What if we had one BIG self driving car that dozens of people could comfortablely sit inside while traveling on a shared route?
We could have multiple vehicles traveling that same route so you’re almost always assured a ride without waiting long. And as were saving a lot of money with predictable road wear, less pollution and less accidents, we could probably make the rides very affordable, if not free. Last thought, kind of out there , but we could even have one person sit at the front of the bus and look out a window - If they saw a child, animal or some other potential issue on the road ahead, they could see it well ahead of time and hit some sort of hand or foot button that slows the vehicle to a stop temporarily so there aren’t any software related accidents from the self driving vehicle that result in injury or loss of life.
It will be like an uber… But for all of US. We’ll call it UBUS!
But, my profit margin!
-Oil and gas companies
That’s actually…kinda genius. It’s not just fresh thinking: it’s a scalable and green solution to a real problem. I think you could really make a difference with this idea. Would you like to work out some ways we can make life worse for the working class while we implement it?
Green solution? That sounds like communism
Green solution? That sounds like weed!
It’s a niche idea from a small European nation, but have you tried having the trains late 2/3 of the time?
I just can’t get you out of my head, boy your mechanical phrasing and can-do enthusiasm are all I think about
Theres an entire unionized industry of train operators that has a problem with this statement.
Up until very recently all train route planning in Sweden was done manually with huge sheets of paper and rulers. Scheduling trains is a very hard problem due to the inability for one train to pass another in many places and the constantly high congestion. Any change in the schedule affects basically the entire rail network.
In computer science it belongs to the class of “NP-hard” problems which are essentially intractable to solve optimally. There are various approximate methods that can be employed to get something that’s almost always good enough.
done manually with huge sheets of paper and rulers. Scheduling trains is a very hard problem
Just because it is a hard problem, it doesn’t mean it is easier to do with paper and rulers than with algorithms. So the problem being “hard” should be unrelated to Sweden being behind the times.
The problem with train scheduling is that computers don’t just make it better. There’s a very real chance computers could make it worse or result in approximately the same outcome but not require millions in investment into a new system.
I’m having trouble understanding how that relates to the statement about train operators, the ones actually driving the trains because most trains are not autonomous.
Hold up. This gives me an even better idea. What if, and this is totally hypothetical, but instead of self driving cars, we used trains to transport people?
The train could even theoretically transport a whole bunch of people at one time.
Holy shit. I think we are really on to something here.
And you force people to live on train lines. You disenfranchise any community, especially rural poor, by making areas not supported by trains into useless land with added expenses just to live.
There’s no single solution to this. Many modes of transport need to be supported.
Make more railroads and trains, duh. Still doesn’t cover areas where trains simply can’t go, which is where air transport comes in
Cars is the solution.
The problem with this is that they don’t solve the same problem.
I use the train for almost all my transportation, trains are amazing.
However, the train doesn’t bring me to my front door. The train doesn’t bring me to my exact destination.
A self-driving car would save me at least 45 minutes during my commutes (one way), purely because of the flexibility.
Literally buses?
If you have volume/demand problems:
- Buses not frequent enough
- Bus stop is not close enough
- Buses take a circuitous route / take too long
This will naturally increase the more people use them. So the only limiting factor is you, your family, neighbours etc.
Thought about the limiting factor called “workforce”?
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self-drivingcar would save me at least 45 minutes during my commutes (one way), purely because of the flexibility.Fixed that for you. I don’t see how “self-driving” would be 45 minutes faster.
True, but that requires me having a drivers license + requires me driving. We are talking about the comparison to train commutes and the usefulness of self-driving technology. I don’t drive the train.
You used the self-driving bit saving you time as an argument in favor of self-driving cars, hence the correction. The time save has nothing to do with who operates the car (unless it’s a F1 driver).
The problem is that this whole debate is poisoned. Self-driving cars are not, and will likely never be safe. They can be safer on average than human drivers, it’s just that other people will die in accidents than those killed by reckless drivers. The ones dying will die due to software errors / profit calculations and the likes. As such, promoting self-driving without a mechanical guiding control (as in railways) is highly unethical.
It might be possible to overcome the technological challenges of safe self-driving, but humankind as a whole is too selfish and profit-driven to ever reach a point where that kind of research will even be funded with any meaningful budget. That’s my prediction.
In one of my other comments I mentioned the reduce of traffic jams as an argument, due to coordination between vehicles.
About the accidents: reckless drivers also (mainly even I think, no source) kill innocent people on the road. Reducing the total amount of deaths is more important than some supposed moral superiority of only reckless drivers dying vs people dying due to technical faults.
In one of my other comments I mentioned the reduce of traffic jams as an argument, due to coordination between vehicles.
Yes, that is possible. However, in today’s neofascist regimes, this is a beloved excuse for total surveillance. Not that they still need it - we basically have always-online and trackable cars already anyways. :(
About the accidents: reckless drivers also (mainly even I think, no source) kill innocent people on the road. Reducing the total amount of deaths is more important than some supposed moral superiority of only reckless drivers dying vs people dying due to technical faults.
