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Despite big promises in the title, the thesis is just - self-driving cars aren't perfect yet (trots out the usual double-standard headlines which get zero atte

Despite big promises in the title, the thesis is just - self-driving cars aren't perfect yet (trots out the usual double-standard headlines which get zero attention when humans do them all the time) - our cities were already destroyed by poorly-designed infrastructure, and self-driving cars don't suddenly fix that (something which was never promised or expected?) - whenever you mention reducing millions of human-caused traffic fatalities, use a sarcastic tone of voice Disappointing. I had much higher hopes going in. He says it himself: self-driving cars are just cheaper taxis.

jerlam 2y ago
I usually like this channel's content, but this video is a hour-long strawman argument.
vendiddy 2y ago
Thanks for saving me the time.
throw0101d 2y ago
> He says it himself: self-driving cars are just cheaper taxis. Which can lead to more traffic (@21:07). Which can encourage more resources to be moved from people to vehicles (@32:37). More traffic can increase pollution (@38:05), both particle and noise, even with EVs because tire wear, road wear, and brake wear (even with re-gen) generally increase with higher vehicle weights/masses. He then contrasts London (Ontario) and Utrecht (@43:28), and how even given their similar beginnings and similar populations, the decisions each made on how to design things made one more human-habitable and the other one less.
- schiffern 2y ago
  More traffic = more transportation services provided, so your first point isn't inherently bad. I agree we should invest in more walkable infrastructure (your second point), but that doesn't happen for many reasons, and AVs can also assist that process by eg removing parking spaces and making buses cheaper. The remaining noise and pollution concerns call for building robotaxis that are quieter and lighter-weight, which seems to be what's actually occurring. I admit his shallow dismissal of mass traffic fatalities as "marketing" and "corporate profits" immediately destroyed all credibility in my eyes. Millions of grieving parents aren't helped if some video 'dunks on' tech companies with irrelevant non-argument quips, what actually helps is (controversial opinion) to stop the killing. AVs are the only realistic path to that world.
  - throw0101d 2y ago
    > More traffic = more transportation services provided, so the first point isn't inherently bad. And as he points out (@29:56), more traffic would mean a push for more roads, which is inefficient and wasteful: it takes over a dozen lanes of highway to move less people per hour than a signal lane-width of subway. E.g., (@32:11) more car traffic caused the elimination of the trolley/tram/streetcar on the Brooklyn Bridge so that another car lane could be added which decreased the services provided: > If the job of the Brooklyn Bridge is to move people between the two boroughs, the reallocation of space from transit to cars has been disastrous. In 1902, one year before the photograph was taken, the Brooklyn Bridge moved roughly 341,000 people a day across all its modes, according to the Federal Highway Administration. It hit its peak capacity a few years later, with 426,000 people using it each day in 1907. > Today, 125,000 motor vehicles cross the Brooklyn Bridge each day [PDF], as do roughly 4,000 pedestrians and 2,600 cyclists. For the bridge to carry as many people as it did at its peak, each of those cars would need to carry more than three people, but they do not. In 1989, when the city counted around 132,000 motor vehicles crossing, the FHWA estimated that 178,000 people crossed the bridge daily. * https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2011/04/11/the-efficient-past-and-wasteful-present-of-the-brooklyn-bridge https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2011/04/11/the-efficient-past-an... Every mode of transportation needs space to operate, and by focusing on cars for private transportation it has decreased route capacity compared to every other mode, even walking: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Passenger_Capacity_of_different_Transport_Modes.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Passenger_Capacity_of_dif... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_capacity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_capacity > The noise and pollution concerns call for building robotaxis that are quieter and lighter-weight, which seems like what's actually occurring. Noise is a function of speed, so any vehicle travelling >50 kph will cause noise: is there a desire to restrict speeds? If we're going with EVs for our future, the mass of the batteries for a given range can hardly be reduced. > I admit his shallow dismissal of mass traffic fatalities as "marketing" and "corporate profits" immediately destroyed all credibility in my eyes. And his other point (@13:02) that if American road designs were similar to (e.g.) Swedish road designs there would be a 80% drop in fatalities with current technologies? No (possibly) pie-in-the-sky tech needed. Perhaps there could be benefits to autonomous vehicles (AVs), but mass traffic fatalities can be reduced now if the actual desire is there, e.g., Hoboken, New Jersey, has had zero traffic deaths over the last seven years: * https://apnews.com/article/hoboken-zero-traffic-deaths-daylighting-pedestrian-safety-007dec67706c1c09129da1436a3d9762 https://apnews.com/article/hoboken-zero-traffic-deaths-dayli...
mitthrowaway2 2y ago
