This is a good move on Cruise's part. Cruise is still nowhere near the maturity level that Waymo was at when Waymo first started driving on public roads.
On the other hand, we definitely need a real competitor to Waymo. It doesn't seem likely, but hopefully some combination of Cruise, Apple(?), Tesla, or another player will be able to have a feasible alternative to Waymo's Driver.
Out of all the tech problems to solve, driverless cars or driverless taxis has always baffled me. It’s a very complex thing to solve with a zillion edge cases. And for what net gain? What incredible inconvenience are we trying to solve? Lack of good public transit? Let’s solve that instead.
Millions of cars driverless or not are not a great solution to anything.
US also has almost 350 miles of high speed rail, not 0. The Northeast is where it’s all concentrated with Acela being the fastest.
If you live in a major city in the States it’s often way easier and faster to take rail. In Seattle for instance you can beat a driver to the airport every time during traffic. Hell even the LAX station in Los Angeles of all places will be available end of 2024 and that’s the most notorious car centric city in this country. The subway in LA keeps seeing ridership growth. I don’t even rent a car when I visit anymore. Everywhere I want to go is serviced.
Lastly NYC is one of the most serviced by transit areas in the world? Are you living in an alternate universe?
Mass transit is the solution. It’s vastly cheaper to build, moves more people, and far safer. I’ve got a highway interchange by my house that’s taken a decade to finish while they’ve ran rail and built four stations in that time. That’s a perfectly fine pace given our slow building system with environmental review and the like.
I spent most of my 45 years of age in public transport, I only had a car for a year and a half (and a total lemon, I don't miss that). Yet I say: beware of people who speak of THE solution.
For mass transit to work, population density matters. At least in the EU, there is a trend of people being priced out of capital cities to the surrounding countryside, where the population density drops to levels where providing extensive bus service becomes uneconomical. An important limitation is availability of bus drivers. People are loath to take lives of 40 strangers in their hands + rise out of their beds at 4am, and you can only pay them so much before exhausting the budget. And it is not just question of "more money". Prague, the capital of Czechia, spends about 33 per cent of its municipal budget on public transport and it still has a shortage of drivers.
Reliable self-driving, which was the original topic of this discussion, would be a huge boon to public transport. It would reduce hourly costs and address the driver shortage (which becomes especially acute in flu season etc., where too many people call in sick at the same time).
For mass transit to work better, we need to increase population density, and that means killing of the NIMBY phenomenon. Plenty of people, at least where I live, don't mind living in condos, as long as these are safe and clean. They are just priced out of cities by lack of development and the consequent soaring of prices.
Edit: interesting that this post attracted two downvotes, but no rebuttals. Is public transport such a sacred object for some?
From my personal point of view, it is a service like any other, and obviously cannot work efficiently everywhere.
> Reliable self-driving would be a huge boon to public transport.
Public transport would also be a huge boost to reliable self driving .. some years of only having to follow already established routes is a perfect middle step to self driving everywhere.
Vehicles can be tuned to the specific trouble spots of specific routes, there is a reduced need to deal with unfamiliar routes, in a number of cities public buses have established right of way | dedicated bus lanes, there's a pool drivers who can be migrated from driving a single bus to remote over watch of several buses, etc.
Self-driving vans, with all the fancy LIDAR, where people hop on and hop off, that only drives on specific paths that have been excruciatingly mapped and well-worn.
Basically a little bus without a driver that can adjust its route on the fly.
As a user, you'd be able to get picked up a little closer to your location rather than having to walk to "The Bus Stop", you wouldn't be at the mercy of a set schedule, and it would be much cheaper than a taxi/rideshare because IIRC 70% of their cost is the human labor, and the cost is not split among multiple individuals.
Crucially, they would also use our existing road infrastructure, so you don't have to lay down train tracks, streetcar lines, build dedicated bus lanes, etc.
> Plenty of people, at least where I live, don't mind living in condos, as long as these are safe and clean.
And quiet. The biggest problem is noise pollution causing problems. I want to watch my TV or listen to music at an enjoyable level while also not disturbing my neighbors. The problem with the US is the incentives are not aligned to make sound proofing a requirement, making for bad living conditions and bad neighbors.
This is a massive issue with newer builds. They often look sleek and impressive, which is what moves units, but they completely cheap out on soundproofing and insulation.
I think there's going to be greater awareness about noise pollution in the coming decade or so (it's hugely detrimental to human health), and it's worth paying attention to if you're looking to buy a place.
You got downvotes because most people are incapable of nuanced thinking, especially on this subject.
Yes public transport is one of the key talismans in the church of the utopian left.
Public transport in the US is in a terrible state and needs to be massively expanded and funded, yet it cannot solve all of the transportation requirements of our massive economy and geography.
Definitely agree with everything you wrote. I just moved out of a major German city into a small town because I lost my apartment due to Eigenbedarf, then was unable to find a new place in the city at an affordable price in the time I had. Had to get a car again for the first time in 10 years.
And mass transit adoption keeps growing for the workforce. Because sitting in a car in traffic sucks that much. So we make self driving cars and all those people pile into personal vehicles? That only exacerbates the problem.
I’m actually shocked the ratio is only 3:1. That’s not “few” people that’s hundreds of thousands fighting for a handful of bridges and tunnels each and every morning and every evening in between.
I commute into Manhattan daily via public transit.
However when I go into Manhattan for non work related activities, my wife and I (and nearly all my friends) always drive.
The NYC transit situation is decent and tolerable, but still very unpleasant. If I want to enjoy a night in the city, the last thing I want to do is deal with the transit system.
Dealing with mild to moderate traffic within the confines of my (admittedly pretty nice) car is not very painful at all.
We look at the traffic situation before going in. If it's terrible, we just cancel our plans in Manhattan and do something else.
That list doesn't include cities where the local train (subway or street rail) system connects to the airport, which seems odd. In my experience it's way easier getting to the into the city using local rail compared to dealing with parking, rental cars, traffic etc.
The only downside is almost none of these systems are in operation 24/7, with the exceptions being NYC and Chicago. If you have a very early or late arrival / departure, you just can't use them at all without waiting several hours at the airport. I wish more cities could add reduced frequency night service, something like maybe 1 train every hour or hour and a half.
As a somewhat cherry-picked example, if someone in the southern part of my city wants to take a train into the city center, the last good route with only one transfer leaves at 10 pm. At 10:40pm Google maps suggests a route with 3 transfers that takes almost twice as long (and includes the commuter rail which is a separate, more expensive ticket). The last possible option is at 11:40 and takes 3 times as long as the normal route. If we want people to use trains and subways, the service hours have to be greatly improved.
In Seattle, you can beat a driver to the airport using the train…unless you live in Ballard, or any other place not on the I5 corridor.
I never bothered with taking the train to the Beijing airport either, even though it existed for much of time there. Taxi was still more convenient. If we are talking Tokyo or Paris, ok, no problem, but it doesn’t make sense in a lot of cities for a lot of connections to be made.
Whenever I visit Seattle I always take the light rail into the city. The few times I've had a chance to bring this up in conversation with a local they've always been surprised that someone actually uses the light rail to get to or from the airport.
this is exclusively how i pick people up from the airport now, tell them to take the link to northgate then i'll drive to get them from there, so much easier. I love the link but the home to link station bus rides are the slowest part of the journey, i've waited for the rapid ride buses for an hour before.
> In Seattle for instance you can beat a driver to the airport every time during traffic
Sea-Tac is 22 minutes from my house by car, during the worst traffic it is usually around 35 mins (I don't have to drive through downtown), and 1 hour 18 minutes by bus and lightrail. I live about 4 miles as the crow flies from the SODO light rail station.
> Mass transit is the solution.
This is only a solution for a large, dense urban environment, and really only a partial solution at that.
>US also has almost 350 miles of high speed rail, not 0. The Northeast is where it’s all concentrated with Acela being the fastest.
Acela is not "high speed rail". Maybe to Americans it is, but it really isn't. Let me know when the US can make a real high-speed rail where the train company actually owns and operates the track and can actually maintain a high speed, instead of just going fast on one short little stretch and then calling it "high speed".
That Wikipedia list is missing chicago. If you happen to live near the blue line you can ride it all the way into ohare.
San Francisco is already connected via Bart and caltrain can take you to the Bart station before the airport, so you have to transfer. Just like at Oakland where you have to transfer to a tram that links the airport to Bart.
San Jose being connected by train is an egregious bending of the truth. The truth is there is no train to San Jose Airport. There is just a bus.
> Let’s start by having trains take you to the airport directly…
I thought the US had legalised those now, so they'll happen as new systems come online.
> In the meantime, getting self driving cars that are all electric will be a big win.
Why? They're still going to take up as much road space (maybe even more, since they'll be moving around empty half the time). They'll still be spewing particulate pollution around our city centres - maybe more since they'll be heavier. They'll be consuming vast amounts of rare earths that could deliver much more benefit if used for electric bikes.
Self-driving electric cars will deliver at best a marginal safety improvement and a marginal reduction in whole-life emissions. There are much better ways to improve cities, transport, and lives: road-use pricing, bicycle priority at junctions, better parking laws, building more transit...
> road-use pricing, bicycle priority at junctions, better parking laws, building more transit...
Excellent suggestions. Road-use pricing could easily be added as a rule to self-driving fleets. Self-driving cars could always yield to pedestrians and cyclists. There will be a glut of empty parking spaces when self-driving cars are common. Self-driving cars are transit.
> Self-driving cars could always yield to pedestrians and cyclists.
They could, but they will be unpopular with users if so.
> There will be a glut of empty parking spaces when self-driving cars are common.
The self-driving cars still have to go somewhere. If they're not parked then they're going to be taking up space on the roads instead, which might be worse.
> “What incredible inconvenience are we trying to solve?”
> 40,000 deaths in the United States every year. Hundreds of thousands of costly accidents
If reducing traffic death would be a priority, we could reduce the speed limit (would also help with resource consumption and climate change). We could also have smart phones go into sleep when in motion. That's a trivial technical problem. A much bigger challenge would be to allow smart phone usage for passengers while in moving vehicles, but until that is solved, cry me a river. Using a smart phone in a moving vehicle isn't a god-given right.
> it’s great that you want to start building some mass transit, but it’ll take a century if we start now.
I don't buy this. Specially in cities. You have roads, buy some buses and hire and train good bus drivers. Put some poles as bus stops. Lots of countries have done it in less than a decade.
The problem is, unless the government forcefully does it, the people sue the hell out of the city. “Bus lane lawsuits nyc” google search will result in bunch of results. Also doesn’t help how it would be a political suicide for anyone to be pro-mass transit during local elections. Sometimes they even oppose bus routes to go through their neighbourhoods as well, becoming some sort of an inverted “tragedy of commons” issue.
Mass transit in the US is a political problem. Political problems in the US are unsolvable by design. So driverless cars it is. Meanwhile countries where political problems are not unsolvable by design (either because they are dictatorships or they don't have broken political systems) will move ahead with mass transit.
