4 ms·
The two most obvious points about this: 1. The space taken up by cars, especially when they're moving at appreciable speeds, is immense. Even a theoretical zer
by QuarterReptile 4y ago
The two most obvious points about this:
1. The space taken up by cars, especially when they're moving at appreciable speeds, is immense. Even a theoretical zero-latency network between all cars to minimize following distance can't get below the threshold of the area the car takes up (and in reality you also can't have perfect utilization because vehicles have to slow for turns with finite radii.) This ceiling on concentration of people is too low to be tenable, and it creates the 'bad party' experience where people want new people to stay away from their places, rather than welcoming the increased market size and collaboration opportunities.
2. In a theoretical world of perfect autonomous vehicles, collisions can be reliably prevented. This creates a conflict which goes one of two ways. Either
a. The cars are programmed to do some arbitrary, low amount of people killing to keep the people scared of stepping in front of cars; or
b. The people will be physically trapped off of streets, as if every street in town were a limited access highway, because otherwise people can (and will) walk into streets with impunity everywhere, grinding all automobile traffic to a halt. This is a continuance of the perversion of public space in the US, where high value conduits for commerce (streets) are given over to cars driving at ever higher speeds.
- vikramkr 4y agoIn what universe is cars being programmed to kill one of two likely outcomes? The much much much more likely anti-pedestrian dystopia is to extend our current system a bit. Keep the walk signs and red lights. Juice up red light cameras with facial recognition to start automatically writing jaywalking tickets. Take all the cops you've got writing tickets and get them to "patrol" for jaywalking - replacing one revenue source with another
- radus 4y agoThat level of jaywalking enforcement sounds dystopian, no thank you.
- QuarterReptile 4y ago>In what universe is cars being programmed to kill one of two likely outcomes? In the world, already here [0], where driving within safe parameters is considered prohibitive for convenience or fairness reasons. [0]https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59939536 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59939536
- sokoloff 4y agoThe ceiling on density imposed by cars needs to be compared to the ceiling on density imposed by people wanting peace and quiet, solitude or space for kids to play or have a BBQ in their own garden space, space for hobbies/sports, and other constraints on density. If you took away the constraints imposed by cars, I'm not sure that people would be happier cramming together into dramatically denser communities.