This dismissal doesn't do justice to the content of the video. There are a lot of other points made, including: - Self driving cars are not a pipe-dream, the tech is developing and will be in every city in the future, this can't be ignored - There is a real danger that they will destroy the fabric of our cities - They will increase, not decrease, the number of cars on the road and the use of road space - As cars shift electric, gas taxes will be less effective at "charging for usage" of road space, and other means will be necessary, or else AVs will treat the cost of occupying road space as zero, and circle endlessly. - Despite hype that AVs won't need parking space, they will, because people will still want to own private cars and need to park them, and robotaxis will compete for response times and so will need to stay available close to high-demand areas - As AV companies gain adoption and become more available, city design may warp such that AVs may even become required to use roads or get around at all. There's a strong potential for the AV industry to lobby for changes to road infrastructure to favor AVs, including banning human-driven vehicles and increasing speed limits or removing them altogether. This may even go to the point of fencing off streets from pedestrians, because otherwise it would be too easy for people to step in front of vehicles (forcing them to brake). This is not unprecedented based on how quickly the auto industry reshaped laws, standards, and infrastructure to favor automobiles in the 20th century. - AV companies are likely to spread American driving practices and road culture to other countries, because AV tech is mostly developed in the US. - AVs may make it more difficult for cities and countries to update road rules, because of the burden it would put on AV companies to keep up with rule changes, and AV companies might successfully lobby against this. Cities will come under pressure to become more uniformly like Phoenix AZ, in order to be more AV-friendly, rather than AV companies putting in the work to localize their tech to work in every city. - There is a risk that AVs will displace other forms of public transit which are better for the environment, for pedestrians, for land use, and for the surrounding areas - By reducing the perceived cost of spending time in traffic, AVs will encourage people to commute longer distances, resulting in more traffic, infrastructure costs, and emissions overall - The AV lobby has suggested that AVs help mobility-impaired people, but public transit and walkable streets would help these people better than AVs would It's a long video, but I do think there are a lot of points that are worth deeply thinking about, especially for anyone here who might be involved in developing this technology.
fragmede 2y ago
> self-driving cars are just cheaper taxis. From a business perspective, why on Earth would you price it dramatically cheaper? Especially when you have to recoup R&D costs, need to show investors a profit, customers have already shown a willingness to pay market price, and maintenance on the cars and the in-car customer service agents isn't free? And we see that today in the app - Waymo is often more expensive that Lyft or Uber.
- mitthrowaway2 2y ago
  In the long run, if there is competition, it should drive down costs. If the sensors / compute hardware / software costs more than the labor of a human driver then self-driving vehicles won't be viable, but the bet these companies are making is that it will, and in the long run, those costs will be amortized. And if the costs of offering a robotaxi service are lower than a human-taxi service, and if AVs are not a monopoly, then the price will eventually end up cheaper as well.
dkobia 2y ago
I too normally like this channel but a few minutes in and it started to sound whiny. Encouraging “coning” was pretty low. It is starting to become pretty obvious that the many benefits of progress in this area overwhelm minor grievances.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- mcv 2y ago
  > Encouraging “coning” was pretty low. Not at all. It's a great yet simple demonstration of how these cars have no idea about the complexities of traffic situations.
mcv 2y ago
> He says it himself: self-driving cars are just cheaper taxis. That's not what he's saying, that's what he's refuting. When taxis are driven by different people competing against each other, taxis are cheap. When they're controlled by a single tech company that controls the entire market, they'll cost as much as the tech company can get away with. But he makes a lot of other good points too; that it will mean even more cars on the road.
panick21_ 2y ago
Talk about not actually listening. You are scratching the surface ignoring everything else in the video. > zero attention when humans do them all the time Literally his whole channel is about the problems with humans. This one video is about AVs. That it doesn't get more headlines in general is part of the problem. The more important point that you ignore, is that we already know how to make things much saver. > and self-driving cars don't suddenly fix that (something which was never promised or expected?) Except the companies and all the fans who constantly claim that self driving will be better then all public transport and solve future urban problems. To say that nobody makes such claims is just a strange ignoring of reality. And you again, ignore the deeper point that self-driving cars reenforce these problems and potentially make things worse. > - whenever you mention reducing millions of human-caused traffic fatalities, use a sarcastic tone of voice Not sure what your point here is. The point of the video, partly is that we can already reduce the traffic deaths by far cheaper means then AV and nobody cares about that. So all these claims about the amazing benefits (that hasn't been delivered) is mostly just hiding that what these companies really want is profit and the politicians want campaign benefits from these companies, rather then improve safety in the city. Again, the point being that AV as currently sold and advertised re-enforce existing problems, rather then solve them. > He says it himself: self-driving cars are just cheaper taxis. He didn't say that. He said, 'at best they are cheaper taxis', but at worst the have many non-beneficial impacts on society. And more important, there are simply better solutions.