Yeah but China also has its own self driving cars, and Baidu already operates a taxi service without safety drivers in multiple cities. I guess it’s not a dichotomy between driverless and mass transit..
Just made the assumption, because why do you need a train to a non major airport when a bus will do.
If your city doesn’t host a large airport, then it probably doesn’t make sense to have a train system either. And I’m quite confident there’s a bus to the airport in just about any city that has one.
But that wasn’t the point I was responding to. The point I was responding to was that we need to address 40,000 traffic deaths per year, to which I said it doesn’t seem to be the most direct route there.
Just because self driving cars are safer in some situations doesn’t mean that we will inevitably have that result within a reasonable timeframe and level of investment.
Besides the types of things that reduce human caused accidents would lead to benefits for self driving cars: slower speeds, fewer conflicts, etc.
Compared to the time-frame and investments on which alternatives? It might take 40 years for self driving cars to improve and have enough deployments to significantly reduce the number of accidents, but at least there is a path there and it will happen at some point.
Getting americans to use public transit, requires not only investment in public transit: it requires a cultural shift in how Americans view life. A cheaper solution that can never be delivered is not a good solution, it's just a dream.
Death rates have already been trending downward for decades[0]
There are a whole host of technologies that exist and have been invented to improve safety, that fall short of full self driving. From vehicle design, to improved road designs, and changes is laws (drunk driving being a major example).
Self driving advocates treat it like the messiah that must save us, but there is plenty that can be done to continue to make improvements.
> Getting americans to use public transit, requires not only investment in public transit: it requires a cultural shift in how Americans view life.
I can see why you would have that opinion, but it is an opinion, not a factual statement.
While I agree with the thrust of your statement, the point I was making with the graph was that we have been making driving safer over the last several decades. Self driving isn’t some panacea that we must hold our breath for to make improvements.
With less than 4 million miles of pure rider only data by relatively early Waymo rollouts in two cities it can be argued there's room for the claims per million miles to climb as the number of deployments rise.
4 million miles is proportionally less than the width of a gnat against the history of driver miles in the US across all cities, less than a rounding error.
More crucially, these are 4 million entry level service rollout miles .. a time when the company has highly paid engineers paying scrupulous detailed attention to the condition of the cars and the tuning of the automated responses, with jobs dedicated to the avoidance of PR incidents.
comte7092 has pointed out other factors - but these are not "typical miles" these are the miles before typical sets in - who can say if the stats will be maintained as sensors age and maintainence becomes an after tought in the manner typical of human driven cars.
I hope the figure holds up, I'm commenting here on the apples to oranges issues in the comparison at present.
> Does it not drive the same roads as human drivers?
No, human drivers drive on roads beyond selected neighborhoods of Phoenix and San Francisco.
It is unknown how generalizable the results of the study would be beyond the conditions experienced on the roads in the areas Waymo had been deployed in. We might see significantly improved safety or we might not. But given the messaging from Waymo, the presumption would seem to be that performance would be worse in other areas/conditions.
I am not really sure what your question is asking. More accidents on what roads? If you’re talking about the 99% of roads in the country where Waymo doesn’t currently operate, then I can’t really take your question seriously.
We are talking about relative performance of an automated system vs human drivers. The automated system has been specifically tuned to perform well on a certain set of roads. The point is that there is no reason to assume by default that the system would maintain good relative performance under a drastically different set of conditions.
It won’t take a century if there’s political will. China built a network larger than the rest of the world combined in less than 20 years. Yes, you heard that right, in 2007 there was only one high speed passenger rail service in the entire country.
I don’t like being a defeatist, but being anti-public transit, infrastructure investments, and inability to build public infrastructure is very well ingrained into American culture at this point. Countries like China and India call pull it off because government makes the decision for people. Would be a political suicide for any level of government to get up and say “we will take over the land as we see it useful and build useful shit”. And I don’t even want to talk how in North America, our easiest path would be to hire people who can build that stuff very well (engineers from the said countries), which also won’t sell well with the public.
Admittedly I live in Canada, and in my city we have a fairly functional subway and bus system. But nowhere near as good as Tokyo, Hong Kong, Taiwan and etc. It’s such a bummer every time I visit those countries and see how they’re ran, and then travel somewhere like California or Washington to see the opposite when it comes to transit. I know not everything is the best, but I also don’t know how we can fix this problem when majority of people are against the fix.
>Countries like China and India call pull it off because government makes the decision for people
India is a democracy, as is Japan where public transit is fantastic. Many European countries also have very good transit. The problem isn't the type of government, it's the people and culture political will. Americans just don't want public transit enough to build and live in cities where it would work well. Not driving everywhere in a car is unthinkable to most Americans.
Most Beijing subways until recently were all loops, so you could get there via subway, but it would take a long time because it was a giant loop rather than being direct. They are top notch, I'm glad other people take them, but I'll take a taxi unless I need to get somewhere during rush hour.
Especially getting to Beijing South in the morning with luggage, a taxi or hiring a car via didi is the best way to go. To get to Beijing south, how many transfers do you need to drag your luggage through? So let's see, from where I used to live with the lines in place now: I would need to drag my luggage to Tuanjiehu on line 10, take the loop around to jiaomenxi, and then take the line 4 up to beijing south. Or I could pay 50 kuai for a taxi from my apartment complex gate to the front door of the train station.
The main Shanghai HSR station is 45-60 mins from the main business district. That is not convenient. In Japan, all the main HSR stations are incredibly convenient. Usually, walking distance from main business district.
Also, Beijing is a huge city. So what if the "subway network is top notch". It is still frequently 45 mins more travel time on slow subway for final destination.
> Let’s start by having trains take you to the airport directly…
Why should trains be the only alternative to driverless cars? What is difficult about buying a few buses and start taking people to the airport, today?
Buses do take people to the airport, they are extremely inconvienent for anyone but a solo traveler with minimal bags that happen to live close to a bus line.
The only time I take a bus is when I need to take a transfer from the airport parking to the terminal, that part usually takes longer than my drive to the airport. I'd gladly pay another 10-20$ for a valet to park my car from the terminal to avoid those busses.
You want to take a bite out of road deaths legislate a vehicle/phone interlink that disables everything but basic phone functions on smartphones while in the confines of a vehicle, then legislate center console infotainment displays out of existence. Miss me with the bullshit "AI drivers will usher in a new era of road safety", you can trap an AV with a fucking ring of salt on the road if you're clever about how it's arranged. :P
> Miss me with the bullshit "AI drivers will usher in a new era of road safety", you can trap an AV with a fucking ring of salt on the road if you're clever about how it's arranged. :P
How many people die when you do that? An AV stopping cause it encounters a weird situation is failing safe, and it is the correct thing for it to do. And yeah, they normally stop if you maliciously attack them. But human drivers also stop if you blow out their tires, or hit the driver with a well aimed rock. Car safety is not judged on malicious attacks, we are not talking about autonomous tanks.
Nobody bought a Tesla in the last 5 years because “I want fewer highway fatalities”, they often bought it because they thought the overhyped self driving features would let them chill out on their commute.
People want self driving cars so bad because driving everywhere sucks (and sitting on public transit sucks too). Routine travel is mundane and boring.
I will buy a Tesla because I love driving it. Yes even commute. Driving an EV makes driving so easy and fun. I had one as part of a car subscription for 5 months and I always looked forward to my commute. Even an ID5 from VW or something comparable gives you that feeling of... effortless. Can't describe it any better. Even an automatic ICE can't compare at all. Didn't care much about self driving because in Europe it lacks a lot of features compared to the US FSD from Tesla.
They take it, but are they comfortable doing so? Or just have no better alternatives?
Most women I knew in those cities preferred riding with friends or a boyfriend, some even took taxis to avoid the metros at night if they couldn’t. But that was also a crapshoot, because some taxi drivers are even worse and then you definitely won’t have anyone else around.
Most moved out of the cities entirely when they got kids for ‘safety issues’, among other things. Like the logistical nightmare that is navigating the systems with kids and all their stuff. A few stayed and got cars.
Very few systems the public seems to consider generally safe enough to send kids unattended - Zurich, Tokyo, Singapore are the only ones that occur to me.
Tokyo has a serious subway groping issue though, fwiw.
Grifters - truly, such a comforting thing to say that ensures everyone will feel the apparent warm fuzzies you seem to have?
Notably, they left me alone after some eye contact, but seemed to have no issue harassing female parisians indefinitely while the cops ignored them. None of the women seemed surprised. None of them seemed happy about it either. I didn’t see any unsolicited touching though, so that’s good!
No one really knows where the bottom of that number will be, or even what it will be with autonomy. Whenever people bring up this argument I feel like it’s the same as saying “there will be no human error in plane crashes with an autopilot” when we know that isn’t true.
China has 25k miles of bullet trains and China accounted for a third of the cars sold in 2022. A third. This is a country that limits imports and even limits the number of drivers in some cities. So it’s silly to suggest public transit can replace cars.
ETA: Replace all cars.
So as long as we will have cars, we might as well make them safer.
> getting self driving cars that are all electric will be a big win.
I will say that this is still far away and the goals are orthogonal. We have electric cars now, the technology is proven. But it will take a generation of cars to replace the existing ICE vehicles. If and when self-driving vehicles are available it will take a generation to replace existing ones.
China has 2 cars for every 10 people (#99 in the world), while the United States has 9 cars for every 10 people.
While China buys a lot of cars (duh, they have a population of over a billion), they would buy even more if they had the dismal public transit of the US.
Of course public transit replaces cars.
Another fun fact: you would need 15 lanes of highway to handle the same amount of passenger load as a two-track subway tunnel. Manhattan as we know it would be physically impossible to exist if public transit “couldn’t replace cars.”
Sorry I should have been more clear. Of course public transit replaces some cars. By definition this is true. The point is, cars are still around no matter how good your public transit system is, so we might as well try to make them safer.
> you would need 15 lanes of highway to handle the same amount of passenger load as a two-track subway tunnel.
Certainly true for some cases. For the trains I'm familiar with, the parallel road carries many times more passengers in a single lane over the course of an hour.
> For the trains I'm familiar with, the parallel road carries many times more passengers in a single lane over the course of an hour.
Which train and road would that be? That's either a severely underused rail line (if the road is busy enough to be congested - and if not, it doesn't matter), or one that prioritises freight.
This misses the point. It doesn’t matter that the average Chinese has fewer cars. They still need cars, which means public transportation can’t eliminate the problem.
I’m a fan of bullet trains myself. I think it’s way smoother than flying and I wish the US could build some high speed rail. But the reality is, even in places with great public transit like Singapore, people still use cars.
What matters is that cars kill people and automated safety systems (up to and including self-driving) can make them safer.
This misses the point. It doesn’t matter that the average Chinese has fewer cars. They still need cars, which means public transportation can’t eliminate the problem.
Eliminate, no -- but alleviate, definitely. Fewer cars on the roads means safer roads. By offering viable public transportation it does not really matter if everyone has or needs a car -- people will choose to use it less on average.
