Some people are horrible idiots with amazing level of stupidity. Equating fpv drones with "weapons", AI in general with driverless cars. If we allow this hostile sentiment to spread it will be uneconomical for companies like waymo to operate.
It would be a huge shame if it came to that. This (driverless tech) is amazing for what it can do to help people that are old/poor and live in places with no public transport (we have lots of little villages full of people like this with a bus once a day often going only one way). What is the most expensive conponent of proving public transport to such places? Drivers.
Even if it was true it would be a great argument for driverless bus, not for driverless cars.
The original argument doesn't hold though: even if a bus line isn't profitable in a place because there's not enough people doesn't mean that a cheaper taxi service wouldn't be.
Rural areas often don't have enough passengers along routes to fill a bus, so the car is going to be better. (Doesn't have to be privately owned though.)
Those areas often have buses to fulfill ADA requirements, so a lot of the riders are mobile challenged. Vans might work. Or those bigger taxi cabs that can take a wheelchair. I’m not sure how that could be self serve, however.
It is true [1]. And clearly driverless technology applies to vehicles of various sizes.
[1] "Depending on bus type, driver cost accounts for between 40 and 70 per cent of total bus operator cost in Singapore (Ongel et al., 2019) and Australia (own calculation based on ATC, 2006). In Japan, driver salaries account for 53% and 70% of total operating costs of buses and taxis, respectively (Abe, 2019)."
Put that bus on rails instead of tires and operating it autonomously becomes infinitely easier and more realistic in the near term.
As far as profits on rural lines… each line doesn’t need to be equally profitable. Some might even lose money, as long as the popular lines can make up for the less popular ones. There is a significant value to a community in having ubiquitous coverage.
But is building rails harder than developing a self driving car/bus?
We had rails 200 year ago; it’s a solved problem that mostly requires political will and capital allocation to execute.
Self driving cars have been in development of some kind for at least 40 years[1] and it’s still a struggle technically, and will still require some political will going forward as we try to solve all the legal problem they bring up, and the development has also been very capital intensive[2].
If we have to spend the money and deal with the politics anyway, why not put that effort toward something we know works, we can do today, will reduce traffic on roads, and has a better safety record than automobiles.
Augmenting a rail system with some kind of taxi system is fine, but it seems odd to put all the eggs in the autonomous car basket. We were promised cars would be driving themselves across the country 6 years ago, and it’s still just promises[3]. How long are we willing to wait for something that’s actually viable for the masses? And how much are we going to pay per ride? Right now it looks like it will be more expensive than hopping on a train.
People often say Elon pitched the HyperLoop and Boring company ideas to try and kill rail plans, since he owns a car company. I have to wonder if these someday promises of self-driving are a similar tactic.
Driverless vehicles will revolutionize public transport:
- removes the biggest expense: drivers
- works well with restricted area/route requirements
- is flexible with respect to deployment of services in response to demand
The ultimate goal of public transport should be that it is as flexible as a taxi (which is also public transport) with costs lower than buses or trains which have higher capital costs.
...and with as little traffic as with buses and trains.
Constant traffic makes urban streets unpleasant. City life is better when the streets are mostly empty, with at most one or two vehicles per minute in each direction.
What about the economy post COVID has given you any hope that if private corporations are allowed to control the tech, that they will be cheaper than our current solution? Companies have done nothing but inflate profits mostly for making more profits.
The nightmare scenario in self driving is if we can no longer own cars, but have to subscribe to car services, money from public transportation goes to private corporations, and they can raise profits or remove routes as they see fit for the most money.
If everyone in the city took a taxi, the traffic would be unbearable, the city would be clogged, at least a standard European city. One thing I like about metro systems is that they usually take up no space on the ground, many of them are already completely autonomous, they cannot be stopped by manifestations or traffic, and of course they are much more space efficient for transporting people.
I took a taxi to/from work in Beijing even though I eventually lived on line 10 which would do much of the same route (well, a bit more walking in the work side). I shifted my work schedule to really early to do it, and I think it was worth it. The subway is slow, has annoying security to line up for at the stations, and you often don’t get a seat for most of or your entire ride. I tried it a couple of times and it just wasn’t worth it unless I needed to travel during rush hour.
I’m sure if it were Tokyo instead I wouldn’t have a problem (or even the option given the higher cost of taking a taxi).
They also rely on a lot of people travelling from a small area to a small area. The square mile around me has fewer than 4 journeys an hour to anywhere, so how does that work with anything other than an automated taxi or at most minibus?
Do you live in a city where there are only 4 trips per hour in an entire square mile? What city are you talking about? I'm assuming it's a US city because of their characteristic sprawling layout.
No I don’t, I live in a small village. A taxi service would be brilliant, my son could get to scouts and back under his own steam. Automated or manual doesn’t matter, but we can’t sustain a taxi service.l - there’s one in a town about 6 miles away. One taxi.
This is why rail systems were/are great. Sure, you had to have a station, but you could service far more small towns, no need to economically support them. If the train didn't have anyone to pick up it simply wouldn't stop, and unlike the bus it could take on many more cars, amortizing the extra costs of emptier stops.
Instead we have networks of roads that are largely unsafe, inefficient, and more costly to replace, and a dated rail system that hardly services major cities any more.
Building a multi-million pound/dollar/etc line extension to a train line, including stations, for 2,000 perso -trips per year? Each ride would need to cost thousands, just to recoup the loss from building - even if the train never stopped. But it would have to stop, just for 4 people at a time. That public transportation money might be better allocated in denser areas where it's needed by more people. Instead, your use case seems like the perfect case to use all those roads:
A self-driving car would cost tens of thousands. A good bus, maybe up to 10x more. Compare that to a train and tracks and geoengineering for the tracks and building stations, etc. Otherwise, is there a minimum number of trips per year to justify such an enormous, enormous, enormous build as a rail line extension? 200? 20? 1?
We did this before, so it's not that it can't be done efficiently. A lot of the cost savings comes from the millions of people taking the trains in the cities, and the fact that you were going to build the rail anyways. So the costs are not as exaggerated as you seem to think...which is the point. They effectively amortize costs in a way no other transportation can even dream of.
I don't think my math is wildly off, but if you think it is, I invite you to show your work and what the non-off math should be. Claiming the numbers I mentioned are "exaggerated" is a bit misleading and insulting without this.
The cost savings you mention aren't savings: If the extensions to the villages aren't build, the folks in the cities would still use the train just as much as they do now. The question, then, is the marginal cost of bringing an existing rail line, from a city where it already exists, to a village of 4 person-rides per hour. The millions of dollars it costs are just for the parts that go to the village. Or, simplified further:
- having a train in the city which millions take, and then spending millions more dollars extending that train line to a village where 4 people/hour take it
versus
- having a a train in the city which millions of people take, and not spending millions more dollars extending that train line to a village where 4 people/hour take it
The second one is economically feasible, the first one not so much. As for doing things efficiently, that is only 1 requirement. We also have laws, regulations, safety, the environment, and many more considerations to factor in. Once you do, the cost gets to the orders of magnitude I mentioned.
Your error is in assuming that all extensions to villages are built as just to villages.
There are trains between cities, which presumably have non-zero traffic, or some mix of commercial/pedestrian traffic. That's where you garner the savings - you were already spending millions on intercity traffic.
If you have your blinders on with this false-choice of city or city + villages, then you'd have a point, but this is not the case for rail between two cities. In Europe/US there are more than enough cities to make this feasible.
A rail system doesn't solve the problem of truly remote regions where there are no nearby cities, but it does allow for intercity transport with stops at minor villages along the way.
As for "providing the numbers", I'd encourage you to inspect the numbers for city rail systems, they operate on the same principle, albeit at a lower scale - trains operate on loops or lines through many neighborhoods, instead of a hub and spoke system that would require an exorbitantly expensive central hub and N lines, they can operate at a fraction of that cost with usually ~10 lines per city, servicing usually hundreds of stops (an order of magnitude savings).
Compare that with the cost of vehicles with the same city (parking, fuel, licensing, insurance, road upkeep), its fairly obvious that the one system (line with many stops) is far superior to the other (individualized transport).
We're discussing a marginal rail extension to a village, versus no marginal rail extension to the village. That means we can choose to have all the benefits of the city linkages without any downsides of village linkages, unless there's a good reason to add the village linkages to the city linkages.
We can have a train going between cities, which is good. But as soon as you want to branch off and have another line going tens or hundreds of miles in a different direction, to reach that village in the middle of nowhere (maybe 'it's just off a straight line by a little bit' - ok, that will be several million), and make sure to reinforce and grade the land first, and of course the village needs a station, etc.
It adds up. The city nearest me has paid billions over 20 years to lay 75 miles of track. They're trying to do exactly what we're discussing: adding smaller towns into the commuter rail network which already serves larger cities fine. Billions with a "B". And you better believe the funding prospects involve more than 4 tickets per hour. Compare this to the cost of 1 or 2 self driving cars which serve the entire village (currently 1 car serves their needs, but they might grow).
