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I like Filip Piekniewski's take on this [0] - deep learning is appropriate for environments where the cost of mistakes is low (or the errors are reversible) and you're able to 'average them out'. Self-driving cars are absolutely not in that category.
"If your errors are irreversible and you can't average them out, and your application is in open domain where there will never be a shortage of out of distribution samples, you are royally screwed. That is why I'm so skeptical of self driving cars, since that is exactly the application described."
For me it's obvious the real issue are the edge cases - of course a self-driving car does fine in 99%+ of cases, but those small % of outlier cases are the ones where people potentially die. I suspect an entirely different approach is required to supplement/supplant the deep learning one and fully autonomous vehicles are still quite some way off.
I do like all of the driver assist advantages coming out of this work however! I don't think you can underestimate the value of having technology that works _with_ a driver until the point where self-driving cars become viable.
[0]:
https://blog.piekniewski.info/2020/06/08/ai-the-no-bullshit-...
I can see it being possible to "average out" the mortality of self-driving cars when you consider how high road mortality is. But they won't be the same deaths, some would be things a human driver would avoid. We generally define the safety requirements of self-driving cars as being close to airliner reliability but also generally accept that roads, cars and drivers have much lower standards than that right now. So in this environment we can very soon be stuck in an uncanny valley where self-driving cars would already be a net positive in reducing road fatalities but at a level that is still generally considered unacceptable.
>when you consider how high road mortality is
Except, depending upon your perspective, it really isn't most places. In the US it's about one fatality per 100 million miles driven and that includes driving under difficult conditions like snowstorms. People drive a lot so that still adds up to a lot of deaths per year. But the _rate_ is not really all that high.
That rate is on the order of 1000x worse than airliners which was the comparison as that's the level of reliability people are expecting from self-driving cars. A self-driving car that's 100x worse than the airliner standard would still save 90% of all road fatalities. And yet saving 30k lives might still not be enough for people to accept such a lower standard compared to an airliner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...
That seems an unrealistic bar especially as a hypothetical self-driving vehicle will be co-existing with human-driven cars even on main roads for the foreseeable future. Furthermore, airliners are flown by a pair of trained professionals, within an air traffic control system that minimizes their exposure to most serious threats, and are mostly (some bird strikes, sensor failures, etc. notwithstanding) flying under conditions that are fairly predictable. OTOH, I doubt a self-driving vehicle will be all that better at dealing with a deer jumping out in front of a car, unexpected road debris, or black ice all that much better than an alert human driver. (And possibly worse given that a human driver may pick up on certain cues that an automated system might not.)
Something here is unrealistic, that's the point. I'm not so sure it's the reliability threshold for self-driving cars though. I'm more amazed at our continuing acceptance of the risks in driving. Having two pilots, air traffic control, maintenance standards, etc, are all regulation driven. Why do we have all those regulations if we're willing to accept 1000x worse in cars with much more lax regulation?
> OTOH, I doubt a self-driving vehicle will be all that better at dealing with a deer jumping out in front of a car, unexpected road debris, or black ice all that much better than an alert human driver. (And possibly worse given that a human driver may pick up on certain cues that an automated system might not.)
I'd expect the opposite actually. Humans are incredibly slow reacting in the best of circumstances and they often drive distracted. They also suck at reacting even when they do which is why we now have automatic systems to reinforce braking in presumed emergencies as humans don't consistently apply full brakes in emergency situations. Collision avoidance in a few milliseconds with reliable reactions should make quite a few of those scenarios much better.
>Why do we have all those regulations if we're willing to accept 1000x worse in cars with much more lax regulation?
I think it boils down to "because we can and still have a viable commercial airline industry." (And general aviation is much riskier than commercial airlines.) Whereas were we to vastly increase the training, maintenance schedules, monitoring of driver alertness, and requirements to have all the latest safety features, you're probably effectively eliminating driving for most people who can't just hire a professional driver/car.
For many things, we accept that we could make things safer if we wanted to. But were we to do so, we'd effectively be banning the activity or at least severely restricting it. (Which is probably one reason why we don't really have flying cars.)
I agree with most of this, except for the unexpected rapid-response examples you list - I would expect an autonomous collision-avoidance system to react faster than a human being when faced with a deer in the road or someone running a light (otherwise - it's not a very good collision avoidance system!)
It can react faster to an object. But, under at least some circumstances, a human might recognize potentially questionable road conditions in a way that an autonomous vehicle would not. (Of course, presumably the human could also tell the autonomous vehicle to slow down.) And I've definitely seen animals at the side of the road looking they may be inclined to run out.
Overall, I don't really disagree on net though.
This statistic is in terms of passenger miles, but airplanes travel much faster per car, and airplane journeys are normally much longer than a typical car ride.
So, planes might be around 500x better per pax-mile, but per pax-journey they're just about 5x better.
Incidentally, the fatality rate for self driving cars should be also around 5x better (per vehicle mile) than human drivers for wide spread acceptance, according to an 2018 study.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180530132959.h...
Per-distance statistics may stretch the risk perception as people use planes for different trips than cars. But per journey statistics seems a much bigger error in the other direction. Fatalities with airliners are pretty close to 0 per year whereas 30k+ people a year die in car accidents. Most people know of someone that died that way whereas any airplane accident is national news. 5x really understates that difference. I don't think per-journey numbers are reasonable as a comparison.
The study showing 5x is quite neat, thanks. I expect this to be a floor for the difference though. Once some of the deaths with self-driving cars are shown to be things that human drivers would easily avoid the requirements will be higher, even if in total 5x better has been achieved. For widespread acceptance I'd bet on 10x as a minimum and 100x at the extreme, depending on what types of accidents are in there that shape the perception.
> as that's the level of reliability people are expecting from self-driving cars
Why do you think this? It makes sense to me intuitively that people would be willing to accept more death causes by other people than more opaque and unfamiliar autonomous systems, but I haven't seen any hard data on this and am curious. Is this mentioned somewhere in the Wikipedia article that you linked or did you just share that to demonstrate the other number you mention?
The Wikipedia article is just for the fatality statistics. The expectation of airliner reliability for self-driving cars is what I get from the discussions around this. Here on HN and in other places. Maybe it will be lower and the uncanny valley will be smaller but I wouldn't bet on it. People are much more afraid of flying than of driving even though driving is much riskier. And that's because you're much more willing to accept risks when you think you're in control of them. Self-driving cars will take that illusion of personal control away.
Gotcha, OK. Yeah, I agree with you directionally.
I think firstly it's going to be tough with long-tail edge case deaths to really be sure the numbers will be less than human drivers until self-driving cars are unleashed in sufficient numbers.
Secondly, even if you're right (and you may well be) - imagine that a common edge case was a small child jumping out in front of the car. Would we want to accept a vehicle that consistently ran them over? The raw numbers might be better but that doesn't fully paint a picture of what those numbers would look like.
I also think the 'will randomly kill people, but rarely' aspect of self-driving cars will be majorly off-putting on a very human level.
And finally there's a perception issue here - the self-driving hype is around the idea that the car is effectively being driven by a far better driver than a human, the second it turns out it does really crazy things sometimes (doesn't even have to involve fatalities necessarily) is also going to put people off I think.
I personally prefer the idea of driver assists (responsibly developed so drivers aren't just distracted) aiding driver safety while we work on a supplemental self-driving solution, or perhaps as discussed in the article create some infrastructure along roads to make things more certain.
I am far from being against self-driving cars, I just feel the timeline is longer than currently hyped.
I agree completely. My take from the situation is much more that we are far far too lenient with our standards for cars, roads, and particularly drivers. We've set the bar so low that the technology has a good chance of clearing it soon but only serve to reveal how actually uncomfortable we are with such a low bar that we've normalized over time.
Another point might be attribution. It's horrible when a driver is tired, drunk or simply misses something - but on a human level, you can understand what's going on. Also, you know the guy at fault and that he will be punished (at least, somewhat).
An autonomous vehicle, in comparison, is not relatable at all. Some equation delivered some wrong result, maybe it was something in the training set, so that's why the car suddenly drove into you. Bad luck. If you're lucky, you get some damage payments from the car company, if you happen to have enough money for a very good lawyer.
Sure, as a technical person, I understand some of the possible errors, but it still feels like a complex system that one cannot relate too with hardly understandable edge case behaviour. That's probably why we're so much more lenient with humans.
Might be interesting to integrate an AI based self.drivinf system with several additional driver assistance systems, each using fundamentally different algorithmic solutions, and perhaps even some different sensors.
In many parts of North America you cannot function in society without a license. Therefore, we have sympathy for people because are we going to ask people who aren't good drivers to put their lives on hold on the off chance they kill someone? Better to let them all drive and vilify the unfortunate ones that do. However, with machines they have no personal lives so they are afforded no slack. Humans get to make mistakes because they are only human, but machines get no such affordances... even if the net benefit is there.
I think what further compounds this is that normally responsibility for accidents is 'distributed' across the population. whereas with autonomous driving it's going to be a single/a few companies shouldering it all. Being even responsible even just for 10% of total road fatalities (~4000 deaths per year) would be absolutely ruinous if they're held liable for them.
There's (arguably) the limited exception of pharmaceuticals--and, even there, there's a government fund to handle people who get sick or die because of vaccines. But it's hard to otherwise identify products used by consumers that, when maintained and used properly, sometimes randomly kill people and we shrug our shoulders and say "Stuff happens. Still a net benefit to society." We certainly don't do it today in the case of manufacturing or design defects in vehicles.
Responsibility for accidents is concentrated in insurance companies. Nothing substantial will change.
I think the best way to reduce those outlier cases in this phase is to just focus on self driving on the freeway. That's where it has the most value for me, taking over for the long boring hauls.
On the freeway you minimize a lot of those wildcards like bikes and pedestrians, everyone is going about the same speed, and there are only a few places you can enter and exit.
We don't need to jump all the way to self driving in SF, and have people point out all the things that can go wrong, since theres a huge gain just from being able to do it on the freeway.
I totally agree with you.
So why hasn't this happened yet?
I believe this is because what we have here is not a technical problem, but primarily a regulatory and legal problem. If the political leadership of the NHTSA had the will to make highway self-driving happen, they could publish a draft safety and liability standard.
The technical problem here is that while shuttle and robotaxi systems can go slow enough as to make fatal accidents rare, as you said, the most consumer benefit potential is for a highway self-driving system that would not require active monitoring like Autopilot does.
The political/legal question is: _when_ fatal accidents occur, who has the legal liability? If it's the manufacturer, then why would they accept the risk? If it's the driver, then who would actually _go to sleep_ and let their robot potentially kill people? Especially given the problems that Tesla autopilot has with stationary targets in the road.
It's possible that the key innovation required here is not anything technical, but an _insurance_ product that would allow the manufacturer to assume the liability, but be insured for damages. This insurance product would involve a deep technical evaluation of the self-driving system to get actuarial-level probabilities of mortality.
On the NHTSA website, there are many >50 self-driving test sites, but only 3 which are classified as "highway". The most common vehicle type is "shuttle". A full self-driving airport shuttle, with purpose-built road markings, makes a lot of sense as a goal achievable with today's technology, and is far more likely to kill people due to its controlled built environment and slow speeds.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/automated-vehicles-safety/av-test-init...
My proposal is that we treat liability in the self driving car space similar to the way we have a specialized liability framework for vaccines [1]. Similar to vaccines, self driving cars would lead to reduced deaths on aggregate, but there are cases where the technology fails and people are injured/killed. In the case of vaccines, consumers cannot sue the manufacturers using regular courts but instead there is a separate system where the standard for liability is much higher.
[1]
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/driverless-car-stopped-lawyer...
> In the case of vaccines, consumers
> cannot sue the manufacturers using
> regular courts but instead there is
> a separate system where the standard
> for liability is much higher.
So when your car runs me over, I cannot even get my medical bills paid?!
And you wonder why there is no political will behind this?
