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Yes drunk driving is a terrible problem but beta testing software on the open road is not the only option available. It's nothing but irresponsible. Here's on

by prng2021 4y ago

Yes drunk driving is a terrible problem but beta testing software on the open road is not the only option available. It's nothing but irresponsible. Here's one of many: use sensors and AI in the car to detect a drunk person behind the wheel. This is HN so I'm sure readers could spend 10 seconds and think of numerous ways this could be accomplished and many otherideas about what could be done when a drunk driver is detected. I also think the NHTSA should have prevented companies like Tesla from behind allowed to put every single control behind a touchscreen. It's extremely dangerous to have to look away for 2 seconds when you're driving. Imagine if (when?) every car in the world adopted this and all drivers are having to look at a screen to turn on windshield wipers.

bb88 4y ago
You may find it interesting the NHTSA is pushing for breathalizers in cars starting in 2026. Personally I'm more in favor of smart road like technologies where a highway has a mechanical or physical properties to assist self-driving vehicles stay in line with the road. Mostly because a 100% software solution will likely not work, particularly in the midwest and great lakes states during the wintertime. It need not be expensive either. Magnetic nails embedded in the road would maybe be the cheapest way, and would be easy for both city and rural populations to add, and be detectable with icy and snowy conditions.
- andrewflnr 4y ago
  Of course they're doing something dystopian instead of something sensible. But yes, I bet even better standardized road markings would be a huge help for self driving cars. I wonder if there's something stupid simple like a paint additive that would make it easy for machines to track. Magnetic beads?
  - waste_monk 4y ago
    Then any asshole could mix up their own magnetic bead paint and cause havoc. Probably no more than someone painting their own road lines or putting up fake signage does now [1], but if you want something that's better than what we currently have it would need to not only be both machine and human readable, but also authenticated. I always thought it would be quite neat to have those portable roadside displays you see for roadworks and so on also communicate map and driving data (cryptographically signed by your local council or dept of transport). So you might get a sign that says "roadworks ahead, please slow down" for human drivers, and the radio beacon would communicate a change of speed limits inside a certain geo-bounded area that would cause self-driving vehicles to slow down. Or similar stuff for "bridge out ahead, turn around now" causing navigation to reroute. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/17/laying-a-trap-for-self-driving-cars/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/17/laying-a-trap-for-self-dri...
    - sgtnoodle 4y ago
      Just have the human readable signs be reasonably standardized, and the self driving car computer can then read them too. It's a lot easier and more future proof to side-channel map updates to cars through a cell network, and allows for some curation. Also, improved cell network coverage seems like a more worthwhile capital expenditure for a local government than a bunch of smart signs that only help 0.001% of drivers. Cynically, I'm sure some politician's spouse's cousin would be happy to win the contract to slap a BLE beacon into a box and bolt it onto a sign for $150k a unit, though... There is an ongoing effort to introduce infrastructure free direct communication for vehicles, using 5.9ghz spectrum. The spectrum was previously allocated to DSRC radio technology the automotive industry pushed for, but it's been 15 years and it hasn't gone anywhere. The FCC is now letting the cell network folk take a crack at solving the problem instead.
      - kwhitefoot 4y ago
        > Just have the human readable signs be reasonably standardized, and the self driving car computer can then read them too. This is already the case in Europe.
        andrewflnr 4y ago
        Are there self-driving car tests in Europe, and are they doing any differently? Seems like a potential way to test the hypothesis. OTOH I bet they could still have a lot more signs that would help. The Europe/America difference might be pretty marginal...
- prng2021 4y ago
  Nice, I hadn't heard about that. Apparently there's a company working on using light to detect blood alcohol level so you can use a touch sensor. https://www.npr.org/2022/09/20/1124171320/autos-drunk-driving-blood-alcohol-system-ntsb https://www.npr.org/2022/09/20/1124171320/autos-drunk-drivin...
  - twobitshifter 4y ago
    They also need to enforce the speed. In that story the drunk driver was driving 90 mph.
- bdamm 4y ago
  Quality steel nails are expensive, roads are very plentiful, and sensors have noise. Also, staying in a lane is not the problem. Teslas and pretty much all other quality brands sold today do it already. The problem is complex behavior like merging and routing around obstacles (like a person changing their tire.) Cheaper and easier would be surveying and improving road markings. As for snow, well, my Tesla maintains lane position in snow fairly well, and gets better all the time. No magic nails required.
  - saiya-jin 4y ago
    What a surreal read... where are all the cases of Tesla hitting stuff it clearly shouldn't, that no real sane driver would ever do? Also, 'maintaining position fairly well' is too low bar in situation where mistakes can and do cost lives. I am all up for people willingly do beta testing for Tesla they even have to pay for, but it should be clearly marked and explained as so in contracts. The thing is, most folks are not aware of this at all. As things are now, Tesla's and Musk's lies (this and auto drive) cast a pretty bad picture on morals of that company.
    - krisoft 4y ago
      Bb8 proposes that we should install magnetic nails in our roads. Bdamm counters that magnetic nails would help with lane keeping, but that is clearly not the part self driving cars have the most trouble with. As you astutely observe “ hitting stuff it clearly shouldn't” is the problem. Which magnetic nails in the road would not help even a bit. > 'maintaining position fairly well' is too low bar in situation where mistakes can and do cost lives Yes! And again. Maintaining position is the only thing magnetic nails in the road would help with. Bdamm was not arguing that the car keep lane position therefore it is good. Bdamm was arguing that magnetic nails would not help with the real problems. > What a surreal read That is exactly my opinion about your comment. Can you follow two sentences stringed together?
