An ADAS would be L4 if it was designed to be truly autonomous. If it's not designed to be truly autonomous, you have to somehow address the attention problem. Even a good attention monitoring system isn't sufficient, because people have the ability to appear superficially attentive by all external metrics, while not engaging with the driving task mentally.
The data to differentiate these levels is pretty limited for a variety of reasons, and the problem only worsens when you conflate AEB with ADAS as the IHS/IEEE do in this article rather than use an OEDR-based definition.
I recently implemented OpenPilot for my vehicle and used it on a 9 hour road trip.
Due to the nuances of my vehicle, the built-in hands-on-wheel nag was still active and required (small) driver wheel inputs every 10 seconds to prevent the beeps. Just keeping both hands on the wheel was enough to pacify the nag. But this forced me to keep attention on the vehicle, more than OpenPilot's face direction detector. Anecdotally I am certain this kept me more engaged than if I could have gone hands off.
The net effect was I had more capacity to be aware of what was going on around me on the road, AND I didn't feel nearly as fatigued at the end of the drive. Keeping the car between the lines consumes a little bit of cognitive energy constantly, which compounds over a long drive. Freeing up that load allowed me to pay more attention to what was happening on the rest of the road. And the mental burden was still half as much--I felt like I had driven maybe 4-5 hours instead of 9.
I have some ideas for how I might disable the built-in nag, but I'm pretty sure doing so would make my car less safe. The current configuration might already achieve the safety maximum for ADAS based on front-facing cameras only.
It increases situational awareness while reducing fatigue, and I think that anything further I try to do will adversely affect one or both of those effects.
Uber exited the autonomous vehicle race several years ago. AFAICT, largely because of this mismatch. Who's still in this area (in a serious way) that behaves like that?
You can request a ride via Uber. They aren't building the tech. I find it a bit unclear who is operating the fleet (Uber or Wayve), but that seems irrelevant when the question is whether the vehicles' autonomous technology is safe.
That’s a Facebook motto but Facebook (now Meta) isn’t in AVs. I suppose that excludes Facebook of pre 2016 from participating in AVs? I think everyone is fine with that.
> It was Levandowski who...had persuaded Google’s leadership to spend millions of dollars inventing self-driving cars.
> Some of the biggest fights involved risks that Levandowski was taking in self-driving experiments. ... “If it is your job to advance technology, safety cannot be your No. 1 concern,” Levandowski told me. “If it is, you’ll never do anything. It’s always safer to leave the car in the driveway. You’ll never learn from a real mistake.” [0]
Growing proof that PR for autonomous car companies has aligned on a strategy of painting you as a bad person if you want to drive your own car, and therefore you should pay them money to continue being a good person.
There should be laws put in place to ensure drivers will always be able to drive their cars, if they choose, and also prevent insurance companies from skyrocketing your rates for doing so. This is IMO past due.
The promise of tech has been that if we let it rip, we'll have a better democracy and living conditions for all. That promise has failed to materialise, for a variety of reasons. There is increased surveillance, enshittification, huge subscription fees, and upward pressure on climate change (directly linked to bitcoin mining then AI data centres). Then you get Musk lobbying against a city's plans to build a public transport network, so he can build an unsafe single-car tunnel for the rich.
I think people are quite justified in being skeptical of new technology, especially when the track record has shown that the promised societal benefits often never actually materialise. Worse, still, the money earned from selling the new technology is used to make conditions worse for most people. Big tech has a lot to answer for.
I'd be less skeptical if the values of tech capitalism shifted to become more pro-human. They really haven't, and they probably won't. So for now, consider me bearish on new tech.
Sorry, "tech" is not some catch-all for all the new things. "Tech" has given us wonderful new medicine and safer cars and faster internet.
Subscription fees? So "tech" should make producing a film ... free now? What exactly is your point?
Who exactly promised all these so-called benefits you keep saying you were lied about? The companies make products and services. Many, many people buy those things. Both sides are happy, transaction over. What "greater good" are you complaining about, exactly and who promised it to whom?
You are dismissing this as "unhelpful negativity", but are not addressing in any way the obvious (and rather malicious, I would say) PR play that parent comment points out.
This is exactly the message, and I for one welcome the anti-cool-aid sentiments being very visible in public spaces.
Didn't this just happen in an internet company's self driving car with couple kidnappings in the past month? (They were done according to the companies terms of service is what the internet company says if I remember reading correctly)
Thats too much of an honest assessment. An age old playbook. I'd like the tech do actually do things that are hard for me, like taking control of the car in a high stress situation. Sub-milisecond reactions to correct for a mistake. Something, anything more useful than a fancier cruise control.
Your car does that already. It has a superhuman braking system that saves a lot more lives than cruise control, though not quite sub-millisecond in its reaction time.
Yeah, and it should not be understated how bad only having autonomous cars would be for privacy and security conscious folk.
A lot of the time you don't own them, so they're operating on the terms provided by the companies and government, even when it's directly against your own interests. The idea of a car that can't drive certain places, be used at a certain time or be used by certain people feels like a terrifying inevitability, and one which society should refuse at all costs.
If you drive your own vehicle, it goes where you want it to go. If you don't drive your own vehicle, it goes where a company or government wants it to go.
So you mean to tell me that when I called a Waymo a few weeks ago at 1AM because I was drunk at a bar and wanted to go home, it was actually because my government and Google wanted me to go home?
Woah! This conspiracy goes deeper than I thought! Next you'll tell me that a taxi ride requires mutual consent between me, the taxi driver, and the dispatch company!
"If you drive your own vehicle, it goes where you want it to go"
I think privacy conscious folks like yourself consistently overrate how much purchase this argument has. I am perfectly happy to forgo this in exchange for a sufficient increase in convenience / safety (for myself and others). This is not because I have been brainwashed by autonomous vehicle company propaganda, it is because I have different values and concerns.
Given the state of cybersecurity, the car goes wherever anyone with sufficient motivation wants it to go. Including into pedestrians. And, such a scenario could happen at the scale of a botnet swarm. In other words, hundreds of thousands of vehicles could be simultaneously hijacked.
But.. what if it's true? It's like not wearing a seat belt, or smoking, or drinking while driving. If AV are widely available it becomes similarly opt-in high risk behavior.
Using SUVs are definitely worse for safety as well, and it does not require a huge overhaul of the transportation infrastructure, a few new technologies to be invented, replacing ~all the existing cars, etc. etc. But no-one takes the comparatively basically free steps to remove/reduce SUVs.
Lets not forget that its all about the profits, and if we truly want to save lives there are more cost-efficient ways than what some tech sales-people peddle.
You cannot deny the evidence though, driverless cars are safer per-mile than human drivers on average. 1/100 deaths in the United States are due to car accidents, even shaving off 10% of those would save ~4000 people per year.
If driving is dangerous and carries a bunch of negative externalities, shouldn't we expect "good people" to look for alternatives? Not self-driving cars, necessarily, but maybe transit and walking and biking.
And, of course, to support the policy choices that reduce how much we subsidize driving and improve infrastructure for those alternatives.
Tesla did something sneaky just few days ago. They added crash avoidance even when FSD is not enabled, but purchased. So in future if they add pay-per-mile option (great for road trips) you'll likely still keep paying for monthly since it offers additional protection even if you prefer driving yourself (which is lol).
I hadn't thought about it like this, but I think I want the grassroots version of the PR campaign. Society was finally able to rein in smoking when we collectively realized how dangerous secondhand smoke is. People who smoked indoors and exposed loved ones to an early death weren't bad people, but creating societal pressure to feel bad about doing that has saved a lot of lives.
You are more likely to kill someone driving your huge SUV than you are taking a Waymo. Driving your own car certainly doesn't make you a bad person, but I hope self-driving cars will be ubiquitous and safe in the future. When that happens, choosing to drive yourself will be a selfish act, just like exposing people to secondhand smoke is now.
At a systems level, transportation is something we have to be very, very careful about, because if you get it wrong, you start excluding entire groups of people from being a functional part of your society just because they are different from you in where and how they live.
"When that happens, choosing to drive yourself will be a selfish act, just like exposing people to secondhand smoke is now." Really? I drive on logging roads a few times a month to get to some property. This is pretty sketchy even in good conditions and there's always the chance of getting stuck and having to hike a mile or two the rest of the way up to go get the tractor and sort it out. I'm probably not buying a self-driving car any time soon, if ever.
Now, is having self driving taxis a fantastic idea in a very dense city? Of course. There's huge benefits in keeping the average car as safe, efficient in both energy and pollution, and highly utilized as possible. Are these also a good retrofit to dense-ish suburbs where a bus/rail network isn't quite enough (and the costs to build it in already-developed land are unpalatable)? Also yes. But that's not ubiquitous, that's just part of a larger system that needs to be able to serve all users.
And if your point is that "move out of the mountains and into a city because that's the less-selfish option"... that's a certain kind of political statement, I guess.
Many boomers hated antilock brakes, but insurers gave discounts for having them on your car anyway. I think it’s likely going to be a similar thing with self driving.
Even today, I don’t like the intrusiveness of the insurance monitors you can install on your car today and I am willing to forgo that discount to keep my privacy.
Really there should be an obstacle course of some kind based on the most common anomalies leading to accidents. Partially obscured road signs, worn paint markings, obscured sight lines caused by dense parking, driving on a snowed over surface, etc.
While I would like to see that just for the data, from a regulatory standpoint all we really need are the manufacturers being liable in a crash if their cars were driving. The insurance savings of their cars being safer will create the incentive they need.
There's no legislated standard in the US, nor pre-sale verification that a vehicle has met most of the other automotive standards. That's just not how the US regulatory environment works.
There's the beginnings of a standard for L2/L3 vehicles in Europe, and ongoing discussions about what L4 standards could look like, but neither addresses "adversarial" situations.
China is going for what's sometimes called "L3.5" - hands off wheel, eyes off road, driver may have to take over if alerted, but if the driver doesn't, the vehicle must safely stop and pull over if possible.
The trouble with "driver assistance" systems is the handoff to the driver. That's not reliable. Results from the aviation community indicate that it takes about ten seconds after an autopilot disconnect before the pilot has stable control of the aircraft. "L3.5" accepts that. The < 2 second response required by some L2 systems does not.
Such a standard for motor vehicles would result in the loss of licensing for a large majority of Americans. Most people would fight against such testing standards as a condition for driving on public roads. It might not be a bad idea. I just don’t think it’s feasible.
That’s a really difficult problem to solve with the built environment being the way it is. Buses get the closest, but to make it usable at times other than rush hour, they have to run empty or nearly empty, which drives the cost very high (although this is often hidden by subsidies). The way to deal with low density transit is automation.
Depends at the scale you're looking at. How much money is wasted by 30 people driving 30 cars when a bus could take them all? Taking into account car wear, gas, etc.
Low density public transport work very well in places where people simply can't afford personal vehicles, it's not a tech logical or financial problem at all, if anything it's cultural and mostly political
It's also easier to do shared housing but part of it is just that people like having their own personal dedicated space to exist in even if it's not the most efficient answer.
So your contention, then, is that Google>Waymo and the other companies should have invested billions not into AV, but instead into funding trains and paying for buses?