Finland has a comparable number of vehicles per capita to the US and is a sparsely populated country where large portions of the population need cars to get where they need to go. Yet Finland has 5 traffic-related deaths per 100,000 motor vehicles per year while USA has 16.5 -- over three times as many. I would wager this is both because of better road quality with safety built in (like pedestrian safety features and roundabouts, etc.) as well as less use of those vehicles thanks to functional public transport.
> It doesn’t matter that the average Chinese has fewer cars. They still need cars, which means public transportation can’t eliminate the problem.
This sounds like the Nirvana fallacy [1]. The dilemma is not about eliminating all cars. It is whether we should invest in public transit which would also reduce noise, pollution, energy usage, or in self driving cars, which won't fix any of those.
Suggesting that we completely replace cars with public transportation is indeed the Nirvana fallacy. It’s not going to happen in any reasonable time frame, nor is it politically viable or practical. Instead, we should focus on making cars safer.
Yeah, but let's be realistic. The US car dependency is something that to change would both require major reconstructions of multiple cities, and a cultural shift that is just not happening. It is easier to solve fully self driving cars, for every single weather and situation, then it is to convince Americans that maybe a train to their neighborhood is a good idea.
I'm an American, I think trains are good. They're actually building a big train line in my neighborhood next year, right in front of our building in fact.
While true, we kind of need those people to die every year.
More people living contributes to a greater labor pool, which reduces wages. It leaves a greater demand on housing, increasing costs and making so many peoples’ lives more difficult.
If you’re working class, an extra 40k deaths/year is making the world better for you.
I mean it only took China 15 years. But then again Mike Johnson is speaker so.. well, it's not going well.
IMO the main risk around self-driving cars is that it will perpetuate terrible city design. Hopefully the tide will turn towards sane urban policy soon.
"Driverless cars" are a technology that moves atoms without the need for people, a lot like how we move bits around today. There are innumerable benefits to moving the right atoms to the right places at the right time.
There are many form factors that moving atoms can take, only one of which looks like a car. The car is a good place to start for many reasons, including everyone needing transportation, existing infrastructure, existing culture, wasted time commuting, etc.
Now think about what comes after all "cars" are driverless. Their form factors change, roads change, infrastructure changes, proximity between people changes, life changes. Roads are like arteries that feed population centers, and if we can reconfigure them without worry about whether humans can keep up, we unlock whole new ways of living, almost like unlocking new organs with vastly different structures in the super-organism that is society.
The very story of life itself is evolving to move atoms around in new and more complex ways. This is one of the most fundamental and important techs we can invest in.
We have divided ourselves into neat little nuclear family boxes and thrown ourselves together with a bunch of other randos in neat little boxes, with the unstated assumption that the family unit is the end all be all of human lived experience.
This has separated us from our physical (atom-based) communities, to many ill effects including our friends and extended family being further away. This makes having and raising families more difficult than it should be, as we work rando jobs in order to hire rando nannies to do the job that a community otherwise would.
A lot of this comes down to proximity, and available space for people to group up in spaces larger than apartments or single family homes. We've simply lost a part of our daily lived connection to our close community, and being connected to them via only bits is a poor substitute.
When atoms and bits are easy to move around, we have the best of both worlds, pushing the frontier out for having a community experience and having the positive aspects of what we have today.
Sounds like an old way of living to me, and one achievable by removing cars almost entirely from our lives. The most connected I’ve ever been to community was living in large asian cities without a car.
Sort of, but the communities you're describing have a lot more likelihood of being stuck in the place they are. Stuck means less likelihood of people finding the right place for them, because they have less to choose from. Better automated transport infra means being less stuck by virtue of having less time to go further distances, and in better conditions.
Even in high density car-less environments with great transport, you've still got all the attention and friction entailed with being on public transport and last mile issues walking to/from it (effectively traveling through 'far community' to get to 'close community'). This means more need to be co-located to avoid these through 'far community' journeys, which limits ones options for finding their best life.
Meanwhile radically different automated transport infra could mean things like 'you walk into the elevator-like transport connected to your house and 5 minutes later you're at your friends house'. No crazy subway, no need for attention, just hop in the pod and do what you'd already be doing at home like reading or work.
This means you could go from ~20,000 people within 10 mins of you to ~100,000 (or insert your number). And ultimately this means more ways that we could optionally have larger social units, because there would be more 'space' for them to live within 10 mins of you.
E.g. if my friends wanted to all live right next to each other they'd need to find enough land that it'd be like 3 hours away and a huge inconvenience for anyone living in a city. So the only people who would do that are crazy committed to the commune life, and thus quite distant culturally too. If it was 30 mins away instead due to better transport, culturally we'd see a lot more mixing of different types of lifestyles.
I think all this represents a new way of living. It's not near future stuff I admit, but driverless tech is the next on the 'move atoms' tech tree that brings us toward these opportunities.
What other times? People did not live in car centric societies before the 20th century. This is a relatively new problem, why do you think there were multiple attempts at solving it that did not work? The US has only gotten into this mess the last couple of generations.
And we can point to societies that were following a similar path, like the Netherlands, and then decided to stop and focus on a less car dependant society. It appears to be working over there.
Sorry can you be more specific? Humans have lived on and off in community structures throughout history, we evolved as social creatures in these structures. We're proximally further away from these structures in the present time, which has brought up the issues I mentioned.
Among other things, a means of allowing proximity to be less of a factor allows us to explore different sized dwellings due to a greater area of possible land within proximity to us, which allow for a broader range of different sized social units, which allows for some relief of those issues as people can choose to live in more ways according to their preference (e.g. community/kibbutz, loose structure of friends nearby, big family nearby, nuclear family, anonymous in city).
You can literally break it down to a tradeoff of cubic meters of space for a social unit vs time/effort it takes to get to things you want. If you want a commune of X families and a convenience store within Y mins, more efficient transport makes those numbers, on average, work better for people. Maybe it's 60 minutes out of town for 5 families to get together, but only 15 minutes for 3 families, based on ease of getting shared property at a reasonable cost. Do you see where I'm going with this?
If you wanted to go further you could say ease of moving atoms lets you even rethink aspects of dwellings (why we cache food in a fridge, instead of having what we need dropped off to us in a few minutes) and notions of community property (a 'tool/whatever share' program among an opt-in group), and ultimately how we pick what infrastructure serves whom. Lots and lots of implications to unpack when we move atoms around more cheaply, and many of these ideas unlock with small changes. See apps/services that only work economically in cities but not suburbs for a modern example.
Not sure how this relates to The Tyranny of Structurelessness, maybe you're assuming I meant something that I didn't?
You talk about creating communities out of preferences, which makes them communities of interest, not traditional communities of kinship and enforced proximity.
The Tyranny of Structurelessness is directly relevant to communities of interest. Hippy communes. Co-housing projects. Cults both secular and religious. Idealistic people who don't understand what is actually necessary. We've been here before, many times. Read up on the 1960s and 70s. We don't live very differently now to then, and self-driving cars won't change that for at least a hundred years.
The main point of the Tyranny of Structurelessness is not to approach governance of groups of people with naiveté because power exists whether or not it is acknowledged.
The argument I am making is that there is benefit to having social units of >1 families be easier to form in modern society, and better transport helps that by relaxing space constraints. In fact, better transport allows us to explore the frontier of connection to close community and the connection to the amenities and cultural richness of modern living. It's an unlock of scale from what was possible before, which means it is at least partly uncharted territory.
I never said 'and these social units should ignore governance', or define exactly how these social units should operate or how close their ties should be. Obviously they should be mindful of power and define explicit ways to work together, and arguing that this is simply an interest vs kinship category thing is limiting to the point of not saying much. And of course it doesn't happen tomorrow; my argument is this is the way it happens and thus it's worth going down this tech tree.
One thing to consider is that scale has a profound impact on possibility, both in cultural normalization and discovering the appropriate models of governance for a given situation, which are much more likely to emerge when operating at a larger scale. So in turn we a) don't get enough examples to have replicable models emerge, and b) we only get groups that are pretty out there that want to do the thing, and these people tend not to be great models of generalizability because they're culturally far different from the norm. The examples you give are the extreme cultural outliers, not regular people. A weird hippie commune isn't for me, but a place where my four best friends and I can raise kids with some shared outdoor space and nannies and kitchen all within 20 mins of the city? Sign me up yesterday - that's resource pooling at its best, and a way to live more efficiently and sustainably as a species.
A recent analog is the increased sophistication of funding structures for early stage startups, from clunky & predatory term sheets to convertible notes and SAFEs. This happened as a result of the normalization and scale of the early stage ecosystem. Before then early startups were weird and only attracted the types that were ok pushing against the grain or were too rich to feel the pain. Now it's been around long enough and at enough scale to be normal enough to provide an easy on-ramp for good people and good ideas to make waves in the world, not just a place for the elite and the weirdos.
You're house could be mobile and drive itself to new locations every night while you sleep. You wake up in a new location every morning to a new sunset.
I meant this to be sarcastic because we already have this with campers and RV's - but it does sound kind of cool on second thought. Pointless, but cool.
Lovely turn of phrase to describe a whole swath of "why shouldn't this make money" startup ideas. If your goal is revenue, maybe don't base your entire marketing strategy on people with disposable income and decent financial literacy, because once an economic lull hits you're going to be stranded with a whole lot of responsibilities and a huge drop in income.
I keep thinking back to Jupe[1], and how YC actually put their money behind it, as a synecdoche of the absurd and surreal decade we've had with all that money flying around. Some people got very rich on a wish and a promise -- maybe some think that's laudable, I think it's sociopathic.
I mean, a ton of people spend time driving, freeing that time would be huge efficiencies. Not to mention that it would mean cars can be shared between people, hugely reducing cost of operation and greenhouse emissions. Parking areas are reduced and put farther away from city centers, freeing land. If cars learn to share the road with us, they can also used optimized lanes and traffic patterns, speeding up commutes and reducing accidents.
Like it's not any one thing, but a self driving car really changes a lot of things about how cities and transport are designed. Interesting thing is that it's harder to have a self driving car now than it would be in 20 years, because as they get closer and closer, the roads are going to adapt to them.
The world I lived in was kid friendly when I grew up and there weren’t self-driving cars. There were just fewer cars. We can achieve that again with sane urban planning.
After all cars are driver-less comes tanks, artillery and "suicide" vehicles.
What have drivers done anyway to deserve all this attention? Why try to automate something that involves killing people on-error? It seems any other occupation would be an easier more sensible more realistic target.
I think you’re absolutely right. But while we’re daydreaming about the future, I think it’s more likely we’re going to irreversibly fuck the planet well before we realize beautiful technological utopia. And if fucking the planet doesn’t kill (all of) is, it’s going to leave us irreversibly broken. Inequality will reach staggering levels. Further advances will not be for the benefit of all, but the enrichment of the few.
The technologically enabled cities of 100 years from now are not beautifully interconnected reorganized and optimized. They will be literal fortified pockets of safety - gated neighborhoods with autonomous access control. Those living here spend most days completely within the walls. These pockets are surrounded and vastly outnumbered by slums. Ones whose inhabitants have neither inter-generational wealth nor the means to accumulate even a fraction of what it would take to rise beyond their lot. The labor market has long ago dried up with the onset of more efficient and profitable automation. The inhabitants here are the first to bear the brunt of climate-induced emergencies. Hundreds of thousands regularly die at once as bouts of famine, disease, and natural disasters strike with increasing frequency.