The people in the two cities will happily go back and forth between, whether the branch-to-nowhere is built or not. So whoever wants the branch-to-nowhere, has to justify the marginal cost of building it, which, yes, costs millions. Even if the village was literally on existing inter-city commuter rail steel, which it likely isn't, the station and required changes alone would likely cost millions. Can fewer than 4 tickets per hour at least pay for the ongoing operational cost of a station and regular stops there? Maybe.
> maybe 'it's just off a straight line by a little bit' - ok, that will be several million
I understand your general point - diversions have realized material and labor costs. However, not all "diversions" need to be individually costly nor expensive. Partly, arguing over specific costs is political (varies by regional policies) or regional (costs of transporting goods/excavations into a particular geological region).
However, again, as with any data set, it is possible to fit the line to the curve. If viewed strictly from a "point a to point b" situation, sure, you may incur costs by increasing the curvature of the line by routing through some village, however mother nature/politics sees fit to create those costs regardless (mountains, lakes, major roads, airport, etc).
If you must make these million dollar "diversions" as you put it anyways (whether by tunneling, avoiding protected regions), then it should be possible to create low cost stations (the land should not cost much in excess of 40k$ and the station itself should be mostly concrete with possibly some electronic flagging mechanism, no need for fancy stations at every stop) within reasonably close vicinity to many villages on a route between two cities (not every station need run through a town center). This is still more economical than attempting to draw a straight line between two cities, which usually proves to be impossible anyways, due to the increased traffic from the additional rail network entry points.
Regarding being nice, my apologies, "you" is not always intended as a personal attack, rather a pronoun closer to the somewhat archaic term "one".
> If viewed strictly from a "point a to point b" situation, sure, you may incur costs by increasing the curvature of the line by routing through some village
That's just it: those costs incurred are millions to billions, no matter how strictly you view them. The line running between cities is already a straight-ish line, or as straight as it can be. It's already built to deal with geographic features, etc. Any additional routing or rerouting would cost millions to billions.
Now, imagine someone wants to include in the rail network, a village that's 10-50+ miles off this existing line. You could:
- Turn the straight-ish line into a "T", where at some point along the line, it branches off and veers towards the village. Cost: millions to billions for the land, zoning, approvals, terraforming, track buildout, environment assessments, safety assessments, probably legal issues.
- Connect each city to the village with a new straight-ish line, forming a "V". Cost: millions to billions for the same.
- Build no additions to the existing line between cities. Cost: nothing
If there isn't already a line, then the decision is between a straight-ish line which ignores the village, and a "V" which doesn't, with the latter costing millions to billions more. If the latter is chosen, will those extra millions to billions be paid back with marginal tickets purchased as a result of the change? Probably not.
As for the station, it alone would cost millions. Sure, you or I could build a concrete shelter for little money and no bureaucracy or rules or aesthetics, but that won't work for a government rail station. Examining the cost of recently built train stations should bring us closer to an accurate estimate. Here one[0]: £15,000,000 for a station built where there was infrastructure already (a decades-closed station). With all due respect to the architect, it looks like a pretty bare-bones station made from a bunch of concrete.
Your last comment is not actually a retort, but I'll play along for now...
Some hard numbers. We can talk about "millions" of dollars in train costs as if that's some bad thing, actually some back of the envelope math reveals this is a pittance.
Average cost of a vehicle (generous) 30000 (actually much higher after repairs, maintenance), lets say 35000, our drivers all experience great luck and need very few repairs over the life of their vehicles.
Average number of vehicles, per person, lets say, 5. So about 17500$. Lets maybe round that up for easy math, the consumer needs to also pay for insurance (150 USD a month for 12 months and about 40 years of driver time, another 72000 USD).
Already, 5 consumers then cost about 1 million in car costs.
Average lifetime of a train, 40 years. Average cost of a (traditional) train track about 1 million per mile. So the number here is already pretty low per mile (of track, we are assuming for simplicity the mile of track is paid for for 40 years - actual life time is usually 50-60 years, so we are about safe here).
Lets say we cost fit, lets say, 20 villages along a route. Each one causes average 2 miles of track divergence (about 2 million cost per village), and because of politics/regulation, each 40k$ plot of land is closer to 100k$. Roughly 42$ million cost of fitting the track along these routes between two cities.
Using our numbers from earlier, we need about 5*42 or ~210 customers over 40 years to just break even with the automobile cost(s). If we assume we just want to break even, no profit, over those 40 years, that's about 5k$ per consumer per year, or assuming weekly trips, about 96$ per trip.
For 20 villages at ~1k population, I'm gonna bet a lot more than 210 consumers are going to want to use these tracks.
Lets assume best case, all 20 villages of 1k average populations are utilizing these trains now, we have 20000k users now, or 95x times the room for growth. That 96$ ticket? It can be a dollar and still break even.
Charge 10$ and you've covered the cost. And we haven't even gotten into amortizing the costs due to regular city traffic, or talked about real cost of ownership, energy inefficiencies, maintenance costs (hint, much much lower).
The benefits are absurdly high, even after a quick back-of-the-envelope run of the numbers. You have to have some absurdly high costs or do something really dumb, like install T junctions that lead to nowhere, for a rail system to become unfeasible.
Your numbers seem to assume a lot that isn't supported by the data or by the use case we're discussing.
For example:
> Lets say we cost fit, lets say, 20 villages along a route. Each one causes average 2 miles of track divergence
Let's say, instead, they aren't along the route, because they likely aren't, and let's say it's closer to 10-20 miles of track divergence each. Even at the super, super low estimate of $1m/mile (the real numbers from recent commuter rail expansions tend to be at least an order of magnitude or two larger), that adds up to $28-38m for the track and station.
Remember, the use case is a village whose taxi needs are satisfied by 1 car per village, so I don't know where you got 5 cars per person or five people per car. That means the self-driving option costs 1 self-driving car per village. Maybe 2.
Additionally, this is a village whose train needs add up to fewer than 4 passengers per hour. But then you mention,
> 20 villages of 1k average populations are utilizing these trains now, we have 20000k users now
Here you're conflating train riders with literally everybody who lives in the village, which is a huge red flag. The demand is fewer than 4 rides per hour per village, so 20 villages adds up to fewer than 2,000, an order of magnitude smaller.
Plus, now that it's 20 villages, the cost is 20*(millions to billions) instead of just (millions to billions).
Those numbers just don't break even, especially when you add in the cost of maintaining those 20 stations and the additional track. Going back to the example, at an optimistic cost of $28-38m per additional station, and a ridership of 4/hr, and let's say a ticket price of $10. The math says each additional station would take 80 years to pay off, and that's if the station and rails don't cost anything to maintain. But they do, so it'd likely take hundreds of years.
> Remember, the use case is a village whose taxi needs are satisfied by 1 car per village
Eh? No, absurd. I'm not sure where you got that I was limiting myself to villages that only need 1 taxi per village. I think you are thinking of some 3 person 'towns' not a standard village.
Yeah sure you can dial down your prospective customers to some ridiculously low amount, but I already said, I was never talking about rail systems in obscure regions without cities. If that's your beef, you're wasting your time.
There might be different reasons trains would be more economical in some settings but for someone in a hut in Siberia no of course trains are not a sane idea.
> Your numbers seem to assume a lot that isn't supported by the data
What data? My numbers are facts easily and quickly verified on the web, cite sources, please. Saying 'the data' is tantamount to nonsense, here.
> Those numbers just don't break even
Yes so for your 10 huts in the prairie your self driving car is a superior solution, yay, sarcasm. Meanwhile, my rail line is servicing hundreds of thousands of people, in cities and towns, below cost.
> > Remember, the use case is a village whose taxi needs are satisfied by 1 car per village
> Eh? No, absurd. I'm not sure where you got that
Scroll to the top of the thread you've been discussing:
> The square mile around me has fewer than 4 journeys an hour to anywhere[0]
> a taxi service would be brilliant, my son could get to scouts and back under his own steam. Automated or manual doesn’t matter, but we can’t sustain a taxi service. - there’s one in a town about 6 miles away. One taxi.[1]
So, not only not "absurd", but explicitly specified.
----
> I already said, I was never talking about rail systems in obscure regions
This thread concerns villages, not suburbs of cities. Specifically villages with 0-1 taxis serving them, and a total trip demand of fewer than 4 people per hour.
This thread is about running self-driving cars vs. train lines for that city and cities like that.
You joined this thread.
I think we can be forgiven for thinking you were talking about the topic of the thread you joined, and not something else :) Everybody makes mistakes, right?
Sure, and my mistake, if any, was assuming the topic had changed (as happens in the course of comment threads).
Regarding the individual with a taxi in a town 6 miles away, I didn't mean to imply he would definitely be serviced. Instead, its more likely he would be able to walk/find some transportation to a local rail line, if we had a rail line network.
This would still be better than the current state of affairs, by the sound of it - maybe be able to hire a taxi vs being able to walk with their son to a nearby station.
If this individual is truly in a remote region, nothing will solve that. Last mile can and should still be solved by alternative low-cost low-frequency transportation such as cars, bicycles, low-cost trams, buses, airplanes, drones, etc.
