ten years have passed and we’re still being sold the fantasy of self-driving cars instead of getting on with building far better transit and bike lanes. i’m so tired of it all.
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I guess that is the point of self driving vehicles, to prevent investment in public transport like it seems to be the point of those fusion start ups to prevent investments in renewable energy
Notice the “people” sketched in at them periphery. Still.
Why do the fever dreams of the Silicon Valley tech bro billionaires so strongly look like a cross between HG Wells and Le Corbusier, only just not as good?
For some people, it's easier to imagine a world where self driving cars from 70s futurist pop science magazines exist than actually funding existing competent mass transit solutions. It's like people watching a elevator and thinking "we should replace that with 25 paternosters"
Because there's no grounded discussion about the reality of achieving level-five self-driving vehicles. No one wants to admit that we need a computer equivalent to the human brain to make it work safely and reliably.
It's difficult to make money from pedestrians, so the plan is clearly just to ignore them and hope they go away, or better still, from a tech bro point of view, get run over, at which point you *can* make money from them.
I remember my excitement for Uber; they got big as I finished uni, and I would’ve killed to work for them.
your book was brilliantly confronting: a sobering personal reminder of how seductive-yet-destructive tech can be when we fail to scrutinise their offerings.
I thought you guys were sav when you kicked out the real Elon Biden X to blue skies , I saw you Van ECk down by the river probably should of not went towards with old Twitter team tweet tweet @washingtonpost.com
I've got a great idea! Let's connect a bunch of robo-pods that can carry multiple people and put a powerful engine on the front and build them their own track they can run on at high speed and call it, I dunno, a "bullet train" maybe?
Every time my local government asks for comments on transportation I give them an earful on how poorly they run public transport and that all the road projects in the world won't fix things. I just want functional transit 😭
The only question anyone needs to ask these guys is, "Are YOU going to pay the taxes required to replace, redesign, and rebuild every road?" The cricket chirping silence will be your reward
We can do both? I would guess that most people working on self-driving cars aren't the same people who would best navigate the politics of huge infrastructure projects.
These people just can’t get their head around the idea that buses and trains are good, actually, and we should just invest more in them. It’s infuriating.
Yes, please. So sick of pandering to these Jetson wet dreams when our cities are choked with traffic and you can't get there from here on most of our mass transit.
Watching a UK film set in the '50s tonight and was jealous that they could just hop on and hop off trains and, like, GET PLACES.
The math for each station to replace i.e. a subway station doesn't add up. You'd have to have huge areas and lots of lines to connect people with pods.
Ironically, I think that unless they manage to build automated buses I won't be buying anything about self-driving cars. At least automated buses in dedicated BRT lanes.
The author is famous for breaking the law to keep people from using the (public by state law) beach in front of his mansion and being willing to take it to SCOTUS just to buy (admittedly a lot of) time.
Yeah, there called trams and subways and trains. We are shackled by the car and oil industry here in the states. We need serious high speed rail and better public transport. And yes, lanes for bikes.
I think most people living in the birbs just don’t want to travel with the riffraff. In a big city it’s hard not to. There is also the problem of getting someplace now b/c of consumerism. BUT, it would cut back on the need for a car for each person in a house.That should be the goal in the moment.
Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could invest in an entirely new transportation infrastructure that had programmable transport pods that joined up with main thoroughfare “podtrains” to more efficiently move people from one point to another?
Self-driving cars do exist, and a relatively small number of people are already using them on demand like rideshare apps. But, unsurprisingly, they don’t actually solve anything whatsoever as far as transit is concerned. They’re essentially just a cool party trick.
They are a pretty cool party trick, and I hope to ride in one someday. But it’s no better environmentally than a human-driven single occupancy vehicle, and does nothing to alleviate traffic congestion. It’s just cool. That’s it.
Of course, they do also have the potential to make private vehicles more accessible to people who are unable to drive… but not if they’re only available as an alternative to rideshares, where they are no more accessible than vehicles with human drivers.
we could theoretically automate train travel, but it's not worth it. cars are many orders of magnitude more difficult and orders of magnitude more still more pointless to attempt to autopilot.
With all due respect, what part of the world are you from? Fully automated driverless metro trains already exist, right now, today, in many parts of the world.
