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What I find most interesting in this pushback against cars and suburbs is just how temporary the criticisms of them are. We are on the verge of having self dr

What I find most interesting in this pushback against cars and suburbs is just how temporary the criticisms of them are. We are on the verge of having self driving electric cars and most of the complaints about suburb life will seem silly.

pavlov 12y ago
If you had written "helicopters" instead of "self driving electric cars", this post could be from 1950.
- mason240 12y ago
  A fair point, but I think we are way beyond Popular Science projections at this point.
  - marssaxman 12y ago
    Helicopters actually exist. Self-driving cars are still nothing more than research prototypes.
    - ghaff 12y ago
      I assume he meant in the sense of flying personal aircraft as helicopters were widely used in the 1950s. But I agree with your broader point. A lot of people aren't distinguishing the yawning distance between being able to operate on the highway with a backup driver ready to take over control and being able to operate just about anyplace, handle changes that aren't on a map, in any kind of weather, etc. even if there isn't a human inside the vehicle. I watched a recent video with John Leonard speaking at CMU and he had some interesting video showing some of the things he had to handle over the course of just a couple of weeks commuting. (Cops directing traffic around an accident, snow, left hand turn into heavy traffic, sun glare that made it hard to see a pedestrian or a light.) He makes the case that these are really hard problems that aren't anywhere close to being solved.
      - marssaxman 12y ago
        I was clearly too terse; the point I had in mind was that those Popular Science handwavings about the glories of the imminent personal-aviation future were actually more realistic than the current crop of handwavings about the glories of the imminent robot car future, because working commercially-available helicopters actually existed during the '50s-era personal-aviation hype. The engineering problems had been solved, so the leap of imagination only had to cross the safety issues and regulatory challenges - which, of course, ultimately proved intractable. With robot cars, in the year 2015, the imagination must jump even further, because there is no robot car industry yet; all we have are prototypes. Maybe those prototypes will become real products and maybe they won't; maybe those products will make it through all the non-technical hurdles necessary to make them a success, and maybe they won't. In any case, the people expecting robot cars to have a significant effect on our transportation infrastructure in a mere ten or fifteen years are being wildly optimistic, and the people who claim that we can stop investing in trains and buses because ubiquitous googlemobiles are just around the corner are... well, I'll be polite and stop talking about them.
        ghaff 12y ago
        I fully agree. We're probably pretty close to having a lot of essentially convenience autopilot functions--however we decide to allow those to be phased in. (And however they're actually used.) But the "significant effects" require something more along the lines of robo-Uber and that's multiple decades out. It's worth noting that we already have "self-driving" cars. They just have organic computers as drivers. And you see quite a few of them--especially in Asian cities where there's a large wage gap.
    - shard972 12y ago
      Do u even news, elon musk is pushing through an update in Q3 that will upgrade my car to a self-driving car.
lacksconfidence 12y ago
I'm not sure that self driving cars will solve the expense problem. Cars are incredibly expensive to buy, insure, drive and maintain. Sure self driving cabs will make some dent in the expense, but I'm not sure it will be cheap enough to make sense taking a self-driving cab to work five days a week.
- VLM 12y ago
  "but I'm not sure it will be cheap enough to make sense taking a self-driving cab to work five days a week." Take into account the economic bifurcation of the country, we have no shortage of (wasted) potential really cheap human drivers. A world where a cab driver is a middle class job is probably too expensive to take a cab everywhere unless you're in the higher upper class. But if there's only 100M jobs for 300M+ hungry people, no problem creating a permanent underclass living in misery to drive the few remaining middle class to work, until their jobs go away too.
Tiktaalik 12y ago
Self driving electric cars will have little effect on traffic congestion. If the region is completely car-centric in its design, with a weak public transit system, you'll still have traffic jams and lengthly commutes. The only difference is that the single people in the cars can look at their phone instead of looking at the bumper infant of them.
- prawn 12y ago
  One thing that might help is a significant reduction in street parking. The two-lane road (one each direction) I take to work has parking each side. Each may become another lane for cars or bike lanes once the need for parking starts to be eliminated. The four-lane alternative to work has two lanes set aside for parking. In that case, I suspect they'll put light rail down the middle and retain two lanes each side. I think price and convenience will mean that more people car-pool in automated ride-sharing services too.
- marssaxman 12y ago
  I'm not a fan of bumper infants, personally - prefer to keep the squishy mini-humans inside the car - but I can understand why some people might adopt that solution... ;-) More seriously, am I really the only person who can't stare at a phone in stop-and-go traffic without starting to feel motion-sick? Every time the robot car fantasy comes up people talk about how great it will be to sit around reading the whole time, and I just think - no, I'll be sitting there with nothing to do, and that sounds awful.
- forgotpasswd3x 12y ago
  > Self driving electric cars will have little effect on traffic congestion. Are you sure? It seems like it would definitely have a decent impact on traffic in certain situations, like those traffic jams that are only caused by people slowing down too early and speeding up too late, compressing the traffic. I believe a lot of problems of traffic could be fixed with self-driving cars, especially if they worked together. Certainly you'll never make certain cities free of traffic congestion, but I think a lot could be done in smaller cities and suburbs.

