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The fact that a single car can even cause this much harm is a sign of a much larger problem: car centric transportation is NOT scalable. They are testing this

• jbotdev 3y ago
  To be fair, public transport often has similar issues. If a subway/train car is stuck, nothing else can get by on the same track and thousands of people could be delayed. It happens in NYC all the time. At least with the road system there are typically ways to get around stopped cars.
• soligern 3y ago
  That’s stupid. You could park a golf cart on the train tracks and it would shut down all train transport for hours. You could cut out a piece of the rail very easily (with an angle grinder) and it would cause dozens of deaths and shut down the line for weeks. The right course of action is to make messing with automated cars like this a crime just like it is with the railways.
  • almost_usual 3y ago
    Cutting a train track with an angle grinder isn’t the same as taking less than five seconds to put a traffic cone on a car. It takes them 30 minutes in this video. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ISjDp5lL7_Q https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ISjDp5lL7_Q
    • soligern 3y ago
      You could disable a diverter in 5 seconds with a sledge hammer. Also your linked video is splitting along the length of the rail instead of cutting directly across it which would take minutes if not seconds.
      • almost_usual 3y ago
        > Also your linked video is splitting along the length of the rail instead of cutting directly across it which would take minutes if not seconds. Watch how long it takes to cut the top of that rail. You must not have ever used an angle grinder before if you think you’re cutting train tracks in seconds. It took me at least a minute to cut through a single leaf spring for a truck if not longer.
        • soligern 3y ago
          What’s your point though? You’re picking an arbitrary cutoff time based on what? The intention is still disruption. Thirty minutes is nothing. We don’t classify severity of crimes based on how long they take to accomplish. A murder is a murder whether you shot a person once or spent hours carving them up. I have used an angle grinder and it takes me about 10 seconds to cut through rebar. I would assume a rail is like 25 pieces of rebar put together so my naive assumption would be under five minutes.
          • digdugdirk 3y ago
            There's a big difference in both material and size between rebar and rail track, but that's just an aside. I believe the point being made is the difference in level of intent required and the known (or hoped for) outcome from the action. Grabbing a traffic cone from a nearby construction zone and chucking it in front of an autonomous car at a traffic light is harmless to the health of everyone involved, but is a pain in the rear for many. Meanwhile, it makes a statement, and some chunk of everyone's annoyance gets directed at the autonomous car company. On the other hand, cutting a section of railroad takes concerted effort and a lot of premeditation if the individual hopes to get away with it. More importantly - the person cutting the track hopes/expects to cause death and destruction. The two actions are wildly different, and should be treated as such.
            • slashdev 3y ago
              It’s not necessarily harmless. If that traffic jam blocks an emergency vehicle, people can die.
    • manfre 3y ago
      It would take only a few moments to weld a metal traffic cone to a train track. Focusing on the exact timing to disturb the mode of transit is not relevant. There are always optimizations.
  • nerdbert 3y ago
    Railways are a little different - for the most part (except at level crossings) they are operating on dedicated rights-of-way, and someone has to go out of their way to interfere with them. A car on a public street is mixing it up with everyone else, and the dividing line for what constitutes "messing with" them is not clear at all. What if I wear a shirt that confuses their algorithms? Shine a light that does it? Drive, bike, or walk in a pattern that does it?
    • soligern 3y ago
      This is not wearing a shirt though. This is people deliberately causing disruptions by putting a traffic cone, universally recognized as a traffic warning, in front of the vehicles. A lot of regular people would think twice about what to do if they came back to their parked car with traffic cones around it.
      • albrewer 3y ago
        > universally recognized as a traffic warning Except a real driver can recognize when a cone should and shouldn't be there.
    • mannykannot 3y ago
      > ...the dividing line for what constitutes "messing with" them is not clear at all. Putting cones out for no other purpose beyond stopping them moving seems to me unambiguously "messing with" them (though I don't think we need additional laws to address it.)
    • PhasmaFelis 3y ago
      > someone has to go out of their way to interfere with them. How is this thing with the traffic cones not "going out of their way to interfere"? > the dividing line for what constitutes "messing with" them is not clear at all. If you're deliberately jamming up traffic by any means, it's perfectly clear which side of the line you're on.
  • badpun 3y ago
    In fact, there's a "prankster" operating in Poland right now, who is sending the "stop immediately" radio signal to trains. All trains receiving it will automatically start braking. They were able to stop 20+ trains yesterday. Also, when they're not sending that signal, they're broadcasting the Russian national anthem on the emergency braking radio frequency...
