a SDBus on a
| fixed route could be pretty convenient. It would basically
| take us back to the "streetcar suburb" paradigm.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Even individual companies will drive it to the bottom.
| Humans out of picture they will drive price to few
| percentage of margins. Or if we get VC money involved
| beyond that.
| hnav wrote:
| IDT that's the future, and here's why: if you go to any
| modern skyscraper you'll find that elevators ask you which
| floor you're going to rather than just which direction.
| Applying this in 2 dimensions, it becomes obvious that the
| future is something like Zoox's 4 passenger car running
| point to point a la Uber pool.
| bell-cot wrote:
| > ...given proper tax rules, transportation will regulate
| itself in effective and efficient ways.
|
| And if you mix together "modern American government" and
| "billions of dollars at stake for mega-corporations" - just
| how close to zero is the real-world probability of those
| "proper tax rules" being made and maintained?
| [deleted]
| user3939382 wrote:
| Cars that never have a driver could be much smaller. Eventually
| what we need for this scenario in congested areas is a driving
| decision protocol that's based on consensus with neighboring
| cars, some kind of leader election algorithm, etc. If all cars
| were full self driving they could in some situations drive at
| super high speeds as a swarm, you wouldn't even need
| stoplights.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Wouldn't want to be in the car swarm that had a Byzantine
| fault.
| akiselev wrote:
| I love your optimism. I predict the GP is correct though,
| since everyone will want one of those Mercedes megavans to
| set up a comfortable bed or office while stuck in traffic.
| There's no way I'm going to sleep or work in a tiny self
| driving smartcar.
|
| Since they'll autopark or circle anyway, their size no longer
| becomes a limiting factor for most people.
| thegabriele wrote:
| Surely all these points are food for thoughts, but it seems
| that in this scenario we solved the energy cost/production
| problem first
| lallysingh wrote:
| I guess it's the season of AI fear. Humans don't rarely drive
| to their endurance levels now, so why would removal of a
| rarely-used limit affect much?
|
| 8 hours (4+4) spent in commuting, driving or not, is an entire
| life. This isn't a realistic concern, but something pulled out
| of a cyberpunk novel.
|
| Cars can park away from you and come back to pick you up. This
| should alleviate parking problems, and reduce parking-space-
| search based congestion on the street.
|
| Learning to drive was never that hard.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I've met several people who in pre-pandemic times were
| commuting from beyond Sacramento to San Francisco, which is
| about a 4-5 hour daily commute. You'd be surprised how far
| some people will go to have both a good paying job and the
| house of their dreams.
| earthling8118 wrote:
| Now if only there were time to enjoy those things
| manquer wrote:
| There are plenty of places between SF city and _beyond_
| Sacramento which would be just as affordable.
|
| this kind of commute _daily_ no less seems to be more of a
| stubborn personal choice than any economics forcing it .
| Arrath wrote:
| What the hell is the point? With that kind of commute
| assuming they work a full day they'll be home for a scant
| few hours a night sleeping (we hope, for the sake of other
| commuters) and the weekends for which they'll probably be
| dead tired.
| pc86 wrote:
| Nobody actually does this commute 5 days a week, 45-50
| weeks a year. It's either someone who does it
| sporadically but regularly (e.g. every other Monday or
| something for a few years) or briefly while finding
| something less insane (for a few weeks, maybe a month or
| two).
|
| I had a job with an effective ~4-hour round trip commute,
| from one major city to another in both my car and a
| train, but only had to do it once a month.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| I used to have a similar commute into NYC. I lived about
| a 10 minute walk from the train station and my office was
| another 10 minute walk from Grand Central Station. Round
| trip was about 4 hours. I did the commute about 3 days
| per week but saw tons of people on the train that did it
| every day. I saw a guy talking to the conductor saying it
| was his last time commuting after THIRTY YEARS. I imagine
| most of those people were driving to the train station
| and then taking another subway once they made it into the
| city, adding a considerable amount of time to the already
| brutal commute.
|
| I only lasted a year before I went fully remote.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I take the 510 AM train from Albany to NYC about once a
| month. There's a dozen folks who are on that train enough
| that I recognize them or chat with them. There's a few
| who board at Hudson too.
|
| It's a mix of lawyers, construction guys and others like
| FDNY guys.
| ghaff wrote:
| If I go into the city for a customer visit (not
| frequent/not rare), I'm 2 hours going in whether mostly
| train or mostly car. And about the same going home by
| train and maybe more like an hour+ by car.
|
| I did have a job that was about 90 minutes door-to-door
| each way (train schedules were a bit better then) but
| even then "only" had to do it about 50% of the time.
| Wouldn't have been long-term sustainable.