> For me it's obvious the real issue are the edge cases - of course a self-driving car does fine in 99%+ of cases, but those small % of outlier cases are the ones where people potentially die. I suspect an entirely different approach is required to supplement/supplant the deep learning one and fully autonomous vehicles are still quite some way off.
Why is that every time the safety of self driving cars is brought up, people appear to ignore that human drivers are not 100% perfect. There are on average of 104 deaths on the road each day in the US. if we can get that number to 50 people, that's a net positive.
Self driving cars don't need to be perfect, just better than us.
So the question shouldn't be "are SDC perfect yet?" but "are they better than us?"
I think you misinterpret what I said, it is the edge case scenarios where fatalities tend to occur. Of course in humans that can be due to drunkeness or distraction or confusion, nobody is claiming human drivers are perfect, but if it is the 'weird' situations that tend to result in accidents and deep learning tends to make mistakes in 'weird' circumstances, that doesn't fill me with confidence.
Also it is not at all obvious that self driving cars will do better than humans. Perhaps they will, but it isn't just about numbers. As I alluded to in another comment, imagine if they had 50% of the human death rate but it was all small children and occurred seemingly randomly. Do you think that would be acceptable and a better outcome? These things are less black and white than they might seem.
Another factor is that with deep learning it is fully a black box. It is very difficult to understand WHY a particular course of action was taken, whereas in human cases you can usually determine this. The why might also be limited, e.g. 'human child was mislabelled as stop sign' or similar, which just causes further questions.
The fact that you have scenarios the car will definitely not know how to handle combined with a deep level of inscrutability makes it difficult to have confidence in issues being resolved or the technology improving on a safety basis.
If self-driving cars are marginally better at driving than humans, but people take more rides in them out of convenience, it's easy for the technology to result in a net increase of human deaths.
I don't think if all cars were replaced by self driving cars fatalities would go down. In any case there is little evidence to support that. So I am skeptical of this claim that people are being too hard on the self driving cars.
Is the manufacturer gonna take the liability for those deaths?
It seems obvious they'll have to provided the vehicles are being used and maintained in accordance with manufacturer instructions.
Would you get in a vehicle if you could be charged with manslaughter for killing someone through absolutely no fault of your own?
Conversely, can imagine society collectively throwing up their hands in the event of a death caused by an autonomous vehicles and going "Them's the breaks. It's all for the good of society."
SDCs will never be 100% safe because at the end of the day, the underlying task is still to push around a couple tons of metal on heterogeneous roads at speeds requiring dozens of feet of stopping distance.
But if it can get to half the fatality rate of human drivers, that'd be a huge win. And unlike human drivers, every fatality involving an SDC can become a fleet-wide software improvement to, ideally, prevent that failure from ever happening again. That's not something we can do with people; nobody but traffic engineers and wonks read NHTSA reports to find out how accidents could have been avoided.
I suspect the outliers that confound machines will also frequently confound human drivers, so a lot of that is a wash.
The only way to remotely look at this meaningfully is in aggregate. Deaths and losses per million trip-miles.
This is where the momentum will come from. There will be a day where machines reach and surpass the human level, and we'll see a huge momentum towards penalty-boxing human drivers. I fully expect to call Progressive in 2040 and the hologram Flo will tell me that it costs four times as much to insure me if I have the audacity to retain a steering wheel.
I also think there's a snowball factor. Self-driving cars are going to be way more consistent and predictable than human drivers. That only amplifies as more and more vehicles on the road are self-driving. Once you get to 90% self-driving, I could imagine things like increasing speed limits and dynamically organizing convoys for efficiency.
Right. We’d probably be better as a society if we were interested and willing to do some infrastructure projects to alleviate the burden of driving cars. I really wish Elon’s boring company were further along and getting much more headwind for this reason.
I am extremely skeptical of the boring project. The claimed money saving (a 10x improvement vs. every single tunnel digger in the world without any evidence to back it up?) the safety issues of a car breaking down in a tunnel or being brought up and down, the enormous cost with digging deeper tunnels, etc. etc.
Road tunnels exist and have been built all around the world, these kinds of ideas have been tried and ultimately general underground road tunnels are just not economical or particularly safe.
Thunderf00t has done a series of videos debunking these claims [0,1,2]. Unfortunately Elon has a habit of frankly lying which I think does serious harm to public perception of these things.
These kind of infrastructure problems are just hard and have a ton of trade offs, there is no silver bullet.
[0]:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBtL3qDvdZc
[1]:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ezF7NmwQZs
[2]:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hyy-19qyNWE
Rocket launch technology was at a standstill for 30-40 years until Elon Musk founded SpaceX. 15 years later they built reusable rockets. The cost of putting something into orbit is likely to drop by a factor of 100-1000 when SpaceX's next rocket is up and running sometime in the next few years.
It seems like such a waste of time for people to try and debunk these claims from people who are very competent and have access to the best in people and technology. Do they want a world where people don't try new things and make great improvements? One should really encourage people with a track record of getting people together to do amazing things to continue to do so. Elon Musk has stated that he thought that SpaceX had a 10% chance of success. I'm glad he could look at that chance of failure and tried anyway.
I don't follow rocket technology closely, but is SpaceX really unique in regard to reusable rockets? Didn't Blue Origin do each milestone (announcement, vertical landing, relaunch) before SpaceX did?
Why tunnels instead of the Japanese/German solution of ramps/viaducts?
In the same vein, why underground instead of light rail?
See, open air systems like those are much easier to service. Removing a crashed car from that requires just a big crane.
Because tunnels can go under buildings, roads and other tunnels with very little interference.
Bridges can also go above bridges, probably cheaper and safer as well
Underground doesn’t get affected by weather. I wonder whether simply having more tunnels side by side would help for servicing issues. Small, numerous tunnels instead of large tunnels.
Building wide tunnels is very hard and nullifies the main advantage of having the tunnel in the first place, which is easier routing.
Cost also vastly increases, likelihood of total failure as well. Big tunnels need big supports and big service ducts.
Its quite funny to me that literally everybody that is against Boring company is sighting these 'Thunderf00t' videos, and judging from some of his other videos he has a pretty clear bias. He is also a chemist and why his knowledge of engineering is better then those of the engineers at SpaceX and Elon Musk is highly questionable to me.
> the safety issues of a car breaking down in a tunnel
The cars have front radar and can break. It would stop the line but I don't see how it is a safety issue. Most danger in tunnels is from bidirectional traffic that Boring avoids.
> the enormous cost with digging deeper tunnels
The same could have been said about other Elon Musk projects. Nobody is surprised that an electric car can have better performance and power and yet a diesel driven tunnel boring machine can not be improved? Tunneling is incredibly conservative and uses both diesel driven tunnel boring and diesel driven locomotives to transport out the dirt. The inherent problems of having lots of diesel engines a tunnel are quite clear and eliminating it has clear operational advantages.
> underground road tunnels are just not economical or particularly safe
What the evidence for underground one-way tunnels not being safe?
> These kind of infrastructure problems are just hard and have a ton of trade offs, there is no silver bullet.
Therefore we should try to improve it with modern technology from other fields? Its not a silver bullet, it is tacking new technology from automotive and aerospace and applying it to tunneling and mass transportation.
> a diesel driven tunnel boring machine
!?
I'm not a tunnel building specialist, but a cursory search seems to indicate that tunnel boring machines _commonly already are_ electrically powered by simply using a very long high voltage cable stretching all the way from the tunnel entrance.
Whether that cable then connects to the electricity grid, or to a bunch of temporary diesel generators stationed _outside_ of the tunnel is a different matter, which in any case doesn't bear on the tunnel boring itself.
The boring company is a bet on improving tunneling machines for speed and cost. This might not be realized but there's no good argument that proves it to be impossible.
There are fields where physical limits were already reached, for example rocket engines specific impulse has barely improved since the 60s because of fundamental chemistry, but this is not the case for tunnels.
Provided enough funding it should be possible to dig faster, and cheaper per km.
>_I really wish Elon’s boring company were further along_
It's unfathomable to me that people believe car tunnels are the future of anything.
Right now The Boring Company is trying to recreate an underground train in Las Vegas, and is already behind schedule and running into issues people predicted before this started:
https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/16/21519692/elon-musk-borin...
What the difference between electric buses behind each other in a tunnel compared to multiple rail way cars behind each other?
One system is cheaper because the units are mass produced far more often and the system is more flexible.
Carrying around a battery rather then having complex high power electronics along the tunnel seems like a no brainier as well.
Las Vegas is literally a first of its kind system, being a few month behind is not surprising or concerning. And the problems have to do with specific fire codes, not any inherent flaw in the system.
Agree. Personal rapid transit system might work but cars, nope!
It's been stated elsewhere in this thread, but there really are a lot of practical, well-understood engineering issues with Elon's proposals that he refuses to admit or deal with. Here's a somewhat humorous review of his claims / what's wrong with them and how they stack up to actual civil engineering projects:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dn6ZVpJLxs
It's actually very interesting .. humans/lifeforms are wired to deal with critical irreversible errors.
I have a feeling I'll be down voted to hell for this, but self driving cars always felt like going the complete wrong direction for me. Aside from small personal satisfaction to the few that will be able to afford them, how is revolving our infrastructure and culture around them any better than simply investing in public transportation by making it a more feasible option for people?
I'm not in the US, and while the public transportation system here is far from perfect, I've managed to get by this far without a car and don't plan on buying one anytime soon. I much prefer a future where this is improved compared to one I have to fork tens of thousands of USD for a chromatic death machine.
I really wish people would stop claiming that the solution to cars is walking or public transport. I don't have a car either but claiming that people should "stop driving" is not a serious approach.
Cars are extremely useful and are not going anywhere. They have problems like carbon emissions and being extremely dangerous but those will have to be solved while preserving the fundamental utility of a cars: They are individual vehicles that can go nearly anywhere and carry considerable cargo.
I don't think anybody is suggesting that. But if public transport is better, if there are safe paved roads for cyclists, and if city center become safer for pedestrians, then maybe people will buy less cars and drive less miles...
The problem is:
1.) Public transportation in the US is at best, tolerable. Usually far worse. Not just in terms of coverage and utility, but in terms of cleanliness and safety. People use it because they have no other choice that is affordable. Get it to a level of quality like Tokyo or Seoul and more people would use it because they actually like it. I doubt that will happen anytime soon due to cultural issues, unless people are willing to tolerate draconian levels of enforcement.
2.) Bicycles are awesome, but you have to contend with precipitation, sweat, and theft. E-bikes help somewhat with the sweat, but then you have "traditionalists" that are trying to fight tooth and nail to ban them, and they are even more inviting theft targets. And you can still work up quite a sweat on an e-bike. Rain is still a problem.
3.) Living close to city centers is abominably expensive. People can drive in, or take public transportation in. But then go back to #1 in regards to public transportation.
> Public transportation in the US is at best, tolerable.
I think this is very dependent on where you live, in both DC and the Bay I think public transportation is good, but expensive. To me, the problem more appears to be an American cultural aversion to intermingling the working class and the "professional" class of people.
> 2.) Bicycles are awesome, but you have to contend with precipitation, sweat, and theft.
Every mode of transportation has some downsides. You could say 'Cars are awesome, but you have to contend with about ~40k people dying in crashes every year.'
> 3.) Living close to city centers is abominably expensive
Hm, maybe if we could densify cities by removing some of these large paved spaces that people are supposed to stay away from.
Regarding your first point, it's to a degree, subjective. But I would classify Bay Area transit to be pretty bad. Have not been to DC, but I live in NYC, where Newyorkers are often fanatically proud of the subway system. But I think the NYC subways are disgusting and horrible compared to say, Seoul, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore, etc. which while still imperfect, are the shining examples of what good, proper, public transit systems should be like. Various European cities also have far better subways.
Then again, many Newyorkers think the subways in those cities are horrible and unusable just because they don't operate between ~1-5AM.
>Cars are extremely useful
I agree, but I also think this is part of the problem.
Choosing to use public transportation for longer distances is a significant personal cost, while the benefit of lower costs in externalities is almost invisible.
