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I wrote this back in 2016 and I think it still holds today: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/self-driving-cars-will-not-solve-the-transportation-problem/ https:/

I wrote this back in 2016 and I think it still holds today: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/self-driving-cars-will-not-solve-the-transportation-problem/ https://battlepenguin.com/tech/self-driving-cars-will-not-so... Self driving cars are dumping an insane amount of time and effort into computer vision and AI for the wrong problem. For the amount of tax subsidies, our money, given to these companies, we could have put down insane amounts of rail. Hell, we could even do small personal autonomous rail car test programs in some cities and it would still be more useful than the current state of self-diving tech. Self driving solves the wrong problem, and it's a good 15+ years until we see this vehicles, if we even see them at all.

vaccinator 6y ago
Few people will own a car if self driving cars become a reality.
lallysingh 6y ago
It isn't the money that stops rail.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  Even Silicon Valley levels of money don’t approach that needed to purchase the land required for rail.
jayd16 6y ago
I love rail but we'll probably see some kind of self driving before we get high speed rail between any of SD, SF, LA, or Vegas.
- bradlys 6y ago
  I agree but only because of bureaucracy and nimby-ism.
  - jayd16 6y ago
    Indeed. Such is life.
jimrandomh 6y ago
Not really. Rail in the US is spectacularly expensive; look up a few recent rail projects with dollar figures attached, they're billions of dollars each. That's the same order of magnitude as the cost of an entire self-driving research program (Waymo has taken $3B of investment, according to its Wikipedia page), which, if successful, would scale quickly and easily to the entire world.
- xvilka 6y ago
  If the US companies can't do it just hire Chinese or Japanese ones who have enormous experience to build the infrastructure way cheaper.
  - FreakyT 6y ago
    Exactly this -- plenty of other countries have figured out how to build rail systems without massive cost overruns.
  - objektif 6y ago
    Well good ideas from capitalism does not apply to public projects did you not know?
  - cycrutchfield 6y ago
    Yeah, just bulldoze some houses and apartment blocks, so easy to build rail lines. Why didn’t anybody else try this?
  - jcranmer 6y ago
    China and Japan aren't exactly low-cost construction countries. Actually, they're among the highest-cost non-Anglosphere countries (which are perhaps best labeled "stratospheric-cost" countries). Instead, you want to look to places like Spain, Italy, Sweden, or South Korea as low-cost countries.
  - TheMblabla 6y ago
    Their costs are lower because their land aquisition costs are lower. The problem isn't the tech it's the regulations/property rights.
beisner 6y ago
The United States is structurally incapable of large-scale public works projects. There are a lot of reasons for this and they aren’t particularly partisan, rather reflect how decisions are made. My guess is places like China and Singapore will have the first true deployments of self-driving, because they’re actually capable of building road infrastructure to support it when it isn’t fully level 5.
- xiphias2 6y ago
  I vote for China, as they have the political strength to allow it even at a stage when it's not yet safer than an average driver. I believe that's not good enough for Singapore or U.S.
  - chillacy 6y ago
    I’ve taken a cab in Shanghai and it was terrifying. If they can make autonomous cars drive there then they can drive anywhere...
- krainboltgreene 6y ago
  Have you really forgotten the Hoover Dam?
  - MagnumOpus 6y ago
    The Hoover Dam was 85 years ago, the moon landing program was 50+ years ago, the interstate buildout was 40-60 years ago. The disfunctionality of the US at large-scale projects emerged in the 80s, possibly to do with both the creation of the modern Republican agenda by Ailes (divisive populism over bipartisanship, and preference of tax cuts over maintaining infrastructure), and the acceptance of the environmental movement by the Democrats. Maybe also by the illusion that the the demise of the USSR meant the "end of history" and the focus can turn from trying to get the US to be #1 to prying to get a bigger slice of the pie domestically...
    - koheripbal 6y ago
ipunchghosts 6y ago
I 100% agree with this. A much better endeavor would have been to built a robot highway and only allow autonomous vehicles on it. Like trains but using 4 wheeled vehicles.
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  Why would that be better? 2.5 billion doesn't get that much highway and even less robot highway. If you're not someone living on or near the robot highway you get no benefit from it and the vast majority of people won't be living anywhere near the robot highway. Conversely, inventing self-driving cars scales really well. Invented once. Commoditized. Sold worldwide for a profit. Massive benefits to everyone worldwide. It's disappointing that Uber's research isn't paying off, but it's clearly a bet in pursuit of much higher stakes than making a highway.
ethbr0 6y ago
I'd offer Kurzweil's (I believe?) observation that the futurist predictions that come true are those that substantially improve peoples' needs. Even substantially expanded rail will never solve the problem of "I want to get from point A to point B, as quickly as possible, whenever I'm ready to leave" in a fundamentally different way. The transit to the starting station might be shorter, and the transit from the ending station will be shorter, but it's still the same experience. Autonomous cars solve that in the same way an personal automobile currently does, albeit removing the inconvenience of actually driving. The former is like-in-kind. The latter is fundamentally-different. Consequently, if I am a consumer, how much would I be willing to pay for the former vs the latter? Cell phones became ubiquitous because they were a fundamentally-different communication experience ("Call a person instead of a location"). Transit will be the same way, if it changes.
- FreakyT 6y ago
  > Autonomous cars solve that in the same way an personal automobile currently does, albeit removing the inconvenience of actually driving. The problem with autonomous cars as compared to rail is that autonomy doesn't solve the other fundamental problem of cars: congestion. If I waved my magic wand and replaced every car in the bay area with a self-driving one overnight, roads would still clog at rush hour.
  - wheelie_boy 6y ago
    If anything, self-driving cars would make congestion a lot worse. If I had a self-driving mini-RV, I would live further from the city, and do my morning routine during my commute. Maybe take a small nap or get some work done.
    - bluedevil2k 6y ago
      Disagree - if traffic flowed more evenly, same speed for everyone, less lane changes, didn’t require the “safe distance padding” re-establishment at every light, the congestion would lesson. Probably not eliminated though.
dmead 6y ago
so uber's entire self driving program cost the same as laying down new rail for one new major route. that is definitely not the same cost.
foota 6y ago
I'm uncertain, something like 20 billion dollars (maybe on par with the amount of funding for self driving cars?). wouldn't really go all that far unfortunately for American transport prices.
babesh 6y ago
3 billion per mile for the Downtown Extension in San Francisco. https://sf.curbed.com/2018/6/18/17464616/bay-area-subway-train-rail-costs-price-bart-muni https://sf.curbed.com/2018/6/18/17464616/bay-area-subway-tra...
ip26 6y ago
From a mile high view, does it matter what the problem is? Early laptops got us the lithium battery. ICBM's got us integrated circuits. Calculators got us microprocessors. Maybe in twenty years we'll look back and say self driving cars got us human-level computer vision- to be applied to anything you please.
bluedevil2k 6y ago
Not sure where you’re located, but when are we gonna stop saying “the US needs more rail”? It’s not a solution in this country and never will be (Not outside major cities). People are too spread out, we’re not like Europe or even Japan, where the habitation area is actually quite small. People want to leave when they want and go exactly where they want. Gasoline is cheap here making cars cheap to own and maintain. It’s tough to move things while carrying them on a train, a reason so many people have trucks and SUVs. This doesn’t even consider all the cost related reasons outlined in other comments. Electric self driving cars are the future of the US.

