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Not to mention entire small town economies, particularly in the West, are entirely economically dependent on truckers to stop by, rest, fuel up, visit prostitut

Not to mention entire small town economies, particularly in the West, are entirely economically dependent on truckers to stop by, rest, fuel up, visit prostitutes etc. Those people are gonna have a much harder time. Any owners of property will see the values of their assets plummet just as their jobs disappear.

mikestew 9y ago
I see the rare few towns along, say, the Dalton Highway on the way to Deadhorse, Alaska as being the first to go. Ignoring the weather for just a moment, that 400 miles of packed gravel would have to be an appealing target for autonomous vehicle engineers. Mostly straight, mostly flat (albeit with one non-trivial mountain pass), little traffic other than other trucks. And poof, there goes Coldfoot and Yukon River when humans don't stop anymore (except for a smattering of tourists). Or maybe the tank range is enough that trucks don't stop between Fairbanks and Deadhorse the way it is now, and I'm talking out my ass. All I know is that the traffic I saw last time I was up there consisted of a lot of trucks, a minivan, one camper at the Arctic Circle that said they were going to Deadhorse, and the remainder of tourist traffic consisting of a bunch of dumbasses like me on motorcycles.
- niftich 9y ago
  I'd guess that a road like Dalton where weather-related and road condition-related hazards can suddenly appear, would make an exceedingly poor fit for self-driving non-guideway vehicles. Far better would be vehicles -- self-driving or otherwise -- on some sort of fixed guideway; given that most of the current usage of the road is for traffic solely between the two points-of-interest on either end. Special vehicles could still be used to access the pipeline running alongside at arbitrary points. A railway, potentially with extra equipment to assist with maintaining traction and negotiating grades, would accomplish this nicely, but is avoided due to its large up-front cost. While self-driving vehicles don't come with such large non-distributed up-front cost, they would be unreliable on such a road without permanent in-vehicle supervision, at which point they're not really making any of the intervening towns that provide driver services superfluous.

mikestew 9y ago

I see the rare few towns along, say, the Dalton Highway on the way to Deadhorse, Alaska as being the first to go. Ignoring the weather for just a moment, that 400 miles of packed gravel would have to be an appealing target for autonomous vehicle engineers. Mostly straight, mostly flat (albeit with one non-trivial mountain pass), little traffic other than other trucks. And poof, there goes Coldfoot and Yukon River when humans don't stop anymore (except for a smattering of tourists). Or maybe the tank range is enough that trucks don't stop between Fairbanks and Deadhorse the way it is now, and I'm talking out my ass. All I know is that the traffic I saw last time I was up there consisted of a lot of trucks, a minivan, one camper at the Arctic Circle that said they were going to Deadhorse, and the remainder of tourist traffic consisting of a bunch of dumbasses like me on motorcycles.

niftich 9y ago
I'd guess that a road like Dalton where weather-related and road condition-related hazards can suddenly appear, would make an exceedingly poor fit for self-driving non-guideway vehicles. Far better would be vehicles -- self-driving or otherwise -- on some sort of fixed guideway; given that most of the current usage of the road is for traffic solely between the two points-of-interest on either end. Special vehicles could still be used to access the pipeline running alongside at arbitrary points. A railway, potentially with extra equipment to assist with maintaining traction and negotiating grades, would accomplish this nicely, but is avoided due to its large up-front cost. While self-driving vehicles don't come with such large non-distributed up-front cost, they would be unreliable on such a road without permanent in-vehicle supervision, at which point they're not really making any of the intervening towns that provide driver services superfluous.