Conversely, driving a car has a comparatively lower personal cost, essentially negative, since it increase freedom of movement. But the externalities are conveniently hidden by our economic and political systems.
Public transportation is synchronous by necessity. Private transportation is asynchronous. There are tremendous economic benefits to asynchronous transport. The truth is a robust system would have a healthy mix of both.
I absolutely agree, the synchronous/asynchronous description is both absolutely apt and correct.
But the choice for the individual is muddled by the very concept of externalities.
It’s cheaper to pollute our planet, than enduring the inconvenience of public transport.
But the only reason that is true, is the terrible economic systems we all live under.
> "But the choice for the individual"
End it there and stop trying to make decisions for other people.
Cute!
I’ll easily do that when every single western country stops subsidizing gasoline and shoveling the consequences onto younger generations.
End it there, and stop defending old people destroying the very foundation that humanity depends on.
Cars are extremely useful for traveling long distances, traveling between cities, and for those rare times when you need to haul a lot of stuff, but they are _terrible_ as daily transportation. They are the solution to a made-up problem that they alone exacerbate, which is that our cities are too spread out. There's no particular reason your immediate neighborhood doesn't have a small grocery store and all the other amenities you require for daily living. (That's how we built cities before the automobile, obviously.)
That's a _design choice_ and it's a particularly bad one that's making your life less convenient, your body less healthy, your streets less safe, and your environment more polluted. When everybody drives you get congestion, which forces people to spread out more, which increases the reliance on cars...and so it goes.
The fundamental prerequisite for functional mass transit is a high population density. That's why it works in NYC and doesn't work in Los Angeles.
But that means it's not just a matter of building mass transit. First you have to build taller buildings.
And even then there are going to be places where it's just not happening. It doesn't matter how you change the zoning, nobody is going to build skyscrapers in Pine Bluffs, Wyoming.
LA has an order of magnitude more population than is required for functioning public transit. But you're right they don't have the density.
The key is to realize _the cars themselves killed density_.
Parking lots, parking spaces, and extra lanes all conspire to push humans and human spaces further apart. This then makes walking less feasible, cars more required, and more space required to accommodate those cars in a feedback loop.
Taller buildings are not required for density, far from it. Look at Somerville, MA, where just about nothing is higher than 3 stories, yet they fit almost 20,000 people into a square mile -- and they like it. What they _don't_ fit is 20,000 parking spaces, and that makes all the difference.
The car did not directly kill density, it enabled people to choose less density.
A small number of people like Robert Moses wielded enormous power over how our civil infrastructure was built in the post war period. Moses was famously opposed to public transit, going so far as to deliberately build bridges with overhead clearance too low for buses on routes to one of his beach developments.
During this period the federal dept of transportation was offering to pay 90% of urban freeway projects. There are a few famous examples of people negotiating a different outcome, like the light rail vs mt hood highway in Portland, Oregon. But the bulk of local politicians simply took the free money and built massive freeway infrastructure without much consideration of the future.
So no, this was not some broadly democratic choice or invisible hand of the market. It was a small number of politically powerful people making unilateral decisions using vast government funds.
People wanted to live in the suburbs. It was definitely promoted by government and business leaders, but it was also desired organically by people. It may not seem obvious now, but prior to the suburbs, a lot of people lived in ragged tenement buildings that were in bad shape. The suburbs were a boon to the economy, to standard of living, to incomes, etc. I found a great video from a filmmaker on this subject:
How The US Government Sold Us On The Suburbs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmL6xIg-EJ0
> It may not seem obvious now, but prior to the suburbs, a lot of people lived in ragged tenement buildings that were in bad shape.
A lot of people still do. The people that could afford to move to the suburbs were also people that could afford to move out of tenements in the city, too, generally.
OTOH, it allowed them to be _farther_ from (and outside shared facilities like schools, etc., with) the tenements and the people stuck living in them. (Which, due to economics and outright, overt discrimination in both lending and things like restrictive real estate covenant, especially meant non-Whites.)
I'm aware, and spent a decade living in that sort of neighborhood where most of the buildings are still original to their 20's construction.
The point is that suburban sprawl was something that was ultimately lead by a small group of people, and was done without a lot of foresight, particularly about induced demand.
Of _course_ many people chose the new suburbs. One of the problems with this style of building is that it is indeed very appealing when it's at it's initial lowest density state. The problem is that as people move into the suburbs and congestion begins to rise, suburban sprawl has no answer. Those wide open freeways that felt so fast and convenient initially become the bane of your commute or even doing simple errands.
Then people get frustrated, and believe the only answer is still that same default idea to return to that initial utopia: just expand the freeways even more! Except as we see today, that simply doesn't work, and the pattern just repeats.
The _whole_ context could have been different, and that would have resulted in very different decision making from consumers, particularly today.
I'll use Portland as another example, as I'm both familiar with it and it's something of an outlier on these issues historically. All the cool neighborhoods that are desirable to live in now are where the old streetcar lines used to run. The entire shape of these neighborhoods is different, with high walkability, because of the remnants of that transit system.
The streetcar system here was deliberately deconstructed here, again, largely due to powerful special interests. The auto and tire industry worked quite hard on promoting buses as the new modern approach, a vision local politicians also helped promote.
Today Portland is reconstructing the street car system, as part of a larger overall transit plan. 100 years later we can see we wished we'd just kept and maintained the original track system, and designed our zoning around it.
That's really the core point I want to make: suburban sprawl is a mirage, that appeals initially. However it fundamentally cannot deal with congestion, which means sprawl only has three possible futures: Door one is continued cycles of expansion and induced demand where congestion just gets worse in the long term. Door two is a mode switch, to provide a meaningful transit option to relieve the pressure of congestion without freeway expansion. Door three is economic collapse, where the whole question is mooted because entire subdivisions become blighted places no one wants to live in.
A large portion of US suburbia is headed for door #3 atm over the next half century. Hopefully we can be smarter than we were half a century ago.
I love making the free choice between a car that costs hundreds each month vs unlimited public transit for $90
My time is money, and public transit costs a lot of time and frustration. And with a car, I have freedom to go anywhere.
There is absolutely nothing like a free market in housing. Many low-density suburbs would already have naturally densified if they were allowed to. The reason they have not is that _it's illegal_. People aren't _choosing_ less density. They're _banning_ density.
If that's what people actually wanted, they wouldn't need to regulate it with zoning laws.
That's a distinction without a difference.
It doesn't enable people to choose, it made a choice and forced it upon everyone.
Somerville, MA is in the middle of the Boston metro area. It's saturated with three and four story buildings and the downtown is 10+ story buildings. It's tall buildings.
LA County is full of detached single family homes and undeveloped land.
Downtown? What downtown? We don’t have one.
If your talking about Assembly Row, that’s a “town center” development. Used to be a movie theater and a sea of parking lots. It doesn’t factor into Somerville’s style of urbanism.
You could argue Davis Square or Union Square I suppose. Bit, no, there's really no urban core the way Boston has one. I'd note that, in spite of that, Somerville is the 16th densest city in the US (with the caveat that comparing city densities involves somewhat arbitrary political boundaries). Cambridge is pretty much in the same boat and is at #26.
OP called out "skyscrapers". What counts as the precise cutoff for "tall buildings" is always going to be a matter of opinion.
But I live in Cambridge, MA and I can assure you Somerville would remain one of the densest cities in the union if every last building therein was lopped down to 3 stories by a giant lawnmower.
> The key is to realize the cars themselves killed density.
People have very naive explanations of why the US is so bad at density and urbanism. Canada and Australia, which are very similar to the US, have very dense cities like Montreal, Toronto, and Melbourne. Do they not have cars in Canada and Australia? If you want to find the real reason why all other developed countries have dense cities with good public transport, but the US doesn't, you need to look at what's different between the US and all other developed countries.
Canada might have certain urban areas with public transport, but huge swaths of the country depend on cars. That is the same situation as the U.S. except we've got 10x the population as Canada...so we've got more people in more places. As for Australia, a huge chunk of the country is desert, and most people are situated along the coasts.
The U.S. doesn't want urbanism. People by and large do not want to live in dense urban areas. Some people like it, but it's not everyone's cup of tea. With the remote work revolution, it's going to become even less appealing to live in a dense urban area.
There's a trope here that the US is some incredible outlier when it comes to per capita auto ownership. It's not. It's in the same ballpark as other wealthy developed countries. It's poorer countries (in Europe and elsewhere) that have lower rates of car ownership. According to a recent Pew survey [1], the US has slightly lower per capita car ownership than Italy and is in the ballpark of countries like France, Germany, South Korea, and Japan.
[1]
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-17/a-pew-sur...
).
People who don't want density should be free to avoid it. What they _should not_ be allowed to do is pass laws that prevent the rest of us from enjoying the benefits of density. The primary reason we don't have increased density in the United States is _that it's illegal_ in most cities to build enough new housing to meaningfully densify neighborhoods.
From the internet:
_Even Vancouver—Canada’s densest major city with 5,493 people per square kilometre—ranks 13th out of 30, and is significantly less dense than San Francisco (7,171 people per square kilometre), a comparable west coast city. In Toronto, there are 4,457 people per square kilometre. In fact, Toronto’s population could triple and the city would still barely have the density of Brooklyn (14,541).
And crucially, Toronto’s population density is less than many other American cities including Philadelphia (4,512), Chicago (4,594) and Boston (5,376)._
>_Even Vancouver—Canada’s densest major city with 5,493 people per square kilometre—ranks 13th out of 30, and is significantly less dense than San Francisco (7,171 people per square kilometre), a comparable west coast city._
The transit systems in both cities operate across the _entire metro area_ not just the "city" proper.
Vancouver Metro Area: 2,463,431 / 2,878km² = 856 persons per km²
San Francisco Metro Area: 4,729,484 / 9,128km² = 518 persons per km²
(Numbers from Wikipedia)
>_Toronto’s population could triple and the city would still barely have the density of Brooklyn (14,541)_
Brooklyn is not a city. It's a densely populated subsection of one.
>_crucially, Toronto’s population density is less than many other American cities including Philadelphia (4,512), Chicago (4,594)_
I'm not sure why you think Chicago and Philly are not comparable to Toronto despite being being only 1% and 3% more dense. They're effectively all the same density for the purpose of this discussion.
To put those density numbers in a bit more perspective: the entire country of the Netherlands has a population density of 521 persons per km². This is including the rural areas. While I wouldn't want to be without a car and happily own two, I can take public transit within walking distance from home, and I'm on the far outskirts of the country.
My (simplified) understanding is that it's more about the ideals. Back in the day, part of the American dream was to live in a semi-secluded suburban neighborhood and own 2+ cars per family. Only the poor and young people were expected to live in city centers. Therefore, the affluent citizens spread out, and cities evolved to cater to their needs, i.e., support private cars and the road system at the cost of not properly funding public transportation. In European cities the ideal was the opposite, and it was thought that only peasants would stay secluded and all the affluent people should live in the cities, which in turn should have great public transportation for practical reasons. I'd imagine that ideal extended to Canadian and Australian cities as well.
The difference is the treatment of poor & homeless. Public transit buildings/vehicles are some of the only inside spaces where they can spend time. Then people with enough money avoid public transit as much as possible. Then they vote against more funding for transit because it is not useful to them.
Toronto: not actually that dense.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+density+tor...
Well…OK, the core of Toronto is pretty dense, but the megasprawl that is amalgamated Toronto is not that dense.
But good luck getting by in any non-major metro area in Canada without a car. Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver…maybe Ottawa…it's doable, but the second you get into the suburbs, or cottage country, it's Subaru time.
> very dense cities like Montreal
Remember it was founded in 1642. The older a city is, the more dense it is.
LA also happens to have a vast bus system that is heavily used.
We do not have subways partly because it would be very hard to build them in LA's geology. Seismic activity as well things like natural tar pits.
Historically I don't think its right to say cars killed the density. LA was several cities that grew into each other. Part of the reason LA is so wide is because of white flight to the outskirts. Do you build transit for something like that?
