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> "When used correctly, [partially autonomous driving] is already significantly safer than a person driving by themselves" If you're an American, you're twice

• JeffL 10y ago
  Maybe that would be a good thing? Without need for parking, commercial districts could get denser and denser, and people could have nice large homes far away for cheaper than ever. If the cars aren't causing pollution or gridlock, what's so bad about living in the suburbs?
  • wahnfrieden 10y ago
    >If the cars aren't causing pollution There's the rub
  • seanp2k2 10y ago
    Electric cars cause pollution; they run on mostly coal or natural gas and have very toxic-to-mine, manufacture, and dispose-of batteries. They also emit just as much particulate emissions as normal cars: http://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/electric-car-particulate-matter/ http://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/electric-car-particulate-m... The way to "save the planet" is to not drive. Driving a 5000# vehicle around thinking you're doing good for the environment is just the marketing genius of the car industry in 2016.
    • maratd 10y ago
      > have very toxic-to-mine, manufacture, and dispose-of batteries. This is absolutely false. Lithium is not toxic to mine at all. It isn't even "mined". http://cleantechnica.com/2016/05/12/lithium-mining-vs-oil-sands-meme-thorough-response/ http://cleantechnica.com/2016/05/12/lithium-mining-vs-oil-sa... > Electric cars cause pollution They cause zero pollution when you have solar panels on your roof and the car is properly scrapped after you're done with it. > The way to "save the planet" is to not drive. This is silly and impractical.
      • eyelidlessness 10y ago
        > They cause zero pollution when you have solar panels on your roof and the car is properly scrapped after you're done with it. Unless you factor in manufacturing.
        • maratd 10y ago
          Why? If you're recycling/biodegrading 100% of the old vehicle and producing the new with solar energy, you should have zero pollution.
      • ams6110 10y ago
        There's more than lithium in the batteries, and other components such as Cobalt or Arsenic are not exactly nontoxic. On balance however, lithium ion batteries are less toxic than alternatives. Realistically, at present most EV owners will not charge their cars from solar panels but from the utility mains and that means coal-generated electricity in many if not most areas. Car manufacturing involves a tremendous investment of energy to mine and produce steel, aluminum, rubber, plastics, and electronics. Recycling itself consumes more energy, and in many cases raw virgin product is cheaper than recycled. Not driving is impractical. Driving less, when possible, is worth considering. Right now if you need to buy a car, the most environmentally friendly choice is probably a used (no new manufacturing) fuel-efficient conventional car.
        • ChuckMcM 10y ago
  • beambot 10y ago
    Or better yet: Reclaim parking lots and roadways and turn them into urban green spaces and parks!
    • agumonkey 10y ago
      There were plans in the past of subterrain roads/tunnels so cities would be a place to live, not to move.
  • gozur88 10y ago
    >Without need for parking, commercial districts could get denser and denser, and people could have nice large homes far away for cheaper than ever. If people are living farther away from their jobs, you're likely to get more congestion, not less.
    • nindalf 10y ago
      If this scenario has a majority of cars autonomously driven, congestion is less of a problem. The cars would cooperate to solve congestion issues that individual human drivers struggle with. Also, as a passenger you're probably sleeping or being productive within the car, so the increased commute time is less of a problem.
      • Tiktaalik 10y ago
        > The cars would cooperate to solve congestion issues that individual human drivers struggle with. Does this effect overcome the added amount of cars on the road from people who can now drive that wouldn't be able to before? I'm skeptical.
        • gozur88 10y ago
          That was my point. If I buy a van that drives itself I can tolerate much longer commutes - I'll just put a bed in the back and sleep my way to work. So what if it takes three hours. Incidentally, I was talking with a government transportation engineer recently, and that's what keeps them up at night - trips that are too long or just too inconvenient today become doable with self driving cars.
    • kevan 10y ago
      Theoretically autonomous cars will decrease congestion through better driving patterns and maybe coordinating with each other, meaning we could support a lot more traffic with the infrastructure we already have.
      • ams6110 10y ago
  • eyelidlessness 10y ago
    Suburbs destroy public life, create anxiety and a sense of atomization, and turn natural spaces into scar tissue. Even if you could perfect transportation technology, suburbs are the least optimal configuration for humans to live in the world.
    • ams6110 10y ago
      I like living in the suburbs. Dense urban areas create anxiety for me.
    • int_19h 10y ago
      Dense urban areas create anxiety for me, while suburbs give the nice quiet retreat with plenty of open space, and no random annoyances. I bet I'm not alone in this. Don't assume that your subjective personal experiences translate to everyone. Here's a question for you. If suburbs are "the least optimal configuration", then why did urban sprawl occur in the first place? Why did so many people leave the cities and sought bigger homes on wider lots?