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      > where are all the cases of Tesla hitting stuff it clearly shouldn't, that no real sane driver would ever do? Real sane drivers hit stuff all the time. Miscalculated takeovers ending up in frontal collisions (these can be really REALLY fucking nasty, two 3-ton SUVs @ 100km/h have a lot of potential energy), trucks crashing into traffic jam rear ends and squashing together a dozen cars in front of them, people mistaking stairs to a train station as a car parking ramp (this is a common occurrence here in Munich [1])... the simple thing is, as long as an instance of an object is on a road, one of the instances will eventually get hit by a stupid mistake of someone. [1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/muenchen-marienhof-u-bahn-unfall-suv-1.4617371 https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/muenchen-marienhof-u-ba...
- fortylove 4y ago
  I've wondered about the possibility of such a nail mechanism being tampered with. Sounds a bit dangerous to blindly trust such a mechanism
- xani_ 4y ago
  > You may find it interesting the NHTSA is pushing for breathalizers in cars starting in 2026. Yeah, another idiocy. They aren't reliable and need constant calibration, good luck driving a car full of drunks as designated driver...
- sgtnoodle 4y ago
  Lane following isn't the hard part of self driving cars. I wouldn't say it's trivial, but it's a minor detail compared to everything else that also needs to work reliably 99.9999% of the time. Such infrastructure might help make cheaper lane-keep assist as standard options I guess, but at the speeds where it matters for safety, you need significant look-ahead on the trajectory rather than just lateral position error. I suppose you could go crazy and embed some sort of NFC into the road, so that it can communicate the lane geometry. It could probably even be done cleverly, perhaps by embedding multiple nails and encoding curvature in their spacing, or maybe in the orientation of the magnetic flux itself. All that to avoid some front facing cameras and image processing, though, that can also be used to detect other cars and pedestrians.
  - fastball 4y ago
    Do you need everything to work reliably 99.9999% of the time? Is that the reliability rating of human drivers?
    - Retric 4y ago
      Depnds on how you count. If you consider every ~5 seconds you could have an accident, and a minor or worse accident happens once every 2,000 to 20,000 hours of driving that’s 99.99993% to 99.999993% reliability. On the other hand if you start talking per trio then we aren’t even close to that.
      - fastball 4y ago
        Why in the world would you count in 5 second intervals? If the measure is accidents per hour you don't then divide it by 5s. Reliability with 1 accident per 2k hours would be 99.95%. Reliability for 1 accident per 20k hours is 99.995%.
        Retric 4y ago
        Five seconds seems roughly how long it would take for really bad choices to cause an accident. In heavy traffic you can cause an accident by steering into a car in under a second. I am sure someone has had two independent accidents in under a minute. An hour on the other hand is completely arbitrary, why not a day or a minute?
- Animats 4y ago
  Magnetic nails embedded in the road Volvo wanted to do that, in Sweden. They pointed out that it would also be useful for snowplow guidance. That's often done by putting up poles at the side of the road.
  - kwhitefoot 4y ago
    Volvo are just trying to get someone else to provide the infrastructure for self driving. I live in Norway, the poles at the side of the road are not just for the snowploughs, they are very helpful for human beings too. Magnetic nails embedded in the road are not at all useful to humans and are just more stuff to maintain, especially in an environment where simply maintaining centre and edge markings is a difficult and time consuming job.
    - BurningFrog 4y ago
      Roads should provide the infrastructure for driving.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  It's a train. You're inventing trains but much worse and not available to the poor. Just build a train.
  - jlund-molfese 4y ago
    If everyone lives right by the train station that’s fine. What about people in wheelchairs who live in the countryside and prefer to be dropped off at their doorstep? Or someone who can’t drive themself but could use an autonomous car or taxi to go to the hospital in an emergency situation (without waiting a while for the next open train)?
    - dontlaugh 4y ago
      Most people already live near a train, tram or bus station. Or somewhere it would be worth building one anyway. Taxis already exist, just like trains they work fine. Personal cars will likely always exist, but only a small minority absolutely needs one. The bulk of human transportation doesn’t need cars.
      - jlund-molfese 4y ago
        Trains are great. They’re safer, more efficient, and often more convenient than cars. But it’s not either-or. My comment was emphasizing that smart road technologies would be useful to many people also. There are many places where it’s not possible or desirable to build train infrastructure—these are areas that can be served by autonomous vehicles.
