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At least in town there were periods of time when huge quantities of people were on self-driving vehicles. We called them trains. In theory transit is the optima

At least in town there were periods of time when huge quantities of people were on self-driving vehicles. We called them trains. In theory transit is the optimal solution for the vast majority of people, not cars. So from that perspective yeah it's probably more useful to have self-driving tech deployed in mapped areas you control, where the stakes are lower and you can do it really well with existing tech.

asdfman123 4y ago
It seems like instead of full self driving they should just paint down something like a yellow line that’s easier for the cars to follow.
- alanbernstein 4y ago
  I imagine that it we put all the money into expanding city road infrastructure to include sensor networks, rather than autonomous cars, we'd get to the end goal faster and the hardware would be cheaper.
  - xnx 4y ago
    Sounds good in theory, but in the real world smart edges and dumb pipes are almost always the way to go (the Internet is a pretty good example of this).
  - onethought 4y ago
    This some how feels like: "Cover the world in leather rather than just wear shoes" kind of approach.
    - alanbernstein 4y ago
      I guess that would be a fair comparison if shoes were unbelievably complicated to build?
      - onethought 4y ago
        Not really covering your feet with leather compared to the world is probably the same ratio of complexity as covering the world in sensors and autonomous driving terrain rather than deploying it on the cars.
        alanbernstein 4y ago
        And yet we have covered the world in paved surfaces
        onethought 4y ago
        Well I guess if we already did it, it must be smart/the best way to do things
        alanbernstein 4y ago
        Ah, so you're suggesting all vehicles should be designed for heavy off-road use, and we can get rid of all the roads?
        onethought 4y ago
        No, just “we covered the world in cement” is not a good reason to keep covering it. Definitely doesn’t justify adding autonomous sensors and paint and whatever else to the whole world to achieve autonomous driving. So I was being polite leaving that conclusion for the reader. But I can see I wasn’t clear enough. Given we cycle cars much more often than we cycle roads (globally) makes sense to update the technology on the car.
- gojomo 4y ago
  There have been self-driving busses that use such painted guides on fixed routes; here's a story where Las Vegas was testing such a system using the tech of 22 years ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/26/technology/what-s-next-it-s-a-trolley-it-s-a-rail-car-no-it-s-an-optically-guided-bus.html https://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/26/technology/what-s-next-it... But, I doubt they'd be much help for passenger cars on diverse urban per-trip routes: * roads are constantly wearing & being trenched or resurfaced; the lines would often be broken or need refreshing, necessitating an effective 'lineless' mode * cars often need to improvise (including briefly into oncoming lanes) to get around temporary blockages, and need to pull away from the major maintained lanes – again requiring confident off-line operation * after car sensors/decisionmaking can handle all the other challenges & collisions/traps to avoid, merely following lanes (when needed) is not hard at all: guidelines help with an easy, essentially-solved problem but not the actual potential deployment blockers Full-unattended self-driving cars are working pretty well in SF right now - on a nighttime walk you'll see many, which are behaviorally only a little more cautious/tentative than human drivers. So, it's only the branding & empty driver's seat that distinguishes them.
- danaris 4y ago
  Are you familiar with our rural road infrastructure? There are roads out here that don't even have lines, because they go so long between maintenance cycles that if they did paint them, they'd fade fast enough that they'd still spend more time without lines than with. And how do you handle complicated intersections? Ones where there's 6 different roads all meeting in one place, with three separate pedestrian crosswalks, and traffic lights that handle directing the traffic to various different combinations of possible outflow roads?
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> when huge quantities of people were on self-driving vehicles. We called them trains Are most trains self-piloting?
- pdc56 4y ago
  If two people are in a car, 50% of them are driving. If 100 people are on a train, 1% of them are driving. My point here is that even trains with drivers can be considered close to driver less vs people driving cars.
  - onethought 4y ago
    So Self driving is door to door. Train suffers from the same problems as "last mile delivery" (i.e it skips the hard part).
    - arcticbull 4y ago
      Most successful transit systems are a short couple minutes walk to the train station, bus stop or streetcar. No further than walking from the parking lot to your destination in a lot of cases. Cars are really only 'door to door' in the suburbs when commuting between two homes with driveways. Otherwise they're no different than a decent transit system. I do find it interesting how people automatically assume all driving is door-to-door, forget about parking lots, forget about finding street parking, etc. and immediately talk about how transit can't work based on the same issue.
      - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > Cars are really only 'door to door' in the suburbs when commuting between two homes with driveways American suburbs are incompatible with trains. In cities, Uber is door to door. I get the broader point. But at this crossroad, re-designing our cities for trains is a moot point. We could have, we should have, but we didn’t. Similar to African and Southeast Asian countries leapfrogging copper for mobile and fibre, electric self-driving point-to-point (perhaps with sub regional rail and more-efficient air) looks like the clear future for America, a rich and spread-out country.
FridayoLeary 4y ago
>In theory transit is the optimal solution for the vast majority of people, not cars. Not when the train drivers go on strike. In the uk we know all about driverless trains...
kallistisoft 4y ago
You can go back in time before the invention of the train and find autonomous transportation!!! People used to own 'vehicles' that were capable of automatic obstacle avoidance and fully autonomous navigation to predefined locations. These vehicles were even capable of refueling themselves, self-repairing minor damage, and even self-assembling new units!! Occasionally the they would glitch and cause unexpected behaviors, and given the technology of the time, the waste products from the 'fuel cell' would cause problems, but they worked pretty well... Eventually they were replaced by the non-intelligent automobiles, but they are still the preferred method of ground transport in rocky/uneven terrain, and can occasionally be seen in urban environments during parades, or being used for crowd control. We called them horses ;)
- arcticbull 4y ago
  I appreciate your sense of humor but horses were far from self-driving :) In fact the etymology of the words "driver" and "driving" may surprise you. > The origin of the term driver, as recorded from the 15th century, refers to the occupation of driving working animals, especially pack horses or draft horses. The verb ' to drive ' in origin means "to force to move, to impel by physical force". It's literally the job you're implying doesn't exist, heh. Further, the next iteration of transportation after the horse was actually the electric car in the early 1830s, long before the gas car (1886). The arc of history is surprisingly bendy.
  - m348e912 4y ago
    > ... but horses were far from self-driving :) Kind of. But it doesn't get more self driving than this: https://www.foxnews.com/us/ohio-deputy-drunk-amish-guy-buggy https://www.foxnews.com/us/ohio-deputy-drunk-amish-guy-buggy Ohio deputy encounters 'drunk Amish guy' slumped over in moving buggy: 'The horse knows how to get home'

