7 ms·

The lenses that we view the questions also change. In the 1950s, people likely imagined that by the 2020s, roads would be rebuilt with technologies like magnets

The lenses that we view the questions also change. In the 1950s, people likely imagined that by the 2020s, roads would be rebuilt with technologies like magnets or rails to support self-driving cars. But they didn’t anticipate the inertia in infrastructure development. Our roads remain largely the same, and this stagnation is what we need to band aid with for autonomous vehicles today.

mhog_hn 2y ago
Imagine dedicated single lane highways between major cities across the world only accessible to self-driving vehicles
- chrislo 2y ago
  Trains?
  - langcss 2y ago
    Trains... but they end up at your house.
    - elric 2y ago
      Those are calles "buses". Though trams can be even better.
      - andrewflnr 2y ago
        They're not. You still have to go to and from the bus stop, and on the bus's schedule rather than yours.
        dredmorbius 2y ago
        With sufficiently dense urbanisation, and dedicated transit rights of way (heavy rail, light rail, trolley busses, trams, ...), the "getting to and from the bus stop" and "on the busses schedule" problems both disappear. The bus stop is nearer than your car park would be, and the schedule operates with headways of 1--8 minutes such that waits are minimal. With dedicated rights of way, transit doesn't compete with private or delivery vehicles for road space. Further enhancements give priority signalling to transit vehicles. Sufficient density also means that services and functions are located nearby: school (for the kids), shopping, entertainment, healthcare, government services, and employment (assuming you still need to go to an office or similar space).
        andrewflnr 2y ago
        "Sufficiently dense urbanization" has a similar scent to "sufficiently smart compiler". It does exist for some cases, but I'm not going to count on it showing up for me.
        dredmorbius 2y ago
        The greatest impact on private automobiles hasn't been on commutes, sex lives of teens, or the lore of the road trip. It's been on land-use patterns of urban regions (writ large, think metropolitan statistical areas rather than strictly city limits within the US). With automobiles, low-density sprawl residential, commercial, industrial, educational, and recreational developments become not only possible but largely inevitable. The corollary is that to change land-use patterns, it is necessary to change transportation economics. The other factor is, of course, that there is tremendous inertia in land-use patterns, and urban regions which pre-date automobiles have preserved at least some of their earlier densities. One sees this in the old cities of Europe, of the Eastern US (largely east of the Mississippi, though most notably along the Atlantic Seaboard), and in a very few of the original West Coast US cities such as San Francisco (spatially constrained by its geography) and Seattle (old town regions). Los Angeles and San Diego which both saw explosive growth after about 1920 far less so, likewise for most of the Southern US which grew following both the automobile and air conditioning. How rapidly this works in reverse, and whether or not low-density cities, towns, and urban regions can reconsolidate is a quite interesting, and critically important, question. I suspect that it may be possible, though we'll see some strange hybrid / transitional land-use patterns initially, and there will likely be much opposition (NIMBY / landowners / pull-up-the-drawbridge types). We're beginning to see much higher costs of automobiles as EVs hit the roads, leading in part to the increased popularity of electric bicycles and motorcycles (though to a very small extent). Point remains that it's much easier (and cheaper) to electrify small vehicles than large ones. There are congestion tax proposals, enacted in London, on hiatus in New York City. Higher fuel costs can have an impact. I believe that simply sprinkling majyckal transit pixiey duste over urban sprawl fails miserably. I also agree that changing urban density patterns takes time. However there are existing regions with those patterns, and they may well start to see increasing appeal to those who don't wish to be car-bound. That's already part of the explanation of high housing costs in cities such as SF and NYC (though that's another complex matter and is hardly specific to those cities). But my point remains that density and transit go together like bees and honey, utterly addressing your initial objection.
    - OtomotO 2y ago
      I don't want my house to be at the end of a highway ;-)
    - frogpelt 2y ago
      You’ve given me an idea: tiny houses that move on rails… the trains are the houses!
  - ivalm 2y ago
    Trains where train cars separate for better last mile logistics.
    - igornadj 2y ago
      Like the channel tunnel train?
- RealStickman_ 2y ago
  Yeah, but then imagine if we took all these separate vehicles and stuck them together to increase efficiency. And now we could regularly send such vehicle groups, making travel predictable for everyone. Wait...
  - throwaway290 2y ago
    But that means the government controls my movement! Oh no! (It totally doesn't control it via the network of public roads... /s)
    - ahartmetz 2y ago
