Good public transit > self driving cars
Good public transit > self driving cars
104 comments
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I've been saying for years "self driving cars are solving the wrong problem". The problem isn't that I have to steer my car. The problem is I need a fucking car to go anywhere worth going.
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somebody should do a compilation including data about:
- the costs of public transport against private cars, for the whole city
- the space consumption for parking your private cars in a city compared to the space consumption for all public transport vehicles
and make a statistics and post it here
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They have (I've seen them, but don't have a link sorry) and car free or semi car free with good bike and public infrastructure is almost always cheaper and more efficient
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Or even
Wait for it
SELF DRIVING TRANSIT
Which yes is already a thing too
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Okay
but what, hear me out now.
What if we just got a bunch of self driving cars.
and we linked them together to increase capacities.
and had them run on a dedicated path
and create special locations where these car links come and go on a regular schedule, so people can get on and off predictably?
It'll be new, neverbefore seen, and revolutionary! /s
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And much easier to implement than self driving cars
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I saw a video recently by a car enthusiast who hates the idea of self driving cars for a novel reason.
Even if self-driving cars are safer than people it won’t stop bad owners. People who drive with unsafe mechanical issues they can’t or won’t get fixed are still going to exist, and bald tires and worn brakes would eliminate any potential safety benefits of self driving.
And by further removing people from the operation of a car, you’re making them worse owners. They won’t know what a worn tie rod bushing would feel like because they never steer. Making cars into appliances just makes them less safe.
He also made a point that I agree with: If we get people who don’t want to drive off the road, the roads would be nicer for people who do want to drive.
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People who drive with unsafe mechanical issues they can’t or won’t get fixed are still going to exist, and bald tires and worn brakes would eliminate any potential safety benefits of self driving.
In European nations we just inspect the shit out of every car to ensure safety. The car must be mechanically satisfactory and have adequate brakes, tyres, etc.
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In the US only 19 states have mandatory periodic safety inspections
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Back when I used to agree with Mush, he said something I still agree with, "you don't want flying cars, because you don't want a poorly maintained car to fly around and lose a hubcap".
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Also having worked in the industry the "if" in "Even if self-driving cars are safer than people" is carrying the weight of the sun. You might be able to get them safer than humans in a specific subset of circumstances but I would never trust one.
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I somewhat disagree with this. If you can feel worn tires, brakes, or suspension bushings, it's easy to imagine the car feeling them and raising a service alert, and locking out if not appropriately serviced.
Vendor lock-in and enshittification, baby.
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Certain things are fairly easy to detect like wheel imbalance vibration or a bad muffler sounds. but there’s so many “vibes plus experience” things that I don’t think software will catch. The human brain is exceptionally good at picking signal out of noise, and “feeling” a bad set of tires or an old timer being able to “hear” how healthy your motor is, aren’t really things you can teach an algorithm.
I’m sure somebody will try to predict failures, but it might not go well. Surely it will be used to gouge consumers, and of course the owners of self-driving cars won’t know any better.
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Imagine getting in your car and it refusing to drive you anywhere because the wear sensor on the brake pads is bad, but everything else is fine.
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Worn tire is almost impossible to detect if without any physical inspection, and sensor just can't cut it. Sometime it worn on the side because of bad alignment, sometime it's the middle, sometime it's uneven for whatever reason. Unless you want your car to be all sensor, which is the reason recent car is such a nightmare to maintain, you wouldn't want a tyre wear sensor that you have to clean the sensor once in a while, which that time could be used to physically inspect your tire.
Imagine having sensor all over your suspension, tierod, tire, and one fault is detected mean it's towing time. That would be a nightmare of a nightmare.
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So many times watching a car crash video, someone hydroplanes through a puddle …. my first reaction is I bet they live somewhere without safety inspections and those tires are bald
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A solution to this would be if mechanics would come to every owner's house, inspect the cars, and do repairs, but that's not unique to autonomous cars. Plus, that's super expensive. Not the best solution by far.
Alternatively, since the cars are autonomous, they could report to repair facilities on their own, and return to owners once repairs are complete. This might be a decent solution if the owner can program which repair facility the car should go to, likely based on what's cheapest or well known.