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      > What about people in wheelchairs who live in the countryside and prefer to be dropped off at their doorstep? The important thing is to build a system that works for wide masses - even replacing half of individual car transit by rail and bus works wonders for space consumption [1]. The more complex cases - rural people, mostly - can be dealt with later on, e.g. by providing something like a "phone bus" service. Here in Germany, we're experimenting with on-demand buses [3]: they serve the existing station network, but unlike the usual village buses that run every two hours or worse, you can order them like a taxi and use your existing public transport ticket. Saying "no" by default because a system is not entirely perfect at the beginning is a destructive discussion tactic that only serves those in power. > Or someone who can’t drive themself but could use an autonomous car or taxi to go to the hospital in an emergency situation (without waiting a while for the next open train)? Someone in an emergency situation should just be able to call an ambulance. That's what they exist for. Ideally, someone in an emergency situation should also not have to fear going bankrupt (to the tune that this scenario has become a meme in itself [2]). [1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Comparative-efficiency-of-buses-and-cars-in-road-space-use_fig4_336280478 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Comparative-efficiency-o... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/ThatsInsane/comments/utbn5z/a_man_kept_running_away_from_the_ambulance/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ThatsInsane/comments/utbn5z/a_man_k... [3] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/landkreismuenchen/landkreis-muenchen-oepnv-rufbus-sammeltaxi-mvv-1.5675405 https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/landkreismuenchen/landk...
- ericmay 4y ago
  People drink and drive in America because they have no choice. You can’t walk him from a bar, and even if it’s available nobody is paying $40 for an Uber when they can drive their car. If we want to lower drunk driving incidence rates we need people walking to the bar or taking public transit. It requires us to fix our outdated and asinine transit culture. All of the technical solutions in the world can’t solve this problem because they’re solving for the wrong thing (safer cars) when we should be solving for reduction in driving.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    >People drink and drive in America because they have no choice. You can’t walk him from a bar, and even if it’s available nobody is paying $40 for an Uber when they can drive their car. List of choices: 1. Not drink alcohol 2. Drink less alcohol, and switch to water at least 1 hour before driving. 3. Pay for a driver 4. Live where you can walk to an establishment that serves alcohol 5. Rent a hotel room nearby And so on and so forth. Drunk driving is certainly a choice, one made because the perceived or true cost of drunk driving is less than the cost of not driving drunk.
    - piaste 4y ago
      6. Sleep in your car I think it's important to add this one because it's free and doesn't even require previous planning, so it's very hard to argue that you couldn't do it instead of driving drunk. (Although keeping a blanket in your trunk makes it a much better experience.)
      - tacticalturtle 4y ago
        You definitely will run into legal issues depending on the state. Some states like California you can only get a DUI if there’s evidence you moved your car, but in other states it’s a lot less clear - and you can be charged with any appearance of intent to drive, like sleeping in the driver’s seat. Not to mention the possibility of getting a trespassing charge in a private lot overnight.
      - 4y ago
- danaris 4y ago
  Any solution to self-driving cars (that purports to be a universal solution) that requires specific modifications to the roads is doomed to failure. Even leaving aside all the gravel and dirt roads, and the many places where, at any given time, there's construction moving a lane 5 to 15 feet to one side temporarily, do you know how many miles of road there are in the US alone? I sure don't, but I know it's a staggering amount, a hell of a lot of it is rural (and some seasonal), and getting all of it retrofitted with even the most simple and low-tech self-driving guidance assist tech like your magnetic nails would cost vast amounts of money and either take a decade or three or cost about ten times as much.
- wanderingmoose 4y ago
  Caltrans had pilot program in the mid-1990's running self driving cars that used magnets embedded in the road. They would run "caravans" of five-ish vehicles driving almost bumper to bumper. This was tested on the car pool lanes on sections of a highway between los angeles and san diego. This was a partnership between caltrans, the college of engineering at uc berkeley amongst others. Unfortunately I can find any readily available links, but all of the data should be public. I'm only aware of this because I worked w/ some of the technical groups on the project (very tangentially involved). I know the magnets were always considered a problem (cost/effort), but there weren't other options at the time, as computer vision was too computationally expensive at the time.
m463 4y ago
Have you driven a tesla? I think they help with the driving. That said, touchscreen controls (with tiny targets) instead of dedicated controls and the new square steering wheel with touch controls instead of stalks... gah!
wheybags 4y ago
No need for fancy sensors and ai - I used an electric scooter rental in Germany recently, and it made me do a reaction speed test on my phone before starting. Super easy.
- JamesBarney 4y ago
  Are they worried you'll kill someone with your electric scooter?
  - exclusiv 4y ago
    It happens as it causes swerves and crashes. Deer do this too. With a deer your best course of action is to try and stop but mow it over if necessary. With a person swerving on a bike or moped, you may not be able to stop in time and most likely swerve.
  - willsmith72 4y ago
    They're worried you'll kill yourself
    - JamesBarney 4y ago
      If people can get on an escorted i wonder if they wall or uber. If they walk i could totally see the total number of fatalities being hire than escooting. Similar to how drunken walking has a higher fatality raid than drunken driving/biking.
  - Broken_Hippo 4y ago
    Yes, especially yourself if you aren't wearing a helmet. More commonly, though, the electric scooters cause injuries and accidents. Starting next year, Norway is requiring insurance for them and rental prices will surely increase in response.
  - twobitshifter 4y ago
    It is inexplicable how e scooters are treated like death machines in comparison to 4000 pound SUVs which get no restrictions. Scooters have regulated speed, zones that are banned from use, reaction tests, sidewalk restrictions and on and on. You would think there were thousands of e scooter deaths per year.
JamesBarney 4y ago
If it gets us to autonomy 6 months earlier that could easily save 50x as many lives as deaths it's caused.

