8 ms·

The comments here are rather disappointing. It doesn't have manual controls? Well thats the point! I want to leave my crap in it and paint it some ugly color? G

The comments here are rather disappointing. It doesn't have manual controls? Well thats the point! I want to leave my crap in it and paint it some ugly color? Get with the times, young people already opt to not own cars. I can't double park in the city? Why are you imposing your steel box on people living in cities, many of which do not own cars and want walkable streets? I mean, this is the news website for a startup accelerator. If you are on here, have some appreciation for new ways of doing things. To disrupt the status quo is the very goal. If you ask for perfection from day one, we will never get anywhere. These cars have the potential to massively reduce traffic fatalities (one of the biggest remaining killers) and make cities useful again to the people that actually live in them.

pc86 12y ago
Is a car parked on a street really an imposition on you?
- e98cuenc 12y ago
  It is (indirectly) to me. I often visit the US, and I'm always amazed that I can't seem to go anywhere walking. The distances to go anywhere are huge. It seems to be that way because cities in the US where designed / build with cars in mind. In Europe cities were obviously not build with cars in mind, and as a result I enjoy here a much higher density of amenities (and suffer much worse driving conditions / parking time). Having all this space available for cars is not transparent to pedestrians.
  - Touche 12y ago
    > It is (indirectly) to me. I often visit the US, and I'm always amazed that I can't seem to go anywhere walking. The distances to go anywhere are huge. It seems to be that way because cities in the US where designed / build with cars in mind. Huh, why would you think that? I'm not sure there's a major city in the U.S. that wasn't already a major city pre-car. And cities weren't redesigned post-car, that's why a lot of them have road problems. U.S. cities are spread out because of suburbanization. It's only going to increase as the workforce becomes more remote-based.
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      > I'm not sure there's a major city in the U.S. that wasn't already a major city pre-car. Los Angeles. Possibly more. > And cities weren't redesigned post-car, that's why a lot of them have road problems. Sure they were. Not from scratch, but incrementally. Its true that because it was incremental and not ground-up, and mostly affected new development and re-development, that cities that were major cities pre-car (like NYC) look very different than newer cities (Los Angeles). > U.S. cities are spread out because of suburbanization. "Suburbanization" is an effect, not a cause. Designing for cars is a (but not the only) cause.
    - apendleton 12y ago
      New York City is the most obvious example, but most large east-coast cities were large pre-car. And many cities made major infrastructural changes in light of the car, mostly in the form of the addition of elevated highways, some of which are now being torn out again because of their negative effects on neighborhood continuity, urban fabric, etc. Examples of the former would include the I-395 underpass/mixing bowl into DC and chunk of I-5 that separates downtown Seattle from Capitol Hill, and examples of the latter include the ripping out of the Embarcadero freeway in San Francisco and (likely) the Alaska Way viaduct, also in Seattle.
    - ijk 12y ago
      Note, however, that suburbanization is a post-car phenomenon.
    - josephlord 12y ago
      Las Vegas. I know it isn't a typical case but it is definitely pedestrian unfriendly and largely if not entirely developed post-car. Edit: Even along the strip itself it is hard to take a direct line and you need to go over bridges etc. Walking from the main part of the strip e.g. Bellagio to the convention centre is only a couple of miles but is a pretty unpleasant walk. Whether it is better than waiting for a bus/taxi from CES probably depends on the condition of your feet and the shoes you are wearing. I do understand that in the Summer it would be a pretty unappealing walking any distance at all.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
- prawn 12y ago