These people subside exclusively on the regular allotment of their sovereign governance. And not all of the governments of the world are quite so motivated to maintain a standard of living. Much of Asia and Eastern Europe has largely unified under or become a puppet state to a single authoritarian state. The European Union has condensed westward and hardened, closing off borders in an attempt to maintain sovereignty amid influx of climate refugees. The United States is an aggressive corporate republic, under which the only legislation to pass in decades is related to military spending, border security, and population monitoring in the name of antiterrorism. Policy is now largely decided in the courts, which corporations have found is the shortest path to pushing their agenda, and also the most reliably fruitful, given enough lawyers and money.
Parts of the Middle East are permanently uninhabitable, and the bits of the Amazon that have not been clear cut are now beginning to succumb to changing climate forces. Sea level has risen considerably, and pacific island and Caribbean nations have been all but wiped out, as their governments realized it no longer made sense to rebuild year after year.
Those living in the slums have access to sophisticated VR/AR technology at affordable rates, even compare to their minimal dole and the informal barter/trade economy that has redeveloped. They create as much content as they consume, in an effort to find some foothold they can capitalize on and create wages.
We vastly underestimate the effectiveness of warfare. Highly mobile drones will be able of surgically eliminate threats in seconds. Direct conflict is rare and pointless. Nation states will focus their efforts on undermining infrastructure of their enemies, or isolating entirely. Information warfare will no longer exist to a meaningful degree because the nations themselves will have near unrestricted control over the information their populace consumes. The military and police will have blurred or fully merged in most governments. Revolts will be put down with ease and erased from public memory.
Education is perhaps perplexingly accessible, to a point. AI tutors work one on one with students, who now are considered anyone under the age of 25. The entrenched elite have access to private cutting edge versions of the same, and if you know the right people you may be able to send your children to a Luddite school, where children learn from physical books and corporeal teachers.
You can accuse people of daydreaming of Utopia, and you might be right. But honestly? The future you are painting? That's doom dreaming. With the exception of global warming, whose effects can be so big we cannot really predict, 100 years from now, worst case scenario, western countries look more like Brazil. Big wealth inequality, walls and eletric fences around condos, but no sniper towers.
And if automation improves enough that there is no more labor market? I don't think anybody has a good idea what society would come after that. If you asked someone in medieval Europe what they would think would happen with the introduction of guns, they would probably say that the noble class (which was the martial class, that trained for war) would just use it to oppress the peasantry more. Nobody would guess that their introduction would lead to the complete end of the idea of a noble class.
Trains are enormous, costly, and extremely inflexible to changes in demand. Have you ever seen a train car small enough to only carry a single person? The existence of 4000lb cars and 200000lb trains is because we lacked the ability to quickly and safely move only the necessary atoms from A to B, so we had to bundle them up with a ton of other atoms until it became practical to implement. We can free ourselves from this constraint.
Eh, this is a silly take. Almost all trips are going to a few destinations. Work, Home, Shopping, Schools, etc. A sanely designed city would just build transit to those places.
Self-driving cars are solving an unnecessary problem, if that makes sense. US made some truly terrible design decisions, and self-driving is sort-of doubling down on the disaster.
Where I think we agree is that cars mostly suck for cities, and cars that get self-driving tech tacked onto them doesn't solve most of the fundamental issues with cars as we know them today.
I think the question here is what is a practical roadmap to building better cities with the ones we've got?
An extreme distillation of my pov is: roads&rubber wheels > rails&metal wheels.
I believe roads&rubber are just far better for A-B transport by so many measures, but most importantly that it is an extremely flexible connective tissue because it can be incrementally and cheaply added to or changed.
We can make the big, slow, expensive changes to add rail, and that may (mostly) work (for some), but it is extremely unlikely to happen at scale because it essentially means upending how car-centric cities are designed using top-down process or fiat.
Meanwhile cities are living breathing things pulled in many directions by many forces. The question is whether those forces can be harnessed to bring cities toward what we want them to be. I think roads&rubber do that better, because they allow bottom-up, rapid incremental change that shares costs with citizens (by way of vehicles) and does not require anywhere near the level of commitment or consensus that rail does.
I think it's reasonable to assume that if self-driving tech starts showing up in 10 years, that in 30 years we'll begin to see several changes that push us towards our goals for cities:
* There will be cities that require only self-driving cars in city limits, which will begin the alteration of the rules of traffic flow, since rules can be reprogrammed instantly
* product (car ownership) will give way to utility as all tech does over time
* There will be roads that will be converted to mixed use (parklets, mini-parks, bike lanes, walking) and be limited to only smaller micromobility-like vehicles. An early version of this is SF's 'slow cities' streets in each neighborhood that have been cut off to (most) cars.
* Max size requirements & road size changes will start to be palatable, with roads being recaptured, property lines & zoning shifting, etc.
* longer commutes/travel would use (larger) vehicle types that specialize in long distance comfort whereas short commutes would use (smaller) vehicles that have higher throughput in high density areas.
And more. This is the kind of payoff we'd start getting by investing in self-driving tech today. And these are things that can be done in a lazy and politically simple way, making changes only as they make sense in the moment, not on long planning schedules and anticipations of ridership and population proximity in 25 years.
I doubt that in the same ~30 year span that you could get most cities to install more than a few light rail corridors, and they'd probably not have sufficient throughput and frequent enough stops. We'd have to get like 5-10x better/faster at big infrastructure projects including politically challenging things like eminent domain to get comparable results.
LA metro is a good example: remember the metro construction scene at the end of the movie Speed? That was 30 years ago, and in that time metro has eased maybe ~5% of total traffic and you still absolutely need a car to get around LA. How do we get the other 95%?
The ideal answer in my mind is neither cars nor rail, but a system that operates a lot like rail but flexibly sized and individualized, and using the basic roads&rubber approach of cars.
What do you mean? Cars are a marvelous solution to traveling a medium distance rapidly. They are ubiquitous as a result.
I doubt we will ever have effective public transit across the US. It’s just too big and most places have too low a population density to make it cost effective. And the price of convenience would be high.
I used to be bullish about autonomous driving but no longer am. Ten years ago it felt like a much safer-than-human computer driver was within close reach. It no longer looks so rosy. I think Waymo’s approach will prove the most successful, and will end up with many of the same constraints as public transit. These companies have been going at it for a long time and have mostly demonstrated just how hard the problem really is. There is a decade of sunken cost for anyone leaving the market now. Would replacing human drivers be cost effective in any reality? I’m unsure.
I'm hopeful that robotaxi services end up teaming up with mass transit agencies so you plug into your app "I'm going to X" and the options are:
- point to point in a private vehicle: x time, $y
- to the RT station: x * 1.2, y * 0.3
- to the bikeshare cluster: x * 1.6, y * 0.1
Governments have a role to play in creating the proper incentives here too, ensuring that congestion is properly paid for— every time any road is moving less than 80% of the speed limit that should be considered a failure of policy that it was too cheap to drive on it that day.
A pet idea of mine is app-driven robobus that scales in vehicle size all the way down to that robotaxi and where picking journey by app is encouraged because when you do there is a "wait time guarantee" for the bus service where holes are plugged with robotaxis/minbuses.
Being able to more or less promise a maximum wait time and being able to dynamically scale a bus service in smaller seat increments without the cost per seat going through the roof (I looked up UK coach hire costs breakdowns, and when hiring a 70 seat coach the cost of the driver still added up to about 40% of the title cost including amortisation of the vehicle itself; drop vehicle size and presumably that goes much higher and the per seat costs accordingly), combined with being able to flexibly feed passengers to transit hubs in smaller seat increments on routes where demand can't fill a full size bus all the time could make transit services vastly more convenient.
> It’s just too big and most places have too low a population density to make it cost effective.
I hear this all the time and it still makes no sense at all. Population goes where transit allows population to go. Cars resulted in low population density. By getting rid of cars, you get rid of low population density.
As for cost, there is no world in which every person owning an automobile is cheaper than public transit. It's not remotely close. Average cost of private car ownership in the US exceeds 10k a year. That's about 3.4T of private spending, or 14% of GDP. This does not include the cost of roads. A single year of private automobile spending would build 20k miles of high speed rail, even assuming costs were CA HSR high.
I feel like the "low pop density & too big" argument is one of those things that only makes sense if you never consider second-order effects.
I'm still bullish on automated long-haul trucking. I'd much rather share a road with an self-driving semi on I80 instead of a human driver hopped up on speed driving 14 hours a day.
I don't think I follow. Rail lines are fixed targets and extremely vulnerable to attack. Cars can route around damaged roads and even drive off-road in some cases.
The us spends a ton on defense, the money is there. im not a defense expert but im sure we can squint enough and figure out how to make good use of that money instead of spending it on wars
You’re not the only one. It seems to me we should be trying to get rid of cars in favour of mass transport or two-wheel personal transport. Having personal transport in the form of cars makes little sense in cities where space is at a premium.
Where I live, to get across the city on public transport takes 40 minutes and a bus change. I can cycle it in 20. Replacing human-driven cars with driverless cars is going to make no difference to that.
When I think back to the covid lockdowns and how much nicer and more spacious the city felt with no cars on the roads, that’s what I think cities should be like.
And for rural areas, I understand in the US they have arrow-straight and wide roads pretty much everywhere, but where I live the rural roads even 10 minutes out of the city are very narrow and winding, I’m not sure how well a driverless car would be able to handle that.
The limiting factor for increasing bus frequency and adding new routes is the lack of operators.
Having self-driving buses will obviously help in cities. And given the higher momentum, the margin for error is lower for self-driving buses and it's better to start with cars.
I’m not sure self driving buses are possible with out something approaching general AI. The bus driver needs to be able to respond in real time to questions like does this bus go to X. They also need to be able to communicate nonverbally with passengers waiting at bus stops.
The limiting factor is money. Plenty of people are down to drive buses. But if you think about it a bus is just a gimped version of a light rail / subway. It holds less people, is less comfortable, more expensive to maintain and operate, and being a bus gives it no benefit at all over rail. The only reason buses exist is because we made some terrible design mistakes with cars.
Ah this is first comment on HN I see that ever acknowledged two-wheel personal transport. In Asian countries which have even denser community and worse infrastructure, it's practically the miracle answer. I'm actually a bit surprised when I discover that western countries just, doesn't use it at all, or if they do it's the big variant that's almost as space-filling as a car anyway. It's the densest we can pack people together on the road while still caring about human dignity...
One big problem with two-wheel motorized transport is the emissions: motorcycles and scooters have horrible emissions. They're also really dangerous.
E-bikes are becoming really popular though, in some places. They're about the same speed as regular bicycles, but much easier and less tiring (/sweaty) to ride for most people, especially on hills. Here in Tokyo, every mother with small children has one now it seems.