More sensors with 360 degrees. Faster reaction time. Constantly improving, be it from real world data or from a simulated environment. Zero fatigue.
No emotion evolved. No drugs are alcohol in the system.
But they still cannot drive cars. All this stuff can do is react very slowly, maybe, if it detects it, to a change in the environment.
Self-driving cars will never be safer than human drivers.
If you believe otherwise, show actual proof of some kind. Show some footage of self-driving cars doing anything other than blundering around like an inexperienced and impaired driver.
> Self-driving cars will never be safer than human drivers.
You're responding to something that actually brought data to the table to answer the question, though one can quibble with details.
Yet you're saying that self-driving cars will _never_ be safer, which is a much stronger claim, and you don't bring any evidence to back up the assertion.
Both of the above aren't current consumer models and the Cybercabs run one major version above this.
I've seen it avoid small rodents and deer that were hidden in foliage around a blind turn, it's super freaky with what it sees that humans can't and this is with only cameras. It is really good, in my experience, at reasoning about other vehicles and what they are about to do such as seeing a vehicle not slowing down quickly enough at a stop sign its crossing so it slows itself down to make sure the car stops. My favorite story is that it swerved out of the way of someone doing a u-turn from the opposing lane hidden behind another car; it had already gotten us out of the way before anyone in the car realized what had happened.
An AV is already superhuman because it never loses focus, it can see all the way around the car, and it can react quicker than any human, besides maybe an F1 driver, could.
If I wasn't so lazy I'd find and post the one where my Tesla slowed down to a stop at a red light, lulling me into a sense of security, and then without warning lurched forward and broke the red light.
That is not even a perception issue (I've already had multiple very close calls because of that, and I think Elon was extremely negligent in pushing for vision-only;) This is a damn bug in the planning logic. That's Elon's "move fast and break people" philosophy shining through.
I would trust autonomous cars if they're Waymo. I would not trust Tesla.
That is either an old story or you are on v12 because mine used to do it often and I haven't seen it in at least a year from my recollection. The newest versions are really good.
Waymos aren't without fault either, they smash the front off cars, run into static poles, block emergency vehicles, etc; just the nature of AV development.
This was from last year, so surely the technology has changed, but you know what hasn’t changed in the meantime? The marketing around it. If Elon has been saying the same thing over the years that people have been dying, why would you trust him today?
And sure enough, the most recent red light incident (with video) is only a couple weeks old.
Before entrusting your life and the lives of those on the road to Elon, I would implore you to just google “latest Tesla FSD incidents” every so often for a sobering reality check.
And no one is claiming Waymo is perfect, but the statistics for Waymo are wayyyyy better than those from Tesla.
Every tesla owners excuse is "oh you're not on v64.438185b, thats why you ran over that dog". The youtube recommendations these guys are completely mental when you look at it from outside.
The articles I've read on this have said it's murky because of obfuscation of reported data by self-driving companies.
The target article even notes that "while Waymo leads the industry in transparency, and robotaxi operators are required to report even the tiniest scrape to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), not every company voluntarily reports their total miles driven."
My sense is that there's a lot of massaging the data by autonomous car companies to make their data look good. The article and a linked article describes the comparisons as "human drivers in the same driving conditions" which is kind of vague to me and isn't the same as, say, taxi drivers to robotaxis. It's also robotaxis and not general driving conditions etc.
I always feel like these comparisons become murky in other ways. For example, if autonomous vehicles have lower accident rates in general, but fail in catastrophically bad ways when they do fail — ways that would never happen with a human driver (for example, by inexplicably driving into an avoidable semi trailer for no reason, killing the occupants) — is that better? What if you eliminate cases where the driver is intoxicated? Aren't those cases cases of malfeasance at some level, that could apply to autonomous vehicle use? Do you hold autonomous vehicle companies accountable for deaths, charging executives with manslaughter? How should we think about accountability versus safety?
I'm not trying to argue against autonomous vehicles. I just feel like these types of published discussions get oversimplified often in a way that seems to parallel similar discussions of AI in general, and seems sympathetic to their adoption rather than a rigorously skeptical appraisal.
I have a feeling that once everything goes EV and autopilot, they will start phasing out regular cars or will make it more difficult to obtain the license.
Also, the autonomous car companies will have their vehicles coordinating to make it difficult for humans to drive, such as holding a long convoy with close following distance in a single lane.
Definitely. They'll be like the obnoxious people on public transport who play music and videos out loud, people who don't give up seats to the elderly etc
The streets of the future are an unbroken conveyor belt of fast moving death machines; existing outside of a car or building will become illegal by lobbying "to keep people safe".
This will be a gradual process. But probably getting a drivers license will become a lot less common for people over time. There won't be any need once cars drive themselves.
Insurance and liability become a lot simpler if you just don't touch the controls at all. There will be a clear split between people who don't drive and therefore are not liable and the remaining group that still drives and is causing most of the remaining accidents (and cost for insurers). That's going to inevitably get more scrutiny from everybody: insurers, authorities, occupants of self driving vehicles, other manual drivers.
This will probably be insurance driven. If you don't need to drive anymore, you don't actually need a license. And if you are not driving, you can't be held liable for damage caused by your vehicle. You'll still need insurance to cover any damage/harm your vehicle might cause but this will likely be quite cheap given autonomous cars are safer and on average don't really get involved in accidents. It's quite possible that eventually just gets folded into warranty terms for your car and covered by the manufacturer.
As manually driving increasingly becomes a choice rather than a necessity, your insurance for that might become conditional on you being current and proficient in the same sense that licensed pilots need to regularly do check rides to verify they can still safely operate a plane. Additionally, insurers might insist on you passing a regular health checks to verify that you are still fit enough to drive. Some countries already test elderly drivers but there are lots of elderly people with pretty serious health issues passing these tests as well. Expect this to get a lot more strict.
And it'll negatively impact all but the upper classes. Automakers would rather everyone use their autopilot taxi services for the higher profit margins, so autopilot EVs will be prohibitively expensive to outright buy.
There's a large percent of people who have their daily commute possible by public transport, but the weekend or odd trips are not well covered. A cheaper uber powered by self driving would cover the odd trips and save people the massive expense of owning a car.
The main problem I see with this argument is that I'm not sure how we get to a "cheaper uber" with fully autonomous vehicles.
A large percentage of rideshare drivers use the cheapest allowable vehicles and make minimum wage or less after expenses.
There is also the issue of who gets paid to clean the garbage passengers will inevitably leave in the autonomous vehicle (ask me how I know). Or worse, vomit or other hazardous bodily excretions.
The loss of the joy and satisfaction of driving a proper drivers car with a firm feeling manual transmission will be hard to explain to future generations for sure.
But the bigger fear is the loss of autonomy in movement that having everyone become beholden to a botnet for transportation will bring.
"Drive me to the anti government protest. I want to make my voice heard."
The article sensibly asks if the (intentionally or not) cherry-picked stats about automated driving (fair weather only, limited to specific areas that aren't especially difficult) is valid then cites a study that really massages those stats in a dubious way (e.g. only counts as a crash if the airbag triggered, no mention of weather). Hmmm...
Another thing I'd really like to know: let's suppose that these are indeed safer than the average driver. Is it also the case for the median driver?
Insurance will just be bundled with the self-driving car software. Insurance and car are separate today because driver and car are separate today. Once they're the same, there's lots of money to be saved by bundling the sale.
In 2015, Volvo issued a press release claiming that Volvo would accept full liability whenever its cars are in autonomous mode.
[…]
Starting in September 2023 in the United States, Mercedes-Benz takes liability for the Level 3 Drive Pilot as long as the "user operates Drive Pilot as designed," but "the driver must be ready to take control of the vehicle at all times when prompted to intervene by the vehicle."
The actual money will be made because the driverless car manufacturer is self-insuring and cutting out the insurance company. Competition among manufacturers will then pass most of those savings on to you.
Similarly, many car makers offer heated seats without a subscription fee, because of the magic of competition.
If freedom is being shackled to an expensive appliance by a yearslong loan and autonomy is being trapped at home if it breaks or you lose the ability to operate it... I'll pass on both.
Using my phone to make a car show up when I need it and disappear when I don't feels like utopia.
Sorry Citizen, your ID / payment account / device has been flagged for <reason withheld>. If you believe you are being denied transportation in error, please engage with our automated attempts to pretend to help you.
Waymo is already self-insured so if they have an advantage it's already on their balance sheet. In California nobody is going to get a discount for having ADAS software because we encoded into the state law in the 1980s, part of a long magical thinking campaign by boomers, that insurance companies can't use that type of thing to set prices.
If they were going to do that, they would have done it by now for those drivers opting into the insurance monitor device: they can literally tell that you're a driver that never took a risk, never got into a situation to brake hard, never drove recklessly, etc, and yet, the insurance cost with the device is only slightly less than the insurance cost without the device.
In any case, if this was strictly a financial decision, why would the human cost go up? The larger the percentage of SDVs there are on the road, the less likely a human driver gets into an accident, their risk goes down too, so their insurance should also go down.
It's a pool. If all the drunks switch to autonomous vehicles then we all win. If all the school teachers switch to autonomous vehicles then the drunks lose.
In my own life I see the most reasonable/thoughtful drivers raving about autonomous driving and the most reckless ones ranting against it. YMMV.
yeah. no. i have had autonomoous driving trying to kill me and I don't want the car telling me where I can and cannot go. eff you and your authoritarian scaredy cat BS
> Haven't wealthy people spent most of history paying someone else to drive for them?
My understanding is that it is a legal and safety liability for them to drive. The driver is employed by and the car is owned by a company that the wealthy person founded and pays so if the driver hits & kills someone, the company gets sued for a bunch of money then the liability can be discharged in bankruptcy / isolated to the company's coffers rather than the wealthy person's.
It's the same gambit as their security. I am sure more than just Gates and Musk do it but I know that both of them own personal security companies who only provide security to themselves. It's all just shells of liability shielding.
Well, there is the alternative that prosecution is low enough in case of accidents that insurance payouts are low and consequently insurance is low priced. Also, the majority could easily vote for price controls on car insurance like they have on home insurance.
I can easily construct arguments along the lines of “cars are necessary to drive and insurance costs are regressive since they don’t scale with income so we need to have price controls on insurance for low-income drivers”. These will be quite popular.
That's assuming people are rational with their money.
Cars already are extremely wasteful assets in terms of resource, space and money if you live in a decently served urban area. It already irrational to have one 90% of the times.
An indirect and somewhat hidden cost like insurance is unlikely to move the needle anywhere near significantly.
Fatality data is extremely skewed. 44% of drivers aren't using a seatbelt, 29% are speeding related, I recall alcohol involvement being about 30%, though it's not listed in the link I checked. About 20% of automobile fatalities aren't in cars but are pedestrians or bicyclists struck by cars (add another 16% if you want to include motorcyclists, though only half of which involve another vehicle). I recall the percentage of vulnerable road user deaths is much higher in urban areas.
The majority of drivers are good, but some drivers are really bad.
Life in USA is extremely car-centric and taking away a license is often infeasible and the offender usually drives without their license anyways. If anything, I'd like autonomous cars to give a legal out to remove bad drivers. You get a DUI, or commonly speeding? You may only take an autocar.