The Sydney M1 Metro has driverless trains and is fully autonomous. It runs every 4 minutes during peak hour, and every 10 mins offpeak and on weekends, at speeds of over 100 kph under Sydney Harbour.
Yes. It’s great. While I we can’t even get rail less than 100ks away from Sydney to connect major regional centres. No choice but to drive. Yay Sydney.
As an example the distance between two of my specialists is over 100k’s. With no choice but to drive. I wish politicians would realise that people are choosing Sydney because the rest of NSW is a service desert. Upgrade services and people will follow.
‘Fully automated’ is never really a thing because you need humans in the loop making executive functions for many forms of externalities, ie someone is watching the tracks, ‘largely automated’ where by and large humans don’t have to jump in is fairly ubiquitous (japan is a perfect example).
In many automated MRT system they're pretty much attendance or conductor who oversees train operation. No one's actually driving the train. And tbh I prefer having someone in charge who can intervene as a safety barrier. Someone sitting in CTC room far away might have no idea what they're seeing
And the fact this can only be done in very limited, controlled situations, with remote monitoring, demonstrates exactly how far away we are from safely putting driverless cars on open road networks, mixing with pedestrians and/or human-driven vehicles. We can't do intercity trains, let alone cars...
The whole spiel was about much easier it is to automate trains (which we have done) vs cars (where attempts are routinely injuring/killing pedestrians and drivers alike). I’ll always appreciate seeing more trains because they are just superior to cars for transit and quality of life of passengers.
Idk about thousand kms long trains, but in Santiago (Chile) we do have some Metro lines with autopilot.
For what it's worth too, it's faster than traveling in car.
Paris metro I think has driverless trains as well, about a decade of operation. They seem to be ok.
Glasgow has just introduced them on the underground too.
don't we already in some places, automate trains to be on autopilot between stations, and conductors only take over when the trains get close to a station?
We have driverless metro trains in our city going every 4 mins. They’re incredible but I don’t get the point of driverless - I’d rather have a human operating the thing, with common sense etc. Driverless transport just means more people out of work - I don’t get why silicon v is obsessed with it.
On mainline? Closed systems such as metros are much, much easier. Not to mention easy to get to if there is an accident. If an intercity train needs evacuation 10 km from the nearest big road you need staff already on the train.
I love how even in the stupid “Dream scenario” image accompanying the article there are zero crosswalks or bridges..how is a pod person to get from one side to the other here??
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Why do the fever dreams of the Silicon Valley tech bro billionaires so strongly look like a cross between HG Wells and Le Corbusier, only just not as good?
your book was brilliantly confronting: a sobering personal reminder of how seductive-yet-destructive tech can be when we fail to scrutinise their offerings.
you’ve shifted my whole outlook.
Robotaxis, on the hand, are a great way to extract more wealth.
Plus, they allow the rich to not have to mix with the poor, which is a side benefit.
Especially frustrating when the correct solution is in place in many places but somehow is not available to us.
Watching a UK film set in the '50s tonight and was jealous that they could just hop on and hop off trains and, like, GET PLACES.
We still live in a pseudo feudalist society where the top of the hierarchy dictates what is and isn't fashionable to desire.
Y'know, THEM. Those.. OTHERS.
The ones with the funny clothing and weird ideas about what constitutes 'food'.
Cream sauce on lutefisk? What kind of madness is that?
What are they at peak? Every 30 seconds? Or slower because it takes time to load them?
Basically, they're so frequent, there's not enough time for a huge peak hour crowd to build up.
Kids in love sitting at the front window, where the driver's compartment would normally be.
If you want to be really pedantic then yes, the trains are remotely monitored and can intervene remotely if something goes really awry.
But. (1/2)
Which you can do in a controlled environment (most of it is on either tunnels or viaducts).
Design features, like platform screen doors, minimise the number of unexpected events as well.
Nothing theoretical about it. Many cities around the world — Singapore, Sydney, Paris, Vancouver — have automated driverless metro trains right now.
For what it's worth too, it's faster than traveling in car.
Glasgow has just introduced them on the underground too.
STOP TRYING TO PUT US PODS I DONT WANT TO RIDE AROUND IN A FVCKING POD
that's a BUS. they're talking about BUSES.
So you don't have to frightened of hearing strange music or somebody's crying baby, etc.
No odd stops because other people don't have to get out of the pod, just you.
Everyone knows pods are futuristic, duh.