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Self-driving cars are inevitable, but I still feel like everybody is focusing too much on the vision of them being the primary mode of transportation well into
by snuxoll 9y ago
Self-driving cars are inevitable, but I still feel like everybody is focusing too much on the vision of them being the primary mode of transportation well into our future.
Cars as transportation should be dead in the next 50 years, outside of fairly niche (relatively speaking) use cases like construction/maintenance/etc. workers who need to carry large loads or people who live or need to travel well outside of city limits. Research into self-driving vehicles is an important part of improving road safety, but I think we need to focus more on public/mass transit rather than "everybody gets a self-driving pod to go from Point A to Point B".
As someone who loves to go outdoors, and regularly visits family a couple hundred miles away I can't see my families need for a personal vehicle completely going away. But 99% of our road time could just as easily be served with a couple trains and busses instead, freeing up valuable land that is needed by our massive road network as well as the horrendous city designs that have spawned from the assumption that everybody has their own personal vehicle.
- cameldrv 9y agoWhy? Mass transit is an industrial age solution to the congestion problem, when we couldn't plan for demand in real-time. Mass transit means that there need to be a lot of people who want to go from the same place, to the same place, at the same time. This is never true, so you have to relax the assumptions: they aren't coming from the same place, so force them all to walk to a stop. They aren't going to the same place, so force them to walk from a stop. They don't want to go at the same time, so force them to wait for the next bus/train. If you're in a very dense city at a busy time of day, this isn't too bad, you don't have to walk too far, and you don't have to wait too long. Otherwise, it's not possible to get enough people that want to make the same trip at the same time without making people walk long distances or wait a long time. On demand Lyft Line style routing, automatically driven, with variable sized vehicles depending on demand in the area, is going to completely replace mass transit in twenty years. The cost will be the same, and the travel time will be half or less.
- alooPotato 9y ago> The cost will be the same, and the travel time will be half or less. Is this a guess or is there data/papers on this somewhere? Genuinely curios if there are any sources.
- snuxoll 9y agoMass transit in the modern age fails because we started planning cities around everyone owning cars, not because it's an inefficient solution.