> "The majority of drivers are good, but some drivers are really bad."
I take issue with this. The majority of drivers are "mostly fine as long as circumstances are favorable", not "good". People for the most part do not even know about the concept of defensive driving let alone practice it. Even the best people are fundamentally complacent in basically everything they do. They zone out sometimes, they get too close, they don't always look where they're going. They don't get into more collisions because the world doesn't throw more obstacles at them, not because they're good at driving.
I disagreed with you and went looking in the article for evidence (yeah bad, epistemologically). I actually found evidence for your point. The largest cause of fatal crashes is Generally distracted or "lost in thought" (daydreaming) at 64%. That happens to most people,.
The human brain was not designed for a task which requires hours of siting down doing mostly nothing while being hyperfocused the entire time ready to take over in an instant on the rare occasion something happens. While running or cycling your brain is actively engaged keeping yourself upright and avoiding obstacles which keeps you alert.
That's true. Humans are bad at this task. On the railways they have a problem with this too, "Lookout" seems like a ludicrously easy job, but it's basically impossible because you must pay attention to an incredibly boring thing for hours or your friends might die. Getting rid of human lookouts should be a priority but it feels easy and so it's hard to motivate this.
This is also a big challenge for airline pilots. The planes mostly fly themselves these days, and most takeoffs and landings are uneventful. Being an airline pilot involves an absolutely massive amount of business as usual and preparation, for the very rare times something happens and you suddenly need a team of very focused experts to solve a difficult problem in a stressful environment.
At least they have simulators. Last time I saw a driving simulator I was a teenager.
Imagine you had to pass a simulator test involving responding to ANY crisis while driving before your license would be renewed. Rates of driving would plummet.
I bet most drivers don’t even correctly handle a flat tire on the expressway.
I disagree. The human brain reinforces circuitry that is used often, meaning the human brain is generally quite adaptable. Ancient (and modern) hunters sit still and silent for hours waiting for game, with their brains ready to take over in an instant on the rare occasion something happens.
Right but you don't get in car accidents or near-accidents often. Ergo your brain becomes wired for the 99.9999999% of driving that is completely uneventful.
Hunters are a self-selecting group of people who enjoy the activity you describe. If you don't like it or can't do it, you just don't do it.
Virtually every single adult in America has to drive, however, to live a functional life.
You are avoiding cars constantly when driving with a non-zero amount of traffic. Way more incidents than predators in the savanna while doing persistence hunting.
I try to watch car crash dashcam videos once a month or so on Reddit or YouTube. I feel like it recalibrates my brain to be more aware of the things that could happen that are out on the tail end of the distribution, like you say.
How many of those 64% had their accident because of phones/drugs/recklessness and claimed to be distracted instead? With all the liability and shame involved in fatal crashes there's absolutely no way people are going to honestly self report illegal behavior.
I think your point probably sort of stands - most drivers aren’t bad most of the time. But everybody gets distracted sometimes, and the consequences of getting distracted while driving are very severe and very predictable.
no. As per the link, that is 64% of <<distracted driver>> fatalities were "lost in thought". not 64% of <<all>> fatalities. Distracted driving is the 2nd or 3rd largest factor in fatal accidents (behind speed and alcohol I believe). Somewhere around 20-30%. Though this is for fatalities. Distribution is going to be way different for just hospitalization or property damage accidents.
The people OP is talking about, the 0.05% absolute worst drovers, are not merely complacent, they're doing things like getting hammered and going street racing (shamefully I can say, I was 19 once...) or speeding away from crimes etc
edit: someone else replied with data contrary to this, maybe they are right but Im leaving this here to represent the counterargument
The fatality rate is 1.19 per 100 million vehicle miles [1], ~83 million miles per fatality. The mean driver averages ~15,000 miles per year. So, the mean driver encounters a fatal crash after ~5,500 years of driving. If you started driving when the Great Pyramid was built, you would still have another 1,000 years before you would expect to die in a fatal crash.
The mean driver in the context of the USA driving environment is shockingly safe. Being safer than even the mean human driver in the USA is hard and takes a shocking amount of data to verify. Anybody downplaying it as "lol humans are so unsafe" to argue the problem feels easy to solve or can be solved by the end of the year with a little bit of elbow grease is utterly clueless.
Sir this is a Wendy's, I mean a discussion about autonomous vehicles. The benchmark for the autonomous vehicles in the USA is in comparison to humans in the USA. That means autonomous vehicles need to go ~5,500 person-years worth of driving between crashes to equal the mean driver. The mean US driver is a very high bar to reach for technology, that is why Waymo has just maybe barely reached that bar after nearly two decades and billions of dollars.
You are correct, I missed the adjective on my second use. As my points were exclusively about fatal crashes and I never mentioned the injury or crash rate at any point and previously used 5,500 years exclusively in relation to fatal crashes, it should be obvious that I intended to mean that and my point still stands with that correction.
You're conflating a bunch of things here, and it screws up your position as each additional conflation gets you further and further from your headline statistic into "??? -> Profit" underpants gnomes territory.
1) Fatalities vs non-fatal injuries. Not the same thing.
2) Crashes that caused injury vs crashes that did not cause injury. Not the same thing.
3) Crashes that did not cause injury vs crashes that could not have caused injury. Not the same thing.
4) Crashes vs unsafe behaviors that could cause a crash. Not the same thing.
5) Being "safe" in the sense of "enjoying fortunate circumstance" vs being "safe" in the sense of "actively contributing to safety". Not the same thing.
Here is a thought experiment for you to consider:
If you run a red light and the cross traffic brakes and swerves around you, so no collision occurs, were you driving safely? No, right? Then why would you think that fatalities are the true measure of driving goodness?
As a point of evidence in favor of this viewpoint:
Multi-dozen car pileups aren't particularly rare, with the common cause for a lot of these being "one car hits an icy patch, hits another car, car behind them tries but fails to stop in time due to the ice, rinse and repeat a few dozen times". And the root cause of that is every single driver in that collision driving too fast for conditions and unable to make the requisite emergency stop in time.
In my callow youth I was responsible for a couple of fender benders and the cause was always a highly imperfect understanding of the appropriate stopping distance of my car. This obviously gets worse, the worse the conditions are. My Tesla never makes this kind of mistake.
This is not supported by crash data. In Australia alcohol is involved in some 30% of fatal crashes. A lot of crashes are caused by a very small number of hoon drivers, distracted drivers etc.
Autonomous cars beating the average that includes the above are still worse than a diligent driver, which anyone can resolve to be.
I mean when comparing to machines though the only thing the machines are better at is maybe not getting distracted while humans tend to be better at adapting which is usually important for safety to put it mildly
After all the first Tesla auto drive fatality was literally "that is probably a sign not a trunk"...
I said favorable circumstance, not favorable conditions. I mean the person in front of you doesn't stop quickly or veer into your lane very often regardless of whether there is fog.
Yeah, there's a woman who is quite old and has a severe disability who drives regularly through our neighborhood who's car every few weeks has a new giant dent, missing fender, broken windshield, etc.
It's sad we don't have a better way for people in these situations to do what they need without driving.
It will be incredible to have autonomous driving just for older and or disabled drivers like this.
I believe Tesla’s FSD is already better than such unassisted drivers. Particularly with the current FSD limitations which require monitoring driver attentiveness. If every drunk who attempted to drive was using FSD, deaths due to drunk driving would be virtually eliminated. Heck, even advanced lane keeping and smart cruise control from other manufacturers, while much more crude, would still help tremendously.
I wonder how much of drunk driving crashes are because driver turns into speeding asshole vs dozing off. You wouldn't be able to force them to use FSD, especially in a fun car like Tesla. Maybe if it derated itself if it detects erratic driving. They already released a feature where it avoids crashes even when FSD is disabled (but does require subscription).
I think people are just incredibly bad drivers when drunk, but they do it because they don’t want to hire a cab or leave their car at the bar overnight, etc. Having FSD handle driving would be way safer.
You could always invest in actual public transport & sane infrastructure, rather than relying on clogging the streets up with more cars, autonomous or otherwise? My mother-in-law is in a wheelchair and zooms by on the bike paths faster than I do thanks to her handbike (it's seriously insane how fast people can move with handbikes), and if she needs to travel large distances she hops onto a train instead.
The best part of proper infrastructure and public transport is that it makes life for the drivers easier, too!
>You could always invest in actual public transport & sane infrastructure, rather than relying on clogging the streets up with more cars, autonomous or otherwise
So what should the disabled people do until that amazing public transport infrastructure materializes, if it ever even does for them at all? Sit at home and wait?
I dislike this type of patronizing superficial handweaving advice that is disconnected from the harsh challenges of building more great public transport infra (lack of funds, geography and land ownership issues, nimbyism, labor/material shortages, government bureaucracy, corruption and incompetence etc).
People use cars because they have no better choice. I'd also want my city to build me Swiss levels of public transport so I wouldn't have to drive, but guess what, the infra sucks and the city is broke, so that leaves me with little choice for the next decades as nothing will change. So car driving it is.
You need money to build infra, a lot of it, and when cities are broke, that externality is burdened on the individuals because they have no other choice but still need to get to work and other places. Telling them they can "just build more infra" is like telling homeless person they can just buy a house. OK, but with what money?
The point is that society's priorities are messed up. Throwing your hands in the air and taking the path of least resistance is never going to lead to change.
The world is literally on fire but the average person simply doesn't give a shit because they don't want to be inconvenienced.
>The point is that society's priorities are messed up.
People's priorities are putting a roof over their heads and food on the table for the family. Everything else is secondary.
> Throwing your hands in the air and taking the path of least resistance is never going to lead to change.
NO, but you and him are yet to provide a better solution that leads to an actual immediate change for the better. People aren't gonna sacrifice their lives and become martyrs for a moral cause that does nothing in the end except make them poor while other people and countries get rich while fucking the planet even harder. Lead by example!
>The world is literally on fire but the average person simply doesn't give a shit because they don't want to be inconvenienced.
People care more about themselves and their family than the planet. Especially when China and India are lighting the planet on fire and billionaires and politicians are taking private jets and yachts to moralize on saving the planet. Again, lead by example!
> So what should the disabled people do until that amazing public transport infrastructure materializes, if it ever even does for them at all? Sit at home and wait?
No, the point was that instead of cities waiting until self-driving cars become an option to help get rid of terrible drivers, the cities could invest in public transportation today, and get better road safety that way.
Not everyone wants to live in a big smelly crowded city. And those old people? You think they're going to walk 5 blocks and hopefully catch a bus? I lived in a city with great public transit and I walked a TON. Couldn't imagine doing it on old crotchetty legs.
My pithy response is the same as people who have told me what to do when I try and advocate for transit. “Move somewhere else.”
I don’t find these problems unsolvable. We spend over $200 billion on roads a year. That’s almost $75bn more than the CA high speed rail. That’s project has its own problems but local buses and street cars and road diets would cost minuscule fractions of that number and improve conditions and options for nearly everyone.
Cars are clearly not a perfect solution. They are expensive and unsafe. But for some reason transit and buses have to be the perfect solution for everyone upon immediate delivery just to get the tiniest fraction of funding.
It’s actually quite easy. RTD in the front range in Colorado has drastically reduced issues on buses and the light rail the past couple of years. It wasn’t that hard.