pavlov 12y ago

If you had written "helicopters" instead of "self driving electric cars", this post could be from 1950.

mason240 12y ago
A fair point, but I think we are way beyond Popular Science projections at this point.
- marssaxman 12y ago
  Helicopters actually exist. Self-driving cars are still nothing more than research prototypes.
  - ghaff 12y ago
    I assume he meant in the sense of flying personal aircraft as helicopters were widely used in the 1950s. But I agree with your broader point. A lot of people aren't distinguishing the yawning distance between being able to operate on the highway with a backup driver ready to take over control and being able to operate just about anyplace, handle changes that aren't on a map, in any kind of weather, etc. even if there isn't a human inside the vehicle. I watched a recent video with John Leonard speaking at CMU and he had some interesting video showing some of the things he had to handle over the course of just a couple of weeks commuting. (Cops directing traffic around an accident, snow, left hand turn into heavy traffic, sun glare that made it hard to see a pedestrian or a light.) He makes the case that these are really hard problems that aren't anywhere close to being solved.
    - marssaxman 12y ago
      I was clearly too terse; the point I had in mind was that those Popular Science handwavings about the glories of the imminent personal-aviation future were actually more realistic than the current crop of handwavings about the glories of the imminent robot car future, because working commercially-available helicopters actually existed during the '50s-era personal-aviation hype. The engineering problems had been solved, so the leap of imagination only had to cross the safety issues and regulatory challenges - which, of course, ultimately proved intractable. With robot cars, in the year 2015, the imagination must jump even further, because there is no robot car industry yet; all we have are prototypes. Maybe those prototypes will become real products and maybe they won't; maybe those products will make it through all the non-technical hurdles necessary to make them a success, and maybe they won't. In any case, the people expecting robot cars to have a significant effect on our transportation infrastructure in a mere ten or fifteen years are being wildly optimistic, and the people who claim that we can stop investing in trains and buses because ubiquitous googlemobiles are just around the corner are... well, I'll be polite and stop talking about them.
      - ghaff 12y ago
        I fully agree. We're probably pretty close to having a lot of essentially convenience autopilot functions--however we decide to allow those to be phased in. (And however they're actually used.) But the "significant effects" require something more along the lines of robo-Uber and that's multiple decades out. It's worth noting that we already have "self-driving" cars. They just have organic computers as drivers. And you see quite a few of them--especially in Asian cities where there's a large wage gap.
  - shard972 12y ago
    Do u even news, elon musk is pushing through an update in Q3 that will upgrade my car to a self-driving car.

lacksconfidence 12y ago

I'm not sure that self driving cars will solve the expense problem. Cars are incredibly expensive to buy, insure, drive and maintain. Sure self driving cabs will make some dent in the expense, but I'm not sure it will be cheap enough to make sense taking a self-driving cab to work five days a week.

VLM 12y ago
"but I'm not sure it will be cheap enough to make sense taking a self-driving cab to work five days a week." Take into account the economic bifurcation of the country, we have no shortage of (wasted) potential really cheap human drivers. A world where a cab driver is a middle class job is probably too expensive to take a cab everywhere unless you're in the higher upper class. But if there's only 100M jobs for 300M+ hungry people, no problem creating a permanent underclass living in misery to drive the few remaining middle class to work, until their jobs go away too.

Tiktaalik 12y ago

Self driving electric cars will have little effect on traffic congestion. If the region is completely car-centric in its design, with a weak public transit system, you'll still have traffic jams and lengthly commutes. The only difference is that the single people in the cars can look at their phone instead of looking at the bumper infant of them.

prawn 12y ago
One thing that might help is a significant reduction in street parking. The two-lane road (one each direction) I take to work has parking each side. Each may become another lane for cars or bike lanes once the need for parking starts to be eliminated. The four-lane alternative to work has two lanes set aside for parking. In that case, I suspect they'll put light rail down the middle and retain two lanes each side. I think price and convenience will mean that more people car-pool in automated ride-sharing services too.
marssaxman 12y ago
I'm not a fan of bumper infants, personally - prefer to keep the squishy mini-humans inside the car - but I can understand why some people might adopt that solution... ;-) More seriously, am I really the only person who can't stare at a phone in stop-and-go traffic without starting to feel motion-sick? Every time the robot car fantasy comes up people talk about how great it will be to sit around reading the whole time, and I just think - no, I'll be sitting there with nothing to do, and that sounds awful.
forgotpasswd3x 12y ago
> Self driving electric cars will have little effect on traffic congestion. Are you sure? It seems like it would definitely have a decent impact on traffic in certain situations, like those traffic jams that are only caused by people slowing down too early and speeding up too late, compressing the traffic. I believe a lot of problems of traffic could be fixed with self-driving cars, especially if they worked together. Certainly you'll never make certain cities free of traffic congestion, but I think a lot could be done in smaller cities and suburbs.