> _almost 20,000 people into a square mile_
That's less than 1/3 the density of Manhattan and about on par with SF.
Right...
>where just about nothing is higher than 3 stories
The point is that cars destroy density regardless of what your building height limits are.
You don't have to build skyscrapers to achieve high population density, you just have to build 3-6 story buildings close together. See Paris for an example. And you can have functional public transport at modest population density as long as the road network is a well connected grid and not a maze of cul-de-sacs. See Toronto for an example.
I agree that most of the US has been designed explicitly around the car, but there is no need to be fatalistic about it. Most US cities (including LA) had good public transportation before WW2, and they could have it again if they wanted.
Yeah, there's a cool project [1] that maps out all the historic streetcar routes in SF. There used to be a LOT of them, they all got ripped out to make more room for cars. There were rail tracks on the bay bridge! Those got ripped out in 1956 apparently. Everything was converted to buses so yeah, there's still public transit but I definitely feel like something valuable was lost there. I'd also argue that much of the bay area was built for street cars (they existed after all!) and we could always put them back if there was a compelling cost/benefit to doing so.
[1]
LA has good public transportation but car-induced sprawl makes it less useful than it could be, and car culture here makes public transportation less appealing and less used than it could be. but if you live & work near one of the train lines, it’s awesome.
The rest of the world is rife with small, rural towns that nevertheless have great public transit systems, or at least ones that are more effective than what we see in the US. The major difference is that these places are willing to invest in the public sphere, and they're by and large willing to permit construction that is not car-centric (i.e., no parking minima to subsidize drivers).
Could you give a few examples of small rural towns where people can afford cars but instead the town has great public transit? Genuinely curious!
Iowa City, Iowa
Am I missing something? Iowa City seems to have only busses, and they run hourly. Perhaps I'm wrong?
If I'm not wrong, then we have vastly different definitions of "great public transit" -- I would not be happy there without a car.
Redmond, Oregon
Am I missing something here too? Redmond seems to have only inter-city busses.
Whistler, BC
> The fundamental prerequisite for functional mass transit is a high population density.
This just doesn't seem to be true. It probably needs some density (think "town", not "farmland") but the fundamental prerequisite is a commitment to planning and building public transit infrastructure, rather than automobile focused infrastructure.
Lot's of relatively low density places in Europe, Japan, etc. have very functional public mass transit. It's not universal, but there are good examples.
If you start with the assumption that approximately everyone has a car, you can choose build cities in ways that only support that...
Precisely. And the second fundamental prerequisite is frequency. Make public transport frequent enough, and with privileged access (eg bus lanes) and it will be more convenient than private cars.
> The fundamental prerequisite for functional mass transit is a high population density.
What does "high" mean? I think this should be quantified, preferably by someone qualified.
Unqualified opinion: It seems to me that if we took all of the money spent on personal vehicles, time spent driving, fuel and emission costs, infrastructure maintenance, and costs to human happiness + safety, we would be able to provide a better transportation system.
That's not exactly true. Bus systems are viable for low-density urban areas. Indeed, prior to the mass adoption of the automobile, buses and streetcars were fairly ubiquitous, even in such heavily urbanized areas as Peoria (population at the time: 70k).
Running a bus isn't that expensive. Running one every 15 minutes around a small town in a loop isn't that expensive.
I don't think there's anything fundamental about density. Its about ridership and funding. Even LA could have functional mass transit if it had the will to fund 15-minute busses on a grid all day. A 25 cent tax on gas would do it. If even 2 people average rode each bus, it'd break even on traffic density as well?
Listen you’re totally right.
But even if car people lived somewhere with the best public transport in the world, they would drive.
It’s not about technology or even reality. This conversation is a lot like trying to tell private health insurance users about single payer systems. Or private school users about federalized education. Or telling people with 4 children or 0 children how to live in a world where a thing like the sedan is designed for people with 2 children.
It is telling rich people you know better and also they are wrong, which is not an emotion you’re permitted to send.
Many people are stretching the budget to have a car. With an adequate bus system that gets you anywhere in town taxi distance with a maximum single transfer of 15 minutes, there are perhaps many who's lives would be greatly improved by ditching the car. Or even just keeping the job if the car breaks down. Or using the car just for weekend jaunts.
> 25 cent tax on gas would do it. If even 2 people average rode each bus, it'd break even on traffic density as well?
Busses accelerate, decelerate, and turn differently than cars, so even if in terms of steady-state flow the two-riders = break-even argument is correct, it's not in city traffic.
Moreover, I'd like to see your work on operating and capital costs, especially accounting for road wear for which the usual approximate rule of thumb is that it varies with the fourth power of vehicle weight.
Well, I'm repeating something my old boss Eric Carlson at Unisys said, in his Master's thesis on City Planning.
And remember, the City busses are running only every 15 minutes. So whatever effect they have on localized traffic, it's very intermittent.
The city I live in has around 65 thousand people and has perfectly functional public transportation. This doesn't ring true for me.
Los Angeles is spread out _because_ it had functional mass transit at the turn of the last century. The Red Car interurban line sprawled out from downtown into the county and housing popped up six blocks on the side from every stop. Later mass car ownership filled in the blocks further out and the space in-between stops.
In that same period, just about every large town and small city had a trolley line.
You don't need skyscrapers for mass transit. Just enough political will to keep it funded.
> The fundamental prerequisite for functional mass transit is a high population density.
The Chinese and Japanese rail networks would like a word.
Twenty years ago I interned in a small robotics company, and one of scientists there was a Phd from Berkeley. He had done his thesis on dynamic controls for autonomous vehicles. I was asking him a bunch of questions, and at the end he just said that it's a moral question, and that they've already solved all these problems -- "you just connect the cars together physically, and it's called a train". I thought it was pretty funny and insightful.
The city that I live in is very spread out.
The idea of hopping from a subway to a bus to another bus just to get to a doctor's appointment sounds awful. And if I had to take 4 young kids along with me for the trip, double awful.
For the denser cities - my wife and I lived in SF for close to five years. As our family grew, and the city space grew more populous, parking spots were really rare. Getting to a pediatric appointment was misery. We knew the above scenario was our future. And it sounded completely miserable. So we moved to a spread out, suburban city.
I want to go directly to the location and start the errand as soon as possible. I hate waiting or slow buses or waiting for people to get on, get off. I just want to be able to go.
Indeed, the creature comforts of a car is probably the big reason they are so successful compared to the alternatives. I rode public transportation well into my late twenties I think. When some folks would accompany me for the trip at times they didn't even own hardy thick winter coats to be able to bear the cold elements outside. People who haven't had to spend significant times standing and waiting to be picked up outside can be pretty shocked at how unpleasant the experience can be, especially given harsher locations.
Come to reflect more on the public transportation experience you'd often overhear people's aspirations and progress towards car ownership, especially among the teens from what I recall. Forgot all about that frequent occurrence.
Your city is very spread out because everyone has a car. This is why this is such a difficult problem - transport networks, whether road or rail - are a fundamental part of the anatomy of a city. You can't simply take a city which grew up around driving and replace that with taking the train, any more that you can transplant a crab's exoskeleton into a rabbit.
Nonetheless, our cities must eventually become crabs. So we need to have a plan for how we're going to make that transformation gradually, as the cities grow and evolve.
Agreed, but self-driving cars would enable self driving buses and they could be great.
One problem with buses is that paying the drivers is expensive. As a result buses need to be big to amortize the cost of the driver across lots of users. But big buses don't work well in low demand times of the day. The only option is to run them less frequently, which sucks for users. And big buses don't fit down small streets. And fewer larger buses means fewer routes. Self driving buses could solve all these problems.
I'd still prefer to walk or cycle, but I'm probably biased because I live in a warm, dry and flat part of the UK and don't have kids.
Couldn't we already have self driving buses if we just put them on tracks? They go a predefined route anyway :)
Roads are cheaper than rails, and easier to change.
Buseses on wheels are more flexible than trams or whatever on tracks, and can route around a collision.
Rails in the road are a severe hazard for cyclists and somewhat hazardous for pedestrians.
(sarcasm)
>I'd still prefer to walk or cycle, but I'm probably biased because I live in a warm, dry and flat part of the UK and don't have kids.
I'm glad you said this because it's a key point so many in this thread appear to miss: what works for one person or locale is not the solution for another, therefore cars aren't going away but this does not negate the legitimacy of bikes or trains either.
> Agreed, but self-driving cars would enable self driving buses and they could be great.
Self-driving cars would enable self-driving taxis which would be superior to both private vehicles and public transport.
Imagine if there was no need to park and you could summon a vehicle of the appropriate size at will.
I have a theory that large fleets of self-driving taxis will make congestion worse (compared to private cars). They have to drive to you, then drive wherever you want to go, turning one vehicle journey into two ( * ). There are lots of other factors to consider but that seems to be a fundamental problem with the taxi model. I'd be interested in replies that explain the flaw in this theory. I assume it is wrong because I haven't heard anyone else say it.
* It could be even worse. Imagine the morning rush - thousands of taxis have driven to peoples' homes and then driven them to their work/school. Then most will have to park until the next peak of demand in the evening. Either they park in the city, or they drive to an out-of-city parking lot, then drive back in to collect, then drive people home, then drive somewhere else to park until the morning rush. What would have been two vehicle journeys using a private car became six.
The issue is throughput and latency.
Public transit is high throughput (and can be low latency if you are lucky and stay on the same link) but as soon as you have to make a transfer (bus to train or bus to bus) the latency immediately spikes up. And the latency pretty much is unbearable as soon as you move to and from a non-central location (suburb to suburb) or not during peak hours.
To further use the computer network analogy, the last mile is generally also a problem. Doesn't matter if most of the network is fiber, if my house can only get a twisted pair the network is going to be bad. Same thing if the bus station or train station is 2 miles from my house; it's like it didn't exist.
It is a large and very heterogeneous world. There are plenty of places where public transport will work best and plenty of others where a car (self driving or otherwise) is much more useful.
Public transit is obviously one facet here. But another is just flat out poor urban planning in the U.S. Walking and bicycling should be more viable forms of transportation. But there are only a small handful of cities (arguably just one) where that's currently feasible in the U.S. It's pretty ridiculous that we've spent the past 100 years designing our cities around the least efficient, least pleasant, most dangerous form of transportation in existence. Like you, self-driving and electric cars don't interest me a whole lot—I feel like they're largely missing the point.
Only 5% of the U.S. population of takes transit to work, 2-3 percentage walk and .5% bike. And everyone else drives or works from home. I don't think it's missing the point at all.
A lot of self-driving is likely to replace taxi service, not make its way to private ownership.
The advantages of individual vehicles for motion around a city are diminished wait times and arbitrary point-to-point linkage. One is not constrained to traveling only on the public transit arteries plus foot-travel distance.
(The tradeoff of fossil fuel consumption is huge and should not be ignored, however).
electric kick scooters (and bikes) make foot-travel distance less relevant in many places, extending the serviceable radius around a station from 1/3 mile to 2-3 miles. we just need to turn street parking into dedicated bike/scooter lanes to make it safe enough for more people to choose this option.
Possibly. Americans seem real reluctant to hop on a bike, and I don't think it's just for safety reasons. Big chunks of the US are too cold to want to be outside that much, a lot of the year.
But more dedicated bike infrastructure would be a huge help in general.
"Big chunks of the US are too cold to want to be outside that much, a lot of the year."
There are surely limits to everything and not everyone is into extreme sports, but even in the winter I really like cycling. Much, much more, than the virus infested public transport.
There is a saying, there is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing.
Clothing won't help when the roads are slushed up.
Spikes do, though. But like I said, there are certainly limits for most people.
But most people probably consider a grey sky, where some rain drops may fall, their limit.
sure, there are some parts of the US that get too cold and snowy, but there's plenty of the country that doesn't (like my own neck of the woods, southern california).
i was more pointing out that 2 relatively inexpensive changes (use scooters, convert parking to bike lanes) could dramatically change the balance of cars vs. public transport in those places (not everywhere). it doesn't have to require a wholesale change of our built environment to get benefits now (even for those dependent on cars).