  (I say this as someone who drives to work each day and parks on the street.) Yes, think about the space taken up by parking, and the visual barrier it presents. There's a shopping and restaurant strip between me and my office. The shop owners campaign for maximum street parking for the convenience of their customers, on top of the side-street and off-street parking behind most of their buildings. Yet at almost all hours, the entire strip is lined on both sides with cars to the point that anyone passing can't easily see shop windows, foot traffic, the social proof of people eating in a popular restaurant, etc. You just drive on through because it lacks appeal. Think about a shopping centre and how open-air parking means that the complex takes up a huge amount of space and sets it all back so far from the road for anyone walking. If we took out parking allocations (or went with undercroft parking) and collapsed cities or filled in those areas with more "living" spaces, I think the result would be more appealing. Blocks could be more lively or smaller and more walkable. There's some interesting stuff about parking here: http://www.cato-unbound.org/2011/04/04/donald-shoup/free-parking-or-free-markets http://www.cato-unbound.org/2011/04/04/donald-shoup/free-par...
- revelation 12y ago
  Real estate in most cities is extremely expensive. Now consider all the space we give away for free so people can momentarily store their cars. Some people have realized the extreme bargain this is: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/08/nyregion/a-rent-free-place-if-you-can-find-a-spot-to-park.html http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/08/nyregion/a-rent-free-place...
- lars512 12y ago
  A whole lane for parked cars each side of a street often means no dedicated lanes for public transit like buses or trams. Letting them get stuck in traffic is a huge loss for the many people that commute on them.
- apendleton 12y ago
  Assuming this is an actual rather than rhetorical question, I'd recommend Donald Shoup's The High Cost of Free Parking: http://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Parking-Updated-Edition/dp/193236496X http://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Parking-Updated-Edition/dp/1...
m0nty 12y ago
> The comments here are rather disappointing. Most of them remind me of Clifford Stoll's famous rant: http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirvana-185306 http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirva... "This new thing isn't like the old thing, so it could never work."
- nahname 12y ago
  >The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works. Sure called that wrong.
  - bicknergseng 12y ago
    No kidding... change.org such a letdown.
- danielweber 12y ago
  Stoll was one of the first to hop on the Internet bandwagon, and he thought he could get lucky twice by hopping off the fad before it became passe. As for the crazy from the other side, read anything by Nicholas Negroponte at the same time. A lot of young people, especially young hackers, think like authors of science fiction novels, where there is some grand society that they have designed, and how everything is happy. Why don't people get on board? First, they don't trust you to be right about all the trade-offs. This mistrust only increases when you tell them to get with the times; it's clear distaste for their preferences, so it only signals that you don't value their input. Second, even if your new society model is better, you have to get people to use it. And if the way you transition is "everyone give up your old thing, then we will all move to the new thing, trust me," they will do the opposite of trust you. Self-driving cars are a very nice transition, because no one is forcing them into use. You can have one if you want. You can hear your friend talking about how useful they are. You can try it out, and if you don't like it you don't have to use it. "No one owns a car" is not a nice transition, no matter how awesome you think it is in the latest novel you read about able-bodied and pretty 20-somethings. Public transportation really sucks in a lot of places precisely because making public transportation awesome gets less priority than a bunch of other things, like demanding that people get to bring their pets or bikes on board, or the homeless people using it as a place to sleep. You can make a very good case that social justice requires letting the homeless sleep on the buses. That's fine. It may even be the right call. But it means that no one else will want to use the buses. (NYC has cops every block to keep the homeless moving along, and their public transport is pretty nice.) Buses could be awesome, if they were managed like Google buses. I would love to take one of those to work. But look at all the grief they get from the left. Grand ideas for re-imagining society will face opposition from places you would never have imagined.
usaphp 12y ago
> young people already opt to not own cars. Really? Any study on this matter?
- melling 12y ago
  Yes. This has been discussed on the Internet quite a bit. Not sure if exact reason has been determined. I'm not young but I sold my car years ago because it's expensive, inconvenient, and seldom used where I now live on the US east coast. Here's one article, you can Google hundreds more. http://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/5-reasons-young-people-are-not-buying-cars-or-getting-their-drivers-license/#!Rl3Lx http://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/5-reasons-young-people-are...