| ghaff wrote:
| I don't think it's 8 hour commutes so much. But that I could
| now take the 75-90 minute trip into the city that's about 50
| miles away for dinner/show without thinking about it too
| much. I've really cut down on casually swinging into town to
| meet someone or do an activity on a weeknight because it's
| just a hassle to drive with all the traffic and driving back
| home when I'm probably getting a bit tired.
|
| Of course, it still costs money and if everyone does that now
| maybe it's 2+ hours in a car each way and I still won't
| mostly do it.
|
| I'd also routinely take the car into the city for a work
| event of some sort rather than dealing with non-trivial
| hassle of multi-modal driving to the train station and 2
| different forms of public transit.
| yesco wrote:
| > 8 hours (4+4) spent in commuting, driving or not, is an
| entire life
|
| There are already people who live in their vans anyway, if
| they didn't even need to drive them anymore perhaps areas
| with overzealous zoning laws that circumvent supply & demand
| would see an influx of small moving apartments instead.
|
| It would be like a land yacht, and economically sound so long
| as the price of gas is lower than the price of rent.
| theossuary wrote:
| This is my plan. As soon as self driving tech is available
| I'm putting it in a school busy mini-house. Punch in any
| destination and then live my life while I head there. It'll
| basically be teleportation in my lifetime.
| elif wrote:
| What you describe is basically how my wife and I treat
| the model Y on road trips, except we speak the
| destination instead of punch it in.
|
| But you'll still want to wear a seatbelt because although
| self driving cars don't tend to cause accidents, they
| very much are the victim of them.
|
| And consider the electricity demand of keeping your big
| skooli heated and cooled compared to that of a small and
| tight modern vehicle, you'll likely be forced into
| charging last thing every night and first thing every
| morning while on the road, while for us it is about 25%
| of battery on the worst nights so we can camp anywhere.
| mrcode007 wrote:
| This debate reminds me of one of the funniest hacks ever:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drzymala%27s_wagon
| mgsouth wrote:
| > 8 hours (4+4) spent in commuting, driving or not, is an
| entire life. This isn't a realistic concern, but something
| pulled out of a cyberpunk novel.
|
| You poor innocent child. Spent a couple of years of my life
| doing pretty much that, in crowded trains with a thousand
| others doing the same. Some did it for many, many years. It's
| a thing. (OK, I was lucky about where I worked and _only_ had
| a 3-hr commute each way.)
|
| Related data point... my commuting choices were
|
| a) drive all or most of the way (saving 45 minutes to an hour
| each way);
|
| b) drive 15 minutes to a park-and-ride, take a commuter bus;
|
| c) drive 45 minutes to train station, take train in (extra 30
| to 45 minutes each way, exta $$/mo).
|
| Often did (b) for practical reasons, much preferred (c) for
| comfort. Didn't do (a) too often. (d) "black car" (private
| driver) was an idle astronomically expensive dream. But if it
| was only a relatively small premium over normal car
| ownership? I and 100's of thousands of my fellow commuters
| would have given our left kidneys.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| In the Bay Area in particular it is known commutes from
| Sacramento, Gilroy, and elsewhere happen. To say nothing of
| traffic and closures (devil's slide is STILL closed between
| Pacifica and Half Moon Bay) creating 3+ hour commutes from
| what google maps may indicate as < 2 hour commutes.
| roughly wrote:
| > This isn't a realistic concern, but something pulled out of
| a cyberpunk novel.
|
| Can I direct your attention to all of the labor market
| everything since Reagan?
| brenns10 wrote:
| > Cars can park away from you and come back to pick you up.
| This should alleviate parking problems, and reduce parking-
| space-search based congestion on the street.
|
| I know this sounds nice for just a moment, but if you
| consider it longer, it's awful. It won't decrease congestion,
| it will increase it. Why?
|
| 1. Cars will still be searching for parking: many people will
| prefer to have their car nearby. It's not as if every car
| will altruistically drive to a far-off area. Since self
| driving cars have more patience than humans, they'll be on
| the road much longer searching for their parking. It may be
| more efficient to keep the car circling the block, which is
| even worse.
|
| 2. Parking availability is a major inhibitor of car trips,
| especially in cities. This is a good thing. If it becomes
| easier to "park" (ie leave your car driving on the street or
| send it away), that will induce more car trips, and more car
| trips means more congestion, until there's a new equilibrium
| (maybe a 7-minute parking search is eliminated, but it's
| replaced with 7+ minutes of traffic).
|
| 3. Pick-up and drop-off in cities is already difficult with
| rideshare services. If all personal vehicles are doing it as
| well, they'll definitely congest the curb lanes more. This is
| definitely a more solvable problem than the first two, but
| still an annoyance.
|
| And for what it's worth, the 4-hour commute may be a bit far
| fetched, but it's hard to deny that many wouldn't mind an
| extra 20 minutes of commute time in traffic if they can
| relax, nap, read, watch a show, etc. People will chose that
| option more, adding more trips and more congestion, until an
| equilibrium is reached. Maybe it won't be 4-hour commute
| times but it will be a major increase and added congestion.
