8 ms·

Once enough of a city's inhabitants become adversarial towards robotaxis, the technology is done for. Their only means of long-term success is if the people co

Once enough of a city's inhabitants become adversarial towards robotaxis, the technology is done for. Their only means of long-term success is if the people cooperatively tolerate their existence on the roads. If you need a security guard in every vehicle to defend it, you have a driver.

pierat 3y ago
[flagged]
- Zigurd 3y ago
  The US is too lo-density for human driven buses to be better for the environment. AVs will enable a transit fleet of right-sized vehicles that respond to demand and can surge without a big labor force working split shifts.
  - pierat 3y ago
    HAH that is one of the most ridiculous excuses... and is also directly refuted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REni8Oi1QJQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REni8Oi1QJQ ^^ "Not Just Bikes"
    - Zigurd 3y ago
      I have ridden commuter rail, aubways, and busses in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Amsterdam, London, Vienna and other places. While you have a point that "lo-density" is an oversimplification, only New York has the kind of density and frequency of service that make public transit really usable. Boston commuter rail sucks pretty bad, with a too-sparse schedule. BART from SFO to the city is OK but around town there are too few lines and stops. This all could be fixed, but the fact is they suck compared to cities like Amsterdam where cycling has the infrastructure and the critical mass to be safe (unlike London, for example).
  - kiba 3y ago
    There are plenty of area that could support mass transit, especially in cities. Even suburbia can be made more walkable. For example, walking to my local gas station isn't really that practical due to a lack of continuous sidewalks. It isn't that far but the path to the gas station can get pretty muddy at time. I once tried to get food at a fast food joint by walking, the lack of sidewalks is even more acute. Crossing several lanes of road felt pretty unsafe even when the traffic light is red.
  - arrosenberg 3y ago
    Or it'll encourage people to live in a more dense area, if society no longer subsides the driving lifestyle.
  - throwyawayyyy 3y ago
    That's one ideal, sure. I don't see it though -- who's going to keep all these individual driving pods clean? How is access going to be gated to them? SF is a dense city, only New York has higher population density. Its BART and muni and bus service isn't bad, either -- and partly because it's such a pain to drive downtown, it gets used, and being used keeps it safe.
  - delecti 3y ago
    This is a story about San Francisco. SF has plenty of density for human driven buses to be better for the environment. AVs are not currently competing with human drivers in the use-case you say they'd be best at, they're clogging already dense cities with even more cars.
- skepticATX 3y ago
  Exactly. I don’t mind AVs, but we don’t need them clogging up the core of our cities. Cars have their place. But let’s build real transit in our cities. I also worry about a future in which we can’t own cars, but public transit has been mostly done away with in favor of privately owned AV companies. In the present, here in Austin Cruise is regularly blocking streets at night. The tech works great…until it doesn’t. I wish they’d stop alpha testing at our expense.
- samstave 3y ago
  Yes! And the bay areas transit system is one of the biggest jokes in the country. I am getting so incredibly jaded at pretty much every single thing the us systems do. It’s a joke. - And I don’t think the Bay Area is going to be a walkable smart city any time in the near future.
- mytailorisrich 3y ago
  People prefer invidual vehicles because they are much more convenient and comfortable. People use mass transit because it's cheaper or because the circumstances make individual vehicles very inconvenient (e.g. not parking space and terrible traffic), not because they prefer it.