I live in California which is known for its "car culture," but that aside I don't think I would ever be comfortable with only using public transportation or not owning a car. Having a car is convenient and gives you full control over exactly when and where you want to go.
I was working at a large corporation a couple of years ago and looked out over the parking lot which covered many acres - there were roughly 3000 cars there. And this was just one of 4 campuses of said corporation in my area. In total they have well over 10,000 cars parked on those parking lots every day (prior to covid, anyway). At an average cost of $25,000 there were around $250M worth of cars parked on those lots. And they sit Idle there for 8 hours/day. Most cars are sitting idle 95% of the time. That's a lot of capital just sitting doing nothing most of the time not to mention all of the land required to store them.
Getting the rich to subsidize new tech is a great way to democratize it, though. The self driving car's endgame might not be a car after all.
They don't help as much as mass transit but they help in a couple of ways.
The most significant is that we spend a huge amount of inner city land on parking. We could build denser without worrying about that. A fair amount of inner city traffic is people cruising around looking for parking too. Also, outlying rail or subway stops should really have a lot of development around them but often in the US they're surrounded by parking lots for people commuting in to work. Reducing the need for parking really helps in this case.
Also, people currently have to buy a car big enough for their greatest needs. You don't need a large a car when commuting in to work as when you're taking a road trip with your family but if you're thinking of buying a car you need one to do both. So hopefully we see the average car on the road being much smaller than they are now.
Could not agree more.
As someone who commutes primarily via bicycle, I've always been mystified by colleagues and friends who choose to drive to work in the densely populated northeastern city while cycling through center city is faster, more fun, better for your health, etc. There are obvious times when driving a car will make more sense, e.g. transporting delicate flowers, but for the average commuter it breaks down to the fact that the car is just somewhat sacred in our society. It is an important aspect of the American identity and our vision of success in this country, and so here we are, innovating around cars with technologies like self-driving rather than looking forwards to new potential paradigms of transportation.
This is just in regards to the average commuter, I'm sure that self-driving does have its place in like, moving 40' containers in low-density areas.
I completely agree. I see the benefit for things like trucking. For cities though, I would much rather live in a place like Amsterdam or New York than one that's completely car-centric, even if the cars drive themselves.
I take the subway everywhere in my city in the US. I don’t expect it to be perfect and I’m not disappointed.
I’m also very happy to let my car drive for long boring stretches on long trips. I find I arrive at my destination much more relaxed. And yes, I keep my hands on the wheel and eyes watching around me. The car does the stupid stuff like keeping the car in the middle of the land and watching for other cars all around.
> how is revolving our infrastructure and culture around them any better than simply investing in public transportation by making it a more feasible option for people?
Public transit can't haul freight cross-country. Self-driving vehicles can.
As others have pointed out, self-driving vehicles could significantly cut the operating costs of public transit. This also seems like a major win for investing in public transit.
> Public transit can't haul freight cross-country. Self-driving vehicles can.
Freight should be hauled cross-country on rails, not on roads.
You're absolutely right!
Freight cannot be efficiently moved between the railyard and final destinations on public transit, on foot, or on bicycles. Self-driving vehicles can do this.
There's also what's known as the "geometry" problem - 1 self driving car takes up as much space as 1 human driven car.
Part of the problem is the general incompetency and mismanagement of US public transit construction -- the costs are insane, even when compared to "socialist" "high-cost" union-heavy Europe.
This was a great read on why we get so little for our money:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
- and it busts the common misconception that it's 100% because unions. (tldr: it's because politicians get rewarded for creating jobs (votes) and spending money on contractors (lobbying), and because we outsourced everything)
One SDC takes up slightly less space when we factor in the necessary buffer around human-driven vehicles to account for human reaction times and safety perception.
A fleet of SDCs snaking down a road can "tuck in" tighter to each other because computer reaction times are better (especially if they're networked and sharing decisionmaking signals).
Of course, it's still not as space-efficient as a bus. But the bus infrastructure as a solution has been challenged by COVID-19.
If autonomous vehicles werebto ever become cheap and reliable, I fear induced demand could have a much larger effect on traffic volumes than the role it plays in traffic now when vehicles rely on human occupants. As people find more creative use cases for autonomous vehicles, the roads would fill up with ghost cars performing any number of progressively more trivial tasks until traffic returns to equilibrium.
Quite possible.
The constraining factor on SDC commonality in the short-to-medium term will be maintenance. These cars require dedicated service (which is why they'll likely start as replacements for taxis, not privately-owned; people will have to be hot-rodders to want to do all the work necessary to keep the sensors clean and tuned).
There may be a threshold in the future where the sensors are hyper-rugged or self-maintaining, but it's a little ways off. The maintenance burden will keep the ghost cars down in the short- to medium-term.
Presumably if all cars were self driving, or say 90% were. Then that would become the next "public transportation". And if they were all electric, the footprint would be less harsh as well.
Personal cars will never be the "next public transportation". The density just doesn't work. Personal vehicles are the least space-efficient (to say nothing of energy efficiency) means of transportation among buses, trains, bicycles, and walking. You can't solve congestion issues by replacing a more-dense option with a less-dense one. The only thing self-driving cars solve for is freeing up a person to read or do something else during their commute.
Congestion itself isn't the issue. Wasted time and fossil fuels is. And most of my friends who take public transportation to work have a commute that is longer than my friends who drive to work.
Right now there is a difference in quality of that time in that your attention is more free when taking public transit but self driving cars fix this issue.
It's not public transportation in the same way that taxis aren't solving the public transportation problem. But also, why is it that there is this assumption that when self driving cars become a reality, they'll also be electric? The two problems are completely orthogonal, and while solving both of them are important, making self driving cars electric isn't a priority for most companies today.
> There's also what's known as the "geometry" problem - 1 self driving car takes up as much space as 1 human driven car.
Human-driver cars consume parking spaces at the destination, self-driving cars don't have this limitation. They park themselves away from high-traffic areas or they could ferry other people around.
tl;dr public transit definition needs to stop being confined to rail and buses.
I have always been in the camp that real dystopian future is tens of millions trapped in large cities instead of being free to live and travel where they want. I can never willingly place myself back into a large city.
there is no reason the concept of public transportation does not include self driving vehicles in many sizes. already this day we run separate transit vehicles for those with handicaps which make regular bus and train travel difficult or impossible to access. So why not smaller cars that can serve any one in need at any time regardless of where they are located.
one of the most common traits in any recently freed or booming economy is the personal vehicle and for good reason. it offers the means to travel where and when you want to not be trapped in one location.
When cars will be driving themselves, you wont need to own one... one of the many parked near your home will come pick you up.
I know people love public transport because of the supposed larger benefit to society but having ridden NYC public transport for over 7 years now I absolutely loath it.
The experience is horrible almost every day. Between being crammed in the cars, the mentally unstable accosting you, the lack of cleanliness and the occasional assault I'm simply not willing to deal with that continuously. I put up with it because it was cheaper than owning a car in NYC at a time where I needed to make that trade off but I don't need to make that trade off any more.
This is with the MTA receiving billions of dollars and subsidies. Give us a system like Japan or even some of the light rail like I experienced in France and I can see people moving towards public transport. Continue to give us systems like the New York subway and I don't see cars going away.
This article makes largely the same point -- the way we do public transport in the US is flawed and technology can help us make it less so, but it has to have buy in from our political systems and the people. As long as institutions like the MTA have a say we'll only see mismanaged and rapidly aging systems.
You could just as easily be writing about BART. The United States fails hard at public transit, even where we’re richest and it makes the most sense. I use it all the time, but I can’t really blame the people who refuse.
Tokyo was in a league of its own (2 weeks experience). London Tube was mostly great, with some minor flaws here and there (9 months experience).
This is without even beginning to compare the reach and convenience of stations in each system.
This feels like looking at our ability to Lockdown for COVID. Even when we attempted to fully close, we sucked at it, and got the worst of both worlds (economic crush + virus still spread). At some point, you have to look in the mirror and stop trying to be something you’re not willing and/or able to be and find a new approach.
>> Between being crammed in the cars, the mentally unstable accosting you, the lack of cleanliness and the occasional assault
Three of the four of those are things you don't hear people complaining about with the transit system in Japan because of the culture differences in the USA.
How can that be fixed, here?
I was listening to a youtube recently talking about covid in Japan (their numbers are strikingly low) and the correspondent in Japan mentioned that 5 year olds commonly ride on public transit alone to school without parents. She said it was a rite of passage for 5 year olds that they ride the trains by themselves. That's just unimaginable in the US especially in a city like NYC. Huge cultural differences.
Actually put money into expanded infrastructure and staffing of public transport instead of funneling it into someone's pocket. Regularly patrol the cars. Open more shelter for the homeless and institute better mental health policies. None of this is a cultural issue unless you mean a cultural issue of political disinterest and general apathy from the public and graft from our politicians on either side.
Calling this a "culture differences" is quite the understatement, unless you include politics, access to healthcare and other things under "culture". I do agree that there is definitly a cultural component to this too however.
Not all of the problems with public transit are caused by the mentally ill. It's a very small amount.
I absolutely consider those things culture. The American culture of individualism is the cause of them.
I hard disagree with you. Individualism is not the root of our failing infrastructure.
I think that the hyper-individualism that has been cultivated in certain segments of the American population for partisan political purposes is ultimately the greatest threat that American society faces.
It corrodes all aspects of society when a sizable population will place themselves above all else. The ironic part is that except for a thin slice of the wealthy it doesn't even benefit the people who espouse it the most.
Individualism != selfish and ignorant.
I'm highly individualist. I stay inside, wear a mask everywhere I go and listed to experts like Dr.Fauci on the subject of Covid. That's just one example.
There's a large amount of the population that lack empathy and are willfully ignorant. Individualism may be the cover word but what you actually mean is "hyper ignorance and selfishness"
As A. Savage says, collectivism and autonomy are not mutually exclusive. I'm not sure most Americans know that though. If Americans self identify as individualists and believe that means being anti-collectivism then isn't individualism, or at least the ideas of individualist thinkers, partly to blame for our cultural bias against collectivism? Maybe I should've said it's America's culture of toxic individualism rather than run of the mill individualism.
But that definitely describes hyper individualism in America.
One solution I see suggested often is shut down 24hour subway service in NYC. Use that time to do (thorough) cleaning, maintenance, etc. I doubt that would put NYC's subway near the level of Tokyo's or other cities with actual great transit, but it would help a lot.
Whenever this gets suggested, there is a loud outcry from people that say they would gladly put up with the filth, unreliability, and occasional assault/rape/murder if it meant 24hour service. Usually arguments put forth is that there are always people (including lower income night shift workers) that must have the subway at wee hours of the night/morning. I'm pretty sure Seoul and Tokyo also have night shift workers and they manage to do just fine using buses or other alternate transportation. If anything Seoul and Tokyo have an even more notoriously hardcore "city never sleeps" workaholic culture than NYC.
Well, I can think of two possibilities:
1) Japan has scalably solved mental illness to the point that, in expectation, you will never be near someone still suffering therefrom.
2) Japanese law enforcement doesn't f--- around when it comes to train etiquette, and even so the most dangerous people don't mess with riders.
This happens because the US cannot commit to proper public transport fully. In other places, there are either dedicated bus lanes or entirely separated trams which circumvent traffic all together.
They also routinely upgrade their public transport, instead of NYC which incurs massive costs as it keeps 200 yr old infrastructure barely alive.
It is also unreasonably cheap. $127 a month is lower than the cost of insurance for many.
$255/month for a 2020 Tesla Model 3 in a garage in Brooklyn for pleasure use. With a 2 car discount. From Geico. A 2010 Acura MDX was just over $200 as a single car, previously.
So just one car's insurance is worth two monthly transit passes.
I regardless heavily dislike driving in NYC and would rather take Subway or Express Bus to commute.
I'm quite aware as someone living the situation but thanks I guess.