bb88 4y ago

You may find it interesting the NHTSA is pushing for breathalizers in cars starting in 2026. Personally I'm more in favor of smart road like technologies where a highway has a mechanical or physical properties to assist self-driving vehicles stay in line with the road. Mostly because a 100% software solution will likely not work, particularly in the midwest and great lakes states during the wintertime. It need not be expensive either. Magnetic nails embedded in the road would maybe be the cheapest way, and would be easy for both city and rural populations to add, and be detectable with icy and snowy conditions.

andrewflnr 4y ago
Of course they're doing something dystopian instead of something sensible. But yes, I bet even better standardized road markings would be a huge help for self driving cars. I wonder if there's something stupid simple like a paint additive that would make it easy for machines to track. Magnetic beads?
- waste_monk 4y ago
  Then any asshole could mix up their own magnetic bead paint and cause havoc. Probably no more than someone painting their own road lines or putting up fake signage does now [1], but if you want something that's better than what we currently have it would need to not only be both machine and human readable, but also authenticated. I always thought it would be quite neat to have those portable roadside displays you see for roadworks and so on also communicate map and driving data (cryptographically signed by your local council or dept of transport). So you might get a sign that says "roadworks ahead, please slow down" for human drivers, and the radio beacon would communicate a change of speed limits inside a certain geo-bounded area that would cause self-driving vehicles to slow down. Or similar stuff for "bridge out ahead, turn around now" causing navigation to reroute. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/17/laying-a-trap-for-self-driving-cars/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/17/laying-a-trap-for-self-dri...
  - sgtnoodle 4y ago
    Just have the human readable signs be reasonably standardized, and the self driving car computer can then read them too. It's a lot easier and more future proof to side-channel map updates to cars through a cell network, and allows for some curation. Also, improved cell network coverage seems like a more worthwhile capital expenditure for a local government than a bunch of smart signs that only help 0.001% of drivers. Cynically, I'm sure some politician's spouse's cousin would be happy to win the contract to slap a BLE beacon into a box and bolt it onto a sign for $150k a unit, though... There is an ongoing effort to introduce infrastructure free direct communication for vehicles, using 5.9ghz spectrum. The spectrum was previously allocated to DSRC radio technology the automotive industry pushed for, but it's been 15 years and it hasn't gone anywhere. The FCC is now letting the cell network folk take a crack at solving the problem instead.
    - kwhitefoot 4y ago
      > Just have the human readable signs be reasonably standardized, and the self driving car computer can then read them too. This is already the case in Europe.
      - andrewflnr 4y ago
        Are there self-driving car tests in Europe, and are they doing any differently? Seems like a potential way to test the hypothesis. OTOH I bet they could still have a lot more signs that would help. The Europe/America difference might be pretty marginal...
prng2021 4y ago
Nice, I hadn't heard about that. Apparently there's a company working on using light to detect blood alcohol level so you can use a touch sensor. https://www.npr.org/2022/09/20/1124171320/autos-drunk-driving-blood-alcohol-system-ntsb https://www.npr.org/2022/09/20/1124171320/autos-drunk-drivin...
- twobitshifter 4y ago
  They also need to enforce the speed. In that story the drunk driver was driving 90 mph.
bdamm 4y ago
Quality steel nails are expensive, roads are very plentiful, and sensors have noise. Also, staying in a lane is not the problem. Teslas and pretty much all other quality brands sold today do it already. The problem is complex behavior like merging and routing around obstacles (like a person changing their tire.) Cheaper and easier would be surveying and improving road markings. As for snow, well, my Tesla maintains lane position in snow fairly well, and gets better all the time. No magic nails required.
- saiya-jin 4y ago
  What a surreal read... where are all the cases of Tesla hitting stuff it clearly shouldn't, that no real sane driver would ever do? Also, 'maintaining position fairly well' is too low bar in situation where mistakes can and do cost lives. I am all up for people willingly do beta testing for Tesla they even have to pay for, but it should be clearly marked and explained as so in contracts. The thing is, most folks are not aware of this at all. As things are now, Tesla's and Musk's lies (this and auto drive) cast a pretty bad picture on morals of that company.
  - krisoft 4y ago
    Bb8 proposes that we should install magnetic nails in our roads. Bdamm counters that magnetic nails would help with lane keeping, but that is clearly not the part self driving cars have the most trouble with. As you astutely observe “ hitting stuff it clearly shouldn't” is the problem. Which magnetic nails in the road would not help even a bit. > 'maintaining position fairly well' is too low bar in situation where mistakes can and do cost lives Yes! And again. Maintaining position is the only thing magnetic nails in the road would help with. Bdamm was not arguing that the car keep lane position therefore it is good. Bdamm was arguing that magnetic nails would not help with the real problems. > What a surreal read That is exactly my opinion about your comment. Can you follow two sentences stringed together?
