A whole article about this without a mention of self-driving cars is silly. Even if you think they're still a decade away, they are coming and they are going to change everything about parking in cities.
Did anyone claim _this_ was decades away? The claim is usually about when self-driving cars will actually be viable for anyone to use in arbitrary areas, not when experimental pilot programs are launched in individual cities.
It's funny how this shall be a city of the future, when obviously it can only be built with technology from the present. Claiming that in the city there will be self driving cars, when this technology clearly isn't ready yet seems like an odd bet on what the future will be more than anything.
We will have self driving cars in 3 to 5 years at this point...the writing is on the wall. We will have pervasive self driving cars in 10 or 20 years.
So to ignore something that is pretty much a sure bet to redesign your city over 20 years, when what you are building is meant to last 50-100 years, is kind of stupid. You do what you can with all information available.
Exactly. This article is just as silly. Wide-spread adoption and integration of driverless cars is a long way off yet. I don't know how long, but I also don't care since it isn't my job to predict the curve. I have zero doubt that it will happen. Humans are horrible operators of machinery. At some point the machines will absolutely be better at operating themselves under our direction. So in the meantime, let's find some people who are unnerved by all the media conversation and get some click bait out of it.
I was very bullish on self driving cars back in 2016, but nearly half a decade later and it doesn’t seem like we’ve made any progress at all, and it seems like a decent number of experts and industry insiders agree with me.
Ridiculous predictions. Human drivers legislated away in 20 years max? Please, as if the police or public services would trust their transportation to an algorithm, publicly.
More likely the insurance companies will aggressively raise premiums on drivers who insist on retaining their option to drive themselves. Markets will price people out of the driver’s seat and into the passenger’s.
And the idea that people wouldn’t buy their own cars or that luxury cars would fall by the wayside is ridiculous. The FIRST major self driving cars are going to be in the luxury market, and the companies doing so are already there (Tesla, Volvo, Mercedes-Benz). Having a self-driving car will become the ultimate status symbol among the upper middle class. And you can bet that Hollywood and Madison Avenue will inundate the populace with scenes and ads of attractive young people stepping out of luxurious autonomous cars as soon as they’re on the market.
And of course no discussion whatsoever on rural areas or even people that don’t want self-driving cars. Personally I hate driving but most people I know do enjoy it and wouldn’t fully trust a self driving car not to get hacked and fling them off the nearest cliff.
Something the article absolutely misses is that cars are not simply a means of transportation. They are also a moving storage shed: Umbrellas, rain boots, an extra jacket, diapers, child car seats...
For an article chock-full of futurism, it was surprisingly low on genuine imagination...or even robust analysis.
So get the driverless car that isn't run by Google. I get that there are privacy issues, but I still think this article is overly alarmist.
As an aside, I expect autonomous driving to be phased in gradually - I'd wager freeways first, then city centers, and rural areas only at the very end. However, once there's a sufficient installed base of autonomous vehicles, I expect it will be illegal to drive manually in those areas, because it kind of defeats the point.
I can't read this paywall article, but here are some similar counterpoints to hype, starting in 2016. They are from people actually working on self-driving technology or executives/investors close to it. (I'm interested in any earlier "expectation setting", having heard a lot of this at Google.)
March 2016:
Chris Urmson: How quickly can we get this into people's hands? If you read the papers, you see maybe it's three years, maybe it's thirty years. And I am here to tell you that honestly, it's a bit of both.
Those who think fully self-driving vehicles will be ubiquitous on city streets months from now or even in a few years are not well connected to the state of the art or committed to the safe deployment of the technology. For those of us who have been working on the technology for a long time, we’re going to tell you the issue is still really hard, as the systems are as complex as ever.
Five years ago, car companies were saying around the world that in five years, their cars would be 100% self driving. I said it was bonkers, unless they create a new infrastructure for self driving cars (new roads that can be used only by these types of cars).
You people need to stop saying this kind of stuff. I will bet you $1k on longbets.org that we do not have fully autonomous vehicles operating on public streets in 9 years (i.e. 2025). These types of statements are confusing the non-technical 'tech press' and they are misinforming the public.
I agree in part in that I am skeptical that full self-driving cars will happen in the next few years, but he is completely wrong when it comes to the long term. Not only will the tech get as good as humans, but most forget to account for the fact that the environment will meet the cars part way. We will eventually update markings and beacons on the roads to make it easier for the cars, implement networks in which the cars can talk to each other, and make special lanes for self-driving cars only, among other improvements that will make it easier for the cars. Eventually non-self-driving cars will not be allowed on the road, and will be a niche hobby on race tracks.
I think that is an implausible level of optimism about the ubiquity of self-driving cars.
Building for a mixed-used future, with public transit serving a lot of people's needs for the next 30-40 years, and self-driving cars potentially starting to fill in the gaps in our lifetimes, seems like a far more realistic solution than "do nothing and wait for self-driving cars".
So? Okay, we're not there yet with autonomous vehicles, and have spend tons of money on it. But the tech we have now didn't exist a decade ago. Give it another decade.
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