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I think this is just complacency and a bias towards how things are; imagine a world in which biking is safe, pedestrians are safe, and huge amounts of the city
by jseliger 3y ago
I think this is just complacency and a bias towards how things are; imagine a world in which biking is safe, pedestrians are safe, and huge amounts of the city don't have to be devoted to parking. That's what 24/7 driverless cars can enable.
- malermeister 3y agoIn this world, we'll still have giant hunks of steel zooming around our cities, creating noise, taking up space and wasting energy to move themselves around (the payload to weight ratio of cars is abysmal). We need to get rid of cars altogether, with exceptions for emergency services etc.
- spaceman_2020 3y agoWhat do you suggest people do when the weather isn’t quite as nice? Where I live, it gets so brutally hot and humid in the summer that people literally collapse and die if they do anything much outdoors.
- ZanyProgrammer 3y agoSan Francisco is not like that though. that's the whole point of the article. They could also take transit.
- minwcnt5 3y agoSF despite being dense and having high transit ridership for a US city is still fairly car oriented. If the endpoints of your trip are not near Muni/BART station it's going to take twice as long on transit. And the hills can make the walking part difficult for people who are elderly, disabled, or need to transport items.
- gWPVhyxPHqvk 3y agoThat sounds like a place not suitable for human life.
- spaceman_2020 3y agoWell, hundreds of millions of people already live here.
- sundaeofshock 3y agoNot for much longer. In the 20 - 30 years, those areas will become uninhabitable.
- malermeister 3y agoYou're inverting cause and effect. The reason it gets so hot in cities is because it's a concrete wasteland that traps heat because of, guess what, cars. Here's an experiment to show said effect - same city, same day, very different street layouts: https://doemee.leiden.nl/uploads/55aa69e8-fb15-4ccc-8335-9b697be821a8/text_image/image/e5ae7246-5415-4103-b5f6-c3f307f38716/734a5717-5be8-42f3-91c6-6067741cdff4.jpeg https://doemee.leiden.nl/uploads/55aa69e8-fb15-4ccc-8335-9b6...
- Iwan-Zotow 3y agoThere is 36C outside with ca 50% humidity Do you suggest biking?
- mlyle 3y agoTransitioning to bike-centric urban transit takes decades. The best cities in the world have roughly equal bike and car traffic (and a big chunk of transit), but it's taken decades to get there. Cars moving over the next 15 years to be much safer for pedestrians/cyclists could be a big shortcut on this path.
- jkelleyrtp 3y agoSeemingly Paris has done a great job over the past 2-3 years.
- mlyle 3y agoParis has done great in climbing up to a bit more than 15% of daily trips by bike. My point is: even the bicycle capitals of the world (Amsterdam, etc) have equal car and bike trips per day, and it's taken a long time to get there.
- galeso 3y agoIMHO, San Francisco's Telegraph Hill neighborhood with it's 31.5% grade will take longer than Paris to become bike friendly.
- standardUser 3y agoI'm fiercely anti-car, but I also live in reality. If you find a few tens of trillions of dollars to rebuild every American city to be car free, let us know. I'll buy some books to occupy me during the 2-3 decades on non-stop construction.
- bdw5204 3y agoThese self-driving taxis are basically just buses you can call to pick you up on demand. In areas where there's sufficient density, the most cost efficient option would probably be a self driving on demand bus. In principle, I think they can be part of the solution. The main difficulty is making sure the self driving transit vehicles are safe enough that people feel comfortable taking them instead of individual cars. Even though you are statistically speaking less likely to get shot on Philly public transit than you are to die in a car crash on a Philly highway, many people still choose to drive because there's a shooting on transit every few months or so and other less serious disorder on a more regular basis. I assume the same is also true in other cities like San Francisco or New York. I'm strongly in favor of walkable cities and public transit but most people are going to choose cars and suburban sprawl if it means not having to deal with rampant crime. So anybody who wants to get rid of cars and car dependent suburbs needs to be in favor of both locking up the criminals (in a manner that respects their rights to due process of course) and addressing the root causes of crime (i.e. poverty, bad schools, drugs, etc.) so we don't end up with another generation of hardened criminals.
- spaceman_2020 3y agoUnless you take all human driven cars off the road, you’re not going to get nearly the efficiency and safety you describe. I, for one, don’t want to live in a world where my ability to go anywhere is decided by Google and Uber. Big Tech has way, way too much power already. Please don’t give them any more of it.
- fairity 3y ago> I, for one, don’t want to live in a world where my ability to go anywhere is decided by Google and Uber. Seems like a red herring. I think it’s safe to assume that you will be able to own your own SDC, and the faster Google gets this tech scaled, the sooner you can affordably purchase one.
- ChatGTP 3y agoWould I be purchasing it from Google ? Android Car (tm)?
- sottol 3y agoSelling self-driving cars at cost is not the profit-maximizing strategy here. With Google (and big tech) squeezing more and more for profits, some here even proclaiming it the new IBM, I don't see this ending with consumers winning.
- 3y ago
- skepticATX 3y agoWhy will self driving cars enable this though? It seems to me that an equally plausible outcome is that we move even further towards cities built solely around the car.
- esrauch 3y agoDriverless cars won't ever road rage / deliberately drive close to bikers to freak them out at least.
- sdenton4 3y agoI have never owned a car. As a result, I look at each trip and think about the best way to accomplish it. Usually the optimum in terms of cost is by bicycle, or by bringing my bike with me on a transit connection. If I'm short on time, going to the airport, or my eyes are dilated from going to the optometrist or something, I'll use Lyft or Uber. This is like a once a month or less occurrence, (as you might guess since dilated eyes are one of my main reasons for using a car... I don't go to the optometrist that often.) So I'm a world where few people own care, you might expect something like this. The car costs are up front per trip, not sunk as they are when you own the car, so you should see people thinking more rationally about their trip planning.
- whazor 3y agoIt would be easier to make a street car free. As driverless cabs dont need parking and can use daily updated maps. There would be very little resistance if a street gets converted to a small park. People would have to walk 5 min further to pick up a cab.
- fxtentacle 3y agoDriverless cars can come pick you up, which means you don't care if they park further away from your house, because you don't have to walk that distance. Also, every parked car is one that isn't being used. So if there is lots of parked cars, that means you would need a lot fewer driverless cabs to replace them.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lisasays 3y agoThat's what 24/7 driverless cars can enable If the prospect of this happening was somehow grounded in reality, that is.