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > where are all the cases of Tesla hitting stuff it clearly shouldn't, that no real sane driver would ever do? Real sane drivers hit stuff all the time. Miscalculated takeovers ending up in frontal collisions (these can be really REALLY fucking nasty, two 3-ton SUVs @ 100km/h have a lot of potential energy), trucks crashing into traffic jam rear ends and squashing together a dozen cars in front of them, people mistaking stairs to a train station as a car parking ramp (this is a common occurrence here in Munich [1])... the simple thing is, as long as an instance of an object is on a road, one of the instances will eventually get hit by a stupid mistake of someone. [1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/muenchen-marienhof-u-bahn-unfall-suv-1.4617371 https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/muenchen-marienhof-u-ba...
fortylove 4y ago
I've wondered about the possibility of such a nail mechanism being tampered with. Sounds a bit dangerous to blindly trust such a mechanism
xani_ 4y ago
> You may find it interesting the NHTSA is pushing for breathalizers in cars starting in 2026. Yeah, another idiocy. They aren't reliable and need constant calibration, good luck driving a car full of drunks as designated driver...
sgtnoodle 4y ago
Lane following isn't the hard part of self driving cars. I wouldn't say it's trivial, but it's a minor detail compared to everything else that also needs to work reliably 99.9999% of the time. Such infrastructure might help make cheaper lane-keep assist as standard options I guess, but at the speeds where it matters for safety, you need significant look-ahead on the trajectory rather than just lateral position error. I suppose you could go crazy and embed some sort of NFC into the road, so that it can communicate the lane geometry. It could probably even be done cleverly, perhaps by embedding multiple nails and encoding curvature in their spacing, or maybe in the orientation of the magnetic flux itself. All that to avoid some front facing cameras and image processing, though, that can also be used to detect other cars and pedestrians.
- fastball 4y ago
  Do you need everything to work reliably 99.9999% of the time? Is that the reliability rating of human drivers?
  - Retric 4y ago
    Depnds on how you count. If you consider every ~5 seconds you could have an accident, and a minor or worse accident happens once every 2,000 to 20,000 hours of driving that’s 99.99993% to 99.999993% reliability. On the other hand if you start talking per trio then we aren’t even close to that.
    - fastball 4y ago
      Why in the world would you count in 5 second intervals? If the measure is accidents per hour you don't then divide it by 5s. Reliability with 1 accident per 2k hours would be 99.95%. Reliability for 1 accident per 20k hours is 99.995%.
      - Retric 4y ago
        Five seconds seems roughly how long it would take for really bad choices to cause an accident. In heavy traffic you can cause an accident by steering into a car in under a second. I am sure someone has had two independent accidents in under a minute. An hour on the other hand is completely arbitrary, why not a day or a minute?
Animats 4y ago
Magnetic nails embedded in the road Volvo wanted to do that, in Sweden. They pointed out that it would also be useful for snowplow guidance. That's often done by putting up poles at the side of the road.
- kwhitefoot 4y ago
  Volvo are just trying to get someone else to provide the infrastructure for self driving. I live in Norway, the poles at the side of the road are not just for the snowploughs, they are very helpful for human beings too. Magnetic nails embedded in the road are not at all useful to humans and are just more stuff to maintain, especially in an environment where simply maintaining centre and edge markings is a difficult and time consuming job.
  - BurningFrog 4y ago
    Roads should provide the infrastructure for driving.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
It's a train. You're inventing trains but much worse and not available to the poor. Just build a train.
- jlund-molfese 4y ago
  If everyone lives right by the train station that’s fine. What about people in wheelchairs who live in the countryside and prefer to be dropped off at their doorstep? Or someone who can’t drive themself but could use an autonomous car or taxi to go to the hospital in an emergency situation (without waiting a while for the next open train)?
  - dontlaugh 4y ago
    Most people already live near a train, tram or bus station. Or somewhere it would be worth building one anyway. Taxis already exist, just like trains they work fine. Personal cars will likely always exist, but only a small minority absolutely needs one. The bulk of human transportation doesn’t need cars.
    - jlund-molfese 4y ago