      • jacalata 10y ago
        Tragedy of the commons.
        • int_19h 10y ago
          This would imply that there isn't enough space for everyone. Is that true, though? It feels like most dense concentrations of people are created artificially - either directly through borders (e.g. Haiti vs Dominican Republic), or indirectly through economic limitations (have to live close to where jobs are and commute is too expensive etc). If so, then this is a solvable problem. One other point I wanted to address. One negative side of sprawl is how it affects natural environments - but, again, does it really have to, or do we do it just because it's the easiest and cheapest way to implement it? It feels like living less densely could actually be beneficial for the environment if done right, compared to the cities. Consider: a metropolis will always carve a chunk out of nature and replace it with a dense grid of roads around high rises, completely ruining the ecological system in the affected area - heck, our cities even have their own microclimates now, because of how much heat we pump out at once in a single place. On the other hand, a single residence does not have a significant impact; and if you space them out sufficiently, you can preserve the original environment in that space between. Infrastructure is trickier and more invasive, but we've seen some trends towards more localization recently (e.g. with residential solar, composting etc). Who knows, perhaps we can actually make this description from "The Diamond Age" a reality? "The prevailing architecture here, among those who had not adopted neo-Victorian precepts, was distinctly subterranean; as if these people were somehow ashamed of their own humanity and could not bear to fell even a handful of the immense Douglas firs that marched monotonously up the tumbling slopes toward the frozen, sodden ridge of the Cascades. Even when it was half buried, a house wasn't even a proper house; it was an association of modules, scattered about here and there and connected by breezeways or tunnels."
• BurningFrog 10y ago
  Parking becomes mostly obsolete, freeing up huge amounts of central city areas.
  • JoshTriplett 10y ago
    Cities already tend to have limited parking. We might see more parking structures located in cheap out-of-the-way locations rather than near places people want to go. And street parking could go away in favor of consolidated parking structures, freeing up road space for both car traffic (with extra lanes) and foot traffic (widen sidewalks). But I think it'll have an even larger effect on suburban areas. Shopping centers, strip malls, and similar will no longer need to have massive flat single-story parking lots, freeing up a huge amount of space. Likewise for major employers, and commuter parking lots for mass transit.
    • BurningFrog 10y ago
      Let me spell out the argument more: Instead of 100 people owning 100 cars they drive 5% of the time, they could own 10 summonable cars that drive them around 50% of the time. The first scenario requires 95 parking spots. The second only 5. There is still as much traffic on the roads, and as much transport work being done, but most of the space now needed for parking can be put to other use.
      • mahyarm 10y ago
        No because you have to account for peak usage and have the capacity for it. There will be car savings, but the math wont be as simple as you say it is.
        • intrasight 10y ago
          Have staggered work start and end times and "peak usage" will be a less pronounced peak. Also add in more home offices. I've no doubt that in 20 years car ownership will be a fraction of what it is today. Everything points in that direction and nothing opposes it.
• akira2501 10y ago
  > If you're an American, you're twice as likely to die with a steering wheel in your hands as you are to die at the hands of a murderer. Human-driven vehicle deaths cause grave second-order suffering for families and friends - and hurt the economy. If you're an American you're more likely to die from suicide than you are from motor vehicle related injuries. You're more likely to be poisoned than to die in a motor vehicle crash. You're 16 times more likely to die from heart disease or cancer. Compared to 1950, motor vehicle death rates have more than halved.
  • thucydides 10y ago
    There are 30,000 motor vehicle deaths in America each year. In perhaps 30 years, fully autonomous vehicles could cut all of that needless carnage to nearly nothing. And what about the hundreds of thousands of injuries we'll be spared? Worldwide, fully-autonomous vehicles will be a public health victory on the scale of vaccines or antibiotics.
    • akira2501 10y ago
      > Americans spend a million days each year in the hospital due to injuries sustained in motor vehicles. Sustained _due_ to motor vehicles. The base statistics also include pedestrian deaths. There's also a skew due to vehicles being multi-passenger. Interestingly, it _is_ the leading cause of deaths for Americans between 15 to 29 years old. For females 15-24 the motor vehicle related death rate is 8.7. For males 15-24 the death rate is 21.5. From 24-75 the rates drop a few points for both sexes and then increase again after 75. > In the medium term, fully-autonomous vehicles will eventually cut both of those numbers to virtually zero. My point is, the statistics may be painting a different picture when viewed in the whole. Even if this specific case is true, we may just be trading one cause of death for another. There's no guarantee overall injury or "suffering" will be reduced. > When they're available worldwide, fully-autonomous vehicles will be a public health victory on the scale of vaccines or antibiotics. Maybe, and maybe when everyone can afford them. Yet still, even today in America, more likely to die to the Flu than you are to motor vehicle related injuries. I'm all for automated cars, but I'm skeptical of the rhetoric that gets tossed around.