  - Touche 12y ago
    I would love to see an actual study on this. There are only a few cities in the U.S. where public transportation is good enough to get by without one and while those are typically big cities they aren't big enough to compensate for the number of cities with poor public transportation.
    - cylinder 12y ago
      I came from a car-dependent city to NYC, which is one of those cities where being car-free is less of a hassle than owning a car. However, I still want a car. No, I do not want to have one car for each person in my family. No, I do not want a massive SUV. No, I don't want to commute by car (hate traffic). I want a simple hatchback or wagon that I can use on weekends to haul stuff, I want to be able to drive to the beach or the mountains whenever I want. Renting / sharing isn't the answer. ZipCar sucks, to be frank, and is too expensive. Renting from the majors in NYC is a complete nightmare and is prohibitively expensive. No, I'm not going to use Uber or Lyft to get my groceries or go to Home Depot or to take a road trip. This is why cars will never disappear. The solution is self-driving cars. Cars are a menace when operated by humans. Reducing the danger, traffic problems, and parking issue with cars is the answer, not removing them entirely (although I do support banning them in dense urban areas and business districts -- people can always park on the outskirts and take transit in).
gambiting 12y ago
Are you saying that if my opinions are unlike yours, then I should not be visiting HN, or even voice my opinions? Not everyone on HN is from the US - US has a massive car problem, because Americans had a very strong car culture for 7 decades now - so for them, not having a car is "new". I come from a country where 25 years ago pretty much no one had a car, because you had to have a permission from the government to own one, and even if you did, there was a 5 year wait to be allowed to purchase it. For us, having a car and embracing the car culture is "new". Not having cars is a sign of the older, poorer country, which we want to have little to do with now. For me personally, driving is like the second favourite activity I do during the day, even if it's just going to work. I dread the day when self-driving cars become mandatory - I will be incredibly unhappy and I do not want that to happen anytime soon. Is it ok to voice my opinion here? Or will you tell me that I should go away from the "startup accelerator; new way of doing things" website that I have grown to love? Can you not like both startups AND cars? Is that too complicated?
- revelation 12y ago
  This isn't even about cars (self driving or not) per se. It's about someone doing something different and all the comments amounting to this isn't how I'm used to things working, and I don't like change anyway. As Elon Musk puts it, you can't necessarily ask people what they want because the answers will be incremental updates to the status quo. Since you insisted on cars: the short answer is that theres lots of evidence humans can't drive cars. It goes well 99.9% of the time and the rest ends up being 30000 people dead every year, many of them not in a car at their death. So they died for somebody elses convenience, and that turns out to be a rather common occurence with cars and all the things they bring along (just look for the free parking debate below). So the sentiment in countries that have had cars for a long a time and have seen the effects of that is shifting to no longer put up with it, certainly in cities where suburbia descends every morning.
  - ijk 12y ago
    > 30000 people dead every year, It's worse than that: the annual global estimates are 1.2 million dead, 50 million injured. [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_motor_vehicle_collisions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_motor_vehicle_c...
samstave 12y ago
While I do love this and think it is going to mae for a fantastic future, why wait also, for this and ignore fixing two of the biggest blights in the SFBay area; train and bus service. BART is a cancer, Caltrain and Amtrak have service schedules designed by morons and make, I think, literally TWO farking connections to BART. There is a hell of a lot of improvement that could be done to fix public transportation in addition to working on this.
kevando 12y ago
> this is the news website for a startup accelerator. Something people forget waay too often..
hippee-lee 12y ago
What about driving for fun? Please note, fun has no correlation to speed when it comes to driving.
- sanderjd 12y ago
  I suspect people who like to drive for fun will continue doing so, and that eventually it will be a fairly uncommon novelty, like horseback riding.
  - hippee-lee 12y ago
    It's funny you should mention horseback riding as the fun driving I was thinking of involves driving a a truck with a horse trailer attached to it. :-)