  - seadan83 3y ago
    > individual vehicles very inconvenient I suspect individual vehicles is inherently inconvenient. The parking lot for Disneyland is an example, the traffic jams of any city with over 50k people in it are examples. Individual vehicles do not scale very well, and through extreme expense the US has built infrastructure to make individual vehicles as convenient as can be. > not because they prefer it. I would like to see data behind this. Driving for a commute is generally not enjoyable, it's time a person will not get back and meanwhile they have done very little productive other than perhaps listen to a podcast. OTOH when on a bus, someone else is worrying about the roads and plenty of people get significant work done, reading done, generally relax. I suspect most would prefer mass transit if it were more time efficient. Driving yourself is still a pretty killer option in most of the US as it's an extreme reduction in commute time due to lack of density and frequency in the mass transit network. *To clarify, the typical bus experience in the US can vary quite a bit. I commuted into Seattle for several years on the bus system. That is my experience, those trips were 99.9% fine experiences, it was quiet and essentially everyone was just messing around on their smart phones. The only really unpleasant part of the bus experience was there were not enough of them running such that the bus could be crowded and was a long wait between buses. That is a different experience for sure from the buses that run within downtown and riding those buses around 2pm when there are no commuters on them. My claim is that a well funded bus system is intrinsically more enjoyable for the same reason an AV is - because you can do something other than 'driving' while traveling.
    - zht 3y ago
      in my short 4 month internship in Seattle I have had two bad experiences (among others) 1. Some woman starts yelling at me saying I am a foreigner (I am, but I am more Canadian than anything else). She gets louder and louder and tells me that I am probably a visa student and that I’ll be deported when my studies are done. She went around the entire bus making derogatory comments about them (I.e. what are you doing with that white bitch to an interracial couple) 2. A woman accuses me of being a North Korean spy on the bus (she says I have the nose of a North Korean). I exit the bus because she is increasingly hostile. I get off the bus. She follows me 4 blocks to my apartment, trying to get the red blooded Americans to catch the North Korean spy. Can you see how some folks would prefer to drive?
- bluescrn 3y ago
  > And we need to de-personal-vehicle-ize. It's already killing us. That's never going to happen. We've had personal transport ever since we tamed horses. And we can't really go back to horses. We just need to prioritise small personal vehicles powered by pedals and/or batteries, particularly in urban environments. We need to make more roads safer for them, and solve the storage/theft problems.
  - somewhereoutth 3y ago
    It is happening for many young people (particularly in Europe). To own a car is becoming pretty unusual (and generally because of a specific need).
- HPsquared 3y ago
  Mass transit is usually a local monopoly. For cars, there will be competition.
  - nayuki 3y ago
    Ah yes, as if the road provider isn't a monopoly, or there's any competition in the price of gasoline.
stale2002 3y ago
Inhabitants are going to become increasingly pro driverless car though, not anti. Consumers like good products. And driverless cars are a good product, as evidenced by the literally free taxi service that is just being given out to many people in SF right now (but will still be cheaper than regular taxis when it goes mainstream).
- pierat 3y ago
  > Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. That's the process of "Enshittification" by Cory Doctorow. And it's blatantly obvious by your comment that we're in stage 1, "good to their users".... except people LOVE free shit. But no techbro gives shit away for free. This is 'buy-in' and training data. It ONLY gets worse from here. And 100 cars on the road is still 100 cars on the road, even if only carrying 100 people. It's a waste of energy, waste of resources, and climate-destroying by fact of all that asphalt and resources to make said cars... all so you don't have to ride in icky 'public transit', cause that's what the "poors" take.
  - dpkirchner 3y ago
    It's 100 fewer cars having to park, idle and unused, for hours a day. Also, it could lead to thousands of fewer cars in existence if that single AV is even moderately used. I think that might make the tech a net win.
    - nerdbert 3y ago
      We were told that Uber would mean fewer cars on the road, and in fact it's led to exactly the opposite - an explosion of additional VMTs, with all the accompanying pollution, resource waste, congestion, and crash deaths. If AV taxis are cheap then people are going to use them for all sorts of things they previously could not afford to use a taxi for. And if they're expensive then they will cannibalize public transport for the benefit of the upper economic classes and the significant detriment of people of lesser means. There is no way this turns into a net good.
BurningFrog 3y ago
You just need law enforcement. Not a core SF strength, but there are many other cities.
- Invictus0 3y ago
  So simple! Just have a police car follow all the driverless cars around everywhere!
bluescrn 3y ago
Driverless cars will eventually be safer and more efficient than human drivers. They'll respond faster in emergencies. They won't be drunk or stoned. They won't exceed speed limits. They won't rev or honk angrily. But to reach that point, we've got to accept a learning/development process that will involve some risks and some annoyance.
- blurker 3y ago
  > They won't exceed speed limits. Uhh, about that... > Tesla allows self-driving cars to break speed limit, again - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/16/tesla-allows-self-driving-cars-to-break-speed-limit-again https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/16/tesla-all...
  - cozzyd 3y ago
    I feel like I should be able to file a class action lawsuit against Tesla if the cars are programmed to speed.
  - fastball 3y ago
    Because going the speed limit is unsafe in certain scenarios, because other human drivers are expecting people to exceed the limit like they do. It's the same with Tesla wanting to allow rolling stops at stop signs – not the letter of the law, but it's what humans expect. In many instances you are more likely to cause a minor accident (being rear-ended) by coming to a complete stop at a stop sign than the risk of causing and accident by rolling through an intersection that clearly has nobody else in it. Won't be a problem once most cars on the road are driverless.
- petee 3y ago
  No we don't have to accept that. Experimentation belongs in a laboratory, and all these companies can afford to build private, controlled environments, they just don't want to spend the money. The time to find out your car does not stop for emergency vehicles, is not during an emergency. Yet here we are
  - 3y ago
innagadadavida 3y ago
This is a huge regulatory failure and not just a technology problem. These cars can be networked and a human can monitor and override when exceptional situations arise. Amazing to see how billions of dollar of VC money, tech bros, government bureaucrats all get this so spectacularly wrong after working on the problem for decades.
Natsu 3y ago
It's funny because these are running just fine in other cities. And for all they've driven, there's been what? One fatality from someone who literally walked in front of a car. Compared to how many fatalities there are from human drivers, that seems a lot lower.
- nullc 3y ago
  The number of passenger miles/hours driven by AVs are such that no fatalities would have been expected with a human driver. A lot of automobile deaths happen but it's not because cars are dangerous it's because we drive a mind numbingly large amount.