|
| All of these extra miles traveled searching for parking, and
| adding extra congestion, are disastrous to cities and
| neighborhoods. Sure, the fossil fuel emissions alone would be
| awful, but suppose (charitably) that all autonomous vehicles
| are electric, and assume that their electricity generation is
| emission free (unrealistic for decades). The weight of EV
| batteries will dramatically increase road wear and tear, and
| they'll increase the pollution due to rubber tires, which are
| already the major source of microplastic pollution. And of
| course, it's a dramatic waste of energy from the power grid.
| And all of this is ignoring that dedicating that much road
| space storing to idling and parked vehicles is a no-good,
| terrible, awful way to utilize public space in a city or
| neighborhood, when it could be used by some efficient public
| transit, parks, and safer infrastructure for personal
| vehicles when necessary.
| lallysingh wrote:
| Price the spots by location (or bid) and make their
| availability known through a web service. The parking trip
| is a straight shot and spot congestion is managed better
| than today. Another benefit of automating a manual process.
| brenns10 wrote:
| Sure, fair market pricing for parking via bidding would
| be amazing. Of course, there's decades of subsidies for
| parking built-in, but the price would still be much
| higher than you'd expect. (Check out "The High Cost of
| Free Parking" by Donald Shoup for a great overview of the
| huge public subsidy we already give cars, paid for by
| non-drivers).
|
| You'd then need to price the time a vehicle spends on the
| road without an occupant. Otherwise you're just pushing
| people to send their cars around the block for an hour to
| avoid paying market rate for parking.
|
| But it's hard to enforce the "unoccupied vehicle" rule,
| so it would be much better to just charge for all road
| use time in high congestion areas. Maybe... congestion
| pricing?
| elif wrote:
| In many European and Asian cities this is a solved
| problem. You buy your own parking spot, lease one by
| year, or pay for the expensive hourly lots. Those are
| your only options.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Tolled roads and market parking are likely to come, just
| with different names. Bay Area terms are "demand-
| responsive parking pricing" and HOT.
| fortran77 wrote:
| Everyone pays for free parking, not just non drivers.
| brenns10 wrote:
| Exactly. Which means drivers are getting a great discount
| thanks to the people who don't use a car, and the non-
| drivers are getting a markup on all the prices they pay.
| And the non-drivers were already paying a huge amount to
| maintain car infrastructure (at least in the US) because
| the gas tax doesn't nearly cover it.
|
| Now don't get me wrong, I understand the value of a
| public good. Grocery stores receive food via trucks on
| roads, so even non-drivers get the benefit of the road.
| The parking subsidy, however, is insidious because it's
| so much less visible. It's not a government investing in
| a public good: the city instead requires businesses to
| maintain off-street parking, and they pass that cost on
| to everyone. It lets everybody believe that parking, and
| driving altogether, is much cheaper than it really is,
| because the (actually enormous) parking costs are hidden
| away and subsidized by those who don't use it.
| ghaff wrote:
| >the city instead requires businesses to maintain off-
| street parking, and they pass that cost on to everyone
|
| I'm not sure how generally true that is where I live
| relatively nearby (Boston/Cambridge). There are some
| businesses that have generally fairly crowded/small
| parking lots. (And places like hospitals certainly do
| though you generally have to pay for them.) But in
| general you have to pay for metered parking or find a
| garage.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I'm not seeing the downsides.
| brenns10 wrote:
| Congestion pricing and market rate, unsubsidized parking
| _should_ be the default already. So let's start with
| those policies now :)
| purpleblue wrote:
| > 1. Cars will still be searching for parking: many people
| will prefer to have their car nearby.
|
| You're not thinking with an open mind.
|
| If I own a robot car and I know I'm going to be at dinner
| for 2 hours, I will send the robot car to do a few Uber
| rides while I'm eating. Or it will go and charge. It
| doesn't have to just drive around in circles like a human.
| It can coordinate will all the other robot cars in the area
| and pick a place where it won't create traffic, or they can
| distribute traffic among each other. Maybe it can park-
| share, where if there are 3 cars and 2 parking spots, the 3
| cars can coordinate and rotate who goes driving around.
|
| Maybe robot cars will be fungible, so you don't own a
| specific robot car, but you own a time share, so all the
| cars are basically like Ubers, and you can call the one
| closest to you.
|
| The possibilities are endless, don't think that a robot car
| will just emulate a human.
| jayknight wrote:
| Having a car come pick me up and take me to/from work
| would be great, and with no human to pay would be cheaper
| than owning a car for that purpose. But the family car
| packed with backpacks, jackets, sports gear, etc is gonna
| make owning at least one car per family that can afford
| it a reality for a long time. But self driving taxis will
| revolutionize how we get places and get stuff delivered,
| and ultimately for the better.