      Trains are great. They’re safer, more efficient, and often more convenient than cars. But it’s not either-or. My comment was emphasizing that smart road technologies would be useful to many people also. There are many places where it’s not possible or desirable to build train infrastructure—these are areas that can be served by autonomous vehicles.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > What about people in wheelchairs who live in the countryside and prefer to be dropped off at their doorstep? The important thing is to build a system that works for wide masses - even replacing half of individual car transit by rail and bus works wonders for space consumption [1]. The more complex cases - rural people, mostly - can be dealt with later on, e.g. by providing something like a "phone bus" service. Here in Germany, we're experimenting with on-demand buses [3]: they serve the existing station network, but unlike the usual village buses that run every two hours or worse, you can order them like a taxi and use your existing public transport ticket. Saying "no" by default because a system is not entirely perfect at the beginning is a destructive discussion tactic that only serves those in power. > Or someone who can’t drive themself but could use an autonomous car or taxi to go to the hospital in an emergency situation (without waiting a while for the next open train)? Someone in an emergency situation should just be able to call an ambulance. That's what they exist for. Ideally, someone in an emergency situation should also not have to fear going bankrupt (to the tune that this scenario has become a meme in itself [2]). [1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Comparative-efficiency-of-buses-and-cars-in-road-space-use_fig4_336280478 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Comparative-efficiency-o... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/ThatsInsane/comments/utbn5z/a_man_kept_running_away_from_the_ambulance/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ThatsInsane/comments/utbn5z/a_man_k... [3] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/landkreismuenchen/landkreis-muenchen-oepnv-rufbus-sammeltaxi-mvv-1.5675405 https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/landkreismuenchen/landk...
ericmay 4y ago
People drink and drive in America because they have no choice. You can’t walk him from a bar, and even if it’s available nobody is paying $40 for an Uber when they can drive their car. If we want to lower drunk driving incidence rates we need people walking to the bar or taking public transit. It requires us to fix our outdated and asinine transit culture. All of the technical solutions in the world can’t solve this problem because they’re solving for the wrong thing (safer cars) when we should be solving for reduction in driving.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  >People drink and drive in America because they have no choice. You can’t walk him from a bar, and even if it’s available nobody is paying $40 for an Uber when they can drive their car. List of choices: 1. Not drink alcohol 2. Drink less alcohol, and switch to water at least 1 hour before driving. 3. Pay for a driver 4. Live where you can walk to an establishment that serves alcohol 5. Rent a hotel room nearby And so on and so forth. Drunk driving is certainly a choice, one made because the perceived or true cost of drunk driving is less than the cost of not driving drunk.
  - piaste 4y ago
    6. Sleep in your car I think it's important to add this one because it's free and doesn't even require previous planning, so it's very hard to argue that you couldn't do it instead of driving drunk. (Although keeping a blanket in your trunk makes it a much better experience.)
    - tacticalturtle 4y ago
      You definitely will run into legal issues depending on the state. Some states like California you can only get a DUI if there’s evidence you moved your car, but in other states it’s a lot less clear - and you can be charged with any appearance of intent to drive, like sleeping in the driver’s seat. Not to mention the possibility of getting a trespassing charge in a private lot overnight.
    - 4y ago
danaris 4y ago
Any solution to self-driving cars (that purports to be a universal solution) that requires specific modifications to the roads is doomed to failure. Even leaving aside all the gravel and dirt roads, and the many places where, at any given time, there's construction moving a lane 5 to 15 feet to one side temporarily, do you know how many miles of road there are in the US alone? I sure don't, but I know it's a staggering amount, a hell of a lot of it is rural (and some seasonal), and getting all of it retrofitted with even the most simple and low-tech self-driving guidance assist tech like your magnetic nails would cost vast amounts of money and either take a decade or three or cost about ten times as much.
wanderingmoose 4y ago
Caltrans had pilot program in the mid-1990's running self driving cars that used magnets embedded in the road. They would run "caravans" of five-ish vehicles driving almost bumper to bumper. This was tested on the car pool lanes on sections of a highway between los angeles and san diego. This was a partnership between caltrans, the college of engineering at uc berkeley amongst others. Unfortunately I can find any readily available links, but all of the data should be public. I'm only aware of this because I worked w/ some of the technical groups on the project (very tangentially involved). I know the magnets were always considered a problem (cost/effort), but there weren't other options at the time, as computer vision was too computationally expensive at the time.