      It's a bit like some people were complaining about the "Covid dictatorship" at the time. Apparently seeing only what's right in front of their noses, not all the other government actions and policies that are on a spectrum from less to more important than Covid policies and which happen for worse to better reasons as well. At least that's how I think one "notices" a sudden dictatorship of democratically elected parties.
- hug 2y ago
  I find the kind of responses you’re getting wildly ironic, given the article.
- two_handfuls 2y ago
  People are joking about how this is trains or busses, but I think you hit on something fundamental: - engine tech is now such that we no longer need one huge engine and lots of passenger to get good efficiency: many small engines works just as well. - removing the need for everyone to stop where any one person needs to go ("bus stop") improves the experience drastically. - the one remaining problem is density: cars would have to shrink a lot before they can reach the density of busses or trains. So perhaps: a single-lane highway only accessible to self-driving vehicles driving in formation and where the vehicles must be below some specified size. This gives us great last-mile experience, high throughput, and good safety.
  - MichaelZuo 2y ago
    How will these very shrunken cars be survivable in a crash at highway speeds? Plus modern crossovers are already very size efficient, A 2024 compact crossover like the Rav4 is pretty much already the smallest possible space that can comfortably accommodate 4 adult men in seated positions and 4 large suitcases.
    - sfink 2y ago
      Why would they crash at highway speeds? On a highway, they'd be in the dedicated lane. Not on a highway, they wouldn't be going at highway speeds. The point is an alternative to today's setup, for the majority of people who need to get somewhere. Not a way to mai
      - MichaelZuo 2y ago
        Because accidents will happen regardless? No one can possibly control all variables that would cause a crash.
    - Toutouxc 2y ago
      > compact crossover like the Rav4 Funny how what you call a smallest-possible compact crossover looks like a huge disgusting waste of space to my European Škoda-driver’s eyes. The moment a car can be described as a “crossover”, or worse, an SUV, it becomes a waste of space IMO.
KineticLensman 2y ago
> But they didn’t anticipate the inertia in infrastructure development On a related note, I think one reason that SF was so uniformly positive about space flight was that if you were writing in the 60s and 70s you would have been looking at almost a century of dramatic improvements in travel including steam trains, submarines, cars, prop planes, jets, and then rockets to the moon. With space shuttles and similar on the drawing board. People just assumed this would continue. What very few SF writers understood was that all of these exploited chemical energy which is very limited in terms of how much can be lifted out of the Earth's gravity well and how fast you can go once you are up there. Many SF authors arm-waved atomics or nuclear propulsion but these, in the real world, never took off, as it were. Not in any mass transit to the stars sense, at least. Edit: In reality space travel hit a hard brick wall due to the laws of physics. Most other forms of travel have experienced massive incremental improvements in reliability, efficiency, affordability, etc, but very few cars and and planes and ships actually now go much faster than they did 50 years ago.
- gmfawcett 2y ago
  > What very few SF writers understood "Understood?" They were writing fiction, not instruction manuals.
  - KineticLensman 2y ago
    Well yes, of course, but I was trying to point out one of the reasons for their blind-spots with such predictions. Of course, some hard-SF authors (e.g. Arthur C Clarke) did try to make their stories technically plausible, which gives to some superb anachronisms nowadays, e.g. the classic combination of rocket ships whose crew used slide rules for astronavigation.
    - Sakos 2y ago
      Science fiction that took place in space weren't necessarily predictions. They were imagining what life in space could be like, whether human or not. I don't see how any of us would benefit if every SF author had "realized" that it was unfeasible and just wrote about earth. There was no blind spot, just it did nobody any good to hamper themselves by things like "well, it'll never happen, no point in imagining it". Fiction would be boring if we always only limited ourselves to being completely realistic and true to our current state of knowledge.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
heisenbit 2y ago
> Our roads remain largely the same Sure? Just maintaining them close to their original quality seems to be a challenge at times. Bridges that are close to coming down are another related issue.
aucisson_masque 2y ago
People in the 1950 has just gone through around a bit more of century of industrial revolution. Things were moving fast, everywhere.. Infrastructure like roads were massively built or improved during this timeframe. Nowadays things are moving fast in technology and some other sector but it's far from being the case for instance with car. They are basically the same 4 wheel petrol engine that we had 80 years ago. I think its normal back then to guess that everything was going to keep evolving just as fast as it did. They had no way to know that the industrial revolution was ending.