It's fortunate that electric scooters have decent range and the (small) battery can be replaced easily, which matches the common petrol scooters with a canister of fuel at home. The overall tradeoff is much better than with cars.
> When I think back to the covid lockdowns and how much nicer and more spacious the city felt with no cars on the roads, that’s what I think cities should be like.
Me too! Short of another global pandemic, the best thing to have on the ride beside "no cars" is self-driving vehicles.
My expectation (from what I know of Waymo's current behavior) is that cars will be perfectly safe and predictable road citizens, no more threatening or dangerous than a Roomba.
Which completely fails in any dense city because all it takes is one random pedestrian to cut you off - and you won’t be moving for hours. Because no one is going to yield if you don’t make them. And waymo won’t try to make them because that is how you get accidents.
There is a reason city drivers are aggressive, and it’s not just because they’re stressed out. It’s literally necessary to make any forward progress in many cases.
If you believe that AI cars are snake-oil in a near peak hype-cycle, then there would be a real concern that that non-solution is distracting from the very real problem of how to move people at scale.
Yes, and every time AI comes up, the downsides of AI are also brought up. Because they're important to talk about.
Anyway, the driverless car pilots are happening in our dense city downtowns. If it was all confined to Palo Alto and other techie suburbs then maybe we wouldn't care as much.
It's a technically impressive technology that's right at a key inflection point with potentially huge ramifications to how 15% of the economy is structured.
I think I'm an outlier because I like trains, bikes, and cars, but you have to pick the right tool for the job. In the US, new train lines are almost never the right tool.
Or rather, it is the right tool, but the constituents are so uneducated about urbanism that they flatly reject it. Kind of an interesting dynamic when you think about it.
Hope so. It's actually the first time I've seen it, but glad it's being raised, and hope it gets raised every time.
As far as I see, this isn't solving a problem as much as it is getting in at the ground floor on a technology that will take even more autonomy away from people.
Fixed rail is not a perfect solution, either. Nor are millions of mopeds. Same goes for articulated buses, or hang gliders.
But be patient. Let more pieces emerge. Let things evolve. Maybe driverless cars will evolve into passengerless engines. Then people own their own passenger cars that are engineless and just hop from one conga line to another to get to their destination.
Once you have driverless solved, you might increase traffic density immensely. Maybe safety goes way up and you can reduce the weight of these vehicles by 500kg. So fuel consumption drops dramatically, road wear drops dramatically, etc. Maybe it allows ambulances to fly down roadways because computers are way better at getting out of the way. Maybe it causes the auto industry to collapse because we go from 3 autos per home, to 0.8 cars per household because you can just summon one whenever you want. Maybe it doesn't do any of this.
The Pony Express was revolutionary, but only lasted 18 months before the telegraph sent it into the history books. Now we have pocket phones. So was the Pony Express a stupid innovation? Or does progress move in zigzag lines?
If public transit can't be solved in SF, the second densest city in the US, there's no hope for the rest of America outside NYC.
On average it takes close to twice as long to get from point A to B in SF using public transit than with Waymo. And for the walking portions you're likely dealing with either hills or sketchy areas.
Public transit can be solved in the US. Plenty of other countries have done it. That's why it's so exhausting that so many of our brightest minds AND the public's imagination of the future are dedicated to turning our unsustainably-car-centric cities into possibly-safer-but-still-unsustainably-car-centric cities instead of, you know, modern cities with good transit.
the fact that it's solved outside of the US is irrelevant here.
the American Dream requires that each successful American owns a Car (and House, which is another reason American Cities can't be like other country's cities). they don't have to drive it, but since you have to own one, you might as well drive it, right?
places like the uk, germany, china, japan, etc all have working public transit, but they don't have the American Dream, so it's not a valid comparison.
the only people in America who will trade in their Car are the same people who might trade in their American Flag or Gun, which is to say the immigrants, poors, and other false-americans. no true American would ever give up their Car.
I used to live in DC and took the DC Metro countless times. I never had or saw problems with crime, though perhaps it was because I was usually in northern Virginia and not the southeast part of DC.
However, the level of service is not great; it takes too long between trains, it's really terrible later at night, and it just doesn't go that many places, so you need a car if your source or destination isn't close to the station or possibly a bus line.
I will give them credit though: they finally extended the Silver line all the way to Dulles, so you don't need to take a taxi or special bus there now.
I appreciate the sarcasm! I agree though that there are a lot of crazy car-brains in the US. But I think the tide is shifting. Cities are pushing back against car infestation. If cities can get enough political will to de-car themselves, then inter-city transit will come back too.
For reasons that have nothing to do with cars, the US will never achieve the clean, safe, reliable systems like you see in Asia that are often heralded as the posterchild of ideal public transit.
Wave a magic wand materialize the Tokyo or Seoul subway system into an American metropolis, and within a short period of time, you'll see it devolve. We just cannot have nice things here.
Ironically, the contingent of people that are most aggressive/ambitious about promoting public transit are often the same that are most against taking the (admittedly, not always the most pleasant) steps needed to sell the idea to the masses.
You're making big assertions without giving any details.
> Ironically, the contingent of people that are most aggressive/ambitious about promoting public transit are often the same that are most against taking the (admittedly, not always the most pleasant) steps needed to sell the idea to the masses.
For example - ensuring there aren't crazy drug addicted homeless persons raging about murdering everyone on the train.
When issues like that are brought up, common responses from the pro-transit crowd include:
"The psycho is completely harmless, just let him be. He has every right to be on the subway too."
"Cars kill people!. The psycho will never hurt anyone!"
"We have to pass Medicare-for-all and pass unconditional housing-first policies first. Until then, we can't/shouldn't do anything to the psycho!"
To be fair:
I am sympathetic with some of the above. However such statements will not help you sell improving/expanding public transit to the American public.
And I know not every pro-transit person is like this. But there seems to be a sizable overlap.
Also, anecdotal, but since the pro-bike and pro-transit crowd also do overlap - I've noticed a lot of people take up commuting or just traveling by bicycle in NYC the past few years. But the most common reason I hear is to specifically avoid taking the subway as much as possible due to dangers.
It seems like such a bizarre jump to say "if we build trains, simply riding the train will drive people to drugs and mass murder, causing a new problem outweighing the benefits of the train".
If the train is not what is driving people to these heinous conditions, then it seems like this imagined problem is some unrelated thing.
Should we not build any shopping malls or parks or roads until we can somehow be certain there won't be a "crazy drug addicted mass-murderer" who goes there? Should we halt the plan to build apartments on the chance a purple dragon might take up residence and burn the town down?
For whatever it's worth, I've personally ridden busses in the US for years, taken subways and trains in no less than half a dozen US cities, and I've been murdered zero times so far. I don't see any reasonable path to "building more trains" leading to my odds of getting murdered going up.
You're reading it wrong. Of course riding the train won't drive people to drugs or mass murder.
Rather, drugs and the perceived threat of violent crime, as well as general unpleasantness, is what turns off people from embracing public transit. Build a brand new shiny transit system in the USA, and you'll still face the same problems without changing the culture or enforcement. Both will face massive public backslash - again, from many of the same people who are most pro-transit.
You're falling victim to the same mentality I mentioned earlier of handwaving away the perceived concerns people have.
I ride transit nearly ever day. Obviously I haven't been murdered or fallen victim to violence. But I commonly encounter individuals who I make sure I keep away from either because of threatening behavior or simple unpleasantness.
Fortunately, it is within our power to both change the culture and enforce it.
Thought TBF the underlying reason is that America has a relatively abysmal safety net (healthcare being the most terrible of the lot), so you just have more people falling through the cracks onto the street.
Yes, the progressive Left does have a problem where we can't seem to agree on how to make sure people feel safe and comfortable in the public spaces which we care so deeply about. Socialist blogger Freddie deBoer has several pieces along these lines [1]. As he points out, the people who shout the loudest on Twitter aren't necessarily the same people out there actually leading pro-transit and anti-car movements. FWIW, one of the most prominent anti-car-culture leaders, Chuck Maron of Strong Towns [2], is a self-declared conservative.
So, you're cherry-picking the most extreme leftists to paint an exremely strawmanned version of the US pro-transit movement. You sound like you've either had some awful public transit experiences or perhaps watched a lot of scary news involving addicts on transit.
At least here in Boston, where I've ridden transit regularly for a decade, I feel safe around other riders. The things that make me feel UNSAFE on transit is the state of the physical infrastructure, which is not the result of lefty anti-police rhetoric but is the result of transit underfunding, cost disease with US public works projects, and historically poor management culture at the MBTA. These are hard problems but they are abstolutely all fixable. The new general manager is already showing that management culture can be improved.
Lastly, drug problems and povert in US cities can be clearly linked to the communities which were most devastated by highway expansion and transit defunding. There's a reason that the neighborhoods immediately adjacent to highways look hellish and depressing. So, it seems that you've declared that this problem which is at least in part caused by car culture cannot possibly be fixed by walking back car culture, because, obviously, most pro-transit people also want to disband the police, or so you say.
I'm the opposite way - I ride NYC subways almost daily, and other than the ability for crazies to push people into the tracks, the infrastructure doesn't feel unsafe. Granted, they are at least looking into installing barriers. Cleanliness is another story, but that too, is a matter of culture.
I've obviously never been murdered, nor have I been assaulted on the subway. However I very frequently do encounter people raging in a threatening manner, or otherwise behaving unpleasantly. Are they a real threat? Odds are they aren't unless provoked. Do people perceive them to be a threat? Yes, and valid or not.
You're again falling victim to asking for perfect but impractical solutions. Why can't we (as in, society) fix the issues with American transit in practical, incremental steps that will genuinely improve transit? As opposed to demanding we fix all societal ills - which while genuine, is going to prevent us from ever getting around to fixing transit? As I recall someone saying in another HN thread long ago, the NYC MTA should be running trains, not running a homeless shelter/mental asylum.
But I don't know why that means we can't have nice transit in the US, unless we're just throwing up our hands now and submitting to the most ardent anti-law-enforcement flank of the left.
Did you know that car ownership in the Netherlands has steadily increased over the years? Despite known for its small size, flat terrain, biking and public transport friendly policies? - [1]
Flexibility, comfort and convenience are car’s benefits, and people value that. Despite the disadvantages of higher cost or the burden of parking. The article highlights the older people group, which is only getting larger. I can list many other examples in countries with great public transportation.
Talking as someone who loves train and commutes by train, car will always be an important transport option, and any approach that helps improve safety, increase efficiency, lower emission, is a net gain.
Self-driving is a distraction from the fundamentally unsustainable car-centric world we've built. Would it be nice to have? Sure. Will it solve the underlying problems? No.
All countries should be moving towards what the Netherlands is doing. Yeah, the 588 cars/1000 people [1] isn't ideal, but it sure beats the 908/1000 of the US.
Also, I think car ownership may not be the right metric to look at, most journeys are probably made by the young - commuting, etc. I wonder what the stats look like when adjusted for miles driven, considering car ownership in the NL for the 18-29 age bracket is low and slowly dropping.