m463 4y ago

Have you driven a tesla? I think they help with the driving. That said, touchscreen controls (with tiny targets) instead of dedicated controls and the new square steering wheel with touch controls instead of stalks... gah!

wheybags 4y ago

No need for fancy sensors and ai - I used an electric scooter rental in Germany recently, and it made me do a reaction speed test on my phone before starting. Super easy.

JamesBarney 4y ago
Are they worried you'll kill someone with your electric scooter?
- exclusiv 4y ago
  It happens as it causes swerves and crashes. Deer do this too. With a deer your best course of action is to try and stop but mow it over if necessary. With a person swerving on a bike or moped, you may not be able to stop in time and most likely swerve.
- willsmith72 4y ago
  They're worried you'll kill yourself
  - JamesBarney 4y ago
    If people can get on an escorted i wonder if they wall or uber. If they walk i could totally see the total number of fatalities being hire than escooting. Similar to how drunken walking has a higher fatality raid than drunken driving/biking.
- Broken_Hippo 4y ago
  Yes, especially yourself if you aren't wearing a helmet. More commonly, though, the electric scooters cause injuries and accidents. Starting next year, Norway is requiring insurance for them and rental prices will surely increase in response.
- twobitshifter 4y ago
  It is inexplicable how e scooters are treated like death machines in comparison to 4000 pound SUVs which get no restrictions. Scooters have regulated speed, zones that are banned from use, reaction tests, sidewalk restrictions and on and on. You would think there were thousands of e scooter deaths per year.

JamesBarney 4y ago

If it gets us to autonomy 6 months earlier that could easily save 50x as many lives as deaths it's caused.