vaccinator 6y ago

Few people will own a car if self driving cars become a reality.

lallysingh 6y ago

It isn't the money that stops rail.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
Even Silicon Valley levels of money don’t approach that needed to purchase the land required for rail.

jayd16 6y ago

I love rail but we'll probably see some kind of self driving before we get high speed rail between any of SD, SF, LA, or Vegas.

bradlys 6y ago
I agree but only because of bureaucracy and nimby-ism.
- jayd16 6y ago
  Indeed. Such is life.

jimrandomh 6y ago

Not really. Rail in the US is spectacularly expensive; look up a few recent rail projects with dollar figures attached, they're billions of dollars each. That's the same order of magnitude as the cost of an entire self-driving research program (Waymo has taken $3B of investment, according to its Wikipedia page), which, if successful, would scale quickly and easily to the entire world.

xvilka 6y ago
If the US companies can't do it just hire Chinese or Japanese ones who have enormous experience to build the infrastructure way cheaper.
- FreakyT 6y ago
  Exactly this -- plenty of other countries have figured out how to build rail systems without massive cost overruns.
- objektif 6y ago
  Well good ideas from capitalism does not apply to public projects did you not know?
- cycrutchfield 6y ago
  Yeah, just bulldoze some houses and apartment blocks, so easy to build rail lines. Why didn’t anybody else try this?
- jcranmer 6y ago
  China and Japan aren't exactly low-cost construction countries. Actually, they're among the highest-cost non-Anglosphere countries (which are perhaps best labeled "stratospheric-cost" countries). Instead, you want to look to places like Spain, Italy, Sweden, or South Korea as low-cost countries.
- TheMblabla 6y ago
  Their costs are lower because their land aquisition costs are lower. The problem isn't the tech it's the regulations/property rights.

beisner 6y ago

The United States is structurally incapable of large-scale public works projects. There are a lot of reasons for this and they aren’t particularly partisan, rather reflect how decisions are made. My guess is places like China and Singapore will have the first true deployments of self-driving, because they’re actually capable of building road infrastructure to support it when it isn’t fully level 5.