| elif wrote:
| Or, your car parks in the spot you yourself would park
| in, the ones building codes require the restaurant to
| provide.
|
| No one wants their $60k+ self driving car casually
| risking accidents. And I certainly don't want to end my
| date night with drunk/messy Uber patron roulette for like
| $10 profit. Not hating if you do.. just not for me.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Or, your car parks in the spot you yourself would park
| in, the ones building codes require the restaurant to
| provide.
|
| In that case it sounds like the self-driving doesn't
| matter and we're no worse off.
| CPLX wrote:
| > If I own a robot car and I know I'm going to be at
| dinner for 2 hours, I will send the robot car to do a few
| Uber rides while I'm eating.
|
| I mean assuming I don't want to leave my sunglasses in
| the car, or anything else.
| brenns10 wrote:
| I mean, for sure there are some cool moonshot ideas.
| However I think it's pretty important to have some proof
| of concept or even a technical idea of how that would
| work before dismissing all of the concerns around
| congestion. Waving around "tech will save us" is really
| easy to do. (Especially when the solution to congestion
| already exists and is criminally underfunded.)
|
| You're right that I did predicate that little rant on the
| idea that the majority of AVs would be personally owned
| and not part of a fleet. I'm sure that car share will
| come into play to some degree, but I do think it's tough
| to convince people who are used to their car being a
| personal, (relatively) private space that they can store
| nearly for free on public roads, to give that up. It's
| especially hard to convince the automobile industry that
| the incredibly profitable 1-2 car per household model
| should be pushed aside in order to manufacture fewer,
| shared vehicles. Cruise (i.e. GM) will not cannibalize
| their personal car sale business: they're using this as a
| way to get test data to build personal AVs. Maybe car
| share will increase over time, but we're not about to
| witness some revolution, especially if it reduces
| consumption or profit.
| coeneedell wrote:
| I'm not sure why the idea that the cars will talk to each
| other is so "moonshot". We have much more impressive
| pieces of infrastructure in place already. What might be
| moonshot is my proposal that it should be run by the US
| Postal Service.
| brenns10 wrote:
| I think it's a moonshot because it expects that we will
| have shared, open standards and protocols for all of
| this, which will either need to come from industry, or
| from regulators. Neither feels very likely. But then
| again, it could happen :)
| Spooky23 wrote:
| How many cars are operating 12 hours a day?
|
| With self driving cars, it will be like a NYC taxi, the goal
| is 24 hour operations.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Only if it's serving a lot of users.
|
| So for _those_ cars, the time on the road per user doesn 't
| change much, but the need for parking greatly decreases.
| donmcronald wrote:
| > 8 hours (4+4) spent in commuting, driving or not, is an
| entire life. This isn't a realistic concern, but something
| pulled out of a cyberpunk novel.
|
| What if that time is spent sleeping? Maybe you don't even
| need a house, so you'll have more money to spend on a nice
| car.
| sporkl wrote:
| If you don't have a house, and sleeping when you're in the
| car, then why would you bother commuting at all?
| nix0n wrote:
| In many places within the USA it is illegal to sleep in a
| car.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Maybe you're the next generation of digital nomads -
| working from a nice location for a day, then sleeping in
| your car while it shuttles you to a new nice location for
| tomorrow.
| lallysingh wrote:
| That just digs deeper into cyberpunk distopia.
| trgn wrote:
| lol
|
| It's really uncanny, every time, there it is, man must
| submit to the technology rather than have technology
| submit to us. Because a self-driving car is advanced
| technology, therefore men must move with self-driving
| cars. Even if that literally includes having to live out
| of your car.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Indeed this is how it works. Or, more accurately, man has
| to use the new technology to keep up with other men, as
| those who don't get outraced by those to do. The end
| result is a ratchet of progress.
|
| It's ironic how people in software don't notice it,
| despite the fact that our industry caused several such
| shifts, and we're all living with (and whining about) the
| consequences. Myself I didn't notice it for close to two
| decades since first learning to code. The realization
| came to me with age - I'm at the point where I have more
| disposable income than free time, so all the "wonderful"
| self-service software enabled now grates and irritates me
| to no end.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| Easy to solve: Price time on the road quadratically.
| rodgerd wrote:
| > Anyone ever think about what a nightmare driverless cars will
| be if they actually work?
|
| The scenario you outline was part of Mega-City One's landscape
| in the 2000AD/Judge Dredd comics: cars on the road all day
| every day, with people living out of their perpetually moving
| RVs; something similar was depicted for Termight in the Nemesis
| the Warlock series.
| rtsao wrote:
| I recall many years ago Jonathan Hall (economist at Uber)
| describing a "traffic apocalypse" caused by _empty_ self-
| driving cars flooding city streets. I think the notion was the
| operational cost of self-driving cars was so low that wasteful
| (empty car) usage would skyrocket without anyone directly
| paying the cost of time /road use. Today, the mean number of
| people per car on the road is at least 1, but with empty AVs
| that could plummet to <1.