> If this individual is truly in a remote region, nothing will solve that.
That seems a little fatalistic! I would hope the comment would be "I can't think of anything that would solve that".
Because I and a few others can:
Self-driving vehicles. Cars or busses. That's what we were discussing before someone mentioned that no, self-driving cars are bad for this specific use case, trains would be better.
> That's what we were discussing before someone mentioned that no, self-driving cars are bad for this specific use case, trains would be better.
That's a gross mischaracterization of what I actually said, which was that we have an unfortunate network of roads and barely any rail.
And, furthermore, if you have the infrastructure to support refueling stations, then you aren't so remote, are you? If you have such infrastructure, then you probably have a population density to support other infrastructure, like rail. And yes, that is always preferable (as your main means of long distance land based travel).
France has been stopping these, tearing them down, selling train stations because of the cost of maintaining that stuff. Even without talking of ADDING some rail, just maintaining old rail and (rare) service is too expensive for a small village. Even when that would be the lifeline to the town nearby (which it can't be anymore because the large stores in that town are not near the train station anymore.)
The reason a lot of people travel from a small area to a small area is the nature of existing public transport.
Enable a different sort of public transport and that promotes decentralisation, which is much more humane as well as more economically and environmentally attractive.
Automated vehicles enable a service between taxis and buses. Think a small bus/minivan that travels a general route, but drops you off nearer your house, for instance.
Most of them are though. People can’t get off their phones, they’re addicted. Every time I see a car swerving in front of me and I pass, they’re on their phone. We have to figure out self driving cars because humans can’t disconnect and focus on their multi-ton vehicle.
You might want to look into the, more deeply. Anti-car advocates (here ant least) are lumping in “high” pedestrians deaths with the cases you are expecting, to inflate their case of an increase due to traditional distracted driving. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the increase in pedestrian deaths corresponds to the same timeline as the current fentanyl epidemic. But you have to go case by case to see where your local increase is coming from.
I said this many times in other posts lately, but if Americans wanted to get serious about this problem, they would need a multi-faceted approach like the Dutch rather than just hoping drivers do the right thing (without focusing on road redesigns or pedestrian behavior also).
Pedestrian fatalities - they happen when drivers speed, run red lights, hit pedestrians in crossings while turning. Self-driving cars will probably eliminate 90% of these. Same for people who are killed on bikes.
With Motorcycles, I don't know. But I bet that at least half of these would also be eliminated if car drivers followed the rules.
They happen on class b highways at night. They often get hit from behind.
There are more than just human factors. Self driving cars can't control pedestrians or guarantee they will follow traffic laws or not be inebriated. Also weather happens and snow and ice change everything.
Self driving is not magic. Sensors have limitations, and can even just get dirty.
Drivers won't ever follow rules. Automaton that allows our even requires driver intervention will probably not offer any improvement in fatalities.
A recent rider video in a Waymo car showed pretty outstanding handling of unpredictable pedestrian behavior. One example of pedestrians partly hidden and then darting across the path of the car from between parked cars; another of pedestrian making to dart through and not going through with it; another of pedestrians hesitating (or easy to confuse with hesitating). The response to potentially dangerous pedestrian situations was noticeable and impressive. IMO much better than many human drivers would have. The Waymo car was hyper-alert and taking in a lot of clues - absolutely at the level of a hyper-alert human.
Statistics I've seen have the pedestrian being inebriated in 40-50% of incidents. I know some scatter-brained people who have been hit multiple times while crossing intersections/parking lots/driveways - they just don't pay attention or look both ways. Self driving won't necessarily prevent those.
Automating car traffic will lead to more car traffic. Today the number of cars on the road are limited to the number of drivers. If the drivers are removed, there can be even more cars, just driving around empty to go get someone. Even if demand for transit remains the same, driverless taxis have the potential to double the number of trips that need to be take. From going to a place and returning home (2 trips), to empty to pickup, go to a place, empty to pickup again, and returning home (4 trips). At scale, this will be a nightmare.
To reduce car traffic we need to build alternatives to cars (protected bike lanes, rails, etc). We will never get people away from cars by building more/better cars.
I think we are talking about two distinct policy goals here:
1) humans, including children, should be able to move through the public realm safely, no matter if they walk or bike
2) we do not want all the space in cities to be taken up by cars
Self-driving cars help with reaching goal number 1 partially, but it is not sufficient. Bike paths and other non-car infrastructure is also needed.
In terms of goal number 2, self-driving cars might open up a political chance to ban on-street parking.
You're right that they alone won't fix the problem, but I think they don't make it worse either. Traffic in cities is already limited by capacity, not by demand.
Yeah, and taking humans who hate bikes out of the equation - I basically stopped biking because several drivers literally tried to run me down (on a residential street no less).
I think there is a misunderstanding of why cars are dangerous to cyclists and how to fix it. There are only two proven methods, slow car traffic right down til it is essentially co-mingling with pedestrians, or separate the two types of traffic completely. Automating cars changes neither of those. Maybe your lycra clad road cyclist doing 40kmph could co-exist with cars passing them at 60kmph+ but if you wouldn't let your kids cycle there then it's not actually safe. I would not trust a kid riding in a painted bike lane next to Tesla, even if it is less likely to hit them due to distractions there is still a whole host of things that can go wrong and then you face the fundamental issue of a speed and mass mismatch.
Changing the roads and infrastructure is the only way to avoid that fundamental physics problem.
In general I completely agree that updating infrastructure to create dedicated spaces for non-car modes is the only way forward.
But given how politically difficult it is to change--and especially to take away--existing infrastructure, and how much easier politically it is to introduce new tech, I hold out a smidgen of hope that driverless cars might help us inch in the right direction. Because they'll be managed by companies rather than individuals, they almost certainly will be required to adhere strictly to speed limits and other traffic laws, can be programmed to give bikers and pedestrians a wide berth, and won't (I hope dearly) get road rage. With luck and a sufficient volume of autonomous cars, this could help more people be comfortable riding with cars until we can get enough political will to build some decent infrastructure for non-car-users. And at this point I'll take what I can get to keep the ball rolling (and hopefully accelerating a bit) towards a friendlier future.
As a pedestrian who doesn't drive and doesn't cycle, in 10 years living in a major city (with decent cycling infrastructure) I've had 0 close calls with cars, and 4 very dangerous close calls with cyclists. In all cases, they were driving through red lights as pedestrians crossed, not signalling when turning, or ignoring other basic rules of the road. If we got rid of all car traffic and replaced it with cyclists, I am not confident things would be safer.
> You know what driverless cars can't do? Redirect a passenger to the emergency room due to acute problems that occur in the car.
You state this as a fact with absolute confidence. That's interesting. Not only do I respectfully disagree, but I'm actually surprised you are so sure of yourself. It seems (to me) rather obvious that self driving cars are not a mature technology yet. In fact, they aren't even deployed widely. In that regard, of course it isn't a mature technology!
So I'd really appreciate it if you could help me understand how you arrived at that conclusion. Being so incredibly confident you must have a rock solid set of arguments about this topic and I'd love to hear them.
I don't know of any technology that can respond to the injury of its passengers by sending them to the hospital. That doesn't mean it can't happen, it just isn't a reality yet. I hope it gets there and most importantly I believe it can get there.
If it fails 10% or the time that sounds like a great start and I hope they can improve it! 10% failure rate seems like a great process that could be improved.
Again, I'm interested in why capitalism makes you pessimistic about technological advancement. Capitalism seems pretty good at advancing technology. Let me ask you a question, why do you think "capitalism" can get such a system to 10% failure and then stop improving forever? That seems pretty random to me. I'm interested in why you think that!
Also, why do you think it's a zero sum game? E.g. we can cure cancer and make self driving cars better at the same time! It's pretty sweet actually.
It is imminently within the realm of possibility that a smart watch can, with minimal human intervention, redirect the current driverless vehicle to an emergency room. I would not be surprised if the iWatch->phone->CarPlay integration were to expose this path in the next or second-to-next major iOS revision.
> Capitalism seems pretty good at advancing technology.
Capitalism is good at providing 'efficiency', nothing more nothing less. It's a dumb (as in not smart not necessarily stupid) filter on economic activity.
I think what they are referring to is that such a system does not prioritize reducing failure rates to zero, it prioritizes reducing costs to zero - 10% is probably an arbitrary lower limit, but the cost of the court fees, medical bills, and manufacturing loss should be greater than the cost of developing and deploying the technology that can reliably reduce rates below X amount.
It's a fairly ruthless algorithm that will justify millions of deaths based upon economics.
Compounding the simple issue above, is when the system attempts to increase efficiency by lowering the cost of legal/medical repercussions e.g. by with-holding blame, fines, and economic relevancy rather than by improving the technology.
E.g. if only 100 people can afford to use a technology then a 1% failure rate is statistically easy to achieve, and efficiently requires very little testing. Applied to a population of millions however that is potentially a mass genocide.
Capitalism has a very dark side, for those willing to look the truth in the face, like with any tool, it can and will be wielded in terrible ways.