I take various forms of transit regularly and I’ve never had an issue more noteworthy than any interaction I’ve had in a car.
It's pretty easy to solve once the political problem is solved. Colorado has solved the political problem, but many jurisdictions haven't. Mustering the political capital to defy the coalition of groups that oppose strict enforcement of city ordinances on public transport is something many major cities have not managed to do.
> the cities could invest in public transportation today
Again, with what money? My city is insolvent and every extra money it gets goes to cover the massive financial hole of social programs like elderly care and handicapped people, which is growing in need.
Would you sacrifice the elderly and disabled, so people give up on needing cars to get to work?
Again, just saying "invest in public transportation" is like telling homeless people to invest in real estate.
Car infrastructure is typically a huge part of the costs of any city. Roads and parking spots and so on don't maintain themselves. If most people used public transport, you'd need far less road infra to maintain every year.
Anyway, my point was about how we allocate existing money, not about increasing spending.
>Car infrastructure is typically a huge part of the costs of any city.
Car drivers, at least in EU, are net cash cows to the economy with all the taxes they pay on everything car related and second order business they support: fuel tax, car tax, insurance, parking , service stations, gas stations, shops, dealerships, finance leasing and banking, etc
All of these businesses profit from care drivers. If you remove cars you'll have a massive hole in the economy. That's why no government has banned cars, but just made driving expensive.
> Roads and parking spots and so on don't maintain themselves.
Roads and parking spots are not free for car drivers, they pay for them, and it's a net profit for the cities economy. That's where the maintenance comes from.
>If most people used public transport, you'd need far less road infra to maintain every year.
Buses drive on the same car infrastructure as cars and cause more road damage due to their massive weight so you still need roads and maintenance costs.
>Anyway, my point was about how we allocate existing money,
That's stupid. You can't allocate existing funding away from roads towards public transport because that also depends on roads existing and being maintained. If you want to improve or add new public transport you need more money.
Huge amounts of insolvency is due to supporting this failed urban planning experiment. Urban centers are significantly more economically productive and significantly less expensive. Carism leads people into this trap when they should be advocating for significant expansion of dense cities and transit.
This is just learned helplessness. The US already spends unfathomable amounts of money and resources on car infra, and there's always some nonsensical defense like "it's just impossible to do it any other way!", as if cars are simply a law of nature. That lack of money can be solved by diverting some of the money going into roads into instead improving public transport infra.
The solution should NOT be investing in driverless cars, which are all owned by megacorps and leave people shackled to Google and Elon Musk.
You even mentioned another cliche, Geography, but then right below mention Switzerland. Same goes for NIMBYism and everything else you mentioned, how come these aren't issues when building massive 12 lane highways, but adding some dedicated bike paths suddenly turns into a quagmire that rivals the Manhattan Project in scale and difficulty?
Utrecht in the Netherlands is a perfect example of reversing course on car-centric designs. They had a canal, emptied it out to build a massive highway, then realized "hey, that's idiotic!" And turned it back into a canal and banned cars from the area completely. It's now a gorgeous city center free of cars, plentiful public transport options, accessible to wheelchair users and kids and literally everyone.
Americans do not care about biklanes or modifying their cities in that way, they want driverless cars and more large multilane highways/roads so that's what we will get.
Americans don't like walking/biking and love cars.
It's not really learned helplessness it's just what the vast majority of our country wants.
Remember the majority voters voted someone in who specifically campaigned on getting out of any climate change agreements and to bring back coal mining.
Yes, I was never against that. I asked where do you get the money to implement it if the city is broke? And until that is solved decades from now, how should people get to work until then?
Colorado is shipping a regional rail project in the front range. Service will start in ‘29 and the district is voting on new sales tax to fund the expansions.
It’s a very solvable problem. We’re also not talking about removing car infrastructure just funding a small amount of reasonable local transit. You can get quite far with Bus Rapid Transit, bike facilities, etc. The goal is to reduce the vehicle miles traveled in cars in general. Right now it’s very hard for any individual to make that choice because the transit infrastructure sucks.
Roads cost $200b a year and that doesn’t include the individual cost of owning a vehicle, fuel, insurance and maintenance. It also ignores the opportunity cost in having parking lots and land taken up by highways instead of being more economically productive in even small cities.
Public transport is not the same as cars. It's silly when people pretend like they are interchangeable and it's just a matter of having "better infrastructure".
The point is that good public transport makes cars unnecessary for the vast majority of everyday life in an urban setting. And, in particular, it means that taking away someone's license, even for a long period of time, doesn't have to be as crippling as it is in cities that don't have good infrastructure - hopefully leading to society being way more willing to apply drastic driving penalties to repeat offenders.
You can argue all day whether cars are good or bad. That's not my point. My point is that pretending public transport is equivalent to cars if you have good enough infrastructure is silly. They are different experiences, each with their own tradeoffs. And those tradeoffs matter differently to different people.
The point is this: if you live in a city with bad/no public transport, then a car is necessary for going about everyday life. If you live in a city with good public transport, it's really not.
Given the fact that car infrastructure competes for resources with public transport infrastructure, and is vastly more expensive per person-km, and vastly more dangerous as well, prioritizing efficient use of public resources trumps personal comfort when looking at this. The same can't be said for housing, so the comparison is not relevant. Plus, there are very objective reasons for which privacy is an absolute requirement at home (mostly to do with vulnerability and sexual behaviors), which also don't apply to cars; especially since the kind of privacy you get in your own car is actually quite limited anyway - it would be both illegal and quite unsafe to drive around naked, at least in a bad neighborhood, for example.
Unnecessary is the perfect word. If a car is unnecessary then can simply choose to not have one. Right now a car is required to live in most places in the US.
No one is saying people must give up their cars. I just want more options.
Your housing analogy is also perfect. Nearly 80% of the land in my city is single-family zoning so it’s necessary to buy an expensive detached home to live in my city. I would like more choice in housing, transit, etc.
Unnecessary is the perfect word and it’s not strong at all
No one said it is, and I even clarified at the end that better public transport infra makes life for drivers easier as well. More public transport means less people on the road since they're concentrated in buses and trains and trams, meaning for people who do need cars, they have to compete for less space on the road.
For example the Netherlands simulatenously has world class public transport infra and the happiest and most satisfied drivers. 60% of the country still drives, it's just that it's not the only option and the drivers also take public transport and bike when it's more convenient than driving.
It's sad we don't have a better way for people in these situations to do what they need without driving. It will be incredible to have autonomous driving just for older and or disabled drivers like this.
We likely do. First and foremost, services already exist to have people driven to places, like uber, taxis and public transport. Other possibilities to help them do what they need to do include: neighbors, family, door dash, the mail, nurses, moving to assisted living, etc.
As much as people who live in NYC like to believe they're a state they're not, they're a city. Most of the state of New York does not have good public transit.
Even in New York City,
a very large number of people are not taking transit, there are a lot of cars. Generally gets about a third though different boroughs have different numbers, Manhattan, most people are walking, everywhere else cars are significant, though subway and transit are also there. But you can't really say overall for the city that transit is how people get around.
I don't live in NYC for the record, my point was more about not having to own a car than public transport, hence i gave a few options surrounding traveling through NYC.
Using public safety as a cudgel to mandate adherence to any technology is a nonstarter.
The imposition is huge. We’re talking about privacy, movement and its relationships with housing/work/family management/safety.
At the very least, it needs to be plainly stated that this concept is not being studied out of curiosity. A few companies have a gigantic investment in seeing massive, government-facilitated adoption that creates guaranteed customers and gated entry.
i'm kinda hating how privacy is becoming a boogeyman to oppose literally anything. i'm predicting that public will catch hold of this rhetoric eventually.
literally any. single. thing. gets opposed on privacy grounds. and its a good move because technology by definition works by passing information around so it lends to being opposed this way everywhere.
i think Foucault is partly responsible for this with his whole panopticon nonsense.
> Fatality data is extremely skewed. 44% of drivers aren't using a seatbelt, 29% are speeding related, I recall alcohol involvement being about 30%, though it's not listed in the link I checked.
How is that 'skewed'? It sounds like you're just listing dangerous things, and yeah of course dangerous things are associated with fatalities, duh.
It's like saying that accidental gun deaths are 'skewed' because they're associated with keeping your gun loaded and not locking it up in a safe.
skewed in the sense that 2-5% of the population is a terrible driver and 90-95% are sufficient.
It's an outlier effect. Like the mean networth of a USA household is around $1 million dollars. But that figure alone gives you an extremely poor view of overall financial health of the median american.
Another wonderful usecase of safety, when the elderly get too old to drive themselves an autocar may improve the quality of life of later years. I sure hope it's around by the time I'm too old to drive.
Unfortunately I find speeding makes me a lot more engaged, only on highways and higher speed roads when there is a lot of visibility and less traffic though, which makes it safer IMO. I do not tailgate, always leaving 5 or 10 car lengths to soak up the energy if needed... I also don't listen to podcasts because they tend to take my mind off the road. I got a ticket 20 years ago when I was a new driver doing 40 in a 35, but other than that, once I established my hardline safety rules I've done 85 to 95 in 65/70 zones with no issues, no close calls, and no tickets. I see the person with the radar/laser well beforehand and know what is going on around me because I feel as though I'm paying very good attention.
That being said, I would think speeding combined with moving violations/phone distraction would be a better metric for banning people to autocars.
We'll have arrived at the automated transit network when they stop putting up road signs. The cars know where they are, and how to get there. Signs are for fallible ignorant humans.
GPS not nearly that reliable. There's a reason drones are moving towards computer vision rather than purely relying on GPS. The physical signs won't glitch out and show 100m offset because a tall building was reflecting GPS signals.
Maybe in a 100% automated system we would replace the icons with QR codes or something but physical markers will likely be here to stay.
Human-readable? Why? Just sprinkle RFID tags in the roadway, and drive it and register the tags and GPS/Inertial frame with a database and now you know where you are with machine-readable 'signs'.
I'd much rather all of the resources that are going into autonomous cars was instead going into proper public transit infrastructure. Cars are so hopelessly space and energy inefficient, and I hate driving them. If I could get around by bus, light rail, bike, and all of the wasted city space devoted to parking could be turned into more housing and amenities, that would be great.
I think it would be meaningful to also compare the fatality rates of the time tested and proven forms of public transit to these self driving cars too.
AVs and public transportation are not comparable. The cumulative lifetime investment in Waymo would not fund even half a year of capital expenses for the New York MTA, for example.
I'm not sure that's a fair comparison. The most expensive part of self driving cars is building the roads and highways. Would make more sense to compare Waymo to the operating expenses of PT, hiring the drivers and maintaining the trains.
You are suggesting that we should attribute a fraction of the costs of our road building and/or maintenance under autonomous vehicle development? If so, what fraction are you proposing?
No I'm not suggesting that. I'm suggesting that if the proposal was to spend less on self driving and more on public transport, we should be looking at the running costs of PT. Rather than comparing Waymo to digging tunnels or laying tracks, considering we didn't factor road building in the Waymo costs.
Roads are used by everyone. Transit right-of-ways are limited to use by transit and are extremely underutilized. In many cases, it would be better to turn those in to bike and/or AV lanes.
