Nothing of what I said indicates dedicated infrastructure. In fact, I don't think that would work (as you say why not
I'm thinking more like expanding priority bus-lanes (if you have visited regions outside the US these are common) and ensuring there are markers that are abundantly clear for everyone and more usable for self-driving vehicles.
There’s already extensive road infrastructure pretty much everywhere. Autonomous cars that could just use that would be much better than having to build out and maintain rails.
Buses do not work absurdly well. They take three times as long to go the same distance and operate on a fixed and often infrequent schedule. They aren’t available all the time. You can’t easily transport cargo in them.
Ideally we’d redesign cities to be more walkable and bikeable so cars aren’t as necessary, but that’s not going to happen overnight.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, this is a legitimate take.
My thinking is this is two-pronged. It won't make sense to make the infrastructure investment until there are sufficient proof points that this is 1.) something people want and 2.) something that's economically viable.
It's likely that the early geofenced version of passenger autonomy will demonstrate what further infrastructure is needed and how much it would cost.
One interesting side point; dedicated lanes for autonomous traffic are already being proposed on some roadways, particularly interstates in the U.S and highways in Europe. The economic benefits from autonomous logistics (e.g. trucking) are more readily capturable, so the infrastructure investment might make more sense there up front.
not saying roads/infrastructure is not important. I’m saying that I would not want to pay extra for something that maybe is going to guide the cars. we already have something that does that: it’s called a railroad.
my bigger point is that we’ve fallen in love with the idea of having self driving cars. do we need self driving cars? who should shoulder the cost?
the things I gave as examples are not ordered. truly high-speed internet everywhere would be great as i believe can actually enable telecommuting and eliminate traffic. it can also enable access to education and drive us, as a society forward.
Road infrastructure is crazy expensive and even if you are willing to rebuild it for the autonomous cars instead of building a mass transit, you will have either segregated roads for autonomous cars(which is essentially individualistic mass transit) or you will have mixed car infrastructure.
The US has a road network of 7 million km and apparently it costs about 1 million to 45 million[0] to build 1 km of road, depending on the nature of the infrastructure. Obviously the higher end is for large roads built in city centres but even at the lower end of the cost spectrum its crazy expensive.
IMHO doesn't make sense to rebuild the infrastructure for autonomous cars. If you re going to rebuild the infrastructure you can be better of to built continent wide mass transit. At least you won't need parking lots.
A problem with this is that I don't think there are very many places with available, extra lanes.
That prevents a smooth, gradual transition. Essentially you're proposing a massive public transport project that will progressively take over and replace existing transportation infrastructure.
I guess that's possible, but we could have done that without autonomous automobiles and it hasn't happened yet (well, not on a pervasive scale). Actually, if we could do that, I'm not sure we'd actually choose autonomous vehicles, as generally envisioned, as the mode of transportation.
Put another way: I think the whole lure of autonomous vehicles is the idea that they can adapt to existing infrastructure rather than the other way around. That's exactly what seems to make makes it possible for them to catch on in a big, general way, and eventually replace human driven cars.
I actually had a long discussion about this with an Uber driver the other day. Given that this article predates that discussion, I would imagine he was sourcing a lot of his arguments from this article.
My position in this discussion is that yes, infrastructure improvements are necessary, but they'll be relatively straight forward in the US, as basically every city in the US was designed to support automobile traffic.
Self driving cars are going to have a much tougher row to hoe in Europe and Asia, where city infrastructure predates the automobile by centuries/millenia
Even in smaller cities, building transportation infrastructure would greatly reduce congestion, and even reduce the need for future highway expansion. The common excuse is "America isn't built that way" but .. well it was at one time, less than 100 years ago. We use to have more streetcars and passenger rail than EU does now!
I didn't address the technical merits, but we've already seen leaked Google training data on here (that was really bad training data because it seemed to use automated/AI to build the training data and put boxes around a lot of things it shouldn't have ... can't find the link to that now), we know about Uber's engineers screwing up royally and killing a cyclist, we know about Tesla's autopilot getting people killed ... which shows even using sensors as safety features may make people less attentive to the road.
It's a hard problem space. Personally when I get really old and can't drive anymore, I'd prefer to live some place where I could still walk to cycle or take a train everywhere I really need to. I trust that stuff more than us finding the magic bullet to self-driving AI.
And I think what we can get from this article: good self driving AI requires advanced general purpose AI. And once you have that, good luck getting something that intelligent to drive you car. I imagine Marvin from Hitchhiker's Guide, "The most advanced robot in the galaxy asked to do the most menial tasks ... fix the engine Marvin. Fly the ship Marvin. Go buy groceries Marvin ... I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed."
but the infrastructure for trains is too costly. what if we could reuse the existing infrastructure and everything else you said. we could call these autonomous vehicles 'busses' or something like that.
Yeah, it's not a far-fetched idea either. It's already been proven that dedicated lanes for buses improve road performance overall (especially improving bus performance) so at that point it should be easy to use autonomous operation as a way to justify more dedicated space.
We need to create a new highway system for driverless cars/vans/trucks/etc. The current road infrastructure with its potholes, tolls, traffic congestion is not ideal. They need to conceive something similar to HOV lanes in order for this to move forward.
I'm not sure we need to retrofit Atlanta or Dallas, or what you might envision here. You could for example maintain existing infrastructure without spending a lot of taxpayer money on new highways and instead allocate funding to improving density, adjusting zoning, eliminating surface parking lots, and literally just paving sidewalks and bike lanes.