This is an alternative of the trolley problem. There’s no clear ethical answer to this. Personally, I think that today’s technology proves that companies will always put profits over safety, and I will always prefer to control my own vehicle when it comes to personal travel, over having any kind of safety relevant automation. Just think of Boeing’s 737 MAX debacle, where Boeing murdered (with the amount of criminal energy they put into obfuscating the redesign of the plane there’s no other way for me to see this) the crew and passengers of two civil airliners for profit.
We’re not doing anything meaningful against reckless drivers in today’s world, even when it’s trivial, and our governments are corrupt to the core and will never exert more control over corporations than they will over private people who drive recklessly.
The last part about governments not acting upon reckless driving, I think it depends on the country. In the Netherlands it is pretty well done. Most disciplined drivers you could find in the world.
The last part about governments not acting upon reckless driving, I think it depends on the country. In the Netherlands it is pretty well done.
Absolutely not! My experience from a couple of years living and driving in NL: Speeding is expensive, but has no other consequences -> speed limits are effective for poor people only. No other controls are in effect. The average speed measurement over longer stretches of road is a nice touch, but again, no consequences but expensive tickets. Also, contrary to Switzerland, fines are NOT bound to your income / wealth.
Most disciplined drivers you could find in the world.
Also not. Things wrong with the average Dutch driver that come to mind immediatley: Due to the low speed limits, overtaking another vehicle is a long process - that’s not the fault of the drivers, but the system’s fault (although the average speed limit is designed to allow a quick burst in speed for this, it’s hard to know when you’ll pay an expensive fine and I wouldn’t rely on it either). What the average Dutch driver does with it however is a problem:
- the driver overtaking will creep up to the car to be overtaken’s rear bumper before changing to the left lane, and will typically go right back into the original lane after clearing the slower car by like 5 meters - due to the slow process of “catching up” this leads to minutes with a very dangerous distance to the car in front of them, and will occasionally cause accidents (thanks to the low speed those are not as fatal).
- the driver being overtaken basically never slows down to speed up the process and make it safer for all involved
- on the contrary, people will sometimes even drive at very irregular speeds and speed up a little just when someone attempts to overtake them
and then 4) many Dutch drivers do not understand zip merging and hate people doing it correctly. If a lane is closed down, people will merge onto the other lane(s) kilometres before the road closure, and there will always be someone who behaves aggressively towards vehicles using the lane until the frontmost part where it is closed and the zip merger should be done. I’ve seen truckers(!) veer to the side to try and intimidate cars passing for a zip merger, because they perceive these people as “cutting the line”
A real self driving car would increase your commute because it would be able to transport children, dogs, sandwiches etc and the overall effect would be a like 30%+ increase in traffic as people buy or rent more self driving trips for people and objects normally not able to rent rides.
The effect would be analogous to “Jevon’s Paradox” where more efficiency increases demand.
A city built for cars (no matter if “self driving” or not) has to be built much more spread out. Distances for everything multiply. At the same time that spread out infrastructure leads to heavily mono-directional traffic, making rush hour load much worse.
That is why people in car only cities aren’t any faster than cities well designed for public transit. Yes, heavy rail does not cut it alone, that is why there is also light rail, bus lines etc. With all of that, you can get anywhere you need to go, in places that are not primarily or exclusively built for the car.
Who said car-only? I said that self-driving cars and trains/buses/subway do not solve the same problem. They can coexist just like how they do now.
The only thing this technology does is allowing commute time to become more productive and allowing more automatization for a job that always has shortage (think of bus drivers). If self-driving technology would become sufficiently good, the bus in my village could drive 4 times an hour, purely because there is no bus-driver necessary.
Also, things like traffic jams are supposed to become rarer too with autonomous vehicles, because all those cars are supposed to coordinate with each other. You ever realized that many traffic jams could be solved if everybody would start driving at the exact same speed at the exact same moment, instead of accelerating, slowing down, accelerating, slowing down. This is all because of human reaction time and the lack of coordination between vehicles. Traffic accidents are also supposed to go down.
The car share can be replaced with self driving cars, however if you make self driving cars more attractive than cars now, you’ll shift the balance and are heading towards more car centric and therefore more hostile and less attractive places again.
It is a nice fairy tale hat self driving cars are more space efficient. Real service patterns have shown that they fill up road infrastructure more than regular cars as they will do either fill up trips or need to drive everything twice. Also, making use of these fancy advantages (higher speeds, shorter breaking distance, dynamic crissings without traffic lights) make roads much more pedstrian hostile, more highway like.
After visiting Tokyo, I’m convinced that both can exist. Trains take 95% of the travel and the 5% of the time you need to be someplace specific, car it is.
As for to your door… I was a 10 minute walk to every single destination I needed.
Better train infatructure plus busses and metrolines will help with this problem
I don’t live in the USA, I live in the Netherlands, infrastructure here is very good, public transport-wise too. It’s just that a train can’t go to every little village that exists. There is a bus, but it only comes and goes once an hour (which is entirely reasonable for my village), which severely affects the travel time.