|
| I believe this scenario was discussed as an argument for
| congestion pricing, serving as a vital solution to the tragedy
| of the commons exacerbated by self-driving cars.
| prawn wrote:
| I've never forgotten a Hacker News comment about the same
| idea - might have predated Uber even. If parking costs
| increase, and self-driving cars can recharge cheaply, then
| we'll see them slowly navigating streets en masse while
| waiting for their next gigs. Like a molasses taxi rank oozing
| around with no urgency.
| medellin wrote:
| I already had this experience where i had to wait 30
| minutes for someone to come pickup a car. Driving it around
| was cheaper than parking it for 30 minutes
| opportune wrote:
| I see self driving cars as a backwards compatible way for us to
| reimagine infrastructure.
|
| Right now, SDC is operating in the real world, in non-trivial
| environments (San Francisco), without special road
| infrastructure to make them work. It's beautifully backwards
| compatible, at the cost of not being generalized (the service
| areas are extensively mapped).
|
| Once SDC take off we'll likely start getting infrastructure and
| rules to support them. Think standards for communicating
| position locally - ie car A broadcasts its position and route
| to cars B, C, D within 200m, special road infrastructure to
| make lanes and corners more manageable for SDC, rules against
| aimless circling. There's already a carrying cost in the form
| of gas or electricity plus wear incentivizing aimless driving,
| also the opportunity cost of not actively moving someone or
| something, but we can probably introduce some kind of toll or
| tax on a SDC operating with no humans inside it to further
| disincentivize this.
|
| A very useful thing about SDC, and something I think people
| forget about rideshare and taxis, is that they let people move
| around independently without needing parking for those trips.
| In dense cities like SF and NYC that's hugely useful. A single
| rideshare or SDC can move 10 people on custom routes without
| any of those people needing to find and pay for parking, and
| without using any parking infrastructure. That's great because
| it disincentivizes wasting more space on parking in aggregate.
| Over time this should let us build denser.
|
| Of course, public transit could obviate all these concerns, and
| I'm a big believer in funding way more public transit than we
| do already, but it will take a lot of time and political will
| to make that happen in the US. And it still does not offer the
| flexibility of SDC and rideshare. SDC is fully compatible with
| existing infrastructure and may give us a way to morph into
| public transit more smoothly with things like dynamically
| routed SDBusses and a reduction of parking infrastructure
| leading to denser urban environments that more easily support
| public transit. I think we can solve the "spending too much
| time on the road doing nothing" problem with congestion
| pricing, which we should really be doing already.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > I see self driving cars as a backwards compatible way for
| us to reimagine infrastructure.
|
| Which may be.. but backwards compatibility doesn't absolve
| you of actually doing maintenance on your legacy systems.
| Unless the upgrade is free.
| pc86 wrote:
| I've never been to a major city, especially NYC or SF, and
| thought "man this would be great if it was just a little
| _denser_. "
| q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote:
| SF could frankly stand to be 5-10x denser. It's not getting
| any bigger, but more and more people want to live there.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Funny, that's my prime complaint about SF (which I
| otherwise love). I'd like it to be like Tokyo's inner
| districts.
|
| I believe it's quite common. In about 50 y this place will
| look very different.
| prawn wrote:
| The most enjoyable cities/suburbs I've experienced around
| the world have been fairly dense in terms of narrow streets
| and multi storey buildings. 3-6 storey buildings on
| average. NYC and SF already have a good amount like this,
| though still dominated by roads. There'd also be scope to
| turn parking lots into actual parks or multi-purpose areas
| for events, food stalls and so on. Parking lots are just
| grim.
| SergeAx wrote:
| On the other hand, we will see a sharp decline in human-driven
| cars on the streets. Who would do it themself anyway? At every
| moment we will have on the streets exactly the number of cars
| to serve current demand. They will not clog curb parking places
| - there's no point for driverless car just to stay there for
| nothing. They will not roam free - there's no point for that
| too. They will stay in the cheapest, ergo most inaccessible for
| humans places waiting for orders.
| adrr wrote:
| If cars could talk to each other you'll get better utilization
| of the road because you could cut follow distance to a few
| feet.