These are the only solutions I can think of that don't include a third party owning the cars themselves, with monitor where the cars are and can direct them to their own repair facility (or one of their choosing). Doesn't really seem so far off from the owner's having this control now that I think of it.
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Any sane country has mandatory periodic safety inspections for vehicles. No need to have mechanics inspect cars at people's homes since owners are required to bring them to the garage every few years.
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Manufacturers would probably require owners to go to their garages, autonomous cars would probably kill of most independent mechanics. Then we'll see massive price gouging and planned obsolescence - this is the same industry that had widespread cheating on emission testing after all
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If we get to the point of self-driving cars, it'd make sense that the car would refuse to drive if it's unsafe enough
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How would it know? Might be able to figure out that it has reduced braking capacity but most everything else could either just be seen as road conditions or require about a thousand pounds of sensors that may still not be able to figure it out. And that’s not talking about the person who will “fix their car” in the most unhinged ways possible, like the video I saw of the guy that replaced his brake lines with clear plastic hose.
I do all the work on my car myself, and can pretty confidently say that a lot of stuff just isn’t even possible to monitor. There are ways to monitor a lot more than we do right now but diagnosing issues is pretty complicated and without certain information it can be downright impossible. I took a friend’s car for a drive be auss he said it shook only when turning one direction and I nearly immediately clocked it as something loose with the outside wheel(it was the lugnuts) but for something like that a computer just couldn’t know.
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I'm hearing you want continental Europe
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Shame that they don't want me. ;_;
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exceptions may apply
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*western continental Europe
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*and affordable. The trains by me are barely affordable, so I will only take them if absolutely necessary. It would be amazing if it was cheap enough that I could just pick a place to go and explore without needing a reason.
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Free at point of service. No more of this regressive individual riders pay nonsense.
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Self driving buses though can be very useful!
No labor cost to drive the bus means it suddenly becomes a lot cheaper to operate buses with less capacity. Meaning, more frequent buses in low density neighborhoods.
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Lets go a step farther and put that bus on tracks, which will make it even easier and safer to implement self driving.
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maybe we can connect multiple busses together and that way it can carry more on the same track!
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Hear me out:
We give them road specifically for them, make them self driving, give them lidar and whatever sensor to be safe, paint a specific coloured line on the route, direct them to only self-drive on that line so no deviation = no worry with traffic, and call them well-trained bus.
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Tracks are cool but kinda difficult to cover the suburbs with them!
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But this would be eye wateringly expensive. Imagine all the towns and villages that buses serve and now lay rail on all the roads. But it would be even more crazy since the idea would be to increase frequency and variety of destinations.
Now you also need to buy expensive trams (relative to a bus), maintain both rail and roads.
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If they are electric maybe. Busses are loud as fuck.
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My city in Florida just started a self driving bus system...its a pilot program of course. I should go downtown just to take a ride.
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Boring?
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Yeah, public transit so common and part of day-to-day it's unremarkable and boring.
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Hell yeah!
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Start with one city. Designate one city and allow everybody who wants public transport to move there. The city will be public transport paradise soon.
Downvoters, what's wrong with that approach? You know Divide and Conquer. To make a change, resources have to be focussed. Have one successful city and others will want to follow.
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There are many other factors than public transport that attract/attach people to a city or town. Like friends, families and jobs. And it takes a long time to build a city from nothing and even longer to rebuild an existing city. I don't think it will be as smooth as it sounds in your comment.
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"just move to the middle of nowhere and then build your own integrated public transit bro"
If there was some movement like that, it would be both easier and more effective to just move to a city with good public transit, Seoul or Beijing or Shenzhen if you have a fetish for electric cars.
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Designate one city
That's not nowhere.
The big decoupling is coming. Moving to China is not an option for everybody who hates cars.
What about all the other political demands that are ignored forever? To make a change, actions have to be taken which require majorities. The easiest path would be to meet in one city. The frightening part is that it could be successful.
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Self-driving cars would be real neat though to use the existing infrastructure. But that's in addition to great public transit
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I want self driving cars to take me home at night when public transit is down or partially down.
This happens in major cities with big public transit network (Paris, Tokyo).
The people that need to move at this hour isn't big.
104 comments
Copenhagen pretty much has this. So easy to get around everywhere.