You don't think it's pretty easy for a Waymo car to monitor its passengers for unresponsiveness? For speech asking for help? For mention of "take me to the hospital"?
Seems pretty easy to me. Would surprise me if some of this was not already in the programming.
Tons of human drivers would either panic, not notice or wouldn't know where nearest hospital is. Are we going with old trusty "can't do edge case X, entire thing is worthless" line of argumentation?
> Redirect a passenger to the emergency room due to acute problems that occur in the car.
It seems pretty clear to me that the current cars will feature that soon. If they don't already do. Through monitoring the passengers and responding for against-the-rules behavior and un-responsiveness, and distress speech. Because that seems pretty easy to do and pretty liable otherwise.
Alternatively: this is San Francisco where on a good day the locals don’t need much excuse to set fire to a car (although I usually associate it with the Giants winning a World Series) and this poor dumb stupid driverless Waymo drove into a celebratory and by the looks of it somewhat drunken crowd on the Streets of Chinatown during the Chinese New Year where in following its prime directive to do no harm, it got itself stuck up the creek without a paddle so to speak. Waymo probably should have accounted for that ahead of time and told their cars not to go near Chinatown this evening.
I can't tell you how many smashed cars I've seen with rolled down windows and notes begging people not to trash them and that there are no valuables inside.
That’s different: it’s just drug addicts looking for drug money and the citizens being too nice to get their police to crack down on that. But lighting a car on fire for anger and kicks is something else.
Be assured it isn't "just" drug addicts but increasingly profit minded criminals and misguided teenagers, 'etc. They smash the windows anyhow and occasionally set things on fire for kicks.
And there are more and more organized and semi-organized groups.
I can see some kids getting in on the action, but unhoused neighbor bashing in a car window in plain view is common where I’m at (Seattle). The only time I’ve seen it done otherwise was with Kia Boyz in a Fred myer parking lot, but I think they were just doing random things without much real thought (let’s steal some cars, and then go use them to try to snatch purses and bash windows at a busy Fred Myer on a Sunday afternoon).
As for doing so on Chinese New Year? I honestly think this Waymo got stuck in the crowd at the wrong place at the wrong time. Waymo has a good track record and still does in my books, but this car shouldn’t have been near Chinatown on Chinese New Year. It’s just stupid that it was, and unfortunate for the car. Those streets really are narrow and yeah, it gets crowded, so I’m inclined to think this was more a crime of opportunity. A mob gathered, some of them drunk and/or edgy, one thing led to another, etc.
Also it’s possible I overplayed how much of this was an SF phenomenon. It’s the City I know best but I found reports of other sports fans doing the same across America and Canada when I was Googling those links for you.
> Also it’s possible I overplayed how much of this was an SF phenomenon.
Yep. This is a phenomenon everywhere. I don't have hard data to support this, but I'm under the impression that soccer fans in Europe are even crazier.
Ya, or hockey fans in Canada after they lose an important game. But Paris is special, since this generally happens every summer and May Day from kids just being angry.
Unheard of in Asia, however a skyscraper was accidentally burned out on the last day of CNY in 2009.
This is a hilarious take. A few youths went bonkers and defaced private property. Has nothing to do with philosophical beliefs or a Big Tech agenda. You should debate the finer points of the Big Tech agenda with them while they run up to you in a maddened rage.
You’re going to get banned but you’re speaking the truth
Ironically can’t reply to the person who replied to me because my account is partially banned :D
To the other reply: dang has personally confirmed that I am rate limited, so no. It’s also in the publicly available HN source code. If I post more than 5 times in 12 hours I get a “you are posting too fast” message. Other people don’t get this
Generally speaking people don't get banned here, also they have ~75,000 internet points so they know what they're doing.
Either this thread will get flagged to death because ultimately this is a VC forum or dang will come in and dish some well deserved scoldings if anyone goes too far but that's about it.
I think HN automatically imposes a limit on how much furthur down a comment chain an existing participant can comment in, to prevent heated discussions. So while I, somebody who hasn't commented till now, can reply to the reply to your comment just fine, you, somebody who has commented previously, cannot.
Hope that clears it up, I don't think your account is shadow banned.
Not the person who said it, and I’m in favor of rails, bike paths, etc being the basis of any multifaceted transit system.
That being said, augmenting a public transit system with something like self-driving cars would be good for older people, or anyone with limited mobility, who may not be able to handle the amount of walking required with most public transit options.
I don’t think I’d include the poor in the list of people who would benefit, as I would expect a dedicated car driving for doorstep to doorstep would be more expensive than a train or bus which has scheduled stops.
I live in an area with poor public transit, and my parents both live in areas with no public transit options at all. They are 70 now and eventually they will get to the point where they can no longer drive safely. Having a way to get around would allow them to maintain their freedom and independence. Without that, giving up their license will mean depending on family or friends to do anything that requires leaving the house. Uber would be an option for my dad, but unlikely for my mom as she lives in a more rural area, and I’d imagine it would get expensive. I did just look up options for my mom if she has to give up her car. There is a service available from the county that runs from 7am - 3:30pm, Mon - Sat. If she wants/needs to go anywhere in the evening or on Sunday, she’d be out of luck. They also require 3 days notice to pick someone up for a doctor’s appointment, and an hour+ for anything else.
While writing this I also remembered a guy I used to work with who had seizures, so he couldn’t drive. He took the bus to work and it would take him about 2 hours. Since it was a night shift job and the buses didn’t run late, he also ended up getting to work extremely early and then just had to wait for his shift to start. Co-workers often gave him a ride home after learning about all this, as it was less than 20 minutes by car. Having some faster and more direct options would be nice for areas with horribly slow bus services, or with limited hours.
Maybe the transit providers could use the car data to inform them on future transit routes that should be built. That way we can reduce the number of cars that need to be on the road over time, and do it in a way that makes the biggest impact.
Anarchist mobs? It was almost certainly some drunk kids in the middle of the Chinese New Year celebrations.
But the question remains: what was the political ideology of these youths? Anarchists? Marxists? Fascists? Technocrats? Monarchists??? We may never know!
The video shows more than a couple drunk kids kicking a car at random. It shows pretty deliberate behavior. In general, really, it takes more than a random kick to break a car window. And it did take more than that this time.
Vandalism is not much of a political ideology but here we are.
Anarchist mobster here, I think people just don't like roving surveillance wagons.
Also, actual anarchists are not going to vandalize bikes and public transit. It's kind of important that we be somewhat precise about our terminology as otherwise you just stoke political division to no real end.
Just go read some stuff I guess. Everyone thinks it's accelerationism and while there are extremists who inhabit both camps, like every other ideology, it's mostly just a community focused reduction in authoritarian power structures thing.
As I said elsewhere, there are actual agreed upon definitions for this stuff. Careful not to go too far into the "everything is unknowable" hole.
I'm also an anarchist. I guarantee that the person above me and I disagree about some political things. But also, I guarantee we do agree about a lot of the foundational thought and theory. Things like mutual aid, the right to self determination, local communities knowing what their communities need, and more.
Anarchist theory has a ton of practical and academic work over the past few centuries. It's not "the purge", it's a pretty well defined set of principles centered around building a society that primarily focuses on well being for all.
I think you don't really understand what an anarchist is. I'm an anarchist, I wouldn't set someone's car on fire. Happy to give you a rundown on wellbeing for all, mutual aid, and federated production (with a bonus explanation of personal property vs private property,)
Anarchist theory is almost 200 years old now, and for most of human history we lived in an anarchist way. There's much more there than "wreck shit".
> This (driverless tech) is amazing for what it can do to help people that are old/poor and live in places with no public transport
This is so cynical. First cars were used to destroy much of the existing public transport in places like the US and Europe, now drivers are next.
This is so sick, employment (i.e. people) are only seen as a nuisance, a cost factor, a legacy, biding their time until they can be machined out of the picture. FTS.
Arguments about driverless cars aside, the youth in this country are seriously lost. It only takes one generation of poor parenting and poor civic policies to ruin a culture.
Perhaps not you, but maybe some other members of your generation. And maybe your (grand)parents might have interpreted the very act of your being "under the influence of several substances" as a symptom of their culture being ruined.
I am unsure of the point you are trying to make. You seem to be excusing the defacement of private property. Have you ever been in a fight, out of curiosity?
I am not excusing it at all. I meant to say that "culture ruin" means different things to different generations (and somtimes different people in the same generation as well). And I don't see how your question has anything to do with the discussion at hand, but I have been in a fight.
I was asking because those who have never been involved in violence, that is to say, insulated from violence, may treat it lightly. Civility arises not out of weakness or fake niceness, but from the reality that violence can lead to the loss of life. Culture ruin may mean different things to different people, but we cannot excuse violence, and excessive violence and defacement of private property is a universal symptom of cultural ruin.
Sounds like they were right. The youth at that point was lost, and are now raising people who will literally burn down a waymo for fun, or because of some horrifically ignorant idea about fairness.