mhog_hn 2y ago

Imagine dedicated single lane highways between major cities across the world only accessible to self-driving vehicles

chrislo 2y ago
Trains?
- langcss 2y ago
  Trains... but they end up at your house.
  - elric 2y ago
    Those are calles "buses". Though trams can be even better.
    - andrewflnr 2y ago
      They're not. You still have to go to and from the bus stop, and on the bus's schedule rather than yours.
      - dredmorbius 2y ago
        With sufficiently dense urbanisation, and dedicated transit rights of way (heavy rail, light rail, trolley busses, trams, ...), the "getting to and from the bus stop" and "on the busses schedule" problems both disappear. The bus stop is nearer than your car park would be, and the schedule operates with headways of 1--8 minutes such that waits are minimal. With dedicated rights of way, transit doesn't compete with private or delivery vehicles for road space. Further enhancements give priority signalling to transit vehicles. Sufficient density also means that services and functions are located nearby: school (for the kids), shopping, entertainment, healthcare, government services, and employment (assuming you still need to go to an office or similar space).
        andrewflnr 2y ago
        "Sufficiently dense urbanization" has a similar scent to "sufficiently smart compiler". It does exist for some cases, but I'm not going to count on it showing up for me.
        dredmorbius 2y ago
        The greatest impact on private automobiles hasn't been on commutes, sex lives of teens, or the lore of the road trip. It's been on land-use patterns of urban regions (writ large, think metropolitan statistical areas rather than strictly city limits within the US). With automobiles, low-density sprawl residential, commercial, industrial, educational, and recreational developments become not only possible but largely inevitable. The corollary is that to change land-use patterns, it is necessary to change transportation economics. The other factor is, of course, that there is tremendous inertia in land-use patterns, and urban regions which pre-date automobiles have preserved at least some of their earlier densities. One sees this in the old cities of Europe, of the Eastern US (largely east of the Mississippi, though most notably along the Atlantic Seaboard), and in a very few of the original West Coast US cities such as San Francisco (spatially constrained by its geography) and Seattle (old town regions). Los Angeles and San Diego which both saw explosive growth after about 1920 far less so, likewise for most of the Southern US which grew following both the automobile and air conditioning. How rapidly this works in reverse, and whether or not low-density cities, towns, and urban regions can reconsolidate is a quite interesting, and critically important, question. I suspect that it may be possible, though we'll see some strange hybrid / transitional land-use patterns initially, and there will likely be much opposition (NIMBY / landowners / pull-up-the-drawbridge types). We're beginning to see much higher costs of automobiles as EVs hit the roads, leading in part to the increased popularity of electric bicycles and motorcycles (though to a very small extent). Point remains that it's much easier (and cheaper) to electrify small vehicles than large ones. There are congestion tax proposals, enacted in London, on hiatus in New York City. Higher fuel costs can have an impact. I believe that simply sprinkling majyckal transit pixiey duste over urban sprawl fails miserably. I also agree that changing urban density patterns takes time. However there are existing regions with those patterns, and they may well start to see increasing appeal to those who don't wish to be car-bound. That's already part of the explanation of high housing costs in cities such as SF and NYC (though that's another complex matter and is hardly specific to those cities). But my point remains that density and transit go together like bees and honey, utterly addressing your initial objection.
  - OtomotO 2y ago
    I don't want my house to be at the end of a highway ;-)
  - frogpelt 2y ago
    You’ve given me an idea: tiny houses that move on rails… the trains are the houses!
- ivalm 2y ago
  Trains where train cars separate for better last mile logistics.
  - igornadj 2y ago
    Like the channel tunnel train?
RealStickman_ 2y ago
Yeah, but then imagine if we took all these separate vehicles and stuck them together to increase efficiency. And now we could regularly send such vehicle groups, making travel predictable for everyone. Wait...
- throwaway290 2y ago
  But that means the government controls my movement! Oh no! (It totally doesn't control it via the network of public roads... /s)
  - ahartmetz 2y ago
    It's a bit like some people were complaining about the "Covid dictatorship" at the time. Apparently seeing only what's right in front of their noses, not all the other government actions and policies that are on a spectrum from less to more important than Covid policies and which happen for worse to better reasons as well. At least that's how I think one "notices" a sudden dictatorship of democratically elected parties.
hug 2y ago
I find the kind of responses you’re getting wildly ironic, given the article.
two_handfuls 2y ago
People are joking about how this is trains or busses, but I think you hit on something fundamental: - engine tech is now such that we no longer need one huge engine and lots of passenger to get good efficiency: many small engines works just as well. - removing the need for everyone to stop where any one person needs to go ("bus stop") improves the experience drastically. - the one remaining problem is density: cars would have to shrink a lot before they can reach the density of busses or trains. So perhaps: a single-lane highway only accessible to self-driving vehicles driving in formation and where the vehicles must be below some specified size. This gives us great last-mile experience, high throughput, and good safety.
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  How will these very shrunken cars be survivable in a crash at highway speeds? Plus modern crossovers are already very size efficient, A 2024 compact crossover like the Rav4 is pretty much already the smallest possible space that can comfortably accommodate 4 adult men in seated positions and 4 large suitcases.
  - sfink 2y ago
    Why would they crash at highway speeds? On a highway, they'd be in the dedicated lane. Not on a highway, they wouldn't be going at highway speeds. The point is an alternative to today's setup, for the majority of people who need to get somewhere. Not a way to mai
    - MichaelZuo 2y ago
      Because accidents will happen regardless? No one can possibly control all variables that would cause a crash.
  - Toutouxc 2y ago
    > compact crossover like the Rav4 Funny how what you call a smallest-possible compact crossover looks like a huge disgusting waste of space to my European Škoda-driver’s eyes. The moment a car can be described as a “crossover”, or worse, an SUV, it becomes a waste of space IMO.