Building roads for buses are _few orders of magnitude more_ expensive than roads for cars only.
Unfortunately we still have trucking, but it's starting to feel we should build separate roads for them and for special cases only allow multi-axle delivery trucks on normal roads.
We could even build these special purpose, heavy duty roads out of something stronger than asphalt, like metal. Then once we have these sturdy new metal roads for trucks, we can raise the weight limit to allow them to carry heavier loads. And since there’s no little cars getting in the way, we could even group together multiple trucks going in the same direction for better logistical efficiency.
We can have both. The resources aren't coming from the same bucket. Public transportation must be built by the local government, and is subject to that local government's ability to execute. In contrast, Self driving cars are largely siphoning resources from for-profit companies.
I live in the west side of San Francisco, and we may get a subway station by 2050 if we're exceptionally lucky. I'd rather have self-driving cars this decade, please.
>all of the resources that are going into autonomous cars was instead going into proper public transit infrastructure.
They need not be separated. This is the entire point of the Cybercab and the Cybervan: Get self-driving cars, vans, etc. with the one job of moving people around. They only park to recharge or repair.
Where do all those cars needed during peak demand go? They're going to be parked somewhere and it's not going to be in the middle of nowhere, because that's an awful customer experience.
Do you realize the order of magnitude in difference?
If we end up having as many self driving cars as taxis, they can just terminate Waymo tomorrow, what's the point in investing tens of billions? The goal is to replace many or most of the cars on the road.
Autonomous cars are pretty space and energy efficient if they act as public transportation. Cars spend something like 95% of their life parked. If AVs replace personal ownership, that's a HUGE reduction in the number of cars in existence. The future looks like a lot less parking lots and 8 lane suburban stroads.
Source? You can have many buses using a single BRT lane which is much cheaper to build and maintain than the number of lanes you would need to move the same number of people in private vehicles. Even more so once you start building grade-separated highways and their off ramps.
If you live in the US, it's not worse. If you live anywhere else in the (developed) world, it is worse.
My hope is that the bottom-of-the-barrel US approach isn't shoved down the throats of everyone else just when we're finally managing to rebuild cities for people, not for cars.
The mass of unneeded cars will be at the periphery. The equivalent of taxi stands will have needed cars within reasonable distance.
Back in the PRT days we simply planned to store 1-2 vehicles in-station waiting for walk-ups, and if a drop-off comes in they just push out the waiting vehicles and they circle back. The efficiency remains crazy supportive of that model vs empty buses or trains.
> I'd much rather all of the resources that are going into autonomous cars was instead going into proper public transit infrastructure.
Solving the last mile problem also helps solve the public transit problem.
The issue in the US is that the current population configuration does not have single population points connecting to single employment points like back in the days of the mills or the factories. As such, public transit becomes difficult.
For example, the train in Southern California is hampered by the fact that you need huge parking lots and cars at the transit stops. If you can take an autonomous vehicle at either end, that evaporates and a LOT more people can now make use of the train effectively.
>If I could get around by bus, light rail, bike, and all of the wasted city space devoted to parking could be turned into more housing and amenities, that would be great.
I guess it depends on where we're talking about. The majority of the US is not inside a city. So just diverting all resources into public transportation is only serving the metros.
There is a bit of a definitional problem, with people living in suburbs identifying as rural, as do folks in exurbs. I don't think they're considered rural, and they're concentrated enough that well-designed public transit could serve them quite well. A decent public transit system means that families in sub/exurbs can go from 2 cars to 1 car without a major drop in quality of life, but they'd save $5k - $10k per year.
UN urbanization rate is based on the national definition.
The U.S. definition of urban area is based on population (and has been changed recently):
Under the old criteria, an urbanized area needed to have at least 50,000 residents. An urban cluster was defined as having at least 2,500 people, a threshold that had been around since 1910. Under this definition, almost 81 percent of the U.S. was urban and 19 percent was rural over the past decade.
Under the new definition, hammered out after the 2020 census, the minimum population required for an area to be considered urban doubled to 5,000 people. Originally, the Census Bureau proposed raising the threshold to 10,000 people but pulled back amid opposition. The new criteria for urban areas shift the urban-rural ratio slightly, to 79.6 percent and 20.4 percent, respectively.
Its not simply population. A vast majority of the area of the US is not in a metro.
You can say “well people need transportation , not land.” And that’s true. But what’s not necessarily true is that we want to cram more people into the cities as opposed to supporting a broader distribution of the population. We absolutely want the latter in terms of housing prices.
a) even countries known for good transit like Japan still have a ton of cars for various things, and
b) there's no getting around that the money going into self-driving cars vs public transit isn't something that can really be swapped. It's coming from a different place for a different reason.
We absolutely could invest into more trains even with the SDC money flowing anyway, it's not like the SDC money is blocking it. We collectively choose not to do this, and it's not Waymo's fault.
"Let's make car owners more miserable" is a typical sentiment held by young, healthy people who live in dense cities and ride an electric bicycle to work.
Not everyone can do that. Many areas also completely lack the public transit infrastructure needed to support a normal life.
E.g., a couple of days ago, I was shocked to learn just how bad the UK public transport system really is, apparently, outside of major metros (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49445286)
I proposed to let people pay for the services they use.
That is not an attack on redistribution to unhealthy older people living outside of the city.
In the contrary. By reducing the load on the transport infrastructure you make it easier for them to use it.
And for your wish to redistribute: That can easily be done without the city making the use of the land for roads free. You could literally just give subsidies to people who absolutely need cars.
The negative externalities? On net the benefits are enormously positive, which is why every community around the world down to the very poorest, even illiterate societies (ancient civs were mostly illiterate and still built extensive road networks) will start clearing paths to make transport easier. It's an enormous social net benefit, the free, fast, efficient movement of people from one point of their choosing to another.
Just keep it in mind when you are stuck in your 12-lane city streets.
It is a weird position though. Public transport is good for car drivers as it reduces load on the roads. Regardless of that, car drivers loathe people in public transit.
They also always hand wave the last mile problem. Last time this came up some folks were adamant that you could solve public transit and specifically last mile in a city like Dallas.
I welcome the car overlords like Waymo or related companies. I believe this is absolutely a step in the right direction and bringing up the public transit is sort of a “perfect is the enemy of good enough” situation.
Small self-driving busses would do exactly what you want. The cost of increasing bus service is overwhelmingly the cost of bus drivers. If the busses could drive themselves, cities could afford to deploy a lot more busses, especially smaller busses, running much more often.
As for light rail, in the US, light rail projects can typically cost hundreds of millions of dollars per mile. The NYC 2nd Avenue subway expansion cost billions of dollars per mile.
And, if you want people to stop wasting city space on parking, self-driving taxis are exactly the right solution.
If buses are autonomous, it no longer makes sense to have arbitrary routes that people need to wait at a bus stop for. They can wait in parking lots, charging their batteries, until they are summoned, and give people door-to-door transportation.
It sounds like an autonomous taxi, but not necessarily. A taxi usually has only one rider, whereas a bus would have more seats, and potentially pick up and drop off other riders that are more-or-less on the way. This is Via's Microtransit[1] model, but without the cost of a human driver, it becomes much more cost-effective to deploy at large scale.
That model doesn't really work with high demand I wouldn't think. The thing with the fixed route case is you no longer have to serve the many edge cases, you force people to solve it themselves and maximize the service you can offer over a more collectively beneficial routing.
In principle, but there are hard physical challenges such as the lack of space efficiency between a typical four occupant sized vehicle and a bus that holds some 10 or 20 fold more people on maybe only double the road footprint. Time to seek out your paired ridemates is something to consider, it melts away as you pack more people into the same vehicle and increases both in time as well as space as you start introducing more lower capacity vehicles.
You're not comparing against real-world fixed-route bus routes.
In the real world, most bus routes run nearly empty if not completely empty most of the time, belching diesel smoke and paying a driver, in order to ensure that service is provided to remote locations and that service is made available on a regular schedule. In cities, utilization is usually higher, although you see the same pattern off-peak.
In suburban and rural environments, the footprint is nearly irrelevant, but the lack of riders means that early attempts would start with designs that prioritize battery capacity and range over the sheer number of seats. In urban environments, the final mix of buses will look closer to a combination of mid-size buses for door-to-door and full-size buses for trips that are door-to-door but in practice are no different from fixed-routes due to the sheer number of people who take the current routes at rush hour.
> And, if you want people to stop wasting city space on parking, self-driving taxis are exactly the right solution.
Self driving taxis have to be parked (or cruise around continuously), I guess, and that parking better be close cause ain't no one waiting for a self driving car parked 30 minutes away to get moving.
The problem with transit systems is that they aren't designed for competition. They're costly to make, have few builder companies to choose from (who all know the game very well and go over budget as a tactic), and extremely difficult to overhaul/retrofit when more efficient tech becomes available.
They're great for short distance travel in densely populated areas, but outside of that I doubt they'd hold up in long-term cost and efficiency vs autonomous electric cars for long.
As for parking, a fully autonomous car service would allow a car to come to you and pick you up. So it wouldn't need to park near where you are.
Google says annual public transport spend is ~£300bn. If you put all the self driving resources into it it wouldn't make a huge difference. Waymo like vehicles may also help with the last mile issues, giving disabled access to pedestrianised areas and the like.
It has been, from the start and even before FSD had any basis in reality and was just sci-fi stories, obvious that FSD would eventually get here. The only question has been when. We clearly aren't there yet but it is pretty obvious we aren't as far away as the naysayers make out.
I want FSD, but I want it on consumer terms. Safety is only one aspect and it is the one constantly brought up. It is important, but in the long term it will be solved and the more important things will remain. Concepts of privacy, ownership and access will be the real issues of the future and should be the most important discussions about FSD, and transportation in general, now. If we allow FSD to go the rout it appears it is going, car companies requiring you forfeit you privacy, subscriptions and not ownership and companies clearly demonstrating their first attempts at gating access by advertising where you should go and emphasizing where they don't want you to go, then the FSD future we are being led to is a dystopian mistake.
You may not believe FSD will ever get here but I think it is easy to see the direction car companies are pushing things. I am happy to see safety is being solved but I would rather see a major push towards a FSD future that is more like a 1950's space opera than a 2000's tech dystopia.
I didn't even take the insurance monitor they offered because the difference in cost turned out to be something stupidly low (like a saving of $1/month, or similar).
I don't want my car monitored, I don't want my movements monitored, and I certainly don't want my car reliant on the continuing goodwill of some upstream provider.
They need to sort out the software and privacy implications before I'm biting, especially as my personal accident history beats current SDV anyway: over a million kilometers with a single accident.
We've done(ish) the first 80%: long straight roads and grid cities in south USA getting 350 days of sun per year.
The last 20% will be tough. There are 1.3b vehicules in the world, most of the aren't in the US, most places will need a complete infrastructure revamp before autonomous cars can even dream to drive there
Self driving can be safer even if it's less competent because it can just be programed to be more risk adverse, always keep safe stopping distances and slow down when the conditions are adverse. A human driver _might_ be more skilled in driving through a snow storm but the self driving car just slows down and ends up safer.
Most drivers take absurd risks that negate any possible skill advantage.