asdfman123 4y ago

It seems like instead of full self driving they should just paint down something like a yellow line that’s easier for the cars to follow.

alanbernstein 4y ago
I imagine that it we put all the money into expanding city road infrastructure to include sensor networks, rather than autonomous cars, we'd get to the end goal faster and the hardware would be cheaper.
- xnx 4y ago
  Sounds good in theory, but in the real world smart edges and dumb pipes are almost always the way to go (the Internet is a pretty good example of this).
- onethought 4y ago
  This some how feels like: "Cover the world in leather rather than just wear shoes" kind of approach.
  - alanbernstein 4y ago
    I guess that would be a fair comparison if shoes were unbelievably complicated to build?
    - onethought 4y ago
      Not really covering your feet with leather compared to the world is probably the same ratio of complexity as covering the world in sensors and autonomous driving terrain rather than deploying it on the cars.
      - alanbernstein 4y ago
        And yet we have covered the world in paved surfaces
        onethought 4y ago
        Well I guess if we already did it, it must be smart/the best way to do things
        alanbernstein 4y ago
        Ah, so you're suggesting all vehicles should be designed for heavy off-road use, and we can get rid of all the roads?
        onethought 4y ago
        No, just “we covered the world in cement” is not a good reason to keep covering it. Definitely doesn’t justify adding autonomous sensors and paint and whatever else to the whole world to achieve autonomous driving. So I was being polite leaving that conclusion for the reader. But I can see I wasn’t clear enough. Given we cycle cars much more often than we cycle roads (globally) makes sense to update the technology on the car.
gojomo 4y ago
There have been self-driving busses that use such painted guides on fixed routes; here's a story where Las Vegas was testing such a system using the tech of 22 years ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/26/technology/what-s-next-it-s-a-trolley-it-s-a-rail-car-no-it-s-an-optically-guided-bus.html https://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/26/technology/what-s-next-it... But, I doubt they'd be much help for passenger cars on diverse urban per-trip routes: * roads are constantly wearing & being trenched or resurfaced; the lines would often be broken or need refreshing, necessitating an effective 'lineless' mode * cars often need to improvise (including briefly into oncoming lanes) to get around temporary blockages, and need to pull away from the major maintained lanes – again requiring confident off-line operation * after car sensors/decisionmaking can handle all the other challenges & collisions/traps to avoid, merely following lanes (when needed) is not hard at all: guidelines help with an easy, essentially-solved problem but not the actual potential deployment blockers Full-unattended self-driving cars are working pretty well in SF right now - on a nighttime walk you'll see many, which are behaviorally only a little more cautious/tentative than human drivers. So, it's only the branding & empty driver's seat that distinguishes them.
danaris 4y ago
Are you familiar with our rural road infrastructure? There are roads out here that don't even have lines, because they go so long between maintenance cycles that if they did paint them, they'd fade fast enough that they'd still spend more time without lines than with. And how do you handle complicated intersections? Ones where there's 6 different roads all meeting in one place, with three separate pedestrian crosswalks, and traffic lights that handle directing the traffic to various different combinations of possible outflow roads?