xiphias2 6y ago
I vote for China, as they have the political strength to allow it even at a stage when it's not yet safer than an average driver. I believe that's not good enough for Singapore or U.S.
- chillacy 6y ago
  I’ve taken a cab in Shanghai and it was terrifying. If they can make autonomous cars drive there then they can drive anywhere...
krainboltgreene 6y ago
Have you really forgotten the Hoover Dam?
- MagnumOpus 6y ago
  The Hoover Dam was 85 years ago, the moon landing program was 50+ years ago, the interstate buildout was 40-60 years ago. The disfunctionality of the US at large-scale projects emerged in the 80s, possibly to do with both the creation of the modern Republican agenda by Ailes (divisive populism over bipartisanship, and preference of tax cuts over maintaining infrastructure), and the acceptance of the environmental movement by the Democrats. Maybe also by the illusion that the the demise of the USSR meant the "end of history" and the focus can turn from trying to get the US to be #1 to prying to get a bigger slice of the pie domestically...
  - koheripbal 6y ago

ipunchghosts 6y ago

I 100% agree with this. A much better endeavor would have been to built a robot highway and only allow autonomous vehicles on it. Like trains but using 4 wheeled vehicles.

ALittleLight 6y ago
Why would that be better? 2.5 billion doesn't get that much highway and even less robot highway. If you're not someone living on or near the robot highway you get no benefit from it and the vast majority of people won't be living anywhere near the robot highway. Conversely, inventing self-driving cars scales really well. Invented once. Commoditized. Sold worldwide for a profit. Massive benefits to everyone worldwide. It's disappointing that Uber's research isn't paying off, but it's clearly a bet in pursuit of much higher stakes than making a highway.

ethbr0 6y ago

I'd offer Kurzweil's (I believe?) observation that the futurist predictions that come true are those that substantially improve peoples' needs. Even substantially expanded rail will never solve the problem of "I want to get from point A to point B, as quickly as possible, whenever I'm ready to leave" in a fundamentally different way. The transit to the starting station might be shorter, and the transit from the ending station will be shorter, but it's still the same experience. Autonomous cars solve that in the same way an personal automobile currently does, albeit removing the inconvenience of actually driving. The former is like-in-kind. The latter is fundamentally-different. Consequently, if I am a consumer, how much would I be willing to pay for the former vs the latter? Cell phones became ubiquitous because they were a fundamentally-different communication experience ("Call a person instead of a location"). Transit will be the same way, if it changes.

FreakyT 6y ago
> Autonomous cars solve that in the same way an personal automobile currently does, albeit removing the inconvenience of actually driving. The problem with autonomous cars as compared to rail is that autonomy doesn't solve the other fundamental problem of cars: congestion. If I waved my magic wand and replaced every car in the bay area with a self-driving one overnight, roads would still clog at rush hour.
- wheelie_boy 6y ago
  If anything, self-driving cars would make congestion a lot worse. If I had a self-driving mini-RV, I would live further from the city, and do my morning routine during my commute. Maybe take a small nap or get some work done.
  - bluedevil2k 6y ago
    Disagree - if traffic flowed more evenly, same speed for everyone, less lane changes, didn’t require the “safe distance padding” re-establishment at every light, the congestion would lesson. Probably not eliminated though.

dmead 6y ago

so uber's entire self driving program cost the same as laying down new rail for one new major route. that is definitely not the same cost.

foota 6y ago

I'm uncertain, something like 20 billion dollars (maybe on par with the amount of funding for self driving cars?). wouldn't really go all that far unfortunately for American transport prices.

babesh 6y ago

3 billion per mile for the Downtown Extension in San Francisco. https://sf.curbed.com/2018/6/18/17464616/bay-area-subway-train-rail-costs-price-bart-muni https://sf.curbed.com/2018/6/18/17464616/bay-area-subway-tra...

ip26 6y ago

From a mile high view, does it matter what the problem is? Early laptops got us the lithium battery. ICBM's got us integrated circuits. Calculators got us microprocessors. Maybe in twenty years we'll look back and say self driving cars got us human-level computer vision- to be applied to anything you please.

bluedevil2k 6y ago

Not sure where you’re located, but when are we gonna stop saying “the US needs more rail”? It’s not a solution in this country and never will be (Not outside major cities). People are too spread out, we’re not like Europe or even Japan, where the habitation area is actually quite small. People want to leave when they want and go exactly where they want. Gasoline is cheap here making cars cheap to own and maintain. It’s tough to move things while carrying them on a train, a reason so many people have trucks and SUVs. This doesn’t even consider all the cost related reasons outlined in other comments. Electric self driving cars are the future of the US.