Even before Covid, I did everything I could to avoid riding NYC's (and its surrounding regions) public transportation. Namely, bicycle, walk, semi-private ferry services, or even drive. The subways are literally disgusting.
I'd happily use the public transportation if it was anything closer to Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Hong Kong, or many other cities outside the US.
I'm puzzled as to why its such a mess in the US, even in areas with "good" public transportation, compared to other nations. I lived in Japan for several years, and the subway/rail/bus systems are wonderful. Easy to use, reliable, clean, and no issues the mentally unwell or homeless bothering you.
Is it cultural? Or is it a matter of political/economic policy? I have no idea, but I'd kill to be able to bring it to the US.
In Tokyo, railway companies build commercial building near their stations and its rent is part of their main income. Is it possible in the US?
I think this article actually makes quite a fresh and interesting point, after the first few paragraphs that sound like stock self-driving skepticism. The author is pointing out that imagining self-driving cars of the same form-factor and niche as the human-driven cars today is a fallacy on par with a 1990s futurist imagining the internet as simply a way to send letters faster. The point is that changes to the technological landscape as momentous as self-driving rarely are as simple as 1:1 replacement of the technology that existed before: the self-driving car is not _unattainable_, but it is _a red herring_.
Given this, I don't really know why he mentions the challenges involved in self-driving and his skepticism thereof -- it seems to me that his autonomous "rovers" and "software trains" face basically all of the same challenges as a self-driving sedan would.
Overall I applaud the imagination that the author applies, bringing together the threads of autonomous vehicles, micromobility, and lingering anxieties from COVID into a set of bold claims about the future of urban transit.
What I am curious about is whether the future he paints ("micro-sprawl"; "walking is passé") is one people find compelling and desirable. I think he's basically right that the underlying market forces will lead us there in the next couple of decades absent strong action from municipal governments, but is this the right way to model cities of the future, or are we sleepwalking into another Robert Moses style disastrous reimagining of the urban fabric? Personally I'm undecided.
Agree with your positive response.
Missing from this conjecture is a synthesis with car and bike sharing.
There will also be massive land use, zoning changes when there's 90% fewer personal cars. Unused capacity (parking, roads) freed up and repurposed.
The role for autonomous driving for moving people (vs turking cargo) will look very different when our cities look more like medieval villas and college campuses.
I still cannot even guess if the future will be more concentrated or more sprawl. So I've provisionally decided "both", but very different from today.
90% fewer? To me this would seem to ignore that everyone tends to want to go to the same place at the same time. Demand for automobiles (and parking, and roads) is peaky.
90% is my optimistic guess. I'd wager today's style (cars, SUVs) will downsize even more. It'd be interesting to learn the automobile industry's own market size projections.
Most American cities are desperate for massive land use and zoning changes now, but I don't think it could happen without the implementation of broad mandates at the national level, such as you see in Japan. Politically that just seems impossible these days. Maybe it will seem more possible in a few years.
Yes, I think a lot of people here didn't read beyond the first third of the article, which is understandable because it tries to be very poetic and sci-fi and fails to actually make clear what it's talking about until more than halfway through.
>"software trains" face basically all of the same challenges as a self-driving sedan would.
How so? It seems pretty evident to me that having separate, dedicated lanes should make it a lot easier. What I'd say is by far the biggest concern, human-driven traffic, is just completely eliminated with that.
It's not, but because rail is much stricter and the safety protocols semi-automated to fully automated, the self driving is much easier, and unexpected conditions much easier to detect because expected conditions are very uniform.
Self driving supervised trains can drive on non-ETS (not fully automated tracking and safety) rails too with additional precautions. Lines where trains are driven by humans, and where some safeties are manually operated, as long as the presence of those safeties and cars is programmed. These behave then more like driver assist and automated safety.
Self-driving cars, computer speech recognition and the collapse of the federal reserve system. Things that are going to perpetually happen next year since the inception of Hacker News.
Is "Linux on the Desktop next year" still a thing?
I think we called it a win on "The year of desktop linux" when it was clear that Linux was mainstream enough for Microsoft to tie it up with a bow and offer in their app store.
Jokes aside, we're at the point where everyone who wants linux on the desktop can get linux on the desktop without having to struggle. Big, known enterprise-friendly companies like Dell and Lenovo will sell you their flagship and business laptops and desktops running Ubuntu, and it's not uncommon for engineers at the 8000+ not-a-software-company I work at to casually have a Linux machine instead of a Mac or PC. It's not 2010, where you had to be willing to navigate UEFI and "will my broadcom wireless work?" to weed out the casuals from the true-believers.
It was never hard to run Linux. It was always hard to make Linux perform at the same expectations as Windows.
Messing around with chromium versions and netflix's plugin was not fun when you just wanted to watch a show.
It's not polished, any distro.
But Linux server is GOAT.
It's often been hard to run Linux, and the expectations of Windows are very low. When I was being pressured to switch to Linux by peers, it was because of the crappiness and instability of Windows, not any particular merit to Linux (other than not crashing constantly and not having to be restarted after every update.)
edit: I have to say that I don't use netflix or play video games.
_Is "Linux on the Desktop next year" still a thing?_
I'm really sick of this trope. I have been using Linux on the desktop almost exclusively for 15 years. Yes, I still have to fix weird issues on occasion . . . about as frequently as I have to fix weird issues on my wife's Windows machine.
_You_ have, but general adoption of Linux-lineage OS's is focused in the mobile tech space. Desktop adoption is still exceedingly low.
Statscounter shows Linux installs about on par with ChromeOS installs [
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
]. Both are beaten out by the "Unknown" category; there are literally more people running we-can't-tell-what OS than a Linux-derivative OS.
I think these days, the roadblock isn't reliability; it's Linux being off-mainstream. Network effect, essentially. Most of the (non-Internet) stuff the average person hears about in tech media and by word-of-mouth is not guaranteed to be available on Linux and is basically _always_ guaranteed to be available on Windows, MacOSX, or both. Linux archs have done a decent job of solving the "Can I see my screen with the latest graphics card" problem but are still behind the curve on the "Can I buy Photoshop off the shelf at Best Buy and run it on my computer" curve.
_. . . are still behind the curve on the "Can I buy Photoshop off the shelf at Best Buy and run it on my computer" curve._
Or I can use GIMP for free.
You are correct that Linux on the desktop is not mainstream and that is largely down to network effects, but I don't understand the next logical step in the argument. How does that make Linux on the desktop "not ready" or "incomplete?" In my opinion (and I recognise that this is just an opinion), Linux has been a superior experience to Windows for a long time. All common problems have several robust solutions. Uncommon problems often also have a good solution (which isn't guaranteed on Windows either, at least not without spending a lot of money). The idea that Linux isn't "Desktop Ready" is a tired trope. Just because people _don't_, doesn't mean they _can't_. Linux doesn't have a marketing department (and I wouldn't want it to).
> Or I can use GIMP for free.
But again, that's the problem to solve. _You_ can use GIMP for free; most people can't. It's a space-alien UI relative to the Photoshop they know. And while I love GIMP and think it's a fine drop-in replacement for 90% of use-cases, it's still not good enough to fly (not fast enough, not robust enough, not the same size of plugin ecosystem) for the 10% that are using Photoshop in high-volume professional work settings. Businesses love cheap, and if GIMP could be substituted, they'd have already forced substitution on their art-houses.
You can even probably get Photoshop running on your box with the right cocktail of emulators and libraries. Most people can't.
The problem of picking up software from any brick-and-mortar store, taking it home, and running it on my Linux machine has no good solutions. Alternatives that you and I know work just aren't palatable for the average user. The average user still _can't_.
I'm not sure this is, practically, a solvable problem; I'm just identifying that it _is_ the problem for adoption of Linux on desktop outside of the wonks like us that are willing to learn a lot of computer stuff off the beaten path.
Modern desktop Linux is great, but it's a whole commerce-adoption model away from being part of the beaten path.
That's funny, I used Linux on the desktop exclusively for about 10 years, which, by my math, ended about the time your experience started.
And I still find the "Linux on the Desktop" trope to be funny.
No, it's the year of Linux on mobile already!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinephone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5
Sort of, now that Microsoft announced native GUI support coming to WSL2 next year!
I mean, it clearly isn't. When is the last time you heard that in earnest and not as a joke?
I haven't seen that for a while. It seemed to drop off a bit with Chromebooks which are kind of desktop linux.
No, it has not been used seriously for about 5 years. The last time was probably when SteamOS was released.
That was a thing before everybody used android.
Don't forget the universal adoption of 3D television.
But Elon says it's happening next year!
He's raised it to this year!
>“It’s almost getting to a point where I can go from my house to work with no interventions, despite going through construction and widely varying situations,” he said.
>“So this is why I’m very confident about full self-driving functionality being complete by the end of this year. It’s because I’m literally driving it.”
Though reading that it sounds more like the car can drive from A to B on it's own sometimes rather than with any reliability.
I think there's a conflict in what "self driving car" means.
I think many users imagine being chauffered around while they read a tablet, potentially not even needing a drivers license.
Meanwhile I think realists and Elon Musk expect a car that is doing most of the menial parts of driving while a licensed human driver is still hands on but not doing much work.
We're close to that realist scenario in many ways for some areas - though I'm sure we'll see a spike in tragedies once it first goes out and people attempt to treat it like scenario one.
Scenario one is a very long ways away from being universal.
You call them realists, I call them misleading marketers.
The term to use is driverless. Gives the correct idea of what users imagine. All thsi "self-driving" or FSD is just driver assistance given more capability with no regards to safety.
In his intro speech of the Model 3, specifically talking about the FSD he was selling, he talked about something like "one day you could sleep while your car ...". I don't remember the exact quote, but it was something along those lines. Tying it very closely (albeit in some indefinite future) to the product he was selling. He's not a "realist" or "skeptic" in any way.
I used the word "and" there intentionally.
I think Musk thinks the "self driving" will improve as time goes on until it's better than human driving. Which I can see happening but his time scale seems unrealistic. Don't think we'll see a million robotaxis for a while.
Weasel words about "functionality" instead of cars.
We've had self-driving train and airplane functionality for years. Meanwhile self-driving trains and planes are not closer.
Well planes maybe. You've been able to get on a driverless train for nearly 40 years now eg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Island_Line
For whatever reason, self-driving trains have been in a perpetual "testing" phase for many decades.
Oh it will happen, temporary.
Until some really big accident happens in a situation where even a drunk driver wouldn't have messed up that way.
After that self driving will be limited to situations like while you are in a traffic jam or limited to 30km/h and having it's own track or similar.
That would be rather unfortunate. If a system generally performs significantly safer than humans, its use should be encouraged.
Outlier incidents shouldn't matter.
The Problem is that it might not be significant safety outside of well suited situations.
This systems expect the user to shim in fastly if something goes wrong, which just can't work reliable given how human brains work.
Furthermore the situations which can make a self driving car crash are not the same which make a human driver crash.
Such crashes can be pretty arbitrary. Random things like advertisement on a bus has the potential to trick of the self driving car. Similar at least some systems are not very good at handling situations where the lanes are unexpected changed e.g. around a construction site. I had been in more than one situation where the lanes markings what completely messed up and only common sense was left to prevent a potential dangerous situation. This systems don't have common sense.
There already was at least on deadly incident where a Tesla crashed for no apparent reason (blaming the dead driver for not taking over fast enough which again isn't realistic at all, through legal maybe valid).
Tesla is supposedly the leader wrt. self driving cars, but people where easily able to trick that car to drive into the lane for the opposite direction and it has since a while one of the worst emergency brake assistants.
The problem boils down to self driving cars not being good at "unusual" situations but situations which are unusual for the self driving car are in practice pretty common given how much people drive cars and they are not necessary recognizable as such by humans.
Another problem is that traffic's in different countries have different rules and dynamics a self driving system working well for idk. the US might not at all be safe to use in idk. insert arbitrary EU country here even if trained for that country.
