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”
It is clear you have grown up in another country. You are just trying to drive how you are used to drive in another country. That doesn’t make how you are used to drive safer and the system any more unsafe.
“Bumperkleven” is forbidden. Whoever is creeping up to you in a few meters is breaking the law. You are also not supposed to merge back to the lane right in front of the other driver. I barely even see this happening. Most people just stay in their lane after taking somebody over, unless someone else with a higher speed is getting closer from behind them.
why the fuck should the person getting overtaken slow down? That adds unpredictability to the equation, for the person overtaking and the person behind you. That is super dangerous if you’ve been doing that. The slower the process, the better the situation is under control. You don’t want sudden changes in the situation on the road. Just keep driving with a constant speed, the people around you will be able to predict where you’ll be and the situation on the road becomes much simpler. You are the driver people are saying “wtf is he doing” if you’ve been slowing down while getting overtaken. Two cars driving next to each other is not a dangerous situation. Where did you get that from??? Our infrastructure allows for it because the lines on our roads are super clear. It is only dangerous if somebody didn’t notice the car besides them or forgets they are there. But that’s dangerous no matter the situation, not just because they are side-by-side.
Never seen this happen. People being overtaken always keep driving at the speed they are driving at. You are the only person here suddenly slowing down while being overtaken. You are that person you are talking about.
The idea behind it is that the flow of traffic should not be interrupted. The earlier you merge while everybody including yourself is driving at a steady pace, the better. The end of the lane forces the driver to get to a stop, and if you choose to only merge there, you don’t have any flexibility there. If you aren’t so lucky that you can merge instantaneously without slowing down, you would merge with a speed of zero. This forces the whole other lane to go on their brakes because you want to merge. It interrupts the flow of traffic. Yes, we treat people that try to get in front as people trying to get in front of the line because it fucks everybody else up, yes. I dont know where you got the idea from that your way of doing it is the proper way. It clearly isn’t. Merge as early as possible, it allows to keep the flow of traffic flowing.
About speed tickets: if you only go slightly above the speed limit, you’ll get a slap on the wrist (an expensive ticket). However, if you drive at dangerous speeds, you just lose your license. So I don’t really understand what you are talking about.
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.
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.
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.
Daar verschillen wij dan van mening. Ik vind het meestal een bad-faith argument wanneer mensen op basis van de huidige technologie tegen het principe van zelfrijdende auto’s zijn.
Dat laatste geeft ook aan dat je psychologisch iets erop tegen hebt (wat volledig begrijpelijk is, maar toch noemenswaardig).
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.
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.
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:
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”?
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.
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. :(
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.
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.
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:
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”
It is clear you have grown up in another country. You are just trying to drive how you are used to drive in another country. That doesn’t make how you are used to drive safer and the system any more unsafe.
“Bumperkleven” is forbidden. Whoever is creeping up to you in a few meters is breaking the law. You are also not supposed to merge back to the lane right in front of the other driver. I barely even see this happening. Most people just stay in their lane after taking somebody over, unless someone else with a higher speed is getting closer from behind them.
why the fuck should the person getting overtaken slow down? That adds unpredictability to the equation, for the person overtaking and the person behind you. That is super dangerous if you’ve been doing that. The slower the process, the better the situation is under control. You don’t want sudden changes in the situation on the road. Just keep driving with a constant speed, the people around you will be able to predict where you’ll be and the situation on the road becomes much simpler. You are the driver people are saying “wtf is he doing” if you’ve been slowing down while getting overtaken. Two cars driving next to each other is not a dangerous situation. Where did you get that from??? Our infrastructure allows for it because the lines on our roads are super clear. It is only dangerous if somebody didn’t notice the car besides them or forgets they are there. But that’s dangerous no matter the situation, not just because they are side-by-side.
Never seen this happen. People being overtaken always keep driving at the speed they are driving at. You are the only person here suddenly slowing down while being overtaken. You are that person you are talking about.
The idea behind it is that the flow of traffic should not be interrupted. The earlier you merge while everybody including yourself is driving at a steady pace, the better. The end of the lane forces the driver to get to a stop, and if you choose to only merge there, you don’t have any flexibility there. If you aren’t so lucky that you can merge instantaneously without slowing down, you would merge with a speed of zero. This forces the whole other lane to go on their brakes because you want to merge. It interrupts the flow of traffic. Yes, we treat people that try to get in front as people trying to get in front of the line because it fucks everybody else up, yes. I dont know where you got the idea from that your way of doing it is the proper way. It clearly isn’t. Merge as early as possible, it allows to keep the flow of traffic flowing.
About speed tickets: if you only go slightly above the speed limit, you’ll get a slap on the wrist (an expensive ticket). However, if you drive at dangerous speeds, you just lose your license. So I don’t really understand what you are talking about.
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.
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.
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.
Zeker niet de gevaarlijkste vehikel, maar… niet voor mij.
Daar verschillen wij dan van mening. Ik vind het meestal een bad-faith argument wanneer mensen op basis van de huidige technologie tegen het principe van zelfrijdende auto’s zijn.
Dat laatste geeft ook aan dat je psychologisch iets erop tegen hebt (wat volledig begrijpelijk is, maar toch noemenswaardig).
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.