My parents, who are X or boomer (honestly idk), don't complain about gen Z, which I'm in. They criticize millennials, which I agree with. And kids today most likely have millennial parents. I don't think it's that big of a deal in the long run, though.
> the youth in this country are seriously lost. It only takes one generation of poor parenting and poor civic policies to ruin a culture.
As opposed to previous generations that would murder with lynch mobs or would trash cities in riots after winning or losing a big sports championship?
This is one event, we have no information about age or motives of the perpetrators let alone enough information to slander hundreds of millions just for being young.
And scapegoating like this really shouldn't be allowed here.
Teenagers and college students now have the opposite problem, from what I've seen. They're so shy and quiet, almost depressed. I was pretty shy as a kid, but compared to them, I'd be considered extroverted.
That was the thing in the BLM days. Antifa were simultaneously cowardly, weak, tofu and granola eating "pansies" and a paramilitary organization causing fear and terror in God-fearing Americans who believed they'd be shot or beat to death for wearing a MAGA hat.
Are there statements from the people who actually did this? I'm trying to understand the context.
It's intriguing, people in a city with over $300K GDP per capita burning an AI enabled transportation robot. I feel the urge to fit it in some kind of cyberpunk narrative.
I mean it's an unprotected corporate asset in a city where the median employee only makes 1/3rd the revenue they bring in, it's not difficult to think of an excuse.
It's notable that it's in Chinatown. I lived there a decade ago and currently work close by. There are few drug addicted homeless people who reside there. The news makes it sound pervasive for political reasons, but it's actually highly localized. I would bet on job displacement, personally.
While I understand your sentiment It will be interesting to compare income versus average revenue per employee of tech businesses to other kinds of businesses as well. I have a feeling that employee expenses of 30% are quite normal across all industries.
I haven’t seen any statements but here’s the context:
It’s Chinatown, San Francisco. It’s Chinese New Year. The Streets are tiny, narrow, crowded and full of the young and the drunk celebrating the Year of the Dragon, and nobody at Waymo thought to tell their cars to stay away from this area at this time (or they did and this car missed the memo and ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time anyway).
> It's intriguing, people in a city with over $300K GDP per capita burning an AI enabled transportation robot.
That GDP per capita figure really misses the mark on what San Francisco is like. Also: not everyone here is in tech, or cares about tech.
I encourage you to Kagi Image search “San Francisco Chinatown Chinese new years”.
Besides one or two main thoroughfares, the streets are absolutely narrow considering how many people are there during these events. Or hell just during a Sunday. Driving in downtown/chinatown yesterday would be extremely stressful and ill advised for the best of human drivers. IMO.
EDIT: actually you’re probably just remarking that parking sucks which hell yeah wtf, get those cars outta there. Street parking in sf is already so bad that they need to bite the bullet city-wide and commit to transit.
I just think it's ridiculous to say that Jackson is an impassibly narrow street. The reason the Waymo encountered a crowd at this spot is because some outlaw dirtbike losers were having a sideshow in the intersection. It is not some car-free paradise.
I agree, but it is also true that Waymo shouldn’t have been there. You can blame Waymo for not planning ahead, or the City/State for not being proactive about regulating where and how autonomous vehicles operate around what is basically a festival, or both; and you can also blame the crowd for setting fire to it.
However you want to slice that blame cake, it probably shouldn’t have been there and it had no way of making that determination without being directed.
There is no history of new tech not creating more jobs than it displaced. None, zero, zilch. Maybe it will be different this time but with out any evidence to back that up, all of history says that new tech makes more new jobs. So, blocking new tech is protecting a few today and actually preventing more people from having jobs in the near future. Yes, it's no fun for those displaced and we should try to help them but given that more jobs have always been created in the past, protecting those few today means asking more people to go without/starve/be-poor etc. In other words, blocking tech is the exact wrong thing to do if you want more people to have jobs.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
> Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
The zero interest rate phenomenon accelerated this, but also technology accelerates it.
We're seeing the effects in mass tech layoffs yet the tech companies continue to add trillions to their cap and bring in 100s of billions in profit per year to their balance sheets.
In any case, either we need a healthier wealth curve. Or what the young generation are learning the hard way is that it doesn't make sense to have kids. It's really hard to move income classes. Technology makes this worse as the richer get richer owning capital and means of automation - which does what humans used to do much cheaper.
There's no statement, so it just looks like random destruction. But people in SF have vandalized e-scooters and specifically blocked tech companies' buses before.
Lots of people in SF feel that these tech companies are pricing them out of their hometown.
Or it could just be regular vandals looking for an excuse to tear up something and a vague memory about a self driving car killing someone in the news was good enough to tear up one of them.
SF streets aren't exactly safe for cars for a long time. Breakins are extremely routine occurrence. So, this one time somebody decided to take it up a notch. No need to make Butlerian Jihad out of it.
Per capita income doesn't reveal the actual income disparity. SF wasn't always expensive city to live. It was in fact quite the opposite. Last several decades have made the city inhospitable for the economically vulnerable population. Instead of looking at the per capita GDP, you should see the income distribution in the city. The median household income is $126,000 which is not a livable wage in the city for a family. The recent poverty rate is ~10%.
My perception is that, people were partying & were drunk. The Waymo vehicle likely was just passing through and probably got stuck. People simply took out their pent up frustration on it. It's nothing more than that.
This is not a political statement, it just teenagers doing really dumb things when having a metric-ton of fireworks is easily available and no people who will hold them accountable (self driving robots cant get mad)
There is a already a lot of negative sentiment in SF and an increasing number of Westerners who are anti tech and anti progress. That includes people working in the media, just look at the constant criticism in reporting. If it becomes to bad, cars will not be programmed to run over people in self defense. The development would simply move elsewhere and the techphobic parts of the world will be left behind. Something like this would never happen in East Asia, it's inconceivable you'd get a mob of Japanese vandalizing a self-driving car for no good reason other than hate of the tech.
184 comments
[ 9.6 ms ] story [ 913 ms ] threadIt would be a huge shame if it came to that. This (driverless tech) is amazing for what it can do to help people that are old/poor and live in places with no public transport (we have lots of little villages full of people like this with a bus once a day often going only one way). What is the most expensive conponent of proving public transport to such places? Drivers.
Reality check: if there's no public transport, driverless car services probably aren't about to serve those areas either.
The original argument doesn't hold though: even if a bus line isn't profitable in a place because there's not enough people doesn't mean that a cheaper taxi service wouldn't be.
[1] "Depending on bus type, driver cost accounts for between 40 and 70 per cent of total bus operator cost in Singapore (Ongel et al., 2019) and Australia (own calculation based on ATC, 2006). In Japan, driver salaries account for 53% and 70% of total operating costs of buses and taxis, respectively (Abe, 2019)."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22120...
As far as profits on rural lines… each line doesn’t need to be equally profitable. Some might even lose money, as long as the popular lines can make up for the less popular ones. There is a significant value to a community in having ubiquitous coverage.
It's always going to be a trade-off
We had rails 200 year ago; it’s a solved problem that mostly requires political will and capital allocation to execute.
Self driving cars have been in development of some kind for at least 40 years[1] and it’s still a struggle technically, and will still require some political will going forward as we try to solve all the legal problem they bring up, and the development has also been very capital intensive[2].
If we have to spend the money and deal with the politics anyway, why not put that effort toward something we know works, we can do today, will reduce traffic on roads, and has a better safety record than automobiles.
Augmenting a rail system with some kind of taxi system is fine, but it seems odd to put all the eggs in the autonomous car basket. We were promised cars would be driving themselves across the country 6 years ago, and it’s still just promises[3]. How long are we willing to wait for something that’s actually viable for the masses? And how much are we going to pay per ride? Right now it looks like it will be more expensive than hopping on a train.
People often say Elon pitched the HyperLoop and Boring company ideas to try and kill rail plans, since he owns a car company. I have to wonder if these someday promises of self-driving are a similar tactic.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_self-driving_cars
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-10-06/even-afte...
[3] https://www.notateslaapp.com/news/1474/elon-musk-says-tesla-...
- removes the biggest expense: drivers
- works well with restricted area/route requirements
- is flexible with respect to deployment of services in response to demand
The ultimate goal of public transport should be that it is as flexible as a taxi (which is also public transport) with costs lower than buses or trains which have higher capital costs.
Constant traffic makes urban streets unpleasant. City life is better when the streets are mostly empty, with at most one or two vehicles per minute in each direction.
The nightmare scenario in self driving is if we can no longer own cars, but have to subscribe to car services, money from public transportation goes to private corporations, and they can raise profits or remove routes as they see fit for the most money.
I’m sure if it were Tokyo instead I wouldn’t have a problem (or even the option given the higher cost of taking a taxi).
Instead we have networks of roads that are largely unsafe, inefficient, and more costly to replace, and a dated rail system that hardly services major cities any more.
A self-driving car would cost tens of thousands. A good bus, maybe up to 10x more. Compare that to a train and tracks and geoengineering for the tracks and building stations, etc. Otherwise, is there a minimum number of trips per year to justify such an enormous, enormous, enormous build as a rail line extension? 200? 20? 1?