jerlam 2y ago

I usually like this channel's content, but this video is a hour-long strawman argument.

vendiddy 2y ago

Thanks for saving me the time.

throw0101d 2y ago

> He says it himself: self-driving cars are just cheaper taxis. Which can lead to more traffic (@21:07). Which can encourage more resources to be moved from people to vehicles (@32:37). More traffic can increase pollution (@38:05), both particle and noise, even with EVs because tire wear, road wear, and brake wear (even with re-gen) generally increase with higher vehicle weights/masses. He then contrasts London (Ontario) and Utrecht (@43:28), and how even given their similar beginnings and similar populations, the decisions each made on how to design things made one more human-habitable and the other one less.

schiffern 2y ago
More traffic = more transportation services provided, so your first point isn't inherently bad. I agree we should invest in more walkable infrastructure (your second point), but that doesn't happen for many reasons, and AVs can also assist that process by eg removing parking spaces and making buses cheaper. The remaining noise and pollution concerns call for building robotaxis that are quieter and lighter-weight, which seems to be what's actually occurring. I admit his shallow dismissal of mass traffic fatalities as "marketing" and "corporate profits" immediately destroyed all credibility in my eyes. Millions of grieving parents aren't helped if some video 'dunks on' tech companies with irrelevant non-argument quips, what actually helps is (controversial opinion) to stop the killing. AVs are the only realistic path to that world.
- throw0101d 2y ago
  > More traffic = more transportation services provided, so the first point isn't inherently bad. And as he points out (@29:56), more traffic would mean a push for more roads, which is inefficient and wasteful: it takes over a dozen lanes of highway to move less people per hour than a signal lane-width of subway. E.g., (@32:11) more car traffic caused the elimination of the trolley/tram/streetcar on the Brooklyn Bridge so that another car lane could be added which decreased the services provided: > If the job of the Brooklyn Bridge is to move people between the two boroughs, the reallocation of space from transit to cars has been disastrous. In 1902, one year before the photograph was taken, the Brooklyn Bridge moved roughly 341,000 people a day across all its modes, according to the Federal Highway Administration. It hit its peak capacity a few years later, with 426,000 people using it each day in 1907. > Today, 125,000 motor vehicles cross the Brooklyn Bridge each day [PDF], as do roughly 4,000 pedestrians and 2,600 cyclists. For the bridge to carry as many people as it did at its peak, each of those cars would need to carry more than three people, but they do not. In 1989, when the city counted around 132,000 motor vehicles crossing, the FHWA estimated that 178,000 people crossed the bridge daily. * https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2011/04/11/the-efficient-past-and-wasteful-present-of-the-brooklyn-bridge https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2011/04/11/the-efficient-past-an... Every mode of transportation needs space to operate, and by focusing on cars for private transportation it has decreased route capacity compared to every other mode, even walking: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Passenger_Capacity_of_different_Transport_Modes.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Passenger_Capacity_of_dif... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_capacity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_capacity > The noise and pollution concerns call for building robotaxis that are quieter and lighter-weight, which seems like what's actually occurring. Noise is a function of speed, so any vehicle travelling >50 kph will cause noise: is there a desire to restrict speeds? If we're going with EVs for our future, the mass of the batteries for a given range can hardly be reduced. > I admit his shallow dismissal of mass traffic fatalities as "marketing" and "corporate profits" immediately destroyed all credibility in my eyes. And his other point (@13:02) that if American road designs were similar to (e.g.) Swedish road designs there would be a 80% drop in fatalities with current technologies? No (possibly) pie-in-the-sky tech needed. Perhaps there could be benefits to autonomous vehicles (AVs), but mass traffic fatalities can be reduced now if the actual desire is there, e.g., Hoboken, New Jersey, has had zero traffic deaths over the last seven years: * https://apnews.com/article/hoboken-zero-traffic-deaths-daylighting-pedestrian-safety-007dec67706c1c09129da1436a3d9762 https://apnews.com/article/hoboken-zero-traffic-deaths-dayli...