• deleted 10y ago
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• bps4484 10y ago
  It may create more sprawl, but 2 of the big complaints I've heard about living in a city is how hard it is to get around, and it's hard to have a car that allows you to leave. Autonomous cars would solve both of these problems while freeing up cityscapes to also be more walkable/bikeable (you have to do something with what was former car parking). This future is interesting because both living way out in the suburbs AND living in a city both become more attractive.
• melvinmt 10y ago
  If you're human, you're 99.999999% likely to die.
  • pavlov 10y ago
    That means there are about 70 persons on this planet currently who are not going to die?
    • intrasight 10y ago
      I guess he/she thinks that a small number of very young people will live to achieve the Singularity.
  • oh_sigh 10y ago
    So you're telling me there's a chance...
• batiudrami 10y ago
  It's more that it's time consuming than boring, which obviously gets worse with urban sprawl. Sure, I can do all my "down time" entertainment, but I can't schedule anything else while I'm commuting which is the real issue. Though many US city demographics are different to anywhere else in the world due to white flight - the "wealth donut" around a poor inner city rather rather than people getting poorer as you move further out in the suburbs.
  • ams6110 10y ago
    Honest question: are any of the large European cities seeing the "white flight" phenomenon with the influx of poor middle eastern and african immigrants?
    • barrkel 10y ago
      IMO it's the reverse; all the fun for young wealthy people is in the city centre, while minorities are pushed out to the suburbs. Old tenement buildings get reworked into apartments, warehouses in old industrial districts get similar treatment, etc.
      • aidenn0 10y ago
        A similar effect is happening in the US with gentrification of city centers.
• chiefofgxbxl 10y ago
  > Besides direct costs for the car, fuel, and maintenance, the main disincentive to driving is how damn boring it is. What happens when we turn fully-autonomous vehicles into luxury entertainment centers? I suspect that, if we're not smart about this shift, we could see wild sprawl on a scale that would dwarf the mid-20th century sprawl we saw in Los Angeles and elsewhere. I was just thinking about this today (and have been for a while now), but with regards to vehicle comfort. I drive a small sedan, but have ridden in pickup trucks and SUVs. They are far more comfortable than the sedans the way they sit taller, have far more room, and feel like a small bubble protecting one from the rest of the world. This is a danger on two fronts: safety, and comfort leading to more driving. If we continue to make cars more comfortable, we continue to abstract the idea that we are zipping around in 3,000 pound death machines, thus leading to more reckless or risky behavior. As autonomous vehicles roll out to the public, no doubt people will expect computers, internet, and television to be front and center. Others may take naps during commutes. But with this, rather than curing the disease that is longer and longer commutes due to policy that encourages sprawl, entertainment will just treat the symptoms.
  • ams6110 10y ago
    I know what you mean about SUVs and trucks feeling safer and more comfortable. Objectively however, their handling characteristics and weight distribution (particularly the very light rear weight in pickups) make them quite a bit less safe in terms of what they will do in a high speed evasive action situation.
• deleted 10y ago
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• gkya 10y ago
  I don't understand, why would you need self driving cars if you don't want to drive? Public transport is here, is cheaper and safer. Also it allows to multitask.
  • serge2k 10y ago
    autonomous or not, taking the bus is still going to be a craptacular experience.
    • JBReefer 10y ago
      Hey, I love my bus. It's a really pleasant part of my morning.
      • serge2k 10y ago
        last time I took the bus some guy fell asleep on my shoulder. It's loud, slow, too warm, uncomfortable, and literally makes me feel ill about half the time (I get terrible motion sickness).
  • joshmarlow 10y ago
    Well.... public transportation requires infrastructure which is not always around. In the south-east USA, for instance, there are public buses here and there but they rarely go for more than a few miles, and there are no trains or subways to travel mid-distance or between cities. So grey-hound or car rentals are your best bet unless you already own a car.
    • gkya 10y ago
      I'm in one of the most crowded and traffic-ridden of the world, non-US. We have a growing rail complex and a good and frequent bus system. I perceive car ownership as masochism, as public transport is always faster, and you don't have to care about parking, gas, taxes and all the other burdens associated with cars. Electric cars won't solve these, e.g. many cars can self park, but you can't save the time spent searching for a parking space, self drive or manual. It also won't save you from traffic. There are also legal questions about self driving. For example if my theoretical fully self driving hits a passenger on the zebras that hasn't dresses up for the liking of radars, who is guilty? Certainly there needs to be put in place a big infrastructure for interautomobile communication to effectively avoid crashes. Infrastrutture is unavoidable. This is like saying: if the electric infrastructure is not good and widely available, then give everyone a generator.