| isquaredr wrote:
| Sounds good in theory. I'm not optimistic about all the car
| makers cooperating on an industry standard, though. Plus the
| failure scenario seems pretty catastrophic to overall
| throughput. I hope some bright thinker figures those problems
| out; it does seem like a great opportunity
| tshaddox wrote:
| It doesn't seem like you'd need an "industry standard"
| beyond the actual rules of the road. In the same way that
| normal human-operated cars with better visibility can
| change lanes on the highway more safely and efficiently,
| any improvements in sensor ability, reaction times, etc. in
| self-driving cars (and even automatic safety features for
| human-operated cars) should make traffic safer and more
| efficient.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| No, because physics is not affected.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| Gosh, if it gets to the point where cars never stop circling
| because there's no parking ... we could like, make the cars
| bigger, and longer, and then people can just hop on and off as
| needed ... maybe even make a few of them go underground and
| such. Could even give them a cool name - like Timed Rides
| Around In the Near Streets or something like that. If we put
| these things on rails then they would even cause far less wear
| and tear on the road.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Yes, if cars continue to just massively decline in
| performance and quality of life, become entirely a shared
| resource, and lose all their advantages, than they could
| rival trains.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| If the road is full and cars are circling because there is
| nowhere to park, then performance doesn't matter, quality
| of life is already low, and cars no longer have advantages.
| elif wrote:
| Actually my experience with self driving cars is the exact
| opposite.
|
| After giving control over to an AI, suddenly I don't care at
| all about saving 3 minutes by picking the perfect lane, getting
| the best spot on every merge, maxing out the speed limit
| threshold where the local police will pull me over.
|
| That kind of gamification with no tangible reward actually
| generates the anxiety. When you're no longer the player,
| there's no more anxiety about those weird time optimizations.
|
| If streets are "clogged" it saves me a few pennies and gives me
| less reason to worry about a human cutting across to risk my
| life for no reason. It's actually kinda relaxing.
|
| But you are wrong about one thing: AI have a fear of death.
| Every aspect of their training is hyper focused on a paranoid
| level of death avoidance.
|
| When I picked up my father from the airport last month, I did
| your worst nightmare, my car circled the terminal for about an
| hour while I jammed out to progressive rock. 90% of the time I
| was in bumper to bumper on a closed access road with no
| entrance or exit. From a traffic perspective it was irrelevant
| whether I was there or not. On the 10% when I reached the
| terminal on the loop, surprise, I was blocked by loading cars
| in front of me... The same blockage the car behind me would
| face.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| Why can't you just drive like that yourself?
| baremetal wrote:
| Who needs to park, just let the car sit in an alley or side
| street in the middle of the road and if someone comes it moves
| on its own.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Or drive circles around the block... At current parking rates
| might be the cheaper option. And it probably doesn't consume
| that much power when all the cars are doing it and whole
| thing is gridlocked.
| ElfinTrousers wrote:
| Dear manufacturers of driverless cars: let's see how they do in
| Boston. We'll be here anytime you're feeling brave.
| world2vec wrote:
| Let's step it up, let's see how it fares in a city from
| medieval times, like Coimbra (Portugal) or Avignon (France).
| quonn wrote:
| Let's see how it fares in Marrakesh or Delhi.
| world2vec wrote:
| That's super-hard mode!
| jutrewag wrote:
| When I was on vacation there earlier this year, I drove right
| into the middle of the old walled city in Avignon until I
| noticed people giving me wired looks and a confused cop asked
| me how I got in there.
| scottLobster wrote:
| Out of curiosity I looked up Avignon on google maps, and
| sure the roads are skinny as hell but they exist and there
| plenty of cars. The whole place is viewable on Google
| Street View, presumably taken from a car. Maybe you were
| just in a restricted area?
|
| Cars in Avignon Old Walled City: https://www.google.com/map
| s/@43.9491327,4.8100308,3a,75y,99.... https://www.google.co
| m/maps/@43.9493463,4.8114883,3a,75y,328... https://www.goog
| le.com/maps/@43.9482465,4.8084919,3a,75y,3.4... https://www
| .google.com/maps/@43.9476804,4.8115635,3a,75y,126...
| jutrewag wrote:
| Huh maybe it was just restricted during those hours? I
| did see some parked in there so maybe they were residents
| or employees with special permits.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Ever since I got a GPS, I don't mind driving in Boston.
| ghaff wrote:
| I won't say I don't mind. But, for the relatively few
| occasions I drive into Boston proper, it's certainly an
| improvement over balancing a map in your lap and trying to
| figure out where you are and where you're going. It can still
| be tricky and it's fairly to miss turns but much easier.
| opportune wrote:
| I live in SF, I've been seeing driverless cars in the Bay Area
| for 4 years, and recently I've started riding in them
| commercially because I'm opted into their public testing
| programs/commercial riding.
|
| I don't think they'll have much trouble in Boston. The current
| Cruise service area includes a lot of steep hills, narrow roads
| with parking/pedestrians on each side, and some winding
| streets. Driverless cars are typically pretty cautious around
| hazards like this, sometimes a bit too much (like driving up to
| a stop sign too slowly), but matching what I would want a "safe
| driver" to do.