Humans can normally adapt to a degree in the fly, which makes them not have a crash, or less bad crashes in some situations. But the self driving car has no such common sense and might not even realize it's in a situation it's not trained for.
I see a lot of potential to make traffic more safe.(non stuff driving but assistant systems, self driving in traffic jams, slow self driving buses in car reduced inner cities, on highway self driving truck convoys, etc.).
But at least on the close future I'm not convinced "general purpose"/"everywhere any speed" self driving cars are more safe.
I mean we also shouldn't forget that a lot of deadly accidents happen because of negligence, so while self driving cars still require a driver hand over, they still all happen because the driver is as negligent (or might intentionally not use the self driving feature to get faster to work etc.).
Edit: Swipy keyboard mess ups.
The key metric for Tesla and other manufacturers is not necessarily duplicating human cars avoidance in any given situation. Some situations might be easier for humans, and vice versa.
The right metric is simply a much lower accident and fatality rates for self-driving cars.
This flexibility reduces the challenge for self-driving cars since they are far from understanding situations at the level people potentially can, but still results in a safety win.
This was illustrated in a chart[0] by someone on the Tesla subreddit just yesterday.
Using Autopilot is in general much safer even though it does from time to time make fatal mistakes that human would not do. (Like when it fails to recognise a truck and tries to drive through it[1].)
Of course AP is a very different thing to FSD, so this doesn't speak anything about current nor future FSD safety.
[0] Autopilot safety comparison
https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/jim86m/i_graph...
[1] Accident
https://electrek.co/2019/03/01/tesla-driver-crash-truck-trai...
> Another problem is that traffic's in different countries have different rules and dynamics a self driving system working well for idk. the US might not at all be safe to use in idk. insert arbitrary EU country here even if trained for that country.
That is why Tesla is not hyper focused on one city and is not building a team of exclusively AI experts, rather build a tool that other people can use to configure the specifics.
Tesla already are able to read signs in many languages and know about lots of different country specific rules.
> Tesla is supposedly the leader wrt. self driving cars, but people where easily able to trick that car to drive into the lane for the opposite direction and it has since a while one of the worst emergency brake assistants.
'Tricking' the car is kind of nonsense, you can also trick people into things pretty easily.
I have seen a number of reports where Tesla AHAD got the top marks and I have seen many videos of Teslas breaking when the driver was not paying attention. What are you basing this analysis on?
The federal reserve won't collapse, they have the ability to create money.
The currency the federal reserve multiplies? That could collapse.
Since 2020, the dollar menu is gone, home and stock prices skyrocketed. In a year I've seen ~30% inflation. There's no reason for the inflation to stop there.
(Note, I have lots of investment, inflation may help me)
The BLS doesn’t even list a double digit increase for “food away from home” at all this year. “Food at home” has been decreasing the past few months but remains up by almost 5%.
CPI is not the best measure and isn’t always 100% accurate but it’s not going to be off by double digits.
> The index for food away from home continued to rise, increasing 0.6 percent in
September. The index for limited service meals rose 0.9 percent in September,
the largest increase in the history of the index, which dates to 1997.
> Despite the September decline, the food at home index increased 4.1 percent over
the last 12 months. All six major grocery store food group indexes rose over that
span, with increases ranging from 2.6 percent (cereals and bakery products) to
6.3 percent (meats, poultry, fish, and eggs). The index for food away from home
rose 3.8 percent over the last year. The index for limited service meals increased
5.5 percent and the index for full service meals rose 2.8 percent over the last
12 months.
Of note:
> The index for used cars and trucks
rose 6.7 percent in September, its largest monthly increase since February 1969.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm
This is essentially correct mechanically, though I don't share this author's prediction that we're sliding towards a collapse. We're in a pandemic; pandemics push the market around. But they also end.
But mechanically, yes. The Fed can't collapse while it's the controlling institution of the dollar. The dollar is the world's reserve currency. It's the denomination unit for paying IMF loans. It's the unit of money other countries shove under a big ol' mattress (with scary-looking guards around it) to backstop a collapse of _their_ national currency. The dollar is so deeply baked into international economics that only global shocks can fundamentally shake its value as a currency.
If that changes, the Fed's power base becomes heavily disrupted, but most of us in the US won't notice because we'll be too busy riding in gangs with our fellow War Boyz hunting down the last reserves of Go Juice for our Death Rigz under a burning sky. ;)
Ok make any kind of verifiable prediction about this and we will see if it happens or not.
I'll play.
It will be possible to buy large amounts of crude oil without owning USDs by 2026.
I mean this wouldn't necessarily mean a collapse, but I really applaud the relative specificity and reasonableness of this claim.
Still don't think it will happen.
Download taco Bell or McDonald's app. what is the current price for 400 calories? Mine is $1.30, in February this was $1.
For stock info, look it up. Not sure where to get historical real estate prices, I'm just looking for a second property and everything is at least 10% higher than in February as you need to offer more than the selling price in this economy.
Ok make a prediction about the "currency collapsing" and we will see. An actual prediction of the value of the currency not just a remark about prices seeming unusually high to you personally.
I run a website that tracks food costs.
Not sure if you are looking for Data or a psychic. I do the former.
Ok why do you believe this if you can't make one verifiable prediction that it will happen?
Will it happens tomorrow? In 20 years? In 5 months? It's just a feeling you have that isn't backed by data. I can't really ever disprove this because you're not really making any claim.
This is every FED conversation on HN. People totally believe hyperinflation is "just around the corner" but it never happens only standard normal levels of inflation always within FED projections.
What's your website BTW?
Efficiency is everything. Give it a Google.
Also, why are you discounting the last 100 years of federal reserve policy? We obviously had greater than 10x inflation. Is 30% inflation in 8 months not considered hyperinflation?
My kids bank account is 30% less valuable now. I'm not going to fight over definitions that 30% inflation isn't enough to be considered hyperinflation.
That's just being silly.
Ok you're right the Federal Reserve has already collapsed.
/s
_Some experts now predict that we may never achieve the original dream of a reliable fully self-driving car. And even if we do, spreading the technology beyond the Arizona suburbs will require costly retrofits to add navigational hardware to existing roads. This is a non-starter in the post-pandemic age of austerity. Most state and local governments now struggle to merely maintain a much simpler, yet more fundamental technology for orienting both human and computer drivers—the painted markings that guide us along the pavement._
I don't buy this argument. Yes, retro-fitting costs money, but even if one were to lay down guide wires next to every major road, the costs wouldn't be as insurmountable as it is being painted here. The cost of digging up a ditch next to the road just isn't that bad.
Furthermore, it's not just costs to bear, but also benefits to weigh. If an AV capable road might get you from city to suburb, the suburb might just pay for the retrofit themselves.
I don't see the point of guidance wires along a road. When you're travelling at speed down a road, you need to know that the surface is flat and clear with achievable turn radius out to your stopping distance.
Guide wires don't tell you whether the surface is flat. The surface could be damaged/potholed, and the guide wires would still be there.
The guide wires don't tell you whether the surface is clear. For that, you need to have vision, to tell you whether cars, pedestrians, obstructions, and toddlers about to run out into the road are there.
The guide wires don't tell you what the turn radius in the road is ahead - it only tells you where the road is right here. Although technically this could be achieved, it would make it much more complicated.
Ultimately, the car needs to build its own picture of where it is safe to drive that is reasonably resilient to adverse conditions and even malicious attack. Trusting road infrastructure for that I think is not resilient enough.
In most population dense parts of the country where traffic is a problem, there is no “side of the road” to dig a ditch into. It’s all built up.
I thought of this, too, but believed the solution to be even simpler than rural areas. Dense areas are taken care of even more (snow is plowed, etc.). There's also, much more data being constantly captured.
For example, Google Maps can already hyper-accurately predict traffic down to individual road sections simply by observing the position and speed of Android phones on the road.
Even in the less dense areas, the side of the road is filled with buried utility lines (it’s cheap).
I’m also curious what the tolerances of these magical “wires alongside the road” have.
Sidenote, I love the idea of the "post-pandemic age of austerity", as if it contrasts with the "pre-pandemic age of austerity".
I doubt retrofitting will be necessary because it isn't necessary for human drivers. I think the author underestimates how good the technology is for LIDAR-aided visual navigation (and how quickly the technology is growing).
Can you expand on the costs? Any numbers to share?
So what if we eliminate some of the hard problems, like steering, traffic, pedestrians, and setup guided routes specifically for automated vehicles? All you would need to control is signaling and the throttle/brakes. You could even couple multiple vehicles together for more capacity! Seems like an idea ripe for implementation. /s
Hey, we could also make them more efficient by using steel for the wheels and rolling surface!
And we'll only have to bulldoze a few houses to do it!
Ten, twenty thousand at most, I'm sure. ;)
What's funny is that the railroads of the US were mandated to implement this (PTC) by the end of 2018 and have almost universally blown the deadline.
Caltrain tried to roll their own implementation, got caught with their pants down, and iirc are now trying to save face by switching to one of the standard vendor developed systems
And even if we do, spreading the technology beyond the Arizona suburbs will require costly retrofits to add navigational hardware to existing roads.
No it won't? Why would it? Plenty of companies are testing in other areas, and I haven't heard any suggest that they need special hardware on the roads themselves.
Yes, the Phoenix suburbs are the easiest place to start, but that doesn't mean you need special infrastructure in other places. The tech will keep improving, and I predict that this author will turn out to be incredibly wrong.
I'm sure the Phoenix suburbs will perfectly prepare autonomous vehicles in Edmonton taking kids to hockey practice in January at 5:30 am.
You seemed to have missed reading the comment you're replying to. I'll quote the relevant section:
> Plenty of companies are testing in other areas
For example, many have tested in the Detroit area that does indeed get snow.
I'd love to know how you expect a computer to navigate a blizzard on an unpainted country road when even adaptive cruise control systems can't handle a bit of snow on the sensors.
Sure this stuff works fine in Arizona where there is no inclement weather most of the time, and the roads are in perfect condition because freeze/thaw cycles don't cause excessive wear, but what about the rest of the country and the world?
> I'd love to know how you expect a computer to navigate a blizzard on an unpainted country road when even adaptive cruise control systems can't handle a bit of snow on the sensors.
What do adaptive cruise control systems have to do with full self-driving systems? You realize these aren't the same thing, right?
> Sure this stuff works fine in Arizona where there is no inclement weather most of the time, and the roads are in perfect condition because freeze/thaw cycles don't cause excessive wear, but what about the rest of the country and the world?
Again, what's the problem you're pointing to here? Arizona is easy mode, no doubt...and? We already know companies are also testing in areas with fouler weather, after all. Waymo even demonstrated how their sensors handle snowfall two years ago, and presumably they've improved further since then as they've continued development:
https://www.engadget.com/2018-05-08-waymo-snow-navigation.ht...
It's absolutely bizarre how many HN commenters assume that the engineering departments in every self-driving car company are chock full of the biggest morons on the planet. "Oh ho ho, did they ever consider that other places have different weather than Arizona? _Checkmate, tech companies._"
Even if the self-driving can be implemented only partially it can be a big gain.
E.g. suppose the car can only drive itself on highways in daytime in good weather. It still a great convenience feature to have if you don't have to drive for 80-90% of your commute (with the above conditions) and you only have to take over in the city.
Classic anti hype cycle. Won't age well.
How many nines of reliability do self driving cars need before they're safe?
They have to operate in weather. Rain, snow, dark. They have to adapt to novel conditions.
I put the self-driving car in the same category as the flying car and jet pack. This one just happens to have VC funding.
I don't think we'll see these things for another decade, and when that next decade arrives we'll be saying the same. Another decade.
> How many nines of reliability do self driving cars need before they're safe?
That depends on your perspective. I think most of us just wants it to be more reliable than a human driver that's not drunk or sleep deprived. But the liability challenges could mean you'll want more "perfect" reliability.
> They have to operate in weather. Rain, snow, dark. They have to adapt to novel conditions.