KineticLensman 2y ago

> But they didn’t anticipate the inertia in infrastructure development On a related note, I think one reason that SF was so uniformly positive about space flight was that if you were writing in the 60s and 70s you would have been looking at almost a century of dramatic improvements in travel including steam trains, submarines, cars, prop planes, jets, and then rockets to the moon. With space shuttles and similar on the drawing board. People just assumed this would continue. What very few SF writers understood was that all of these exploited chemical energy which is very limited in terms of how much can be lifted out of the Earth's gravity well and how fast you can go once you are up there. Many SF authors arm-waved atomics or nuclear propulsion but these, in the real world, never took off, as it were. Not in any mass transit to the stars sense, at least. Edit: In reality space travel hit a hard brick wall due to the laws of physics. Most other forms of travel have experienced massive incremental improvements in reliability, efficiency, affordability, etc, but very few cars and and planes and ships actually now go much faster than they did 50 years ago.

gmfawcett 2y ago
> What very few SF writers understood "Understood?" They were writing fiction, not instruction manuals.
- KineticLensman 2y ago
  Well yes, of course, but I was trying to point out one of the reasons for their blind-spots with such predictions. Of course, some hard-SF authors (e.g. Arthur C Clarke) did try to make their stories technically plausible, which gives to some superb anachronisms nowadays, e.g. the classic combination of rocket ships whose crew used slide rules for astronavigation.
  - Sakos 2y ago
    Science fiction that took place in space weren't necessarily predictions. They were imagining what life in space could be like, whether human or not. I don't see how any of us would benefit if every SF author had "realized" that it was unfeasible and just wrote about earth. There was no blind spot, just it did nobody any good to hamper themselves by things like "well, it'll never happen, no point in imagining it". Fiction would be boring if we always only limited ourselves to being completely realistic and true to our current state of knowledge.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

heisenbit 2y ago

> Our roads remain largely the same Sure? Just maintaining them close to their original quality seems to be a challenge at times. Bridges that are close to coming down are another related issue.

aucisson_masque 2y ago

People in the 1950 has just gone through around a bit more of century of industrial revolution. Things were moving fast, everywhere.. Infrastructure like roads were massively built or improved during this timeframe. Nowadays things are moving fast in technology and some other sector but it's far from being the case for instance with car. They are basically the same 4 wheel petrol engine that we had 80 years ago. I think its normal back then to guess that everything was going to keep evolving just as fast as it did. They had no way to know that the industrial revolution was ending.