pierat 3y ago

[flagged]

Zigurd 3y ago
The US is too lo-density for human driven buses to be better for the environment. AVs will enable a transit fleet of right-sized vehicles that respond to demand and can surge without a big labor force working split shifts.
- pierat 3y ago
  HAH that is one of the most ridiculous excuses... and is also directly refuted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REni8Oi1QJQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REni8Oi1QJQ ^^ "Not Just Bikes"
  - Zigurd 3y ago
    I have ridden commuter rail, aubways, and busses in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Amsterdam, London, Vienna and other places. While you have a point that "lo-density" is an oversimplification, only New York has the kind of density and frequency of service that make public transit really usable. Boston commuter rail sucks pretty bad, with a too-sparse schedule. BART from SFO to the city is OK but around town there are too few lines and stops. This all could be fixed, but the fact is they suck compared to cities like Amsterdam where cycling has the infrastructure and the critical mass to be safe (unlike London, for example).
- kiba 3y ago
  There are plenty of area that could support mass transit, especially in cities. Even suburbia can be made more walkable. For example, walking to my local gas station isn't really that practical due to a lack of continuous sidewalks. It isn't that far but the path to the gas station can get pretty muddy at time. I once tried to get food at a fast food joint by walking, the lack of sidewalks is even more acute. Crossing several lanes of road felt pretty unsafe even when the traffic light is red.
- arrosenberg 3y ago
  Or it'll encourage people to live in a more dense area, if society no longer subsides the driving lifestyle.
- throwyawayyyy 3y ago
  That's one ideal, sure. I don't see it though -- who's going to keep all these individual driving pods clean? How is access going to be gated to them? SF is a dense city, only New York has higher population density. Its BART and muni and bus service isn't bad, either -- and partly because it's such a pain to drive downtown, it gets used, and being used keeps it safe.
- delecti 3y ago
  This is a story about San Francisco. SF has plenty of density for human driven buses to be better for the environment. AVs are not currently competing with human drivers in the use-case you say they'd be best at, they're clogging already dense cities with even more cars.
skepticATX 3y ago
Exactly. I don’t mind AVs, but we don’t need them clogging up the core of our cities. Cars have their place. But let’s build real transit in our cities. I also worry about a future in which we can’t own cars, but public transit has been mostly done away with in favor of privately owned AV companies. In the present, here in Austin Cruise is regularly blocking streets at night. The tech works great…until it doesn’t. I wish they’d stop alpha testing at our expense.
samstave 3y ago
Yes! And the bay areas transit system is one of the biggest jokes in the country. I am getting so incredibly jaded at pretty much every single thing the us systems do. It’s a joke. - And I don’t think the Bay Area is going to be a walkable smart city any time in the near future.
mytailorisrich 3y ago
People prefer invidual vehicles because they are much more convenient and comfortable. People use mass transit because it's cheaper or because the circumstances make individual vehicles very inconvenient (e.g. not parking space and terrible traffic), not because they prefer it.
- seadan83 3y ago
  > individual vehicles very inconvenient I suspect individual vehicles is inherently inconvenient. The parking lot for Disneyland is an example, the traffic jams of any city with over 50k people in it are examples. Individual vehicles do not scale very well, and through extreme expense the US has built infrastructure to make individual vehicles as convenient as can be. > not because they prefer it. I would like to see data behind this. Driving for a commute is generally not enjoyable, it's time a person will not get back and meanwhile they have done very little productive other than perhaps listen to a podcast. OTOH when on a bus, someone else is worrying about the roads and plenty of people get significant work done, reading done, generally relax. I suspect most would prefer mass transit if it were more time efficient. Driving yourself is still a pretty killer option in most of the US as it's an extreme reduction in commute time due to lack of density and frequency in the mass transit network. *To clarify, the typical bus experience in the US can vary quite a bit. I commuted into Seattle for several years on the bus system. That is my experience, those trips were 99.9% fine experiences, it was quiet and essentially everyone was just messing around on their smart phones. The only really unpleasant part of the bus experience was there were not enough of them running such that the bus could be crowded and was a long wait between buses. That is a different experience for sure from the buses that run within downtown and riding those buses around 2pm when there are no commuters on them. My claim is that a well funded bus system is intrinsically more enjoyable for the same reason an AV is - because you can do something other than 'driving' while traveling.
  - zht 3y ago
    in my short 4 month internship in Seattle I have had two bad experiences (among others) 1. Some woman starts yelling at me saying I am a foreigner (I am, but I am more Canadian than anything else). She gets louder and louder and tells me that I am probably a visa student and that I’ll be deported when my studies are done. She went around the entire bus making derogatory comments about them (I.e. what are you doing with that white bitch to an interracial couple) 2. A woman accuses me of being a North Korean spy on the bus (she says I have the nose of a North Korean). I exit the bus because she is increasingly hostile. I get off the bus. She follows me 4 blocks to my apartment, trying to get the red blooded Americans to catch the North Korean spy. Can you see how some folks would prefer to drive?
bluescrn 3y ago
> And we need to de-personal-vehicle-ize. It's already killing us. That's never going to happen. We've had personal transport ever since we tamed horses. And we can't really go back to horses. We just need to prioritise small personal vehicles powered by pedals and/or batteries, particularly in urban environments. We need to make more roads safer for them, and solve the storage/theft problems.
- somewhereoutth 3y ago
  It is happening for many young people (particularly in Europe). To own a car is becoming pretty unusual (and generally because of a specific need).
HPsquared 3y ago
Mass transit is usually a local monopoly. For cars, there will be competition.
- nayuki 3y ago
  Ah yes, as if the road provider isn't a monopoly, or there's any competition in the price of gasoline.