We did this before, so it's not that it can't be done efficiently. A lot of the cost savings comes from the millions of people taking the trains in the cities, and the fact that you were going to build the rail anyways. So the costs are not as exaggerated as you seem to think...which is the point. They effectively amortize costs in a way no other transportation can even dream of.
The cost savings you mention aren't savings: If the extensions to the villages aren't build, the folks in the cities would still use the train just as much as they do now. The question, then, is the marginal cost of bringing an existing rail line, from a city where it already exists, to a village of 4 person-rides per hour. The millions of dollars it costs are just for the parts that go to the village. Or, simplified further:
- having a train in the city which millions take, and then spending millions more dollars extending that train line to a village where 4 people/hour take it
versus
- having a a train in the city which millions of people take, and not spending millions more dollars extending that train line to a village where 4 people/hour take it
The second one is economically feasible, the first one not so much. As for doing things efficiently, that is only 1 requirement. We also have laws, regulations, safety, the environment, and many more considerations to factor in. Once you do, the cost gets to the orders of magnitude I mentioned.
Your error is in assuming that all extensions to villages are built as just to villages.
There are trains between cities, which presumably have non-zero traffic, or some mix of commercial/pedestrian traffic. That's where you garner the savings - you were already spending millions on intercity traffic.
If you have your blinders on with this false-choice of city or city + villages, then you'd have a point, but this is not the case for rail between two cities. In Europe/US there are more than enough cities to make this feasible.
A rail system doesn't solve the problem of truly remote regions where there are no nearby cities, but it does allow for intercity transport with stops at minor villages along the way.
As for "providing the numbers", I'd encourage you to inspect the numbers for city rail systems, they operate on the same principle, albeit at a lower scale - trains operate on loops or lines through many neighborhoods, instead of a hub and spoke system that would require an exorbitantly expensive central hub and N lines, they can operate at a fraction of that cost with usually ~10 lines per city, servicing usually hundreds of stops (an order of magnitude savings).
Compare that with the cost of vehicles with the same city (parking, fuel, licensing, insurance, road upkeep), its fairly obvious that the one system (line with many stops) is far superior to the other (individualized transport).
We can have a train going between cities, which is good. But as soon as you want to branch off and have another line going tens or hundreds of miles in a different direction, to reach that village in the middle of nowhere (maybe 'it's just off a straight line by a little bit' - ok, that will be several million), and make sure to reinforce and grade the land first, and of course the village needs a station, etc.
It adds up. The city nearest me has paid billions over 20 years to lay 75 miles of track. They're trying to do exactly what we're discussing: adding smaller towns into the commuter rail network which already serves larger cities fine. Billions with a "B". And you better believe the funding prospects involve more than 4 tickets per hour. Compare this to the cost of 1 or 2 self driving cars which serve the entire village (currently 1 car serves their needs, but they might grow).
The people in the two cities will happily go back and forth between, whether the branch-to-nowhere is built or not. So whoever wants the branch-to-nowhere, has to justify the marginal cost of building it, which, yes, costs millions. Even if the village was literally on existing inter-city commuter rail steel, which it likely isn't, the station and required changes alone would likely cost millions. Can fewer than 4 tickets per hour at least pay for the ongoing operational cost of a station and regular stops there? Maybe.
Also, please be nicer.
I understand your general point - diversions have realized material and labor costs. However, not all "diversions" need to be individually costly nor expensive. Partly, arguing over specific costs is political (varies by regional policies) or regional (costs of transporting goods/excavations into a particular geological region).
However, again, as with any data set, it is possible to fit the line to the curve. If viewed strictly from a "point a to point b" situation, sure, you may incur costs by increasing the curvature of the line by routing through some village, however mother nature/politics sees fit to create those costs regardless (mountains, lakes, major roads, airport, etc).
If you must make these million dollar "diversions" as you put it anyways (whether by tunneling, avoiding protected regions), then it should be possible to create low cost stations (the land should not cost much in excess of 40k$ and the station itself should be mostly concrete with possibly some electronic flagging mechanism, no need for fancy stations at every stop) within reasonably close vicinity to many villages on a route between two cities (not every station need run through a town center). This is still more economical than attempting to draw a straight line between two cities, which usually proves to be impossible anyways, due to the increased traffic from the additional rail network entry points.
Regarding being nice, my apologies, "you" is not always intended as a personal attack, rather a pronoun closer to the somewhat archaic term "one".
That's just it: those costs incurred are millions to billions, no matter how strictly you view them. The line running between cities is already a straight-ish line, or as straight as it can be. It's already built to deal with geographic features, etc. Any additional routing or rerouting would cost millions to billions.
Now, imagine someone wants to include in the rail network, a village that's 10-50+ miles off this existing line. You could:
- Turn the straight-ish line into a "T", where at some point along the line, it branches off and veers towards the village. Cost: millions to billions for the land, zoning, approvals, terraforming, track buildout, environment assessments, safety assessments, probably legal issues.
- Connect each city to the village with a new straight-ish line, forming a "V". Cost: millions to billions for the same.
- Build no additions to the existing line between cities. Cost: nothing
If there isn't already a line, then the decision is between a straight-ish line which ignores the village, and a "V" which doesn't, with the latter costing millions to billions more. If the latter is chosen, will those extra millions to billions be paid back with marginal tickets purchased as a result of the change? Probably not.
As for the station, it alone would cost millions. Sure, you or I could build a concrete shelter for little money and no bureaucracy or rules or aesthetics, but that won't work for a government rail station. Examining the cost of recently built train stations should bring us closer to an accurate estimate. Here one[0]: £15,000,000 for a station built where there was infrastructure already (a decades-closed station). With all due respect to the architect, it looks like a pretty bare-bones station made from a bunch of concrete.
[0]: https://www.transport.gov.scot/news/transport-minister-opens...
Some hard numbers. We can talk about "millions" of dollars in train costs as if that's some bad thing, actually some back of the envelope math reveals this is a pittance.
Average cost of a vehicle (generous) 30000 (actually much higher after repairs, maintenance), lets say 35000, our drivers all experience great luck and need very few repairs over the life of their vehicles.
Average number of vehicles, per person, lets say, 5. So about 17500$. Lets maybe round that up for easy math, the consumer needs to also pay for insurance (150 USD a month for 12 months and about 40 years of driver time, another 72000 USD).
Already, 5 consumers then cost about 1 million in car costs.
Average lifetime of a train, 40 years. Average cost of a (traditional) train track about 1 million per mile. So the number here is already pretty low per mile (of track, we are assuming for simplicity the mile of track is paid for for 40 years - actual life time is usually 50-60 years, so we are about safe here).
Lets say we cost fit, lets say, 20 villages along a route. Each one causes average 2 miles of track divergence (about 2 million cost per village), and because of politics/regulation, each 40k$ plot of land is closer to 100k$. Roughly 42$ million cost of fitting the track along these routes between two cities.
Using our numbers from earlier, we need about 5*42 or ~210 customers over 40 years to just break even with the automobile cost(s). If we assume we just want to break even, no profit, over those 40 years, that's about 5k$ per consumer per year, or assuming weekly trips, about 96$ per trip.
For 20 villages at ~1k population, I'm gonna bet a lot more than 210 consumers are going to want to use these tracks.
Lets assume best case, all 20 villages of 1k average populations are utilizing these trains now, we have 20000k users now, or 95x times the room for growth. That 96$ ticket? It can be a dollar and still break even.
Charge 10$ and you've covered the cost. And we haven't even gotten into amortizing the costs due to regular city traffic, or talked about real cost of ownership, energy inefficiencies, maintenance costs (hint, much much lower).
The benefits are absurdly high, even after a quick back-of-the-envelope run of the numbers. You have to have some absurdly high costs or do something really dumb, like install T junctions that lead to nowhere, for a rail system to become unfeasible.
For example:
> Lets say we cost fit, lets say, 20 villages along a route. Each one causes average 2 miles of track divergence
Let's say, instead, they aren't along the route, because they likely aren't, and let's say it's closer to 10-20 miles of track divergence each. Even at the super, super low estimate of $1m/mile (the real numbers from recent commuter rail expansions tend to be at least an order of magnitude or two larger), that adds up to $28-38m for the track and station.
Remember, the use case is a village whose taxi needs are satisfied by 1 car per village, so I don't know where you got 5 cars per person or five people per car. That means the self-driving option costs 1 self-driving car per village. Maybe 2.
Additionally, this is a village whose train needs add up to fewer than 4 passengers per hour. But then you mention,
> 20 villages of 1k average populations are utilizing these trains now, we have 20000k users now
Here you're conflating train riders with literally everybody who lives in the village, which is a huge red flag. The demand is fewer than 4 rides per hour per village, so 20 villages adds up to fewer than 2,000, an order of magnitude smaller.
Plus, now that it's 20 villages, the cost is 20*(millions to billions) instead of just (millions to billions).
Those numbers just don't break even, especially when you add in the cost of maintaining those 20 stations and the additional track. Going back to the example, at an optimistic cost of $28-38m per additional station, and a ridership of 4/hr, and let's say a ticket price of $10. The math says each additional station would take 80 years to pay off, and that's if the station and rails don't cost anything to maintain. But they do, so it'd likely take hundreds of years.