Busses can run on existing highways and throughout cities. City streets can already accommodate trams and bike lanes.
I agree that self-driving cars are "going to be a thing" but their proliferation I doubt. They're not really a category change from Uber, it's just "more efficient" as an additive solution, but we need subtractive solutions. You can think of the car and self-driving cars in particular in the same way you can think of personal digital cameras, alarm clocks, and smiliar devices before the advent of the iPhone. The iPhone (and other smart phones) was a subtractive product and eliminated the need for those devices.
Similarly a sidewalk and building well (among other things) eliminate much of the need for a personal car and so Ford, GM, Toyota, Tesla, etc. can't effectively compete because they don't build sidewalks or have anything to do with this category of transit. If I can just walk over to the grocery store like I could in London or Osaka then no amount of self-driving will matter.
I can imagine it for the sake of argument, but without strong govt action it has a bootstrap problem: no one will create such a lane if there are no such cars, and no one will buy and develop them if there are no roads you can use them on.
Moreover, if the goal is to achieve autonomy with relatively dumb algorithms that fall short of full self driving, you have to do grade separation, fencing, tunnels or overground etc., otherwise you still need full self driving to handle those case where bikes or children roam around in your "dedicated" lane, cars and garbage bins are parked on it, drunk drivers suddenly invade it etc. And if you go the full trouble of dedicated and grade separated infrastructure, why not build a tramway or PRT (like the Booring Co Loop system) that any citizen can benefit from?
All in all, I can't see the scenario you are describing happening in any real city with real politics, maybe some oil prince can decree it.
I agree with you in the abstract. The reality of the US political and administrative system is that it’s not possible to build new public transit, but it is possible to develop self-driving cars.
A useful public transportation system build out in a America is more ambitions than fully autonomous driving. Human-less driving is more of a technical problem than can probably be overcome with research, 10s or 100s of billions worth of development and municipal cooperation on autonomous driving infrastructure.
Public transport is a cultural problem as well as a technical problem. I live in a city with decent public transportation system options. I use it frequently and I'm grateful for it. But as soon as I go even a few miles outside the city, the public transportation options are slim to non-existent. I wouldn't even pretend for a second it's a practical option. You better have a car.
Over a long enough run, maybe, but the roads already exist. You don't need eminent domain, debt-financed billion-dollar public works projects, and years of disruption to existing urban transportation corridors to install rail.
On the other hand, at least making some of these driverless buses or common-destination carpool shuttles would be more efficient over any span than single-passenger coupes.
Right, and I think it's the obvious way to approach autonomous vehicles. With the correct infrastructure investment, self-driving vehicles would be vastly simpler and more reliable.
The problem is who pays for it, and who authorizes its installation. It's really something that has to be done at the governmental level. And I don't think there's any will to pay for it.
There are other issues of course. One is that in an Urban environment transportation issues would be better served by good public transport than self-driving vehicles.
The other is that I think once the government get involved, the numerous sociological issues associated with self-driving cars (which I personally think are more significant than the technical issues) would become apparent.
I see self driving cars as a backwards compatible way for us to reimagine infrastructure.
Right now, SDC is operating in the real world, in non-trivial environments (San Francisco), without special road infrastructure to make them work. It’s beautifully backwards compatible, at the cost of not being generalized (the service areas are extensively mapped).
Once SDC take off we’ll likely start getting infrastructure and rules to support them. Think standards for communicating position locally - ie car A broadcasts its position and route to cars B, C, D within 200m, special road infrastructure to make lanes and corners more manageable for SDC, rules against aimless circling. There’s already a carrying cost in the form of gas or electricity plus wear incentivizing aimless driving, also the opportunity cost of not actively moving someone or something, but we can probably introduce some kind of toll or tax on a SDC operating with no humans inside it to further disincentivize this.
A very useful thing about SDC, and something I think people forget about rideshare and taxis, is that they let people move around independently without needing parking for those trips. In dense cities like SF and NYC that’s hugely useful. A single rideshare or SDC can move 10 people on custom routes without any of those people needing to find and pay for parking, and without using any parking infrastructure. That’s great because it disincentivizes wasting more space on parking in aggregate. Over time this should let us build denser.
Of course, public transit could obviate all these concerns, and I’m a big believer in funding way more public transit than we do already, but it will take a lot of time and political will to make that happen in the US. And it still does not offer the flexibility of SDC and rideshare. SDC is fully compatible with existing infrastructure and may give us a way to morph into public transit more smoothly with things like dynamically routed SDBusses and a reduction of parking infrastructure leading to denser urban environments that more easily support public transit. I think we can solve the “spending too much time on the road doing nothing” problem with congestion pricing, which we should really be doing already.
I am not sure the poor state of existing infrastructure precludes someone from building their own new infrastructure. Public transportation outside of the US is often run by private companies, and they make plenty of money.
It would be relatively easy (which is to say, it would be easier than doing it to private cars) to fit the municipal bus fleet with the equipment to also become automatically piloted "packets." For that matter, it would also be possible to bake-in such functionality to Tesla cars.
I'm thinking more like expanding priority bus-lanes (if you have visited regions outside the US these are common) and ensuring there are markers that are abundantly clear for everyone and more usable for self-driving vehicles.
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