stale2002 3y ago

Inhabitants are going to become increasingly pro driverless car though, not anti. Consumers like good products. And driverless cars are a good product, as evidenced by the literally free taxi service that is just being given out to many people in SF right now (but will still be cheaper than regular taxis when it goes mainstream).

pierat 3y ago
> Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. That's the process of "Enshittification" by Cory Doctorow. And it's blatantly obvious by your comment that we're in stage 1, "good to their users".... except people LOVE free shit. But no techbro gives shit away for free. This is 'buy-in' and training data. It ONLY gets worse from here. And 100 cars on the road is still 100 cars on the road, even if only carrying 100 people. It's a waste of energy, waste of resources, and climate-destroying by fact of all that asphalt and resources to make said cars... all so you don't have to ride in icky 'public transit', cause that's what the "poors" take.
- dpkirchner 3y ago
  It's 100 fewer cars having to park, idle and unused, for hours a day. Also, it could lead to thousands of fewer cars in existence if that single AV is even moderately used. I think that might make the tech a net win.
  - nerdbert 3y ago
    We were told that Uber would mean fewer cars on the road, and in fact it's led to exactly the opposite - an explosion of additional VMTs, with all the accompanying pollution, resource waste, congestion, and crash deaths. If AV taxis are cheap then people are going to use them for all sorts of things they previously could not afford to use a taxi for. And if they're expensive then they will cannibalize public transport for the benefit of the upper economic classes and the significant detriment of people of lesser means. There is no way this turns into a net good.

BurningFrog 3y ago

You just need law enforcement. Not a core SF strength, but there are many other cities.

Invictus0 3y ago
So simple! Just have a police car follow all the driverless cars around everywhere!

bluescrn 3y ago

Driverless cars will eventually be safer and more efficient than human drivers. They'll respond faster in emergencies. They won't be drunk or stoned. They won't exceed speed limits. They won't rev or honk angrily. But to reach that point, we've got to accept a learning/development process that will involve some risks and some annoyance.

blurker 3y ago
> They won't exceed speed limits. Uhh, about that... > Tesla allows self-driving cars to break speed limit, again - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/16/tesla-allows-self-driving-cars-to-break-speed-limit-again https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/16/tesla-all...
- cozzyd 3y ago
  I feel like I should be able to file a class action lawsuit against Tesla if the cars are programmed to speed.
- fastball 3y ago
  Because going the speed limit is unsafe in certain scenarios, because other human drivers are expecting people to exceed the limit like they do. It's the same with Tesla wanting to allow rolling stops at stop signs – not the letter of the law, but it's what humans expect. In many instances you are more likely to cause a minor accident (being rear-ended) by coming to a complete stop at a stop sign than the risk of causing and accident by rolling through an intersection that clearly has nobody else in it. Won't be a problem once most cars on the road are driverless.
petee 3y ago
No we don't have to accept that. Experimentation belongs in a laboratory, and all these companies can afford to build private, controlled environments, they just don't want to spend the money. The time to find out your car does not stop for emergency vehicles, is not during an emergency. Yet here we are
- 3y ago

innagadadavida 3y ago

This is a huge regulatory failure and not just a technology problem. These cars can be networked and a human can monitor and override when exceptional situations arise. Amazing to see how billions of dollar of VC money, tech bros, government bureaucrats all get this so spectacularly wrong after working on the problem for decades.

Natsu 3y ago

It's funny because these are running just fine in other cities. And for all they've driven, there's been what? One fatality from someone who literally walked in front of a car. Compared to how many fatalities there are from human drivers, that seems a lot lower.

nullc 3y ago
The number of passenger miles/hours driven by AVs are such that no fatalities would have been expected with a human driver. A lot of automobile deaths happen but it's not because cars are dangerous it's because we drive a mind numbingly large amount.