I used to be very very excited about self-driving cars. Now I'm 1000% certain they will not improve anything meaningful at all. There are no urgent, legit needs that make these things necessary or acceptable. Meanwhile there are concrete, easier, but "boring" things we could do today to improve safety and comfort on the streets and highways.
Here's a dumb list of some of the automation I want to see:
- Automated speed and acceleration limits based on location. In cities, 20km/h. From 0 to 20 in 5 seconds. On highways, whatever makes sense. But, sorry, you can't go 200 km/h unless you're on a track, a train or a plane.
- Automated / smart traffic lights to end unnecessary stopping and waiting, while giving priority to emergency vehicles, transit, pedestrians, bicycles over individual cars
- Automated emergency vehicle notification to drivers, without increasingly loud,blaring sirens (esp. at night when the streets are empty and response times are 2x better than during the day in the first place)
- Mandatory collision mitigation and other safety assists; you shouldn't have to pay more money to get a safer vehicle (especially safer for others)
- ...but no autopilot allowed outside of specific places/times (eg. certain highway segments at certain times)
- Automated, guaranteed fines when speeding, running red lights or driving recklessly.
- APIs for cities/counties/regions to influence routing decisions made by maps applications: people are free to drive on small streets but the algorithm should not send them there. Before I started using it, waze, in particular, often steered me to complicated routes via small streets to save 90 seconds in a 15 minute trip. Cities should be able to align traffic engineering decisions at all levels.
- Automated engine shutoff and notifications to prevent idling and educate folks. I see people browsing for minutes before/after driving, with the engine on. People eating in their cars with the engine on, etc. In front of folks sitting at a cafe etc. Just ignominious stuff given the noise, heat and air pollution output (idling generates more toxic exhaust than driving).
It's nice to be able to walk places. Maybe a middle ground for having self-driving cars is to think of them as mini-trams.
The self-driving-car-mini-trams pick up and drop off at specific stops, on numbered routes, and they have a dedicated lane that can also be used by emergency vehicles (human driven).
To improve passenger safety the self-driving-car-mini-trams could be made larger, maybe the size of buses, which would have the added benefit of allowing people to stand in them, not use seat belts, and get off and on a lot more easily than crawling in and out of a car.
Sure yep. Why do they need to be self driving? We could build 8-10 people electric buses today, and let randos drive them just like we let randos drive lyfts/ubers.
“There are no urgent, legit needs that make these things necessary or acceptable.”
—Americans alone spend more than 70,000,000,000 hours each year driving.
-On average, not counting commercial drivers, each American spends over 13 hours a week driving, or one third of a full time job.
-Over 20% of the American labor force is primarily employed driving a commercial vehicle.
We are talking about a collective waste of human time and effort of 350,000 lifetimes per year in the U.S. alone.
We are talking about waste of collective labor enough to totally rebuild the physical environment: laying train tracks, building housing, raising flood walls, building pads for rockets and nuclear reactors.
We are talking about centuries of time worth of cognitive capacity to be used as leisure for making art, music, literature. Or simply bonding with families and strengthening our communities.
If that’s not a pressing need I don’t know what is.
Such a fake comment. You were never excited for AVs.
-As AVs scale, there cost will go below that of personal car ownership
-AVs maintain the same flexibility as personal cars, something public transit cannot resolve.
-As Personal cars ownership declines, real progress in emissions, land and safety will be made.
Your suggestions just add more regulation and fees that always end up impacting low income people more.
> Such a fake comment. You were never excited for AVs.
I was excited for AVs for most of my life, just like everybody, because it's cool sci-fi tech. But if you start thinking about the whole picture of transportation / urban design... they mostly don't make sense. Just like flying cars.
> As AVs scale, there cost will go below that of personal car ownership
Why?
> AVs maintain the same flexibility as personal cars, something public transit cannot resolve.
Sure. Why are we testing/using them in SF, a city that can resolve its transportation needs with public transit and light electric vehicles?
> As Personal cars ownership declines, real progress in emissions, land and safety will be made.
My whole point is we can make these progresses today.
Self driving cars and other innovations cribbed from sci-fi, are a distraction that prevent us from addressing our real issues in real ways.
> Your suggestions just add more regulation and fees that always end up impacting low income people more.
Actually, none of my suggestions would impact low-income people more.
You don't think giving 24/7 control of all personal vehicles to a handful of companies is going to hurt lower-income people?
People in the industry and those who support it are excited because of the positives impacts it can make. Not because its scifi tech.
At scale the cost per mile of an AV will be below that of an equivalent personal car because of all these factors
- High utilization means you are not paying for a car that spends 80% of its life parked and removes the costs associated with that
- Insurance, maintenance, and parking costs are reduced because of efficiency gains in a fleet configuration vs personally handling all those things
- Fixed upfront cost that goes down considerably as number of vehicles increases
Testing is happening in SF probably because the data shows that SF residents are high utilization users of vehicles and don't use public transit as much as you think. Ex Uber and lyft to 200k trips in SF alone everyday. SF is a difficult city to drive in so it shows real capability and a lot of the people working on this tech happen to live in and around SF.
Autonomous cars are here today. The things you are suggesting will require all car companies to align on new standards and develop tools for the government to interface with there new standard equipment and than deploy that infrastructure. That will require years more of work. AVs use the infrastructure that is there already.
New equipment is not free. It will add costs to vehicles and someone will pay for it. More fees (ex for speeding) are always a bigger burden on the poor.
Here's a dumb list of some of the automation I want to see:
- Automated speed and acceleration limits based on location. In cities, 20km/h. From 0 to 20 in 5 seconds. On highways, whatever makes sense. But, sorry, you can't go 200 km/h unless you're on a track, a train or a plane.
- Automated / smart traffic lights to end unnecessary stopping and waiting, while giving priority to emergency vehicles, transit, pedestrians, bicycles over individual cars
- Automated emergency vehicle notification to drivers, without increasingly loud,blaring sirens (esp. at night when the streets are empty and response times are 2x better than during the day in the first place)
- Mandatory collision mitigation and other safety assists; you shouldn't have to pay more money to get a safer vehicle (especially safer for others)
- ...but no autopilot allowed outside of specific places/times (eg. certain highway segments at certain times)
- Automated, guaranteed fines when speeding, running red lights or driving recklessly.
- APIs for cities/counties/regions to influence routing decisions made by maps applications: people are free to drive on small streets but the algorithm should not send them there. Before I started using it, waze, in particular, often steered me to complicated routes via small streets to save 90 seconds in a 15 minute trip. Cities should be able to align traffic engineering decisions at all levels.
- Automated engine shutoff and notifications to prevent idling and educate folks. I see people browsing for minutes before/after driving, with the engine on. People eating in their cars with the engine on, etc. In front of folks sitting at a cafe etc. Just ignominious stuff given the noise, heat and air pollution output (idling generates more toxic exhaust than driving).