• andys627 10y ago
  Proven technology around since the beginning of time - walking. The rest of the world love it. We should give it a try.
  • briandear 10y ago
    Is that why the streets are empty and you can always find a parking space in London? How about downtown Shanghai? Or Rome? Or the suburbs of Guadalajara? This qualifies as some of the rest of the world and all of the places mentioned are traffic nightmares. It must be all of the walkers clogging up the roads. As far as the rest of the world loving it, that's ridiculous. The mom in rural Kenya walking miles each day for water.. I bet she'd love a car. When you have to get to a meeting and its 40C outside, I'm sure a brisk walk would be just adorable. Not everyone can afford to live within walking distance.
    • vanderZwan 10y ago
      The walking remark by GP was perhaps a bit snarky, but there is a deeper point to be made: if the problem is caused by cars, limiting your view to designing better cars is not a smart strategy (don't get me wrong: we should build better, safer, smarter cars, they just shouldn't be the only potential solution we look at). Something something Ford something "faster horses". There's public transport, there's biking, even segways and hoverboards and those motorised skateboards everyone loves, and the list goes on. All of which are technologies which themselves can be improved too. Taking bikes as an example, since I'm most familiar with those: Dutch infrastructure is practically built around it[0] and for the vast majority of trips, which are short-distance, it is a far better solution than cars. (of course the Netherlands is unfairly advantaged here, being compact and flat, but that does not make bikes useless elsewhere). For long distance trips a combination of public transport and a locally rented bike is usually all you need to get around. Amsterdam is a famously bike friendly capital, but all our cities are, really, and especially in smaller ones like Groningen it is the de-facto mode of transportation[1][2]. As for your Kenya example, in most contexts bikes are arguably a better solution in developing countries than cars: it needs no fuel, is simple enough to fix yourself, possible to make from local materials even (see Ghana's bamboo bikes[4] for example), less dependent on roads and existing infrastructure and still enough of a time and energy saver that it brings a lot of wealth to the people who own one. [0] https://www.youtube.com/user/markenlei/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/markenlei/videos [1] https://vimeo.com/76207227 https://vimeo.com/76207227 [2] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jul/29/how-groningen-invented-a-cycling-template-for-cities-all-over-the-world https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jul/29/how-groningen... [4] http://ghanabamboobikes.org/en/ http://ghanabamboobikes.org/en/
• zamalek 10y ago
  > A shift to technologies safer than human-driven cars would dramatically reduce human suffering and should be welcomed. Car-for-car I'd easily wager that manually-driven cars have been involved in far more accidents than the one or two Tesla accidents that have occurred over the same time period (not to dilute the terrible result of the most recent accident). The problem is that a typical person doesn't care. Car accidents where a human is at fault are "normal." We live in a society where speeding, aggressive driving and/or DUI are routinely practiced. From personal experience: even when you dial the convenience factor to 11 (Uber/Lyft) people are still adamant that they are OK to drive. The driver is blamed, not the fact that the driver is doing something that evolution has never had to solve. Additionally, the non-technical crowd are very used to machines breaking and doing the wrong thing. So when you come along with a story about how a machine killed a person in, what is very strictly, a motor vehicle accident everyone's built-in beliefs about machines are merely reinforced. Few step back and consider how embarrassingly incompetent humans are at driving, and how a machine that doesn't yet have the sensors required to properly perform the task still runs circles around our very rich set of senses.
  • aidenn0 10y ago
    There's also a significant tort issue. Consider the case where a drunk driver kills himself and someone else. Now consider the case where an autonomous vehicle kills its passenger and the passenger in another car. A jury needs to award damages against A) the grieving widow of the drunk driver or B) A large corporation. I suspect the latter will be at least an order of magnitude higher. This means that until autonomous vehicles are an order of magnitude safer, the car companies will have to absorb more damages than the sum of what all of their customers would have.
    • zamalek 10y ago
      Interesting point. Is this how the rulings are going right now?
• Zigurd 10y ago
  While the fact that hundreds of thousands of lives will be saved annually, worldwide, due to self-driving vehicles is more than enough to justify hurrying toward that goal, self driving technology will have enormous secondary effects, only some of which can be reliably predicted. Your concern about sprawl could come true, or vehicles could switch largely to on-demand access, where urbanization will provide the critical mass for on-demand vehicle use, making the exurbs relatively more expensive.
• mizzao 10y ago
  As a counterpoint, we'd also have the need for fewer roads and parking lots, and hence cities could become even denser.