A single driverless car can substitute for multiple car owners' vehicles if a schedule can be worked out. Long haul freight can have a potentially more efficient alternative to human truck drivers. Accident rates for a horse-level AI are significantly lower than the typical distracted human. There are reasons to pursue this problem.
I specifically mentioned urban centers - the places easily reached by mass transit. Even in dense cities, many neighborhoods are far enough away from mass transit lines that smaller vehicles are required. Taxis would be a better option than zillions of privately owned cars, and self-driving would make it economical.
Is there a codified definition of urban center? Because it’s not a term used by the census definitions; they define urban area.
If your define non-urban center as one far from mass transit to defend the need for cars, it becomes circular logic. It’s probably better to refer to more official definitions, which already reference population density.
I guess it depends on how you define urban (are suburbs still urban?). I think you're kind of right in that currently suburbs are terrible to live in without a car. But if there was magically a huge shift to much better public transport - would that still be the case?
When those suburbs are within the city limits of large cities, yes absolutely they should be dismantled and densified. There's no justification for using government power to create a housing cartel during a housing shortage.
Further, mixed use development like corner stores, restaurants, and grocery stores where people live will eliminate a large fraction of vehicle trips entirely.
Did you think people wanted to bulldoze suburbs and not replace them with anything? What did you think was meant by dismantle? I always assumed it meant dismantling the rules that prevent the very natural market-driven densification process.
Suburbs as they exist in the US do not exist because they are the best X for any X that exists; but because of top-down central planning. Remove those rules, and the apartments all but build themselves.
I don't think anyone wants their house bulldozed, and the way you phrase it is kind of horrifying. Sure, let's dismantle zoning regimes and let development happen organically. Suburbs may get a few more services but this isn't going to magically make the need for cars disappear.
It's definitely an immensely complex challenge, a legitmate "moonshot" scale effort. The benefits can also be huge. Think of the huge portion of a household's budget (purchase price, fuel, insurance, maintenance) and time is spent on cars. If someone can provide a better alternative to private car ownership (and goods transportation), they stand to capture a meaningful portion of those billions of dollars and billions of hours.
Even if autonomous driving is made to work I'll still buy private cars. It will just be another optional feature. I like my cars to be clean and ready to go as soon as I want to. And many of us keep a variety of stuff in our cars like tools, snacks, spare clothes, sports equipment, pepper spray, first aid kit, etc. You're going to need some of that stuff occasionally, especially if you ever drive through rural areas. Parents also tend to have additional stuff like car seats, diapers, and baby wipes. It's a huge hassle to load and unload that stuff every time.
There will be a place for private cars for a long time, but those may operate in self-driving mode a lot of the time. Shared self-driving cars will take some households from 1 car to 0, but it will take many more households from 3 to 2, or 2 to 1.
Absolutely correct. Mobile phone service isn't free either, but it's so much better than land lines that most people have given up their land line. I expect a similar adoption pattern for self-driving car service.
I don’t think that’s a valid comparison. Landlines and mobile solve two different problems and were probably about the same price. If a subscription to a car costs you as much as owning a car over a long period of time, why subscribe ?
You're right, it ultimately comes down to cost and benefits. The ultra-rich have drivers because they don't want to bother with any of the details of car ownership or waste time driving, self-driving cars might bring that level of valet-like service to anyone for the same price as owning an economy car.
Driverless taxies could actually be an integral part of a good public transit system.
Think about it as last-mile public transit. Shared driverless taxies (or call them dynamically-scheduled self-driving mini-buses) that take groups of people from pick up points within a few min walk of their homes to transit hubs with trains or express busses.
The last-mile is always a massive weak point for public transit outside of high-density areas. Such a system could entirely replace the scheduled bus routes that slowly meander though low and medium density housing areas (or don't even exist), while also providing much better transit times.
If the system is reliable and priced correctly, it could drive public transit adoption in areas where it currently struggles, and encourage many people in those areas to get rid of their car.
The other advantage of driverless car technology for public transit is extending service to night-time hours. Because that's a common short fall of current system. You could even switch your fleet of self driving taxies from doing the last mile during peek hours to running ad-hoc long distance routes during the night, where they might be cheaper than running a full train.
You've got a lot of answers already but ... wow...
Allow me to say first of all that I agree we should have denser cities/towns, better public transport to get around, and we should all use it more.
But some stats (no citation, these are rattling around in my memory, feel free to fact check).
90% of cars are not utilised 90% of the time. That is insane wastage for energy intensively manufactured, expensive pieces of equipment.
1/3 of city centres are dedicated to parking (probably a US stat). Huge amount of valuable land unlocked.
Imagine unlocking that capital and land inefficiency. Then imagine cars halve in size and drive bumper to bumper and twice the speed. That could be a 2 x 2 x 2 improvement in commuting.
Don't get me wrong, even if we grant the pessimists on FSD that it won't be till 2100, that's a huge prize to be aiming at.
I don't understand the concerns over vehicle utilization and parking. Even if autonomous vehicles are made to work they will still be idle most of the time in order to have sufficient peak time capacity. Across most of the country, parking isn't really an issue because there's plenty of space. It's only a concern in a handful of dense cities.
There's no need to imagine, what you're describing already exists in Europe. We already know how to do this with today's tech, no need to wait for anything.
It's as simple as public transport + bicycles + dense mixed use zoning.
> Then imagine cars halve in size and drive bumper to bumper and twice the speed.
> Then imagine cars halve in size and drive bumper to bumper and twice the speed.
And now imagine one of those cars hitting a large pothole
Beyond this, how will there ever be 100% adoption to support that dream? There will always be a desire to have a steering wheel on some cars to go off road. It's really hard to see how that 2x2x2 dream could ever happen.
> And now imagine one of those cars hitting a large pothole
Or imagine the first time a self-driving car encounters a road-obstacle it flags it so that it can be repaired and all other cars avoid it automatically.
> There will always be a desire to have a steering wheel on some cars to go off road
Very true. People also own horses and burn candles, but these are not our primary means for transportation or lighting.
> it flags it so that it can be repaired and all other cars avoid it automatically
Doesn't help if you already have a multi-car pile up collision. OP said bumper to bumper at high speeds. Anything goes wrong and physics take over.
> Very true. People also own horses and burn candles, but these are not our primary means for transportation or lighting.
Horses very much still appear on roadways today. The idea that 100% of cars will be AI in the next 50 years I don't think is based in reality. Let's say we somehow get to a point where all cars have a switch to go from AI to not; so for example when on a highway where AI would shine, drivers could switch. What happens when a driver does not switch on the AI system? This is all to say the idea of that bumper-to-bumper driving at 100 mph with very small cars is snake-oil.
> but these are not our primary means for transportation or lighting
Not our primary means, but still a means and used. Again, this goes to the point, if you want that massive efficiency of AI cars, you need 100% adoption, not a single car in a convoy can be human operated. Alternatively, if the AI cars are smart enough to realize that another vehicle is human operated - do the AI cars slow down the entire convoy and then create adequate following distance? At that point, is that _any_ different from driving today?
> Or imagine the first time a self-driving car encounters a road-obstacle it flags
Perhaps the most common road obstacle is falling rocks. They shift around, there are many of them. They are 'repaired' by the bulldozer coming out and moving them all to the side, there is no guarantee that a human won't come out when it is quiet and move the obstacle. So, what is the use to even flag them?
How does an AI car know the difference between a small pothole and a larger one, and one that is even larger that needs to be avoided right now?
Back to the convoy example, let's say a tire blows; the whole convoy then crashes. It's just too easy to picture so many scenarios where a convoy of bumper-to-bumper cars turns into one part junkyard, one part graveyard.
We will get to a point where it becomes unethical to let humans drive cars (outside hobbyist places). A Sam Harris says, "the ape behind the wheel" just causes issues.
"Just causes issues" is discounting what humans are good at and discounts the idea that AI technology in cars could complement humans. Rather, that point of view I think is most useful if you are trying to get to 100% AI cars so that you can sell more roadways and more cars. Peak-hype sir, peak hype.
I'm reminded of the promises from those 1950s propaganda videos for building more highways. That reality turned into the gridlock of LA freeways. [1]
Who cares if a car is only utilized 10% of the time. At 10% use the car is going to last an average of 20 years. Use it 90% of the time and it’s gonna get junked in 1-2 years.
That number could be cut by more than half by applying technology that already exists today. If reducing traffic deaths is the goal then there is no particular need for autonomous vehicles.
A lot of deaths are being reduced by developing ADAS systems (collision avoidance, lane-keeping, blind-spot detection). Self-driving cars takes those systems to their logical conclusion.
A lot of people want to go directly from point A to B in the comfort of a car. You can't just brush that desire away just because you personally don't value it.
And regardless of how America should have built up rail/bus infrastructure over the last century, the reality is that they didn't, and a lot of its cities are already setup to immediately benefit from large self-driving fleets of cars.
There's still a lot of opportunity to build up high-capacity rail where it makes sense, but that will take decades. Self-driving cars (and busses too!) can deliver utility on a far shorter timescale.
Okay, what's the timescale for self-driving cars? That's right, it's unknown but most likely decades away.
Meanwhile, you could sit down and work out a public transport infra plan using current tech with exact timelines today. Oh and it's proven to work too.
I tend to agree a driverless taxi is a luxury good for individuals rather than a social major good, and has the potential to be harmful to society in some ways (e.g. encouraging less public transit use if taxi costs drop), but driverless vehicles will make it possible to provide better and cheaper public transit too.
Some quick searches, and I found pricing examples for coaches where even for a 70 person coach in the UK, the driver at near minimum wage added up to a fixed cost per bus in the fleet that made up near 40% of the cost per coach per day in hire.
Having the flexibility of picking vehicle size based on route utilisation without the drag of a fixed cost per vehicle that substantial that is independent of number of seats would make it viable to add bus routes in places where average utilisation would be way too low to make it possible to justify today.
Public transit is no good. I don’t want to walk to a station and then share the space with other people. I don’t want to lug grocery bags around. I want to make pit stops. I want to go off road. I want to live in the suburbs or semi rural areas so I can have a lot of land.
If we (North America) had more walkable streets a lot of these problems would be solved: grocery stores are easier to place in population centers a short distance with less car and more foot traffic and you can rent a car for occasional "off-road" recreational driving.
In terms of transportation and city design, the US could learn a lot from Europe if it weren't so addicted to cars. It's better for the environment, mental well-being, and a sense of community.
I hate to break it to you but all European cities have walkable streets and yet most still have shit public transport, even on the continent.
It simply isn't economically feasible to have London or NY style underground networks in most cities.
I don't really get why public transport extremists are so against driverless cars. It would be a huge improvement to transport. Just think of them as small buses that aren't shit if you like.
Again you’re talking about dense population centers. Americans for the most part don’t want to live like that. They want stand alone houses with large yards in the suburbs. Those are not densely populated enough to make walking to all the businesses you need feasible.
Rental cars are a pain in the butt. Spend an hour getting one. You need someone to come with you to drive the vehicle you arrived in back or pay for expensive parking or an Uber. Repeat for when you drop it off. They kill all spontaneity.