JumpCrisscross 4y ago

> when huge quantities of people were on self-driving vehicles. We called them trains Are most trains self-piloting?

pdc56 4y ago
If two people are in a car, 50% of them are driving. If 100 people are on a train, 1% of them are driving. My point here is that even trains with drivers can be considered close to driver less vs people driving cars.
- onethought 4y ago
  So Self driving is door to door. Train suffers from the same problems as "last mile delivery" (i.e it skips the hard part).
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    Most successful transit systems are a short couple minutes walk to the train station, bus stop or streetcar. No further than walking from the parking lot to your destination in a lot of cases. Cars are really only 'door to door' in the suburbs when commuting between two homes with driveways. Otherwise they're no different than a decent transit system. I do find it interesting how people automatically assume all driving is door-to-door, forget about parking lots, forget about finding street parking, etc. and immediately talk about how transit can't work based on the same issue.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > Cars are really only 'door to door' in the suburbs when commuting between two homes with driveways American suburbs are incompatible with trains. In cities, Uber is door to door. I get the broader point. But at this crossroad, re-designing our cities for trains is a moot point. We could have, we should have, but we didn’t. Similar to African and Southeast Asian countries leapfrogging copper for mobile and fibre, electric self-driving point-to-point (perhaps with sub regional rail and more-efficient air) looks like the clear future for America, a rich and spread-out country.

FridayoLeary 4y ago

>In theory transit is the optimal solution for the vast majority of people, not cars. Not when the train drivers go on strike. In the uk we know all about driverless trains...

kallistisoft 4y ago

You can go back in time before the invention of the train and find autonomous transportation!!! People used to own 'vehicles' that were capable of automatic obstacle avoidance and fully autonomous navigation to predefined locations. These vehicles were even capable of refueling themselves, self-repairing minor damage, and even self-assembling new units!! Occasionally the they would glitch and cause unexpected behaviors, and given the technology of the time, the waste products from the 'fuel cell' would cause problems, but they worked pretty well... Eventually they were replaced by the non-intelligent automobiles, but they are still the preferred method of ground transport in rocky/uneven terrain, and can occasionally be seen in urban environments during parades, or being used for crowd control. We called them horses ;)

arcticbull 4y ago
I appreciate your sense of humor but horses were far from self-driving :) In fact the etymology of the words "driver" and "driving" may surprise you. > The origin of the term driver, as recorded from the 15th century, refers to the occupation of driving working animals, especially pack horses or draft horses. The verb ' to drive ' in origin means "to force to move, to impel by physical force". It's literally the job you're implying doesn't exist, heh. Further, the next iteration of transportation after the horse was actually the electric car in the early 1830s, long before the gas car (1886). The arc of history is surprisingly bendy.
- m348e912 4y ago
  > ... but horses were far from self-driving :) Kind of. But it doesn't get more self driving than this: https://www.foxnews.com/us/ohio-deputy-drunk-amish-guy-buggy https://www.foxnews.com/us/ohio-deputy-drunk-amish-guy-buggy Ohio deputy encounters 'drunk Amish guy' slumped over in moving buggy: 'The horse knows how to get home'