pc86 12y ago

Is a car parked on a street really an imposition on you?

e98cuenc 12y ago
It is (indirectly) to me. I often visit the US, and I'm always amazed that I can't seem to go anywhere walking. The distances to go anywhere are huge. It seems to be that way because cities in the US where designed / build with cars in mind. In Europe cities were obviously not build with cars in mind, and as a result I enjoy here a much higher density of amenities (and suffer much worse driving conditions / parking time). Having all this space available for cars is not transparent to pedestrians.
- Touche 12y ago
  > It is (indirectly) to me. I often visit the US, and I'm always amazed that I can't seem to go anywhere walking. The distances to go anywhere are huge. It seems to be that way because cities in the US where designed / build with cars in mind. Huh, why would you think that? I'm not sure there's a major city in the U.S. that wasn't already a major city pre-car. And cities weren't redesigned post-car, that's why a lot of them have road problems. U.S. cities are spread out because of suburbanization. It's only going to increase as the workforce becomes more remote-based.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > I'm not sure there's a major city in the U.S. that wasn't already a major city pre-car. Los Angeles. Possibly more. > And cities weren't redesigned post-car, that's why a lot of them have road problems. Sure they were. Not from scratch, but incrementally. Its true that because it was incremental and not ground-up, and mostly affected new development and re-development, that cities that were major cities pre-car (like NYC) look very different than newer cities (Los Angeles). > U.S. cities are spread out because of suburbanization. "Suburbanization" is an effect, not a cause. Designing for cars is a (but not the only) cause.
  - apendleton 12y ago
    New York City is the most obvious example, but most large east-coast cities were large pre-car. And many cities made major infrastructural changes in light of the car, mostly in the form of the addition of elevated highways, some of which are now being torn out again because of their negative effects on neighborhood continuity, urban fabric, etc. Examples of the former would include the I-395 underpass/mixing bowl into DC and chunk of I-5 that separates downtown Seattle from Capitol Hill, and examples of the latter include the ripping out of the Embarcadero freeway in San Francisco and (likely) the Alaska Way viaduct, also in Seattle.
  - ijk 12y ago
    Note, however, that suburbanization is a post-car phenomenon.
  - josephlord 12y ago
    Las Vegas. I know it isn't a typical case but it is definitely pedestrian unfriendly and largely if not entirely developed post-car. Edit: Even along the strip itself it is hard to take a direct line and you need to go over bridges etc. Walking from the main part of the strip e.g. Bellagio to the convention centre is only a couple of miles but is a pretty unpleasant walk. Whether it is better than waiting for a bus/taxi from CES probably depends on the condition of your feet and the shoes you are wearing. I do understand that in the Summer it would be a pretty unappealing walking any distance at all.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
prawn 12y ago
(I say this as someone who drives to work each day and parks on the street.) Yes, think about the space taken up by parking, and the visual barrier it presents. There's a shopping and restaurant strip between me and my office. The shop owners campaign for maximum street parking for the convenience of their customers, on top of the side-street and off-street parking behind most of their buildings. Yet at almost all hours, the entire strip is lined on both sides with cars to the point that anyone passing can't easily see shop windows, foot traffic, the social proof of people eating in a popular restaurant, etc. You just drive on through because it lacks appeal. Think about a shopping centre and how open-air parking means that the complex takes up a huge amount of space and sets it all back so far from the road for anyone walking. If we took out parking allocations (or went with undercroft parking) and collapsed cities or filled in those areas with more "living" spaces, I think the result would be more appealing. Blocks could be more lively or smaller and more walkable. There's some interesting stuff about parking here: http://www.cato-unbound.org/2011/04/04/donald-shoup/free-parking-or-free-markets http://www.cato-unbound.org/2011/04/04/donald-shoup/free-par...
revelation 12y ago
Real estate in most cities is extremely expensive. Now consider all the space we give away for free so people can momentarily store their cars. Some people have realized the extreme bargain this is: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/08/nyregion/a-rent-free-place-if-you-can-find-a-spot-to-park.html http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/08/nyregion/a-rent-free-place...
lars512 12y ago
A whole lane for parked cars each side of a street often means no dedicated lanes for public transit like buses or trams. Letting them get stuck in traffic is a huge loss for the many people that commute on them.
apendleton 12y ago
Assuming this is an actual rather than rhetorical question, I'd recommend Donald Shoup's The High Cost of Free Parking: http://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Parking-Updated-Edition/dp/193236496X http://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Parking-Updated-Edition/dp/1...

m0nty 12y ago

> The comments here are rather disappointing. Most of them remind me of Clifford Stoll's famous rant: http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirvana-185306 http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirva... "This new thing isn't like the old thing, so it could never work."

nahname 12y ago
>The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works. Sure called that wrong.
- bicknergseng 12y ago
  No kidding... change.org such a letdown.
danielweber 12y ago
Stoll was one of the first to hop on the Internet bandwagon, and he thought he could get lucky twice by hopping off the fad before it became passe. As for the crazy from the other side, read anything by Nicholas Negroponte at the same time. A lot of young people, especially young hackers, think like authors of science fiction novels, where there is some grand society that they have designed, and how everything is happy. Why don't people get on board? First, they don't trust you to be right about all the trade-offs. This mistrust only increases when you tell them to get with the times; it's clear distaste for their preferences, so it only signals that you don't value their input. Second, even if your new society model is better, you have to get people to use it. And if the way you transition is "everyone give up your old thing, then we will all move to the new thing, trust me," they will do the opposite of trust you. Self-driving cars are a very nice transition, because no one is forcing them into use. You can have one if you want. You can hear your friend talking about how useful they are. You can try it out, and if you don't like it you don't have to use it. "No one owns a car" is not a nice transition, no matter how awesome you think it is in the latest novel you read about able-bodied and pretty 20-somethings. Public transportation really sucks in a lot of places precisely because making public transportation awesome gets less priority than a bunch of other things, like demanding that people get to bring their pets or bikes on board, or the homeless people using it as a place to sleep. You can make a very good case that social justice requires letting the homeless sleep on the buses. That's fine. It may even be the right call. But it means that no one else will want to use the buses. (NYC has cops every block to keep the homeless moving along, and their public transport is pretty nice.) Buses could be awesome, if they were managed like Google buses. I would love to take one of those to work. But look at all the grief they get from the left. Grand ideas for re-imagining society will face opposition from places you would never have imagined.