Looks like we're over the biggest engineering hurdles. I used to tell people we'd see self-driving cars take off in the 2030s, (with them generally starting to appear mid 2020s) and now this looks like the case.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 32.8 ms ] threadFull self-driving doesn't strike me as necessary to prevent deaths.
The data to differentiate these levels is pretty limited for a variety of reasons, and the problem only worsens when you conflate AEB with ADAS as the IHS/IEEE do in this article rather than use an OEDR-based definition.
Due to the nuances of my vehicle, the built-in hands-on-wheel nag was still active and required (small) driver wheel inputs every 10 seconds to prevent the beeps. Just keeping both hands on the wheel was enough to pacify the nag. But this forced me to keep attention on the vehicle, more than OpenPilot's face direction detector. Anecdotally I am certain this kept me more engaged than if I could have gone hands off.
The net effect was I had more capacity to be aware of what was going on around me on the road, AND I didn't feel nearly as fatigued at the end of the drive. Keeping the car between the lines consumes a little bit of cognitive energy constantly, which compounds over a long drive. Freeing up that load allowed me to pay more attention to what was happening on the rest of the road. And the mental burden was still half as much--I felt like I had driven maybe 4-5 hours instead of 9.
I have some ideas for how I might disable the built-in nag, but I'm pretty sure doing so would make my car less safe. The current configuration might already achieve the safety maximum for ADAS based on front-facing cameras only.
It increases situational awareness while reducing fatigue, and I think that anything further I try to do will adversely affect one or both of those effects.
Article is short on data instead referencing a bunch of aggregated IIHS studies.
They put safety above all else and actually goal to it.
> It was Levandowski who...had persuaded Google’s leadership to spend millions of dollars inventing self-driving cars.
> Some of the biggest fights involved risks that Levandowski was taking in self-driving experiments. ... “If it is your job to advance technology, safety cannot be your No. 1 concern,” Levandowski told me. “If it is, you’ll never do anything. It’s always safer to leave the car in the driveway. You’ll never learn from a real mistake.” [0]
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/22/did-uber-steal...
I think people are quite justified in being skeptical of new technology, especially when the track record has shown that the promised societal benefits often never actually materialise. Worse, still, the money earned from selling the new technology is used to make conditions worse for most people. Big tech has a lot to answer for.
I'd be less skeptical if the values of tech capitalism shifted to become more pro-human. They really haven't, and they probably won't. So for now, consider me bearish on new tech.
Subscription fees? So "tech" should make producing a film ... free now? What exactly is your point?
Who exactly promised all these so-called benefits you keep saying you were lied about? The companies make products and services. Many, many people buy those things. Both sides are happy, transaction over. What "greater good" are you complaining about, exactly and who promised it to whom?
This is exactly the message, and I for one welcome the anti-cool-aid sentiments being very visible in public spaces.
A lot of the time you don't own them, so they're operating on the terms provided by the companies and government, even when it's directly against your own interests. The idea of a car that can't drive certain places, be used at a certain time or be used by certain people feels like a terrifying inevitability, and one which society should refuse at all costs.
If you drive your own vehicle, it goes where you want it to go. If you don't drive your own vehicle, it goes where a company or government wants it to go.
Woah! This conspiracy goes deeper than I thought! Next you'll tell me that a taxi ride requires mutual consent between me, the taxi driver, and the dispatch company!
I think privacy conscious folks like yourself consistently overrate how much purchase this argument has. I am perfectly happy to forgo this in exchange for a sufficient increase in convenience / safety (for myself and others). This is not because I have been brainwashed by autonomous vehicle company propaganda, it is because I have different values and concerns.
Lets not forget that its all about the profits, and if we truly want to save lives there are more cost-efficient ways than what some tech sales-people peddle.
And, of course, to support the policy choices that reduce how much we subsidize driving and improve infrastructure for those alternatives.
You are more likely to kill someone driving your huge SUV than you are taking a Waymo. Driving your own car certainly doesn't make you a bad person, but I hope self-driving cars will be ubiquitous and safe in the future. When that happens, choosing to drive yourself will be a selfish act, just like exposing people to secondhand smoke is now.
"When that happens, choosing to drive yourself will be a selfish act, just like exposing people to secondhand smoke is now." Really? I drive on logging roads a few times a month to get to some property. This is pretty sketchy even in good conditions and there's always the chance of getting stuck and having to hike a mile or two the rest of the way up to go get the tractor and sort it out. I'm probably not buying a self-driving car any time soon, if ever.
Now, is having self driving taxis a fantastic idea in a very dense city? Of course. There's huge benefits in keeping the average car as safe, efficient in both energy and pollution, and highly utilized as possible. Are these also a good retrofit to dense-ish suburbs where a bus/rail network isn't quite enough (and the costs to build it in already-developed land are unpalatable)? Also yes. But that's not ubiquitous, that's just part of a larger system that needs to be able to serve all users.
And if your point is that "move out of the mountains and into a city because that's the less-selfish option"... that's a certain kind of political statement, I guess.
Even today, I don’t like the intrusiveness of the insurance monitors you can install on your car today and I am willing to forgo that discount to keep my privacy.
Really there should be an obstacle course of some kind based on the most common anomalies leading to accidents. Partially obscured road signs, worn paint markings, obscured sight lines caused by dense parking, driving on a snowed over surface, etc.
I passed because I didn’t kill anyone in the span of eight blocks.
There's the beginnings of a standard for L2/L3 vehicles in Europe, and ongoing discussions about what L4 standards could look like, but neither addresses "adversarial" situations.
The trouble with "driver assistance" systems is the handoff to the driver. That's not reliable. Results from the aviation community indicate that it takes about ten seconds after an autopilot disconnect before the pilot has stable control of the aircraft. "L3.5" accepts that. The < 2 second response required by some L2 systems does not.
Low density public transport work very well in places where people simply can't afford personal vehicles, it's not a tech logical or financial problem at all, if anything it's cultural and mostly political
More sensors with 360 degrees. Faster reaction time. Constantly improving, be it from real world data or from a simulated environment. Zero fatigue. No emotion evolved. No drugs are alcohol in the system.
Fyi. Long robotaxis.
Self-driving cars will never be safer than human drivers.
If you believe otherwise, show actual proof of some kind. Show some footage of self-driving cars doing anything other than blundering around like an inexperienced and impaired driver.
You're responding to something that actually brought data to the table to answer the question, though one can quibble with details.
Yet you're saying that self-driving cars will _never_ be safer, which is a much stronger claim, and you don't bring any evidence to back up the assertion.
FSD driving in decently heavy rain (this is mine): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKePEavEhv
Both of the above aren't current consumer models and the Cybercabs run one major version above this.
I've seen it avoid small rodents and deer that were hidden in foliage around a blind turn, it's super freaky with what it sees that humans can't and this is with only cameras. It is really good, in my experience, at reasoning about other vehicles and what they are about to do such as seeing a vehicle not slowing down quickly enough at a stop sign its crossing so it slows itself down to make sure the car stops. My favorite story is that it swerved out of the way of someone doing a u-turn from the opposing lane hidden behind another car; it had already gotten us out of the way before anyone in the car realized what had happened.
An AV is already superhuman because it never loses focus, it can see all the way around the car, and it can react quicker than any human, besides maybe an F1 driver, could.
And this is not an isolated incident because that is one of the things Tesla is being investigated for: https://autos.yahoo.com/policy-and-environment/articles/tesl...
That is not even a perception issue (I've already had multiple very close calls because of that, and I think Elon was extremely negligent in pushing for vision-only;) This is a damn bug in the planning logic. That's Elon's "move fast and break people" philosophy shining through.
I would trust autonomous cars if they're Waymo. I would not trust Tesla.
Waymos aren't without fault either, they smash the front off cars, run into static poles, block emergency vehicles, etc; just the nature of AV development.
And sure enough, the most recent red light incident (with video) is only a couple weeks old.
Before entrusting your life and the lives of those on the road to Elon, I would implore you to just google “latest Tesla FSD incidents” every so often for a sobering reality check.
And no one is claiming Waymo is perfect, but the statistics for Waymo are wayyyyy better than those from Tesla.
The target article even notes that "while Waymo leads the industry in transparency, and robotaxi operators are required to report even the tiniest scrape to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), not every company voluntarily reports their total miles driven."
My sense is that there's a lot of massaging the data by autonomous car companies to make their data look good. The article and a linked article describes the comparisons as "human drivers in the same driving conditions" which is kind of vague to me and isn't the same as, say, taxi drivers to robotaxis. It's also robotaxis and not general driving conditions etc.
I always feel like these comparisons become murky in other ways. For example, if autonomous vehicles have lower accident rates in general, but fail in catastrophically bad ways when they do fail — ways that would never happen with a human driver (for example, by inexplicably driving into an avoidable semi trailer for no reason, killing the occupants) — is that better? What if you eliminate cases where the driver is intoxicated? Aren't those cases cases of malfeasance at some level, that could apply to autonomous vehicle use? Do you hold autonomous vehicle companies accountable for deaths, charging executives with manslaughter? How should we think about accountability versus safety?
I'm not trying to argue against autonomous vehicles. I just feel like these types of published discussions get oversimplified often in a way that seems to parallel similar discussions of AI in general, and seems sympathetic to their adoption rather than a rigorously skeptical appraisal.
The comparisons I've seen are with the general population, not professional drivers. How might that comparison look, since this is a paid service?
Insurance and liability become a lot simpler if you just don't touch the controls at all. There will be a clear split between people who don't drive and therefore are not liable and the remaining group that still drives and is causing most of the remaining accidents (and cost for insurers). That's going to inevitably get more scrutiny from everybody: insurers, authorities, occupants of self driving vehicles, other manual drivers.
This will probably be insurance driven. If you don't need to drive anymore, you don't actually need a license. And if you are not driving, you can't be held liable for damage caused by your vehicle. You'll still need insurance to cover any damage/harm your vehicle might cause but this will likely be quite cheap given autonomous cars are safer and on average don't really get involved in accidents. It's quite possible that eventually just gets folded into warranty terms for your car and covered by the manufacturer.
As manually driving increasingly becomes a choice rather than a necessity, your insurance for that might become conditional on you being current and proficient in the same sense that licensed pilots need to regularly do check rides to verify they can still safely operate a plane. Additionally, insurers might insist on you passing a regular health checks to verify that you are still fit enough to drive. Some countries already test elderly drivers but there are lots of elderly people with pretty serious health issues passing these tests as well. Expect this to get a lot more strict.
A large percentage of rideshare drivers use the cheapest allowable vehicles and make minimum wage or less after expenses.
There is also the issue of who gets paid to clean the garbage passengers will inevitably leave in the autonomous vehicle (ask me how I know). Or worse, vomit or other hazardous bodily excretions.
just to illustrate the idea, not saying these are the exact numbers:
1. $1000 a month to drive yourself and still risk liability
2. $50 a month to have the car drive you, and GOOGL takes excess liability
But the bigger fear is the loss of autonomy in movement that having everyone become beholden to a botnet for transportation will bring.
"Drive me to the anti government protest. I want to make my voice heard."
"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."
Another thing I'd really like to know: let's suppose that these are indeed safer than the average driver. Is it also the case for the median driver?