Eh? No, absurd. I'm not sure where you got that I was limiting myself to villages that only need 1 taxi per village. I think you are thinking of some 3 person 'towns' not a standard village.
Yeah sure you can dial down your prospective customers to some ridiculously low amount, but I already said, I was never talking about rail systems in obscure regions without cities. If that's your beef, you're wasting your time.
There might be different reasons trains would be more economical in some settings but for someone in a hut in Siberia no of course trains are not a sane idea.
> Your numbers seem to assume a lot that isn't supported by the data
What data? My numbers are facts easily and quickly verified on the web, cite sources, please. Saying 'the data' is tantamount to nonsense, here.
> Those numbers just don't break even
Yes so for your 10 huts in the prairie your self driving car is a superior solution, yay, sarcasm. Meanwhile, my rail line is servicing hundreds of thousands of people, in cities and towns, below cost.
One is far more economical than the other.
> Eh? No, absurd. I'm not sure where you got that
Scroll to the top of the thread you've been discussing:
> The square mile around me has fewer than 4 journeys an hour to anywhere[0]
> a taxi service would be brilliant, my son could get to scouts and back under his own steam. Automated or manual doesn’t matter, but we can’t sustain a taxi service. - there’s one in a town about 6 miles away. One taxi.[1]
So, not only not "absurd", but explicitly specified.
----
> I already said, I was never talking about rail systems in obscure regions
This thread concerns villages, not suburbs of cities. Specifically villages with 0-1 taxis serving them, and a total trip demand of fewer than 4 people per hour.
This thread is about running self-driving cars vs. train lines for that city and cities like that.
You joined this thread.
I think we can be forgiven for thinking you were talking about the topic of the thread you joined, and not something else :) Everybody makes mistakes, right?
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39333564
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39333882
Regarding the individual with a taxi in a town 6 miles away, I didn't mean to imply he would definitely be serviced. Instead, its more likely he would be able to walk/find some transportation to a local rail line, if we had a rail line network.
This would still be better than the current state of affairs, by the sound of it - maybe be able to hire a taxi vs being able to walk with their son to a nearby station.
If this individual is truly in a remote region, nothing will solve that. Last mile can and should still be solved by alternative low-cost low-frequency transportation such as cars, bicycles, low-cost trams, buses, airplanes, drones, etc.
That seems a little fatalistic! I would hope the comment would be "I can't think of anything that would solve that".
Because I and a few others can: Self-driving vehicles. Cars or busses. That's what we were discussing before someone mentioned that no, self-driving cars are bad for this specific use case, trains would be better.
That's a gross mischaracterization of what I actually said, which was that we have an unfortunate network of roads and barely any rail.
And, furthermore, if you have the infrastructure to support refueling stations, then you aren't so remote, are you? If you have such infrastructure, then you probably have a population density to support other infrastructure, like rail. And yes, that is always preferable (as your main means of long distance land based travel).
Enable a different sort of public transport and that promotes decentralisation, which is much more humane as well as more economically and environmentally attractive.
That 40000 figure is not entirely due to bad drivers, and expecting a single change to solve all problems is very short sighted.
Even if only 50% of the pedestrians killed were sober - isn't that enough of a crisis to act?
1500 children younger than 14 years died in traffic in the US in 2021.
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/overview/age-group....
Also, understanding the components of the problem lead to you know, figuring out how to fix it, eg:
https://www.kuow.org/stories/pedestrian-deaths-climb-in-seat...
I said this many times in other posts lately, but if Americans wanted to get serious about this problem, they would need a multi-faceted approach like the Dutch rather than just hoping drivers do the right thing (without focusing on road redesigns or pedestrian behavior also).
In Germany it's honestly not that bad, but a lot of people text as red lights.
With Motorcycles, I don't know. But I bet that at least half of these would also be eliminated if car drivers followed the rules.
There are more than just human factors. Self driving cars can't control pedestrians or guarantee they will follow traffic laws or not be inebriated. Also weather happens and snow and ice change everything.
Self driving is not magic. Sensors have limitations, and can even just get dirty.
Drivers won't ever follow rules. Automaton that allows our even requires driver intervention will probably not offer any improvement in fatalities.
Automating car traffic will lead to more car traffic. Today the number of cars on the road are limited to the number of drivers. If the drivers are removed, there can be even more cars, just driving around empty to go get someone. Even if demand for transit remains the same, driverless taxis have the potential to double the number of trips that need to be take. From going to a place and returning home (2 trips), to empty to pickup, go to a place, empty to pickup again, and returning home (4 trips). At scale, this will be a nightmare.
To reduce car traffic we need to build alternatives to cars (protected bike lanes, rails, etc). We will never get people away from cars by building more/better cars.
1) humans, including children, should be able to move through the public realm safely, no matter if they walk or bike
2) we do not want all the space in cities to be taken up by cars
Self-driving cars help with reaching goal number 1 partially, but it is not sufficient. Bike paths and other non-car infrastructure is also needed.
In terms of goal number 2, self-driving cars might open up a political chance to ban on-street parking.
You're right that they alone won't fix the problem, but I think they don't make it worse either. Traffic in cities is already limited by capacity, not by demand.
Changing the roads and infrastructure is the only way to avoid that fundamental physics problem.
But given how politically difficult it is to change--and especially to take away--existing infrastructure, and how much easier politically it is to introduce new tech, I hold out a smidgen of hope that driverless cars might help us inch in the right direction. Because they'll be managed by companies rather than individuals, they almost certainly will be required to adhere strictly to speed limits and other traffic laws, can be programmed to give bikers and pedestrians a wide berth, and won't (I hope dearly) get road rage. With luck and a sufficient volume of autonomous cars, this could help more people be comfortable riding with cars until we can get enough political will to build some decent infrastructure for non-car-users. And at this point I'll take what I can get to keep the ball rolling (and hopefully accelerating a bit) towards a friendlier future.
It could:
- reduce parking, so stuff can be more nearby
- reduced car ownership, waymo is not gonna let you buy a car from them
- walking 5 min to tram/metro might become interesting. Especially if there are no taxis available.
- cities can limit traffic, for example by reducing lanes and people might only notice by increased cost of taxi.
- people would not find out if you remove a couple of roads, they are checking their phones anyways.
Note that you could get rid of normal cars by increasing parking costs
You know what driverless cars can't do? Redirect a passenger to the emergency room due to acute problems that occur in the car.
Driverless isn't magic, it's just a trade, and I'm not entirely convinced it's worth it with our current level of implementation.
You state this as a fact with absolute confidence. That's interesting. Not only do I respectfully disagree, but I'm actually surprised you are so sure of yourself. It seems (to me) rather obvious that self driving cars are not a mature technology yet. In fact, they aren't even deployed widely. In that regard, of course it isn't a mature technology!
So I'd really appreciate it if you could help me understand how you arrived at that conclusion. Being so incredibly confident you must have a rock solid set of arguments about this topic and I'd love to hear them.
What if they do build this and it fails 10% of the time? What do you think the ramifications of that will be?
I'm basing this on history, capitalism, and current available data.
Will this eventually be as everyone believes? Yes. In our lifetime? Almost certainly not.
So, should we wait? Or find more realistic way to save lives today?
If it fails 10% or the time that sounds like a great start and I hope they can improve it! 10% failure rate seems like a great process that could be improved.
Again, I'm interested in why capitalism makes you pessimistic about technological advancement. Capitalism seems pretty good at advancing technology. Let me ask you a question, why do you think "capitalism" can get such a system to 10% failure and then stop improving forever? That seems pretty random to me. I'm interested in why you think that!
Also, why do you think it's a zero sum game? E.g. we can cure cancer and make self driving cars better at the same time! It's pretty sweet actually.
It is imminently within the realm of possibility that a smart watch can, with minimal human intervention, redirect the current driverless vehicle to an emergency room. I would not be surprised if the iWatch->phone->CarPlay integration were to expose this path in the next or second-to-next major iOS revision.
Capitalism is good at providing 'efficiency', nothing more nothing less. It's a dumb (as in not smart not necessarily stupid) filter on economic activity.
I think what they are referring to is that such a system does not prioritize reducing failure rates to zero, it prioritizes reducing costs to zero - 10% is probably an arbitrary lower limit, but the cost of the court fees, medical bills, and manufacturing loss should be greater than the cost of developing and deploying the technology that can reliably reduce rates below X amount.
It's a fairly ruthless algorithm that will justify millions of deaths based upon economics.
Compounding the simple issue above, is when the system attempts to increase efficiency by lowering the cost of legal/medical repercussions e.g. by with-holding blame, fines, and economic relevancy rather than by improving the technology.
E.g. if only 100 people can afford to use a technology then a 1% failure rate is statistically easy to achieve, and efficiently requires very little testing. Applied to a population of millions however that is potentially a mass genocide.
Capitalism has a very dark side, for those willing to look the truth in the face, like with any tool, it can and will be wielded in terrible ways.