usaphp 12y ago

> young people already opt to not own cars. Really? Any study on this matter?

melling 12y ago
Yes. This has been discussed on the Internet quite a bit. Not sure if exact reason has been determined. I'm not young but I sold my car years ago because it's expensive, inconvenient, and seldom used where I now live on the US east coast. Here's one article, you can Google hundreds more. http://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/5-reasons-young-people-are-not-buying-cars-or-getting-their-drivers-license/#!Rl3Lx http://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/5-reasons-young-people-are...
- Touche 12y ago
  I would love to see an actual study on this. There are only a few cities in the U.S. where public transportation is good enough to get by without one and while those are typically big cities they aren't big enough to compensate for the number of cities with poor public transportation.
  - cylinder 12y ago
    I came from a car-dependent city to NYC, which is one of those cities where being car-free is less of a hassle than owning a car. However, I still want a car. No, I do not want to have one car for each person in my family. No, I do not want a massive SUV. No, I don't want to commute by car (hate traffic). I want a simple hatchback or wagon that I can use on weekends to haul stuff, I want to be able to drive to the beach or the mountains whenever I want. Renting / sharing isn't the answer. ZipCar sucks, to be frank, and is too expensive. Renting from the majors in NYC is a complete nightmare and is prohibitively expensive. No, I'm not going to use Uber or Lyft to get my groceries or go to Home Depot or to take a road trip. This is why cars will never disappear. The solution is self-driving cars. Cars are a menace when operated by humans. Reducing the danger, traffic problems, and parking issue with cars is the answer, not removing them entirely (although I do support banning them in dense urban areas and business districts -- people can always park on the outskirts and take transit in).

gambiting 12y ago

Are you saying that if my opinions are unlike yours, then I should not be visiting HN, or even voice my opinions? Not everyone on HN is from the US - US has a massive car problem, because Americans had a very strong car culture for 7 decades now - so for them, not having a car is "new". I come from a country where 25 years ago pretty much no one had a car, because you had to have a permission from the government to own one, and even if you did, there was a 5 year wait to be allowed to purchase it. For us, having a car and embracing the car culture is "new". Not having cars is a sign of the older, poorer country, which we want to have little to do with now. For me personally, driving is like the second favourite activity I do during the day, even if it's just going to work. I dread the day when self-driving cars become mandatory - I will be incredibly unhappy and I do not want that to happen anytime soon. Is it ok to voice my opinion here? Or will you tell me that I should go away from the "startup accelerator; new way of doing things" website that I have grown to love? Can you not like both startups AND cars? Is that too complicated?

revelation 12y ago
This isn't even about cars (self driving or not) per se. It's about someone doing something different and all the comments amounting to this isn't how I'm used to things working, and I don't like change anyway. As Elon Musk puts it, you can't necessarily ask people what they want because the answers will be incremental updates to the status quo. Since you insisted on cars: the short answer is that theres lots of evidence humans can't drive cars. It goes well 99.9% of the time and the rest ends up being 30000 people dead every year, many of them not in a car at their death. So they died for somebody elses convenience, and that turns out to be a rather common occurence with cars and all the things they bring along (just look for the free parking debate below). So the sentiment in countries that have had cars for a long a time and have seen the effects of that is shifting to no longer put up with it, certainly in cities where suburbia descends every morning.
- ijk 12y ago
  > 30000 people dead every year, It's worse than that: the annual global estimates are 1.2 million dead, 50 million injured. [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_motor_vehicle_collisions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_motor_vehicle_c...

samstave 12y ago

While I do love this and think it is going to mae for a fantastic future, why wait also, for this and ignore fixing two of the biggest blights in the SFBay area; train and bus service. BART is a cancer, Caltrain and Amtrak have service schedules designed by morons and make, I think, literally TWO farking connections to BART. There is a hell of a lot of improvement that could be done to fix public transportation in addition to working on this.

kevando 12y ago

> this is the news website for a startup accelerator. Something people forget waay too often..

hippee-lee 12y ago

What about driving for fun? Please note, fun has no correlation to speed when it comes to driving.

sanderjd 12y ago
I suspect people who like to drive for fun will continue doing so, and that eventually it will be a fairly uncommon novelty, like horseback riding.
- hippee-lee 12y ago
  It's funny you should mention horseback riding as the fun driving I was thinking of involves driving a a truck with a horse trailer attached to it. :-)