|
| I took a Cruise in the rain a few days ago and the rain didn't
| seem to cause any problems at all. Even though you can only
| take Cruise at night, between 9 and 12 pm there have still been
| plenty of situations where it had to deal with pedestrians
| walking across middle of streets, opening and closing doors of
| cars parked on the street, cars stopping in the middle of the
| road to unload pedestrians, etc. and it's actually handled all
| of them well.
|
| When the cars get stuck, I am pretty sure it's because they are
| in "mapping mode". I think it's weird and likely unscaleable
| for an entire service area to need to be mapped before opened
| commercially, but once the cars are actually "working" they
| don't get stuck much.
|
| Anyway, I think the only real problem with Boston would be snow
| and ice (on the ground, I think the rains and fog in SF are
| close enough that cars could handle snow and ice in the air).As
| far as I know, no self driving car company has tested much
| under snowy/icy conditions.
| pound wrote:
| it's 10PM - 5:30AM to be precise
| blamazon wrote:
| Just geofence it to the land that was water before about the
| 1800s and it'll work it fine ;)
| igetspam wrote:
| As a human driver who has navigated both Boston and SF, they're
| both equally terrible. Once you're in the middle of downtown
| for either city, you should abandon your car, your plans and
| hope. Just walk.
| james_pm wrote:
| That's basically what these cars do in SF, apparently. They
| get themselves into a situation with no way to figure out a
| way forward and they shut down.
| rippercushions wrote:
| The weather in Boston is considerably more challenging than
| SF though.
| ElfinTrousers wrote:
| Though to be fair that San Francisco fog is famous for a
| reason too. I'm sure that doesn't help.
| clsec wrote:
| Well, as an example, last year the lights at the
| intersection outside my apartment went out during a heavy
| rain storm. I also tend to have a lot of driverless cars in
| my neighborhood. I watched how cars were dealing with the
| blacked out intersection. I saw two different Waymo cars
| stop at the intersection as CA law requires. Then I saw a
| Cruise car approach the intersection. As it did it slowed a
| little but then seemed to speed up as it blew through the
| intersection. I could only imagine the nightmare during a
| bad nor'easter!
| ghaff wrote:
| For all its reputation, I'm not sure Boston is clearly a
| lot harder to drive in generally than a lot of San
| Francisco is--given Boston weather for maybe 8 months out
| of the year. However, after a big snowstorm (admittedly not
| much this year) it's a whole other game. And while it's
| easy to say just don't use self-driving if there's a
| snowstorm or if lanes are partially blocked by snow, that's
| not ultimately a driving system that can be depended on.
| And I guarantee people who maybe only drive a few dozen
| times a year in the worst conditions will be an absolute
| menace on the roads.
|
| (And "just don't drive then" isn't an option for a lot of
| people in a lot of circumstances.)
| opportune wrote:
| I don't think any self driving cars have been trained for
| snow yet, but it does rain (sometimes pretty hard) in SF,
| and because we have wet/dry seasons rains are more
| hazardous in some cases due to months of oils all being
| disrupted at once. It can also be quite windy in SF, it's
| common for gusts to reach >20mph on random sunny days,
| especially this time of year. So aside from snow and ice(
| big exceptions, for sure) I think they can handle Boston
| weather.
| narrator wrote:
| Let's take this in the context of Net Zero 2050[1]. Most human
| driven cars will be banned or made painfully expensive because of
| elimination of gas stations and lack of urban charging
| infrastructure. It's already well-established that mass adoption
| of urban electric cars will fail because of inability to charge
| them all[2].
|
| The self-driving cars will slowly have their carbon usage
| rationed. That rationing will pass down to the individual in
| increasingly compressed travel ranges. Most people will
| eventually walk or not leave their 15 minute cities because of
| roving knife-wielding crackheads (RKC). RKCs will keep people in
| their high-security high rise pods[3] and lower resource
| consumption and help get rid of the miserably non-ecologically
| correct single family home via repeated unpunished "frequent
| flyer" RKC home invasion[4]. Becoming a RKC will be a pretty cool
| way to go, but you know you could die at any moment from the
| wrong pill. If you pick the right pill often enough, one's
| existence will be better than all the high-rise pod dwellers and
| you'll be glad you came out from Oklahoma and how nice the "fresh
| air" is in San Francisco[5].
|
| Anyway, Ta da. We saved the planet!
|
| [1]https://twitter.com/profnfenton/status/1645186289933623296
|
| [2] https://insideevs.com/news/436665/24-million-evs-limit-
| curre...
|
| [3]https://spectrumnews1.com/ca/la-
| west/business/2021/04/28/sta...
|
| [4]https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1644736970139267072
|
| [5]https://twitter.com/michelletandler/status/16443601831525171..
| .
| brenns10 wrote:
| Wow, found the WEF conspiracy theorist :)
| narrator wrote:
| I like to pretend that the city officials aren't just dumb
| and there's some sort of overarching method to their madness.