Ns is wel tof ja maar het kan altijd beter en self driving cars gaan dit probleem niet fixen je kan beter de fiets of een normalen auto pakken en met beteren aansluitingen hoef je geen uur te wachten
Voor die betere aansluitingen zul je toch echt zelfrijdende bussen moeten hebben (als zelfrijdende auto’s zo’n zonde zijn), want geen ziel wil buschauffeur worden in de huidige economie. Hoeveel jaren hebben we al een tekort aan buschauffeurs? Hoeveel jaren moeten we stakingen aanzien omdat de werkomstandigheden niet te doen zijn, eigenlijk gewoon door een tekort aan buschauffeurs?
Het gaat uiteindelijk om de technologie dat een vaartuig op 4 wielen autonoom kan rijden waardoor chauffeurs overbodig worden. Automatisering is de enige manier om ongewilde banen te elimineren.
Zoude zelfrijdende metros dat niet fixen selfrijdende bussen klinken een beetje link plus ik vind een beetje meer belasting betalen voor goed betaalde medewerkers een beteren investering dan zelf rijdende autos
Maat we leven in een polder land, je kunt niet overal metros leggen. De grond in Nederland zakt al genoeg weg. Dat Amsterdam en Rotterdam metros hebben betekent niet dat dat overal zo kan.
want geen ziel wil buschauffeur worden in de huidige economie. Hoeveel jaren hebben we al een tekort aan buschauffeurs?
En in plaats van één goede salaris te betalen, gaan we liever levensgevaarlijke bussen op straat plaatsen. Prima idee.
We hebben het over een hypothetische toekomst waar de technologie veiliger zou zijn dan mensen. Natuurlijk laten we niet voertuigen rijden die gevaarlijk zijn. Dat is ook niet waar het over ging.
Overigens rijden er al een decennia zelfrijdende bussen in Rotterdam.
We hebben het over een hypothetische toekomst waar de technologie veiliger zou zijn dan mensen.
Dat zou volgens mij nooit gebeuren. Terwijl ik niet zou zeggen dat het onmogelijk is, zijn de mensen toch gemiddelt te egoïstisch en gefocusseerd op geld.
Overigens rijden er al een decennia zelfrijdende bussen in Rotterdam.
- bekende weg
- nog steeds een chauffeur voor de controle / toezicht
- rijd langzaam
Zeker niet de gevaarlijkste vehikel, maar… niet voor mij.
And self driving cars will do nothing to change anything. I you push for them, more than for cars currently, cities in the Netherlands will be much worse places and traffic will get much worse as well.
Cars are of course part of the mobility equation, especially in rural regions with small settlements. 1 hour connections can still be perfectly fine for commuting but it can only be a supporting service there. The story is completely different one as soon as you get anywhere close to any major city. In the Netherlands, most people live in such locations.
Well yeah, of course there’s no way to build more train tracks. Can’t be helped, oh well, tough luck.
No, you can’t build train tracks to literally every village. Do you want all the land area to be covered in train tracks instead of roads?
Define “village”. Lol, seriously though. What exactly do you mean? I’ve seen hundreds of ultra local train lines in my life.
Village in the Netherlands is the definition of “village” I am using.
I would recommend studying Dutch infrastructure and get some general knowledge about this country.
I’m not talking about very small villages like in Romania that are amidst huge swaths of empty land that are connected by little trains. The Netherlands is densely populated, all the landmass already has a purpose.
“Just build more train tracks” obnoxious naive response.
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I really do wonder what the implications of cars moving to electric energy will have on the impact of transportation infrastructure.
For instance I don’t believe electricity has the same “scarce-bility”/manipulation as fossil fuels do. The U.S. subsidizes oil so much because it is making the people who pay their campaigns rich. Solar and such are relatively easy compared to drilling your own oil, refining it and making it ready for your vehicle.
So when it gets to the point that it is more expensive for all cars to be gas powered, I think we will see that electricity companies won’t hold the same monopoly values at manipulating markets. So instead of saying, I want to pay $X a year in electric to drive my car, I’d rather pay X/3
Anyways I’m off topic but we’ll see
In a Tunnel!
Pretty sure trains have drivers bro
Some don’t, actually. Driverless trains exist, including metro trains. At least two lines of the Paris metro system - namely lines 1 and 4 - are automated.
Return of the landlines…
Trains only go where they have rails.
Want to give up your mobile phone?
Ear me out: trains for all the inter-city travels, busses for in-city travels that are big and…you walk for max 1km travels
Wait- no think about the investors!! Think about the suckers that need a big ass car to compensate!!Mobile phones work only near cell towers, you dunderheaded rabbit blossom
Mobile phones have many other uses than just calling now. And also all of internet is just cables under the ocean with big data centers.
Trains are on of the best mode of transportation, it is something which can be easily electrified and most parts of the world have done that. It can hold around 1000 people at a time, the cost is also very very affordable. There are problems like delay and too crowded but those problems are policy problems not tech peoblems. Introducing more trains, adding more lines, adding more type of trains - high speed, semi speed, suburban, metro. This is one field where machine learning will be of very help and self driving locomotives with human assistant can be efficient too.