mitthrowaway2 2y ago

This dismissal doesn't do justice to the content of the video. There are a lot of other points made, including: - Self driving cars are not a pipe-dream, the tech is developing and will be in every city in the future, this can't be ignored - There is a real danger that they will destroy the fabric of our cities - They will increase, not decrease, the number of cars on the road and the use of road space - As cars shift electric, gas taxes will be less effective at "charging for usage" of road space, and other means will be necessary, or else AVs will treat the cost of occupying road space as zero, and circle endlessly. - Despite hype that AVs won't need parking space, they will, because people will still want to own private cars and need to park them, and robotaxis will compete for response times and so will need to stay available close to high-demand areas - As AV companies gain adoption and become more available, city design may warp such that AVs may even become required to use roads or get around at all. There's a strong potential for the AV industry to lobby for changes to road infrastructure to favor AVs, including banning human-driven vehicles and increasing speed limits or removing them altogether. This may even go to the point of fencing off streets from pedestrians, because otherwise it would be too easy for people to step in front of vehicles (forcing them to brake). This is not unprecedented based on how quickly the auto industry reshaped laws, standards, and infrastructure to favor automobiles in the 20th century. - AV companies are likely to spread American driving practices and road culture to other countries, because AV tech is mostly developed in the US. - AVs may make it more difficult for cities and countries to update road rules, because of the burden it would put on AV companies to keep up with rule changes, and AV companies might successfully lobby against this. Cities will come under pressure to become more uniformly like Phoenix AZ, in order to be more AV-friendly, rather than AV companies putting in the work to localize their tech to work in every city. - There is a risk that AVs will displace other forms of public transit which are better for the environment, for pedestrians, for land use, and for the surrounding areas - By reducing the perceived cost of spending time in traffic, AVs will encourage people to commute longer distances, resulting in more traffic, infrastructure costs, and emissions overall - The AV lobby has suggested that AVs help mobility-impaired people, but public transit and walkable streets would help these people better than AVs would It's a long video, but I do think there are a lot of points that are worth deeply thinking about, especially for anyone here who might be involved in developing this technology.

fragmede 2y ago

> self-driving cars are just cheaper taxis. From a business perspective, why on Earth would you price it dramatically cheaper? Especially when you have to recoup R&D costs, need to show investors a profit, customers have already shown a willingness to pay market price, and maintenance on the cars and the in-car customer service agents isn't free? And we see that today in the app - Waymo is often more expensive that Lyft or Uber.

mitthrowaway2 2y ago
In the long run, if there is competition, it should drive down costs. If the sensors / compute hardware / software costs more than the labor of a human driver then self-driving vehicles won't be viable, but the bet these companies are making is that it will, and in the long run, those costs will be amortized. And if the costs of offering a robotaxi service are lower than a human-taxi service, and if AVs are not a monopoly, then the price will eventually end up cheaper as well.

dkobia 2y ago

I too normally like this channel but a few minutes in and it started to sound whiny. Encouraging “coning” was pretty low. It is starting to become pretty obvious that the many benefits of progress in this area overwhelm minor grievances.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mcv 2y ago
> Encouraging “coning” was pretty low. Not at all. It's a great yet simple demonstration of how these cars have no idea about the complexities of traffic situations.

mcv 2y ago

> He says it himself: self-driving cars are just cheaper taxis. That's not what he's saying, that's what he's refuting. When taxis are driven by different people competing against each other, taxis are cheap. When they're controlled by a single tech company that controls the entire market, they'll cost as much as the tech company can get away with. But he makes a lot of other good points too; that it will mean even more cars on the road.

panick21_ 2y ago

Talk about not actually listening. You are scratching the surface ignoring everything else in the video. > zero attention when humans do them all the time Literally his whole channel is about the problems with humans. This one video is about AVs. That it doesn't get more headlines in general is part of the problem. The more important point that you ignore, is that we already know how to make things much saver. > and self-driving cars don't suddenly fix that (something which was never promised or expected?) Except the companies and all the fans who constantly claim that self driving will be better then all public transport and solve future urban problems. To say that nobody makes such claims is just a strange ignoring of reality. And you again, ignore the deeper point that self-driving cars reenforce these problems and potentially make things worse. > - whenever you mention reducing millions of human-caused traffic fatalities, use a sarcastic tone of voice Not sure what your point here is. The point of the video, partly is that we can already reduce the traffic deaths by far cheaper means then AV and nobody cares about that. So all these claims about the amazing benefits (that hasn't been delivered) is mostly just hiding that what these companies really want is profit and the politicians want campaign benefits from these companies, rather then improve safety in the city. Again, the point being that AV as currently sold and advertised re-enforce existing problems, rather then solve them. > He says it himself: self-driving cars are just cheaper taxis. He didn't say that. He said, 'at best they are cheaper taxis', but at worst the have many non-beneficial impacts on society. And more important, there are simply better solutions.