    • interloxia 3y ago
      >Poland's national transportation agency has stated its intention to upgrade Poland's railway systems by 2025 to use almost exclusively GSM cellular radios, which do have encryption and authentication. But until then, it will continue to use the relatively unprotected VHF 150 MHz system that allows the “radio-stop” commands to be spoofed. https://www.wired.com/story/poland-train-radio-stop-attack/ https://www.wired.com/story/poland-train-radio-stop-attack/
  • waste_monk 3y ago
    >You could park a golf cart on the train tracks and it would shut down all train transport for hours If a golf cart picks a fight with a train moving at speed, I guarantee you the train will win.
    • HankB99 3y ago
      Yes, and then traffic will be halted for hours while the incident is investigated.
• gravypod 3y ago
  My commute on the M&E line is often (~1/month) cancelled or delayed by normal every day things (tree fall, branches, etc). All trains into New York Penn from my line get stopped.
• clnq 3y ago
  > car centric transportation is NOT scalable. “When intentionally broken, this transport doesn’t work. So it is not scalable.” There are many ways to scale car-centric transportation that have been done successfully in countries other than the US. Public transit is one example. Autonomous buses could solve a lot of the car issues in the US. Not if we keep putting cones in front of them though.
• kelnos 3y ago
  > The fact that a single car can even cause this much harm is a sign of a much larger problem: car centric transportation is NOT scalable. I don't particularly love US car culture, but this is an absurd take. A single broken-down train will block all trains behind it on the same track. Unexpected damage to a runway can choke an airport. So are we to believe that the only "scalable" form of transportation is bicycles, because it's easy and fast to move a broken or crashed bicycle out of the right of way? Yeah, right.
  • developer93 3y ago
    I mean, that would be lovely
    • lotsoweiners 3y ago
      Maybe we should go back to having our correspondence over pen and paper as well?
      • developer93 3y ago
        I like bicycles. Amazing invention. There are also electric bikes. A world completely run by bikes would be lovely, yes. I stand by it.
• galkk 3y ago
  Not the single car. Single idiot.
• NiloCK 3y ago
  > The fact that a single car can even cause this much harm is a sign of a much larger problem: car centric transportation is NOT scalable. This is an interesting to me. From the perspective of an internet builder, systems vulnerable to shutdown from individual bad actors are obviously insecure and "not scalable". But too much time in this environment can make us forget that the actual world is about a zillion times less hostile than the internet. As an educator, I worked with a computer security savvy 13 year old who knew my software background and would occasionally disclose vulnerabilities in the district's systems to me. He was incredulous that the network could be so insecure. I asked about the security systems governing walking around in the hallway - was there any physical impediment preventing one person from punching, kicking, throwing a rock at another? Of course not - the security is socially constructed. Norms, consequences, etc, that on balance seemed to work out pretty effectively. I tried to make a case that security inside a local network of the size and scope of our school board was also ~90% social construction, but the student really struggled with it. There was a strong belief that because it was computers, you were expected to exploit it if it were vulnerable. First paragraph is about the IT security mindset bleeding into real life, third is about the IT adversarial mindset corrupting our disposition toward technical equipment generally. Given how immersed current generations are / have been in the adversarial landscape of the web, should we expect an uptick in the level of generalized adversarialism? Will xyst's (and my student's) assessments of these systems become true? Have they already and I'm just a knob?
  • psunavy03 3y ago
    We're seeing a lot of this in modern society. Social media, guns, politics . . . lots of areas where individual bad actors are overturning "social construction," norms, and trust because they can. Not realizing that a lot of those norms they're pissing all over are vital to having any kind of a society worth living in, which is why seeing them brazenly violated freaks a lot of people TF out. I don't want to live in the ultimate low-trust society because it seems it'd suck for any number of crappy reasons.
    • lawrenceyan 3y ago
      Why not have systems be as resilient and robust as possible though? For example, with the implementation of crypto, now you can massively lower trust necessary for finance to function. That doesn't mean we purposely try to lower trust. But in the rare event it happens, I feel like it's a good safeguard. Strong foundations in many ways can often enable greater trust too I think.
• kortilla 3y ago
  This is a shitty take. Guess how much harm a single derailed train can cause to the New York subway? Guess how much harm a single plane crashed on a runway causes? Every form of mass transit suffers from single outsized impacts of failures. When the Korean airline airplane crashed into the end of the SFO runway it disrupted 10s of thousands flying into the Bay Area.