| Yeah, I did string together a bunch of stuff, but I like the
| idea of roving crackheads keeping people from leaving their
| fifteen minute cities and forcing them out of single family
| housing which is otherwise enormously popular.
|
| All those commercial buildings downtown that have been
| emptied out will get converted into "safe" residential
| apartments and then the whole sunset and outlying areas can
| slowly get turned over to the roving crackheads attended to
| by legions of government employees with enormous pensions who
| make sure their open-air drug markets proceed in an orderly
| fashion while the normies get chased out of their nice single
| family houses into high security "sustainable" pods.
| ajaygeorge91 wrote:
| what a time to be alive
| tyingq wrote:
| I wonder if this scenario will play out on a large scale when
| driverless semi-trucks start displacing jobs. Where some people
| might sabotage the system in various ways to make a point. Not
| just drivers either, as it eventually affects things like
| roadside gas stations, restaurants, hotels, etc.
|
| Not pushing a luddite agenda, just curious how it might all play
| out.
| waynenilsen wrote:
| Standard should be relative to human
| mjburgess wrote:
| For reference, the human standard is <1 death in every 100
| million miles driven.
| uoaei wrote:
| It doesn't seem like you're including classic and obvious
| externalities. What about causing traffic that prevents vital
| organs or rescue personnel from reaching those in need in
| time?
|
| Disruption of economic activity (qua output) can be
| significant in places where traffic is substantial and
| solvable yet unsolved.
|
| In my personal experience (I've spent significant time in the
| neighborhoods around Nvidia's headquarters) approximately 3
| cars fewer get through any given stoplight if an autonomous
| vehicle is in that lane. I can imagine how in a place like SF
| this could cause real, measurable negative impacts.
| mjburgess wrote:
| I think my comment has been read as being "pro self-
| driving", whereas I intended it to be anti.
|
| Self-driving cars have already killed many more people than
| 1/100mill -- it's about 1 in 1 mil iirc.
|
| My comment was to frame the saftey of driving in the
| relevant units: _amount_ of driving. When scaled by the
| right factor, "human driving" is incredibly safe by
| comparison.
| kristianpaul wrote:
| it is dispiriting and disempowering," he says. "There's no one
| there to communicate with at all."
| abeppu wrote:
| > Jaime Viloria of Equity on Public Transit, a grassroots group
| of riders in the Tenderloin neighborhood, says companies
| operating autonomous vehicles should be fined for causing delays.
|
| Insufficient. They'll only count it as part of the cost of doing
| business.
|
| I think every person director or above at these companies should
| be eligible to be delayed at random for a time equal to the total
| human-minutes of delay caused to transit riders and people in
| private vehicles. If a driverless vehicle blocks a train with 60
| riders for 15 minutes, those directors and executives should in
| aggregate spend 15 hours not able to go wherever they want to go,
| and in a way which they are unable to schedule in advance.
| opportune wrote:
| They already have a system for this, it's called "driving on
| the 101 during rush hour"
| abeppu wrote:
| The whole point of this article is that driverless vehicles
| are causing delays which are qualitatively different and
| longer than what human drivers would do. Pointing out that
| bad traffic already exists elsewhere (presumably caused by
| human drivers) does not decrease the problems that these
| companies are creating for the public, and certainly doesn't
| create accountability.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| We don't have consequences if a normal person blocks a train
| for 15 minutes why would we add them for automated cars first?
| abeppu wrote:
| If you stand in front of a muni train for 15 minutes, and
| refuse to speak to or respond to anyone, I think there's a
| decent chance you'll experience a negative consequence.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| Replace 'refuse to speak' with 'scream incoherently' and
| that sounds like a normal occurrence in SF to me.
| hirundo wrote:
| These sound like expected growing pains for such complex
| software, and that there are rapid and effective iterations in
| progress. I salute SF and its residents for putting up with this
| and suffering such delays, making a sacrifice that improves it
| for the rest of us. Their tolerance will eventually save lives as
| well as improving mobility all over.
|
| I just hope that they will continue to extend that tolerance to
| still allowing human drivers for a long time after automated ones
| are more safe. It's almost inevitable that there will be a story
| like this someday about the hazards of letting humans disable
| their auto-pilot.
| ncr100 wrote:
| It is tragic and foul for technology to make things worse in
| this way, IMO.
|
| The bus- / train-riders have no choice in the matter.
|
| It adds hours onto the driver's day.
|
| It's a shame the mitigation takes as long as the article claims
| it does.
| [deleted]
| Animats wrote:
| Now this surprised me.[1] Cruise AV rear-ended a Muni bus at slow
| speed. Clear, daylight, dry. That should not happen.
|
| [1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/file/cruise_032323-pdf/
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| What I'm loving is how they put the "Clear Form" button right
| next to the "Print" button, so it's easy to press it by
| mistake. MWAHAHAHAHA.
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