Seems like the solutions out there are already getting pretty good at handling the kind of rain, snow and darkness you'd see in most urban/suburban areas. Maybe you'll "never" be able to drive autonomously to your cabin in the woods, but so what?
> I don't think we'll see these things for another decade, and when that next decade arrives we'll be saying the same. Another decade.
What exactly do you mean by "seeing these things"? By some measures they're already here. The ones that are truly self driving are slow, and mostly on static routes. The ones that drive on highways need to be monitored by a human, but they're doing pretty well. I think you'll see these different solutions just slowly become better and better. I'd be very surprised if you couldn't hail a fully autonomous robotaxi in many urban areas in a decade. Maybe it can't drive it anywhere, maybe you can't use it in a snowstorm, but it'll be a case of "good enough".
>_I think most of us just wants it to be more reliable than a human driver that's not drunk or sleep deprived_
That is a seriously low bar, and in no way do I think the majority of people feel that driving "better than a drunk" is good enough. In fact, I think it will be the opposite: people will want it to be almost _flawless_ before it's accepted.
For me, "better than a drunk" is good enough
>and in no way do I think the majority of people feel that driving "better than a drunk" is good enough
If that the case something can be done such as smart marketing/social media campaign or something like that to change people perception.
you and rootusrootus have parsed this phrase incorrectly:
> more reliable than a human driver that's _not_ drunk or sleep deprived
emphasis mine.
> more reliable than a human driver that's not drunk or sleep deprived.
No thank you. Almost all the humans I share the road with are neither drunk nor sleep deprived. Putting robotic drivers on the road that make daylight driving as dangerous as 1am driving is not my idea of progress. It'd be a bloodbath.
“Good Enough” will mean that an autonomous car will be effectively useless between 6 and 8 months of the year in the north.
Most of the roads may be clear, but “all” of them never are. Shaded areas are the worst, and can remain iced over for months at a time. Ice, especially intermittent ice, is bad. Slush, deep snow, and packed snow can be miles worse.
Winter driving, as any Californian who has migrated north will tell you, is a dramatically different skill than driving on the roads of California or Arizona. It’s non-deterministic - turning the wheel doesn’t always turn the car. The car will move sideways on the road with no steering input. The speed of the wheels is completely divorced from the speed of the car.
>They have to operate in weather. Rain, snow, dark.
No they don't - a self driving car that knows when it can't drive is perfectly acceptable - not everyone can drive in extreme conditions reliably - doesn't mean they can't drive.
I am imagining the whole fleet of self-driving cars stopping on the side of the road at the same time every time a little rainstorm blows through, kinda like what happens now for a snowstorm. Except rain is a heck of a lot more common. I guess we won't be seeing self-driving cars in the PNW ;)
>_a self driving car that knows when it can't drive is perfectly acceptable_
I don't agree, because of the grey area between the car knowing it can't drive and believing it can, but in practice doing so poorly.
So, like a human?
I think we'll see a lot of approximations of it. Autonomous taxis in predefined spaces (see Cruise, Waymo), trucks on highways (maybe changing to human drivers when entering/nearing cities).
But no safe full self-driving for a while.
Although I do feel like the money spent in the US so far would've been better spent setting up better public transit/train lines.
> Although I do feel like the money spent in the US so far would've been better spent setting up better public transit/train lines.
How much are talking? Waymo is 10 billion in the hole. Tesla spent maybe around that much developing autopilot. This is also not public money being spent.
A typical public transit system costs orders of magnitude more than that. Example: California's High Speed Rail project started at 40 billion and projections have already ballooned to 98 billion.
Better public transit can't be leveraged into a monopoly though, it would just quietly improve peoples lives.
Of course it can, that's what most public transport companies are.
They tend to be government subsidized.
There's very little competition because there is not much to compete for, except in longer distance rail and bus.
You also need permission from the city to use public stops, consult routes and times, which is a barrier of entry. Not an insurmountable one and nobody prohibits you from running private stops or garages.
You can even negotiate the use of bus lanes or tram lines.
The other barrier is much higher capital investment. Both bus drivers, busses and stops are not cheap, while the margin on a ticket is thin. (Compared to taxi fleet.) But it can be done even encouraging competition - see South Korea for an example of where it worked.
Cars will never be safe. At any point if you are moving 50 miles an hour and an animal runs out in front of an oncoming car they may swerve and hit you head on. Or if your tire pops you may swerve into a tree. When cars have accidents 10x less frequently than humans it will be stupid not to switch over.
That “when” is nowhere on the horizon, is what this article and other commenters are saying.
> I put the self-driving car in the same category as the flying car and jet pack. This one just happens to have VC funding.
Flying cars and jet packs are limited by physics (specifically energy density) and progress in this area is almost non-existent. We barely got batteries to be vaguely competitive with internal combustion.
Self-driving cars are limited by software and hardware accelerators and this field is making real progress.
When self driving cars will be consistently more reliable than 99% of human drivers, that will be enough. That is not a lot of nines.
>_When self driving cars will be consistently more reliable than 99% of human drivers_
How could you even calculate this? By running massive experiments and seeing if fewer people die over a given period of time driving versus self-driving? Do you really think we can run such an experiment?
It is possible, but hard, to calculate human performance, it was done very scientific in aviation since ~ 1950.
It is easier to do it if you consider 1% worst drivers, either older people with long reaction times, distracted drivers, drunk drivers etc. If you have a car that is obeying all traffic rules, it never goes above the speed limit and it has sensors that makes it brake before rear-ending other cars you are already better than the 1% limit. It is a simplistic approach, just giving an example of how 99% is not that hard to reach.
Such experiments are already running and there are statistics available comparing the rate of accidents with human versus computer driving.
The goalposts are attached to the front of the car, so we'll never reach them.
flying cars and jet packs have VC funding.
I rather like the XKCD comic in regards to that question:
Well, the predictions 15 years ago that we’d have fleets of self driving cars on all our roads long before now didn’t age all that well either.
I remember a friend saying my kids would never need to learn how to drive. My eldest started her driving lessons last month.
> Classic anti hype cycle. Won't age well.
People also posted this about 3D TVs and Cuecats.
Won't argue!! But those technologies (a) had a fraction of the upside, (b) don't offer partial wins that pay back the R&D (like self driving trucks), and (c) never attracted the same level of investment or talent.
Self driving vehicles will save $250+B/year in labor costs in the US alone - this is more impactful than the cotton gin and rivals the impact of refrigeration. 3D TVs and cuecat are 3-6 orders of magnitude smaller impact
Finally, it's worth mentioning that cuecat became QR codes which took off after getting built into cellphone cameras. 3D television didn't take off but 4K did i.e. consumer demand existed for richer TV images just not specifically 3D. Projectors remain niche as well even though they promise to take TV from 80" to 130+" - if ultra short throw (UST) projectors come down in price, I could see them going mainstream, especially in tandem with 4K/8K.
Maybe it will be like music or video sharing. It's illegal and "can't be done" - until someone big enough does it and then it just becomes trivial.
So maybe all new vehicles will have and old ones will be retrofitted with corner reflectors and infrared beacons or some such, and roads will have markers for AI cars, regularly checked and maintained too (by robots). Digital maps will be public domain. Clothes and bikes etc will get AI visibility signs integrated too.
This article completely ignores China.
In the US, if one pedestrian is killed by a self-driving car, the losses are unacceptable. This is true even if thousands of lives are saved.
In China, the opposite is true. If thousands of lives are saved, and one pedestrian dies, the self-driving car is a success.
China will be the first country to see widespread deployment of self-driving cars for this reason.
Also China would probably move heaven and earth if necessary to get things done. Quickly. Maybe not so perfectly safely though.
In the US, getting approval to construct a 10'x10' dog park requires moving heaven and earth to get permits signed off to even start planning, and then come the lawsuits.
> Ghost roads didn’t demand a massive mobilization of government. The technology of autonomous driving would roll onto existing highways, invisibly weaving a new transportation system. Only this one would be modeled on the Internet. Computers would outnumber people. Code would call all the shots.
Mmrright. Imagine a future where anytime public infrastructure stops working you have to contact Google's tech support. Just think of how that turns out today, when Google's algos decide someone's app is violating TOS or something similar, like the news that comes up every once in a while on HN, where the victims are met with a wall of automated messages that explain nothing.
"If you want an image of the future, picture a human trying to get through a bot to a human operator for ever".
I think Comma.ai and car manufacturers other than Tesla will probably offer a variety of customer support experiences, especially because the cost of churn is much larger than say gsuite.
The idea of a spectrum of roads, ranging from "no drivers" to "no robots" seems near-fetched.
Indeed! Merge onto the highway, relinquish control, program the exit you want to take and lean back.
It seems expensive and I don't see how we get from here to there. Roads are fairly expensive and require a lot of planning, so how do we go from no-robots to a dedicated road with limited human drivers without having a lot of wasted very expensive infrastructure for a length of time?
This article (willfully) mistakes Waymo's caution for allegedly intractable nature of the self-driving problem.
The problem with self-driving cars is the 1% failure of software.
Cars travel at a high rate of speed and a 1% error can easily be fatal. Either by hitting a pedestrian or someone on a bike, or by the car failing to acknowledge something and crashing itself head on into something.
Because cars travel in a highly dynamic environment this 1% error and the fatality risk associated with it is very high, so you need to have something that is 99.99999% safe which is extremely challenging because of the dynamic environment.
Meanwhile, if you look at automated train and rail systems. Because the environment is 99% controlled and less complex a 1% error is actually much smaller, because the environment is so controlled.
The high rate of speed, coupled with fatality risk, coupled with dynamic environments, is why this is such a challenging problem.
Did you just pull 1% out of the air?
I'm not saying it's statistical, it's just a reference to a small issue which is compounded because of high fatality risk and that the dynamic environment makes the likelihood of unlikely events more likely to occur.
Actual red herring here is developing new automobile technologies at all.
Yep.
The car has created more problems than it has solved, what with CO2 emissions, brake and tire dust, and the incredible amount of car crash and pedestrian deaths.
Electric and autonomous cars would be positive steps forward to solving these problems, but are fundamentally still doing the wrong thing better.
The technology to solve all of our transportation problems already exists, and often has existed since the 19th century. Autonomous rapid transit has existed since the 1980s.
Compact towns with walkable streets, safe cycling lanes and high quality public transportation are all more effective and more affordable approaches to how we primarily move about our world.
Thank you for summarizing it... I guess I should have as well in my original post versus just the snide remark. Emotion got the best of me.
I have the greatest startup idea ever: Selling petrol-driven generators with a web interface for charging electric cars. Premium tier will include automatic refuel ordering. Of course the generators will be completely useless when the web is down or our hosting company goes out of business.
Doesn't the way we build cities have more history with (semi-autonomously guided) horses as the prime engine of transport?
Surely there's lessons there worth exploring?
Electric self-driving enables mass transit that evolves to the needs of the citizens without spewing diesel exhaust everywhere.
Hand waving the economic viability of self driving cars because of assumed post Covid austerity is just lazy thinking.
Autonomous transportation should be banned. The cost of putting 10 million + people out work do not match the benefits.
I assume you're also in favor of banning green energy because it puts coal miners out of work.
No I wouldn't support that. It doesn't scale. Coal work numbers in the 10's of thousands, employment through driving in the 10's of millions.
tl;dr ... "Experts" say we will never have autonomous cars and the author would rather live in Hong Kong anyway.
How outdated/out of touch was that line about Women managing children in a covid world?
Just say "parents".
Unfortunately, the numbers do bear out that women are being _extremely_ disproportionately hit by the need to manage children in a distributed manner during COVID.
https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/09/1071502
https://www.npr.org/2020/05/09/853073274/women-bear-the-brun...
In the US at least (and anecdotally), the driving factor appears to be that in a mixed-gender two-adult household, it is basically assumed that if someone has to step back from their job to watch kids, it's the woman---either because she makes less money than her male partner or because businesses are less flexible with granting men off-time for parenting than they are granting women such time. These factors aren't universally true, but I suspect they're on-average true enough to be driving the visible stats.