- autonomous cars cause fewer accidents
- so either insurance will be cheaper for them
- AND/OR human driving car insurance goes up
- even if only one happens, the relative cost of insurance will change in favor of autonomous
- driving your own car becomes a kind of "prestige" thing where only really wealthy people do it (similar to owning your own plane etc)
lol
In 2015, Volvo issued a press release claiming that Volvo would accept full liability whenever its cars are in autonomous mode.
[…]
Starting in September 2023 in the United States, Mercedes-Benz takes liability for the Level 3 Drive Pilot as long as the "user operates Drive Pilot as designed," but "the driver must be ready to take control of the vehicle at all times when prompted to intervene by the vehicle."
There'll be a decade of court cases over how fast this means.
Mercedes will argue 10ms before the crash counts; ambulance chasers will claim it's five minutes.
There’s a lot of money to be made. Just look at the prices for travel insurance direct from the airline versus a third party. 2-3x.
It’ll be like BMW with the heated seat subscription fee.
Similarly, many car makers offer heated seats without a subscription fee, because of the magic of competition.
Using my phone to make a car show up when I need it and disappear when I don't feels like utopia.
They'll never stop me from riding my bike at least.
> - autonomous cars cause fewer accidents
> - so either insurance will be cheaper for them
> - AND/OR human driving car insurance goes up
If they were going to do that, they would have done it by now for those drivers opting into the insurance monitor device: they can literally tell that you're a driver that never took a risk, never got into a situation to brake hard, never drove recklessly, etc, and yet, the insurance cost with the device is only slightly less than the insurance cost without the device.
In any case, if this was strictly a financial decision, why would the human cost go up? The larger the percentage of SDVs there are on the road, the less likely a human driver gets into an accident, their risk goes down too, so their insurance should also go down.
In my own life I see the most reasonable/thoughtful drivers raving about autonomous driving and the most reckless ones ranting against it. YMMV.
Driving yourself will become like horse riding, something you do on private property for sport rather than transport.
My understanding is that it is a legal and safety liability for them to drive. The driver is employed by and the car is owned by a company that the wealthy person founded and pays so if the driver hits & kills someone, the company gets sued for a bunch of money then the liability can be discharged in bankruptcy / isolated to the company's coffers rather than the wealthy person's.
It's the same gambit as their security. I am sure more than just Gates and Musk do it but I know that both of them own personal security companies who only provide security to themselves. It's all just shells of liability shielding.
I can easily construct arguments along the lines of “cars are necessary to drive and insurance costs are regressive since they don’t scale with income so we need to have price controls on insurance for low-income drivers”. These will be quite popular.
Cars already are extremely wasteful assets in terms of resource, space and money if you live in a decently served urban area. It already irrational to have one 90% of the times.
An indirect and somewhat hidden cost like insurance is unlikely to move the needle anywhere near significantly.
(https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...)
The majority of drivers are good, but some drivers are really bad. Life in USA is extremely car-centric and taking away a license is often infeasible and the offender usually drives without their license anyways. If anything, I'd like autonomous cars to give a legal out to remove bad drivers. You get a DUI, or commonly speeding? You may only take an autocar.
I take issue with this. The majority of drivers are "mostly fine as long as circumstances are favorable", not "good". People for the most part do not even know about the concept of defensive driving let alone practice it. Even the best people are fundamentally complacent in basically everything they do. They zone out sometimes, they get too close, they don't always look where they're going. They don't get into more collisions because the world doesn't throw more obstacles at them, not because they're good at driving.
Imagine you had to pass a simulator test involving responding to ANY crisis while driving before your license would be renewed. Rates of driving would plummet.
I bet most drivers don’t even correctly handle a flat tire on the expressway.
The average one-way commute time in the US is less than half an hour:
* https://www.census.gov/topics/employment/commuting/guidance/...
If you can't pay attention for less than 30 minutes should you really be operating a multi-ton death machine?
Hunters are a self-selecting group of people who enjoy the activity you describe. If you don't like it or can't do it, you just don't do it.
Virtually every single adult in America has to drive, however, to live a functional life.
Your brain gets used to in-distribution events.
Car accidents (and the conditions that cause them) are out-of-distribution events.
It's that simple.
Do you do this for the purpose of calibrating your brain? Or more just some morbid curiosity of yours? :D
Hopefully police are figuring out that one of the parties in the accident is high while they do the interview.
I think your point probably sort of stands - most drivers aren’t bad most of the time. But everybody gets distracted sometimes, and the consequences of getting distracted while driving are very severe and very predictable.
edit: someone else replied with data contrary to this, maybe they are right but Im leaving this here to represent the counterargument
The mean driver in the context of the USA driving environment is shockingly safe. Being safer than even the mean human driver in the USA is hard and takes a shocking amount of data to verify. Anybody downplaying it as "lol humans are so unsafe" to argue the problem feels easy to solve or can be solved by the end of the year with a little bit of elbow grease is utterly clueless.
[1] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
So it's clearly not that hard to be safer than the mean human driver in the USA. 3 of the 22 countries manage to have less than half the US rate.
Between fatalities, not between crashes.
1) Fatalities vs non-fatal injuries. Not the same thing.
2) Crashes that caused injury vs crashes that did not cause injury. Not the same thing.
3) Crashes that did not cause injury vs crashes that could not have caused injury. Not the same thing.
4) Crashes vs unsafe behaviors that could cause a crash. Not the same thing.
5) Being "safe" in the sense of "enjoying fortunate circumstance" vs being "safe" in the sense of "actively contributing to safety". Not the same thing.
Here is a thought experiment for you to consider:
If you run a red light and the cross traffic brakes and swerves around you, so no collision occurs, were you driving safely? No, right? Then why would you think that fatalities are the true measure of driving goodness?
Multi-dozen car pileups aren't particularly rare, with the common cause for a lot of these being "one car hits an icy patch, hits another car, car behind them tries but fails to stop in time due to the ice, rinse and repeat a few dozen times". And the root cause of that is every single driver in that collision driving too fast for conditions and unable to make the requisite emergency stop in time.
Autonomous cars beating the average that includes the above are still worse than a diligent driver, which anyone can resolve to be.
That's a term I haven't heard before, care to enlighten me? Don't know what it means but its fun to say lol.
After all the first Tesla auto drive fatality was literally "that is probably a sign not a trunk"...
It's sad we don't have a better way for people in these situations to do what they need without driving. It will be incredible to have autonomous driving just for older and or disabled drivers like this.
The best part of proper infrastructure and public transport is that it makes life for the drivers easier, too!
So what should the disabled people do until that amazing public transport infrastructure materializes, if it ever even does for them at all? Sit at home and wait?
I dislike this type of patronizing superficial handweaving advice that is disconnected from the harsh challenges of building more great public transport infra (lack of funds, geography and land ownership issues, nimbyism, labor/material shortages, government bureaucracy, corruption and incompetence etc).
People use cars because they have no better choice. I'd also want my city to build me Swiss levels of public transport so I wouldn't have to drive, but guess what, the infra sucks and the city is broke, so that leaves me with little choice for the next decades as nothing will change. So car driving it is.
You need money to build infra, a lot of it, and when cities are broke, that externality is burdened on the individuals because they have no other choice but still need to get to work and other places. Telling them they can "just build more infra" is like telling homeless person they can just buy a house. OK, but with what money?
The world is literally on fire but the average person simply doesn't give a shit because they don't want to be inconvenienced.
People's priorities are putting a roof over their heads and food on the table for the family. Everything else is secondary.
> Throwing your hands in the air and taking the path of least resistance is never going to lead to change.
NO, but you and him are yet to provide a better solution that leads to an actual immediate change for the better. People aren't gonna sacrifice their lives and become martyrs for a moral cause that does nothing in the end except make them poor while other people and countries get rich while fucking the planet even harder. Lead by example!
>The world is literally on fire but the average person simply doesn't give a shit because they don't want to be inconvenienced.
People care more about themselves and their family than the planet. Especially when China and India are lighting the planet on fire and billionaires and politicians are taking private jets and yachts to moralize on saving the planet. Again, lead by example!
No, the point was that instead of cities waiting until self-driving cars become an option to help get rid of terrible drivers, the cities could invest in public transportation today, and get better road safety that way.
I don’t find these problems unsolvable. We spend over $200 billion on roads a year. That’s almost $75bn more than the CA high speed rail. That’s project has its own problems but local buses and street cars and road diets would cost minuscule fractions of that number and improve conditions and options for nearly everyone.
Cars are clearly not a perfect solution. They are expensive and unsafe. But for some reason transit and buses have to be the perfect solution for everyone upon immediate delivery just to get the tiniest fraction of funding.
I take various forms of transit regularly and I’ve never had an issue more noteworthy than any interaction I’ve had in a car.
Again, with what money? My city is insolvent and every extra money it gets goes to cover the massive financial hole of social programs like elderly care and handicapped people, which is growing in need.
Would you sacrifice the elderly and disabled, so people give up on needing cars to get to work?
Again, just saying "invest in public transportation" is like telling homeless people to invest in real estate.
Anyway, my point was about how we allocate existing money, not about increasing spending.
Car drivers, at least in EU, are net cash cows to the economy with all the taxes they pay on everything car related and second order business they support: fuel tax, car tax, insurance, parking , service stations, gas stations, shops, dealerships, finance leasing and banking, etc
All of these businesses profit from care drivers. If you remove cars you'll have a massive hole in the economy. That's why no government has banned cars, but just made driving expensive.
> Roads and parking spots and so on don't maintain themselves.
Roads and parking spots are not free for car drivers, they pay for them, and it's a net profit for the cities economy. That's where the maintenance comes from.
>If most people used public transport, you'd need far less road infra to maintain every year.
Buses drive on the same car infrastructure as cars and cause more road damage due to their massive weight so you still need roads and maintenance costs.
>Anyway, my point was about how we allocate existing money,
That's stupid. You can't allocate existing funding away from roads towards public transport because that also depends on roads existing and being maintained. If you want to improve or add new public transport you need more money.
Waiting? NYC, DC, and Chicago are blocking/delaying self-driving cars.
There's no enough real estate in urban centers.
The solution should NOT be investing in driverless cars, which are all owned by megacorps and leave people shackled to Google and Elon Musk.
You even mentioned another cliche, Geography, but then right below mention Switzerland. Same goes for NIMBYism and everything else you mentioned, how come these aren't issues when building massive 12 lane highways, but adding some dedicated bike paths suddenly turns into a quagmire that rivals the Manhattan Project in scale and difficulty?
Utrecht in the Netherlands is a perfect example of reversing course on car-centric designs. They had a canal, emptied it out to build a massive highway, then realized "hey, that's idiotic!" And turned it back into a canal and banned cars from the area completely. It's now a gorgeous city center free of cars, plentiful public transport options, accessible to wheelchair users and kids and literally everyone.
Americans don't like walking/biking and love cars.
It's not really learned helplessness it's just what the vast majority of our country wants.
Remember the majority voters voted someone in who specifically campaigned on getting out of any climate change agreements and to bring back coal mining.