You don't think it's pretty easy for a Waymo car to monitor its passengers for unresponsiveness? For speech asking for help? For mention of "take me to the hospital"?
Seems pretty easy to me. Would surprise me if some of this was not already in the programming.
It seems pretty clear to me that the current cars will feature that soon. If they don't already do. Through monitoring the passengers and responding for against-the-rules behavior and un-responsiveness, and distress speech. Because that seems pretty easy to do and pretty liable otherwise.
Welcome to the Year of the Dragon.
Be assured it isn't "just" drug addicts but increasingly profit minded criminals and misguided teenagers, 'etc. They smash the windows anyhow and occasionally set things on fire for kicks.
And there are more and more organized and semi-organized groups.
2014: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Here-we-go-again-Gian...
2012: https://www.nydailynews.com/2012/10/29/san-francisco-giants-...
2010: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/sports/world-series-damage-r...
As for doing so on Chinese New Year? I honestly think this Waymo got stuck in the crowd at the wrong place at the wrong time. Waymo has a good track record and still does in my books, but this car shouldn’t have been near Chinatown on Chinese New Year. It’s just stupid that it was, and unfortunate for the car. Those streets really are narrow and yeah, it gets crowded, so I’m inclined to think this was more a crime of opportunity. A mob gathered, some of them drunk and/or edgy, one thing led to another, etc.
Also it’s possible I overplayed how much of this was an SF phenomenon. It’s the City I know best but I found reports of other sports fans doing the same across America and Canada when I was Googling those links for you.
Yep. This is a phenomenon everywhere. I don't have hard data to support this, but I'm under the impression that soccer fans in Europe are even crazier.
Unheard of in Asia, however a skyscraper was accidentally burned out on the last day of CNY in 2009.
Usually it’s limited to sports championships and other special events though.
Ironically can’t reply to the person who replied to me because my account is partially banned :D
To the other reply: dang has personally confirmed that I am rate limited, so no. It’s also in the publicly available HN source code. If I post more than 5 times in 12 hours I get a “you are posting too fast” message. Other people don’t get this
Either this thread will get flagged to death because ultimately this is a VC forum or dang will come in and dish some well deserved scoldings if anyone goes too far but that's about it.
Hope that clears it up, I don't think your account is shadow banned.
The ability to type this on an investment forum with a straight face indicates you have a bright future in our industry
What makes Waymo a more suitable solution to lack of public transport, than actual public transport?
That being said, augmenting a public transit system with something like self-driving cars would be good for older people, or anyone with limited mobility, who may not be able to handle the amount of walking required with most public transit options.
I don’t think I’d include the poor in the list of people who would benefit, as I would expect a dedicated car driving for doorstep to doorstep would be more expensive than a train or bus which has scheduled stops.
I live in an area with poor public transit, and my parents both live in areas with no public transit options at all. They are 70 now and eventually they will get to the point where they can no longer drive safely. Having a way to get around would allow them to maintain their freedom and independence. Without that, giving up their license will mean depending on family or friends to do anything that requires leaving the house. Uber would be an option for my dad, but unlikely for my mom as she lives in a more rural area, and I’d imagine it would get expensive. I did just look up options for my mom if she has to give up her car. There is a service available from the county that runs from 7am - 3:30pm, Mon - Sat. If she wants/needs to go anywhere in the evening or on Sunday, she’d be out of luck. They also require 3 days notice to pick someone up for a doctor’s appointment, and an hour+ for anything else.
While writing this I also remembered a guy I used to work with who had seizures, so he couldn’t drive. He took the bus to work and it would take him about 2 hours. Since it was a night shift job and the buses didn’t run late, he also ended up getting to work extremely early and then just had to wait for his shift to start. Co-workers often gave him a ride home after learning about all this, as it was less than 20 minutes by car. Having some faster and more direct options would be nice for areas with horribly slow bus services, or with limited hours.
Maybe the transit providers could use the car data to inform them on future transit routes that should be built. That way we can reduce the number of cars that need to be on the road over time, and do it in a way that makes the biggest impact.
But the question remains: what was the political ideology of these youths? Anarchists? Marxists? Fascists? Technocrats? Monarchists??? We may never know!
Vandalism is not much of a political ideology but here we are.
Also, actual anarchists are not going to vandalize bikes and public transit. It's kind of important that we be somewhat precise about our terminology as otherwise you just stoke political division to no real end.
As I said elsewhere, there are actual agreed upon definitions for this stuff. Careful not to go too far into the "everything is unknowable" hole.
Anarchist theory has a ton of practical and academic work over the past few centuries. It's not "the purge", it's a pretty well defined set of principles centered around building a society that primarily focuses on well being for all.
Anarchist theory is almost 200 years old now, and for most of human history we lived in an anarchist way. There's much more there than "wreck shit".
The second objective is to enshittify the service. (Try not to say that part out loud)
This is so cynical. First cars were used to destroy much of the existing public transport in places like the US and Europe, now drivers are next.
This is so sick, employment (i.e. people) are only seen as a nuisance, a cost factor, a legacy, biding their time until they can be machined out of the picture. FTS.
FPV drones are weapons…
https://streamable.com/lsexbn (war footage)
When you were a kid, don’t you think your parents and grandparents said the same thing?
As opposed to previous generations that would murder with lynch mobs or would trash cities in riots after winning or losing a big sports championship?
This is one event, we have no information about age or motives of the perpetrators let alone enough information to slander hundreds of millions just for being young.
And scapegoating like this really shouldn't be allowed here.
It's intriguing, people in a city with over $300K GDP per capita burning an AI enabled transportation robot. I feel the urge to fit it in some kind of cyberpunk narrative.
I wonder if its a result of discontent with the social contract or just drunk or drugged folks.
It’s Chinatown, San Francisco. It’s Chinese New Year. The Streets are tiny, narrow, crowded and full of the young and the drunk celebrating the Year of the Dragon, and nobody at Waymo thought to tell their cars to stay away from this area at this time (or they did and this car missed the memo and ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time anyway).
> It's intriguing, people in a city with over $300K GDP per capita burning an AI enabled transportation robot.
That GDP per capita figure really misses the mark on what San Francisco is like. Also: not everyone here is in tech, or cares about tech.
That's why its interesting. Extreme wealth next to poverty must be a hotbed for things happening.
Besides one or two main thoroughfares, the streets are absolutely narrow considering how many people are there during these events. Or hell just during a Sunday. Driving in downtown/chinatown yesterday would be extremely stressful and ill advised for the best of human drivers. IMO.
EDIT: actually you’re probably just remarking that parking sucks which hell yeah wtf, get those cars outta there. Street parking in sf is already so bad that they need to bite the bullet city-wide and commit to transit.
It does not warrant to set the car on fire.
I agree, but it is also true that Waymo shouldn’t have been there. You can blame Waymo for not planning ahead, or the City/State for not being proactive about regulating where and how autonomous vehicles operate around what is basically a festival, or both; and you can also blame the crowd for setting fire to it.
However you want to slice that blame cake, it probably shouldn’t have been there and it had no way of making that determination without being directed.
SF is a polarized city. Rich tech bros close to people barely making by.
This was Chinese new year. If Waymo was blocking traffic and stuck, they’d do it to give a middle finger to the big fat corporation.
Technically Waymo is taking away from a job that a human would do. That might not sit well with some.
https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/michael-webb-ai-jobs...
https://pastebin.com/uix3rgBe
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
> Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
You can read the full guidelines here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
However you can be both correct and wrong at the same time.
What we're seeing in US economy is the largest transfer of wealth from middle class to wealthy class in last few years.
The wealthiest 10% owns 90% of the stock value. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/18/the-wealthiest-10percent-of-...
The zero interest rate phenomenon accelerated this, but also technology accelerates it.
We're seeing the effects in mass tech layoffs yet the tech companies continue to add trillions to their cap and bring in 100s of billions in profit per year to their balance sheets.
Total share of top 1% of all wealth rose from 23% to 32% https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBST01134
In any case, either we need a healthier wealth curve. Or what the young generation are learning the hard way is that it doesn't make sense to have kids. It's really hard to move income classes. Technology makes this worse as the richer get richer owning capital and means of automation - which does what humans used to do much cheaper.
Or it could just be regular vandals looking for an excuse to tear up something and a vague memory about a self driving car killing someone in the news was good enough to tear up one of them.
But yes, that doesn't prevent people who don't even seem to be aware of that "old money" from going after tech.
My perception is that, people were partying & were drunk. The Waymo vehicle likely was just passing through and probably got stuck. People simply took out their pent up frustration on it. It's nothing more than that.
There is a already a lot of negative sentiment in SF and an increasing number of Westerners who are anti tech and anti progress. That includes people working in the media, just look at the constant criticism in reporting. If it becomes to bad, cars will not be programmed to run over people in self defense. The development would simply move elsewhere and the techphobic parts of the world will be left behind. Something like this would never happen in East Asia, it's inconceivable you'd get a mob of Japanese vandalizing a self-driving car for no good reason other than hate of the tech.