That being said I would love to have a better train network in the US, just not at the expense of roads.
No thanks. Even if Costco was only a few blocks away I wouldn't be able to carry that much stuff home on foot. I drive back with my car pretty much filled.
The places where I go most often in Europe, people are nearly as car dependent as in North America. Get out of the big cities and you'll see how regular people live.
And rental cars can't be taken off road. It says so right on the rental contract.
In a walkable environment you don’t go to Costco because you don’t need to cram two weeks of shopping into one gigantic trip that takes a long time.
You can walk to stores for things you need when you need them. The “grocery bag problem” is a problem caused by cars.
A bicycle is trash (fun to ride, not that useful). What are you going to carry on your bike? Five bags? That’s not even going to get your family through 3 days. I don’t want to go 5 miles away, I want to go 200. With bikes and walking, your world is small. Electric cars powered by renewable energy get rid of most of the negative externalities. For those that remain, that’s too bad because just like eating meat I’m not going to stop doing it because that’s what makes me happy. I’m only living as humanity has always done, people in dense urban centers are the anomaly when viewed historically. I probably more than make up for any remaining externalities by growing my own meat and eggs and partially growing my own vegetables. That’s probably thousands of miles of transportation emissions saved.
Regardless, you can own a car for those longer journeys just fine and still make most trips by bicycle.
> With bikes and walking, your world is small.
Yeah, that's why public transport is important too. Cars as well, although deprioritized.
> Electric cars powered by renewable energy get rid of most of the negative externalities.
They get rid of some of the noise and almost all of the harmful exhaust. That's about it. They're still 2 ton+ massive steel cages that are incredibly dangerous to everyone else, take up a ridiculous amount of space, and require extremely expensive infrastructure.
As for the rest, sure, I'm not really criticising your particular choices, it sounds like you live in a rural area where a car is necessary anyway. However, there's no way for everybody to be able to live like you do. There are just too many people. We need to live with long-term sustainability in mind.
> What's wrong with sharing space with other people? Do you have some kind of phobia?
Not OP, but I enjoy and value having personal space when I travel. Being able to reliably sit down is also nice.
It's amusing to see that your immediate reaction to someone else having different values is to accuse them of having a mental illness, and then trying to force your personal preferences onto them.
Nobody likes crowded or dirty space, but an aversion per se to having other people around is definitely pathological.
I think this is a social trust thing - lots of people are just scared of strangers. This is particularly true for high-violence/high-tension societies like the US.
My city (in Australia) is very peaceful and I don't feel bothered or frightened at all by the general public - in fact I like being able to people-watch, feel a certain sense of vibrancy, etc.
Yeah, believe it or not I'm familiar with that word. Is it really that hard to understand that other people simply might not like the same things as you?
Fear of public spaces or even being in the same space as strangers isn’t “liking different things”, it’s a psychological problem - albeit one that a lot of people experience due to modern society being very atomised.
Not everyone who prefers more personal space has psychological problems. Why is it so difficult for you to understand? Nuance matters. I commute by train, I enjoy being around people, but I use car when I want to get around on my own time, even if train is available.
Commuting to work by train but driving around otherwise is very common, but it's usually because train lines are oriented about CBD trips, but less so for cross-suburb trips.
Are you saying you'd use a car for non-work trips even when the train would be more convenient?
Yes, that’s what I’m saying. I feel energetic when around people when going to work, but want the opposite when I’m not. I also like quietness inside the car, and the ability to detour along the route.
It’s not feasible to run tracks down every street and dirt road. Each switch is a point of mechanical failure that requires a little intelligence to operate safely. And people and animals would still get run over.
Who said we should? You don’t need to lay tracks literally everywhere there is a road, just the main arteries like trams, trains and subways do. I meant ‘lay down some tracks’ as installing good public transport, not as a one to one replacement.
It's likely that self-driving cars will eventually be better drivers than real people. Obviously, it's not like that at this point, but AI gets quite a bit better every year.
Think about the number of man-hours people spend behind the wheel. Taxi drivers are automated, and people who own cars and do something else while in their cars besides operate the car. It's a huge stress and efficiency boost for society.
I was curious about this from the purely monetary perspective - building good public transit is unfortunately very expensive here in the US and probably even more so in California, but how expensive is it relative to self driving cars?
Supposedly Google has spent $1.1bn between 2009 and 2015 [0], and Waymo has raised $5.5bn in outside funding, supposedly last valuing it at around $30bn. Cruise is apparently on track to burn ~$2bn/yr. Getting reliable figures on actual dollars invested to date on projects is much harder unfortunately. However, it seems like overall it's in the range of billions and likely less than $10bn for any individual project. [1]
As a few benchmarks, I was curious about the cost of the California HSR, Caltrain electrification, and the recent SFMTA Central Subway project.
The SFMTA Central Subway project was a 1.7 mile extension of an existing T line, and cost $1.95bn.
The California HSR's initial 171 mile segment is estimated to cost $35 billion with the final system estimated to be well north of $100bn.
The Caltrain electrification electrified 51 miles of the Caltrain network and introduces new EMU trains at the cost of $2.44bn.
From a bay area resident/layman perspective, the R&D cost for any self driving car project doesn't seem to be out of proportion compared to public transit. Even if we took the information's estimate of the whole industry burning $16bn so far, that'd only buy you half of the initial segment of the Cailfornia HSR, which doesn't make it seem like self-driving car research is that outlandish. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if full autonomous vehicles land before the HSR fulfills its full mission of LA <> SF in under 3 hours.
Bloated local projects like the central subway make self driving car investments a steal, with 1.7 miles of subway in SF costing the same ballpark as a semi-mature self driving car program.
• less of a need to spend money on counteracting the negative effects of climate change
• freeing up a significant chunk of the valuable ~30% of space in cities taken up by oversized roads and parking lots -> more housing, denser cities -> less travel needed -> lower costs
Sum all that up and then tell me self-driving is cheaper than rail.
[2]: "Each year air pollution causes thousands of Londoners to die prematurely and is associated with an increased risk of Londoners developing life-changing illnesses like cancer, lung disease, dementia and asthma. [...] So far, the ULEZ has contributed to over 1 million hospital admissions averted by 2050." (https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-strategies/environment-...)
Speaking from observations, lack of good public transit is more of a political problem. There's extremely less chance of progress unless more people start attending city council meetings and start pushing for public transit. Fortunately, there are several initiatives like Strong Towns that are spreading awareness around this topic.
Which would you rather have, a hundred million cars occupying a hundred million human drivers, or a hundred million cars with those hundred million people now free to do something else with their time?
It's the same hubris that saw efforts in the 2010's at automating all sorts of manual labor because it was considered "easy work" by those who didn't have to do it.
Public transit is not a viable solution. Requires riders to give up far too much autonomy. Covid shows us this unambiguously. We did not require people to mask up inside their own vehicles, while we did require them to wear masks inside public transportation. There were no serious efforts to require vaccination for driving a personal vehicle, but there were serious efforts to require vaccination to ride public transport. I'm permitted to carry a firearm inside my own vehicle, but this is often forbidden on public transit.
A personal vehicle also provides you with a relatively robust protective exoskeleton, while with public transport you are much more vulnerable. Even worse, one encounters the the more frightening elements of society when riding public transportation at a much higher rate. When you combine this loss of autonomy with the increased dangers of riding public transport, it's to many Americans that private vehicles are a vastly superior mode of transportation.
I can't help but feel like this is a disingenuous criticism. The average American spends about 10pct of their waking life driving[0], nevermind the millions of people spending their professional output driving trucks and cabs. Please note that society has found the status quo preferable to public transit, as much as you (or I) might disagree.
[0]A 45 minute commute two ways + errands out of 16 waking hours. I for one would like that 10 percent of my life back.
> What incredible inconvenience are we trying to solve?
The rich and the ultra-rich are thinking long term and they don't want to interact with their angry peasants in the neo-feodal post-climate change world we are joyfully heading to. /s
The main obstacle to better transit in a developed countries is the cost and scarcity of labor. An automated bus would basically eliminate most of the running cost; make it electric and it would be pennies on the dollar compared to running a bus today.
I think an automated bus would have enough electronics such that it would cost a lot more than the bus driver for a long, long time. At least that's the status quo. A Waymo car costs a lot more than a $7K Uber Prius.
Self driving technology (sensors, processing, etc.) gets dramatically cheaper every year, but bus drivers get more expensive. The $200K of equipment that goes on a self-driving car now might drop to $50K in 5 years time.
It might actually be easier to amortize over the cost of a bus. The lifespan the Federal Transit Administration replaces buses at is 12 years, longer than a consumer keeps their car.
Public transit doesn't scale outside of dense urban areas. North America doesn't have the population density to make public transit viable outside specific metros like Chicago, NYC, Boston, DC. And said metros already do have public transit. So cars are the main viable option, and self-driving cars present the opportunity to regain time lost to commuting.
Less discussed, but probably even more important are driverless trucks. There's actually a shortage of truck drivers in the US, since it's a job with pretty bad work life balance and unpredictable hours. Self driving trucks could potentially be huge in terms of improving freight costs.
As someone who doesn't live in silicon valley or in any major cities, it's always strange to see HN users talk about these companies as though they already have widespread recognition. I've never seen a car once in my life, and if I did I would probably be fairly cautious around it. I imagine a large portion of Americans would feel similarly.
Yeah, I read about that. In the comments here. But they aren’t in Germany, and I don’t expect them to arrive here for quite some time. We are very technology-conservative.
This isn't Cruise's move. The DMV revoked their testing permits such that they're no longer street legal, within the last week. This is a PR piece, trying to save some face.
Reevaluating to build public trust would have been fixing things when their cars kept blocking the street or preventing ambulances from getting where they need to go.
NOT waiting until you ran over over someone who was hit by a car and then dragging them along the pavement, followed by lying to investigators about it.
You don’t get trust back after that.
How much do you want to bet all the other cities were suddenly grilling them and they just thought they were about to lose the other licenses as well and this would look better than waiting until they were actually kicked out?
> “During the meeting, the department was shown video footage of the accident captured by the AV’s onboard cameras. The video footage present to the department ended with the AV’s initial stop following the hard-braking maneuver. Footage of the subsequent movement of the AV to perform a pullover maneuver was not shown to the department and Cruise did not disclose that any additional movement of the vehicle had occurred after the initial stop of the vehicle. The department only learned of the AV’s subsequent movement via discussion with another government agency. The department requested Cruise provide a copy of the video with the additional footage, which was received by the department on October 13, 2023.”
As is often the case, it's the cover-up that gets you in the real trouble.
Cruise's death knell was when they were bought by GM. There's something insidious about US Detroit-based car companies that keeps them from innovating almost as a rule. It seems they often deliberately prioritize making their cars worse if it can drive up profit.
Not just traditional car makers though. Didn’t Tesla do something similar by removing radar (against engineers advice) to decrease cost and thereby making self-driving much more unreliable and difficult?