It’s a very solvable problem. We’re also not talking about removing car infrastructure just funding a small amount of reasonable local transit. You can get quite far with Bus Rapid Transit, bike facilities, etc. The goal is to reduce the vehicle miles traveled in cars in general. Right now it’s very hard for any individual to make that choice because the transit infrastructure sucks.
Unfortunately my city doesn't have US/Colorado money.
>the district is voting on new sales tax to fund the expansion
Won't more sales tax make the already poor poorer? My country already tried that and that was the effect.
>It’s a very solvable problem.
If you have money, everything is solvable.
Given the fact that car infrastructure competes for resources with public transport infrastructure, and is vastly more expensive per person-km, and vastly more dangerous as well, prioritizing efficient use of public resources trumps personal comfort when looking at this. The same can't be said for housing, so the comparison is not relevant. Plus, there are very objective reasons for which privacy is an absolute requirement at home (mostly to do with vulnerability and sexual behaviors), which also don't apply to cars; especially since the kind of privacy you get in your own car is actually quite limited anyway - it would be both illegal and quite unsafe to drive around naked, at least in a bad neighborhood, for example.
For lots of people in cities or large portions of Europe, going without a car is much better.
No one is saying people must give up their cars. I just want more options.
Your housing analogy is also perfect. Nearly 80% of the land in my city is single-family zoning so it’s necessary to buy an expensive detached home to live in my city. I would like more choice in housing, transit, etc.
Unnecessary is the perfect word and it’s not strong at all
For example the Netherlands simulatenously has world class public transport infra and the happiest and most satisfied drivers. 60% of the country still drives, it's just that it's not the only option and the drivers also take public transport and bike when it's more convenient than driving.
We likely do. First and foremost, services already exist to have people driven to places, like uber, taxis and public transport. Other possibilities to help them do what they need to do include: neighbors, family, door dash, the mail, nurses, moving to assisted living, etc.
Mostly yes, but some states like NYC its more common to take trains, taxi cabs / Uber / Lyft, etc.
> But you can't really say overall for the city that transit is how people get around.
It's not a third, it's 41% at city level.
If you're rigid about transit, yes, it's only 41%. But walking is 28% and bikes are 3% and growing.
So non car transportation in all of NYC is 70-72%.
70 > 50.
And the trend is only going one way, with transit on the way up and recovering post COVID and bikes also going up.
Well, 80% of us believes ourselves to be above average, so there's that.
The imposition is huge. We’re talking about privacy, movement and its relationships with housing/work/family management/safety.
At the very least, it needs to be plainly stated that this concept is not being studied out of curiosity. A few companies have a gigantic investment in seeing massive, government-facilitated adoption that creates guaranteed customers and gated entry.
literally any. single. thing. gets opposed on privacy grounds. and its a good move because technology by definition works by passing information around so it lends to being opposed this way everywhere.
i think Foucault is partly responsible for this with his whole panopticon nonsense.
It's not.
How is that 'skewed'? It sounds like you're just listing dangerous things, and yeah of course dangerous things are associated with fatalities, duh.
It's like saying that accidental gun deaths are 'skewed' because they're associated with keeping your gun loaded and not locking it up in a safe.
It's an outlier effect. Like the mean networth of a USA household is around $1 million dollars. But that figure alone gives you an extremely poor view of overall financial health of the median american.
That being said, I would think speeding combined with moving violations/phone distraction would be a better metric for banning people to autocars.
Maybe in a 100% automated system we would replace the icons with QR codes or something but physical markers will likely be here to stay.
I think it would be meaningful to also compare the fatality rates of the time tested and proven forms of public transit to these self driving cars too.
Unfortunately we still have trucking, but it's starting to feel we should build separate roads for them and for special cases only allow multi-axle delivery trucks on normal roads.
We could even build these special purpose, heavy duty roads out of something stronger than asphalt, like metal. Then once we have these sturdy new metal roads for trucks, we can raise the weight limit to allow them to carry heavier loads. And since there’s no little cars getting in the way, we could even group together multiple trucks going in the same direction for better logistical efficiency.
You can see where I’m going with this. ;-)
I live in the west side of San Francisco, and we may get a subway station by 2050 if we're exceptionally lucky. I'd rather have self-driving cars this decade, please.
They need not be separated. This is the entire point of the Cybercab and the Cybervan: Get self-driving cars, vans, etc. with the one job of moving people around. They only park to recharge or repair.
Where do all those cars needed during peak demand go? They're going to be parked somewhere and it's not going to be in the middle of nowhere, because that's an awful customer experience.
If we end up having as many self driving cars as taxis, they can just terminate Waymo tomorrow, what's the point in investing tens of billions? The goal is to replace many or most of the cars on the road.
https://john-s-allen.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/mue...
If you account for that, cost per passenger mile on fully loaded electric bus is more than uber chauffeur.
Or would you still need a giant spot of land to park these things outside of peak hour?
So the incentive will be to put/drive cars very close to where people are.
That whole "cars will be stored at the periphery" is propaganda.
My hope is that the bottom-of-the-barrel US approach isn't shoved down the throats of everyone else just when we're finally managing to rebuild cities for people, not for cars.
Back in the PRT days we simply planned to store 1-2 vehicles in-station waiting for walk-ups, and if a drop-off comes in they just push out the waiting vehicles and they circle back. The efficiency remains crazy supportive of that model vs empty buses or trains.
Solving the last mile problem also helps solve the public transit problem.
The issue in the US is that the current population configuration does not have single population points connecting to single employment points like back in the days of the mills or the factories. As such, public transit becomes difficult.
For example, the train in Southern California is hampered by the fact that you need huge parking lots and cars at the transit stops. If you can take an autonomous vehicle at either end, that evaporates and a LOT more people can now make use of the train effectively.
I guess it depends on where we're talking about. The majority of the US is not inside a city. So just diverting all resources into public transportation is only serving the metros.
If we're talking about a small country then sure.
I think this isn't true for the US any more, maybe it hasn't been true for decades?
WorldBank seems to have the ubranisation rate at around 80% for the US: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS?locat...
There is a bit of a definitional problem, with people living in suburbs identifying as rural, as do folks in exurbs. I don't think they're considered rural, and they're concentrated enough that well-designed public transit could serve them quite well. A decent public transit system means that families in sub/exurbs can go from 2 cars to 1 car without a major drop in quality of life, but they'd save $5k - $10k per year.
UN urbanization rate is based on the national definition.
The U.S. definition of urban area is based on population (and has been changed recently):
Source: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/u-s-census-bureau-rede... ("U.S. Census Bureau redefines the meaning of urban areas in America", PBS, Dec 29, 2022)You can say “well people need transportation , not land.” And that’s true. But what’s not necessarily true is that we want to cram more people into the cities as opposed to supporting a broader distribution of the population. We absolutely want the latter in terms of housing prices.
a) even countries known for good transit like Japan still have a ton of cars for various things, and
b) there's no getting around that the money going into self-driving cars vs public transit isn't something that can really be swapped. It's coming from a different place for a different reason.
We absolutely could invest into more trains even with the SDC money flowing anyway, it's not like the SDC money is blocking it. We collectively choose not to do this, and it's not Waymo's fault.
Then people would likely not have a issue with public transit.
Not everyone can do that. Many areas also completely lack the public transit infrastructure needed to support a normal life.
E.g., a couple of days ago, I was shocked to learn just how bad the UK public transport system really is, apparently, outside of major metros (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49445286)
> "Let's make car owners more miserable"
I proposed to let people pay for the services they use.
That is not an attack on redistribution to unhealthy older people living outside of the city.
In the contrary. By reducing the load on the transport infrastructure you make it easier for them to use it.
And for your wish to redistribute: That can easily be done without the city making the use of the land for roads free. You could literally just give subsidies to people who absolutely need cars.
That is a very far stretch.
I definitely want to make transport easier. But a 50.000 dollar ticket to entering the previlige of transport is simply not fair.
Not many people would want to ride the subway if they had to pay the full price.
Just keep it in mind when you are stuck in your 12-lane city streets.
It is a weird position though. Public transport is good for car drivers as it reduces load on the roads. Regardless of that, car drivers loathe people in public transit.
I welcome the car overlords like Waymo or related companies. I believe this is absolutely a step in the right direction and bringing up the public transit is sort of a “perfect is the enemy of good enough” situation.
As for light rail, in the US, light rail projects can typically cost hundreds of millions of dollars per mile. The NYC 2nd Avenue subway expansion cost billions of dollars per mile.
And, if you want people to stop wasting city space on parking, self-driving taxis are exactly the right solution.
It sounds like an autonomous taxi, but not necessarily. A taxi usually has only one rider, whereas a bus would have more seats, and potentially pick up and drop off other riders that are more-or-less on the way. This is Via's Microtransit[1] model, but without the cost of a human driver, it becomes much more cost-effective to deploy at large scale.
[1]: https://ridewithvia.com/solutions/microtransit
In the real world, most bus routes run nearly empty if not completely empty most of the time, belching diesel smoke and paying a driver, in order to ensure that service is provided to remote locations and that service is made available on a regular schedule. In cities, utilization is usually higher, although you see the same pattern off-peak.
In suburban and rural environments, the footprint is nearly irrelevant, but the lack of riders means that early attempts would start with designs that prioritize battery capacity and range over the sheer number of seats. In urban environments, the final mix of buses will look closer to a combination of mid-size buses for door-to-door and full-size buses for trips that are door-to-door but in practice are no different from fixed-routes due to the sheer number of people who take the current routes at rush hour.
Self driving taxis have to be parked (or cruise around continuously), I guess, and that parking better be close cause ain't no one waiting for a self driving car parked 30 minutes away to get moving.
They're great for short distance travel in densely populated areas, but outside of that I doubt they'd hold up in long-term cost and efficiency vs autonomous electric cars for long.
As for parking, a fully autonomous car service would allow a car to come to you and pick you up. So it wouldn't need to park near where you are.
I want FSD, but I want it on consumer terms. Safety is only one aspect and it is the one constantly brought up. It is important, but in the long term it will be solved and the more important things will remain. Concepts of privacy, ownership and access will be the real issues of the future and should be the most important discussions about FSD, and transportation in general, now. If we allow FSD to go the rout it appears it is going, car companies requiring you forfeit you privacy, subscriptions and not ownership and companies clearly demonstrating their first attempts at gating access by advertising where you should go and emphasizing where they don't want you to go, then the FSD future we are being led to is a dystopian mistake.
You may not believe FSD will ever get here but I think it is easy to see the direction car companies are pushing things. I am happy to see safety is being solved but I would rather see a major push towards a FSD future that is more like a 1950's space opera than a 2000's tech dystopia.
I didn't even take the insurance monitor they offered because the difference in cost turned out to be something stupidly low (like a saving of $1/month, or similar).
I don't want my car monitored, I don't want my movements monitored, and I certainly don't want my car reliant on the continuing goodwill of some upstream provider.
They need to sort out the software and privacy implications before I'm biting, especially as my personal accident history beats current SDV anyway: over a million kilometers with a single accident.
The last 20% will be tough. There are 1.3b vehicules in the world, most of the aren't in the US, most places will need a complete infrastructure revamp before autonomous cars can even dream to drive there
Most drivers take absurd risks that negate any possible skill advantage.
It's really only in the US where people still seem to think it's acceptable to drive drunk.