What I find interesting is that this "press release" reads like a response to an exposé of a toxic internal company culture. But as far as I can tell, this was just a technology failure. It's not very clear to me why they need to "examine their processes" and "take a hard look inwards at how they do work" in order to rectify what was basically a software bug.
Two things that make this a potential culture issue, as I see it:
1. Software that operates heavy machinery is life-critical. There’s no such thing as “just a bug” in that environment. It requires a different level of care.
2. As I understand it, Cruise was shut down in San Francisco not because of the software error, but because the company didn’t disclose the full details of what happened with the pedestrian that was hit. That’s very much a cultural problem.
There was a definite bro culture reminiscent of Uber's and we all see all the horrible actions Uber did to try to win / kill it. Unfortunately killing an innocent pedesterian in the process of trying to win / kill it.
Cruise's responses to their many negative events read like Uber's and I expressed my distaste for Cruise numerous times on here because of their bro trying to kill it attitudes (if you're not for robot cars you're out of touch being one example).
I'm not surprised and maybe sharper and more adult heads in GM stopped the program in time saving another poor innocent pedestrian from being mangled by training wheel robot car technology. I.e. The cars all came to a screeching halt when the 5G network it used was clogged up due a concert nearby (wow). It relied on a public 5G network?
Maybe one day robot cars it will be safer then a humans if so it will take decades to more yet is that progress worth these algorithms learning at the expense of more innocent lives?
It is alleged that Cruise neglected to provide the DMV with information regarding an incident that led to a pedestrian being badly injured. Other reports claim they willfully withheld information. It appears to be more than a “software bug.”
There are certain professions that operate with public trust. Doctor, lawyer, and engineer are the classical examples. Sometimes those of us in tech get lulled into complacency because we operate under an industrial exemption (ie, don’t require an engineering license) or we work on non-critical systems where we’re encouraged to move fast and break things. We shouldn’t let that attitude spill into safety-critical applications.
If you have a duty to the public to provide a safe product in an ethical manner, the software bug can certainly be the issue.
Actually I'm having a hard time even seeing it as that much of a bug. As I understand the accident, the woman trapped wasn't visible from anywhere in the vehicle or its sensors. Any human driver would likely have done the same thing (pull over after a collision when your vehicle is still drivable). It's a terrible situation for the victim, but it's not something reasonably preventable by safety technology of any kind.
But regardless, that's not what Cruise is on the hook for. They got in trouble because they tried to hide the full truth from regulators. And that for sure is a toxic internal company culture problem.
If a pedestrian gets flung in front of your car and then you no longer see them, wouldn't you be inclined to check whether they might have gone under your car? Especially if you're hearing screaming...
Driver behavior after collisions isn't remotely that rational. People do all kind of crazy things in extremis (secondary collisions caused by post-collision drivers mistakenly hitting the accelerator instead of brake are a whole category of accident!). And in any case (again, as I understand the accident) this was stopped traffic and the Cruise vehicle was hit by another vehicle. In that kind of situation I think a human driver would be hard pressed to know a pedestrian was nearby at all.
From Cruise's statements and news reports, it does not sound like the Cruise car was hit by another vehicle. A nearby vehicle flung a pedestrian in front of a Cruise. The Cruise car stopped on top of the pedestrian, then dragged them as it pulled over. Even accounting for post-crash panic, I find it unlikely that a decent human driver wouldn't have realized that the pedestrian ended up underneath their car.
But what if I belligerently insist that the average human driver would react in the worst possible way? I am trying to appeal to your angriest moments while behind the wheel of a car and get you to believe that your impression of other drivers then is true of most human drivers everywhere, all the time
That's not a reasonable argument. The point isn't "The robot is good because you can imagine a human making the same mistake", it's "We wouldn't think this accident was notable at all if it were a human driver, so we at least recognize we're holding the robot to a higher standard".
The truth is that virtually every traffic accident can be prevented on some level by every vehicle involved. People (you included, I assume?) who want to argue against automation in all cases will always be able to find something wrong with "the robot". Always. But that's not the right standard to be applying, because those accidents were going to happen anyway. The question is merely if there will be more or less of them with "robots" at the wheel.
You're right, Waymo and Cruise and Venture Cap are on a moral crusade to prevent driving fatalities, this isn't about high margin robotaxis and delusional hopes of accidentally creating AGI with a CV NN. And I agree with you, what the cruise vehicle did in this case, a human would totally do exactly the same thing. I mean humans are fucking neanderthals, have you ever seen one behind the fucking wheel of a car? They can't go more than 30 seconds without nearly crashing, and they only know how to drive in a 4km^2 zone. I personally know that every time I let my tesla go FSD, I'm only intervening every 90 seconds because of the unreasonably high standards I hold it to. Self driving cars only need to make the right decision like ~80% of the time. That's good enough, it's better than most human drivers.
And by the way, there's a cheaper and more effective way to reduce traffic fatalities, and it uses fewer precious resources, energy and land, emits less carbon dioxide, and stimulates economies but it's some kind of stealthtech from the 1800's. (choo choo)
> I personally know that every time I let my tesla go FSD, I'm only intervening every 90 seconds because of the unreasonably high standards I hold it to. Self driving cars only need to make the right decision like ~80% of the time. That's good enough, it's better than most human drivers.
That's only good enough if the type of the wrong decisions it makes is the same as the ones a human would make. Otherwise the car will seem unpredictable to human drivers and therefore dangerous.
If it’s critical enough of a bug that they had to suspend testing immediately then they probably shouldn’t have been doing the testing in the first place
This is the right move but I hope they get back out there quickly. We need as many competitors chasing this as possible — it’s a complex problem and is more of a marathon than a sprint.
As expected, the tech bros and AI bros cannot convince the regulators that their so-called level 5 robo-taxi is any safer than a human driver and are forced to stop driverless vehicles operating on the roads.
It its hardly difficult to just pause the whole thing since these systems didn’t go further than the SF bubble.
Just goes to show that this driverless snake oil essentially put everyone on the roads at risk.
I don't think I'm alone in reading "they ** up" as "they fucked up" in my head, without meaning to. So whoever would be offended, is still offended, only now they can't complain about it since the person technically didn't swear.
There's no stakes here (the internet) for it to matter if you swear or not.
Your attitude on the internet won't result in any meaningful feedback, by default.
Someone has to be watching from a more strict environment for it to matter what you say on the internet. It needs to affect your job, or your wife needs to read your posts, or a moderator needs to clamp down on you.
The community accepts swearing by default.
Soo people who are in professional environments are going to bring their communication norms with them when they post online.
An I over
-explaining an answer to a rhetorical 'why?' question. I think I am.
I can never tell online, if people are literally asking a question that requires explaining OR it is simply a rhetorical question.
This is a great diverging discussion about the "censorship" and the commenting style in public forums. Let me add something: when I was writing the original comment that started all this, I wanted it to be funny, catchy, snarky, and karma-point-worthy. So, I decided to put a swear word as a stylistic choice. Then, to add some extra to the short comment, I decided to poke fun at the whole FCC bleeping regulation. Here, I will warmly recommend a book dedicated to bleeping over the seven "unspeakable words": the famous Steven Pinker's famous book "The Stuff of Thought".
Now, about the number of asterisks: I really didn't think that much about this, I kind of think I counted the right number of letters, but then there is no caret overwrite mode in the bleeping browser, which is yet another story...
Well it's pretty clear I injected my own world view onto your comment and enjoyed it.
The FCC bleeping regulation doesn't really interest me, it's mild irritant in media..
It's slowly becoming obvious to me that the English-speaking cultures (UK, US, AUS, CAN, ect) are sculpted to interpret the same content in their own cultural view and it all somehow works even though we're constantly talking past/parrallel to each other.
Watching an American historian's reaction to philomena cunk peice, showed me how much he enjoys the literal-ness of her straight faced jokes, the same jokes I see as boldly satirical comments made for chuckles. And it somehow works for both cultures.
With that in mind, communicating anything worthwhile over internet comments is obviously orders of magnitude harder because of the cultural barriers. And the cracks between worldviews run deep.. and are starting to show.. I don't really know how to comment to other cultures accurately anymore.
Cruise, taking the high road to build public trust. For now.
I respect that.
Edit: yeah, I get they don’t have a perfect track record. But most tech companies don’t stop even when faced with issues like Cruise. Getting their cars off the road entirely is a major acknowledgment that their tech needs improvement, which is something I never expected from cruise.
They're not taking the high road, they got caught lying and were banned from a state where a third of their vehicles operate[1]. Call me a cynic but I think the time to demonstrate you're "relentlessly focused on safety" is before you're caught red handed.
1: It looks like they have 150 vehicles in San Francisco out of 400 vehicles total nationwide.
Yea, the "relentlessly focused on safety" quote reminds me of every time a company gets breached by hackers, they trot out the same "At $company, we take security very seriously" nonsense. I wonder if these P.R. people have to chug a fifth of bourbon in order to stomach hitting send on these statements.
>> The day after the incident, DMV representatives met with Cruise to “discuss the incident.” During that meeting, Cruise only showed footage up to the first complete stop, according to the Order of Suspension. No one at Cruise told the officers or showed any footage of the subsequent pullover maneuver and dragging. The DMV only learned of that from “another government agency.” When DMV asked for footage of that part of the incident, Cruise provided it.
Are self-driving cars actually going to be lucrative?
Yes, the progress is promising, but it seems to me (as an observer that knows nothing) that things aren't very scalable.
- It seems like every city pretty much requires a custom-tailored solution, and they still haven't solved the "downtown" problem.
- It's far more of a regulatory minefield than a pure software business model.
- The cars themselves, in addition to being expensive, well, cars, also require even more specialized equipment like lidars and infrared cameras.
- I imagine that if real disruption starts to occur these cars are going to be easy targets for vandals and disgruntled transportation employees.
- IIUC the leader, Waymo, does all the computation in the cloud, so you're hosed if the network goes down.
I'm rooting for self driving cars as much as anyone, but it seems like an uphill battle to achieve a "fleet of robotaxis" style approach... seems more likely to me that Waymo will eventually license the tech to automakers for use in personal vehicles.
> IIUC the leader, Waymo, does all the computation in the cloud, so you're hosed if the network goes down.
All the computation for driving happens on the onboard computer(s) and the maps are also onboard, so they can drive just fine without a network. But it is required for managing trips, remote assistance when necessary, etc.
The vehicle will most likely come to a safe stop on its own during an extended network outage because it can’t report the trip status anymore.
They will be lucractive if one company succeeds and can charge "human taxi fares" for driverless rides, and pocket the difference.
That almost certainly won't happen, so it will be a hellrush of legislation and funding resulting in crashing prices and soaring costs and bankruptcies galore.
>That almost certainly won't happen, so it will be a hellrush of legislation and funding resulting in crashing prices and soaring costs and bankruptcies galore.
Teslas solve most of these but you can't mention Tesla here without people raising your pitchforks at you, and of course that's assuming that Tesla manages level 5 some day
Why try to engineer effective solutions to transport that have known benefits and costs when we have can burn billions of dollars in the hopes that someday in the glorious future, everything will be the same but you can check instagram while in the driver's seat?
