cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/18626085
Do you imagine these self driving cars are not owned by individuals, and go off to some dedicated place when not in use? That’s marginally better than "everyone owns their own car that spends most of the time idle. I try to ride a bike here in the city and there’s so much space given up to cars parked on the street.
It sounds grotesquely inefficient to have a car pick up guy 1 and drive him to the train, a car pick up his neighbor guy 2 and drive him to the train, a car pick up the guy on their corner and drive him to the station. Which I guess is what we’re doing today, except the cars get parked at both ends idle all day. So maybe it would be an improvement.
But it can’t be the end-state. We should still be working towards denser, walkable, living spaces. I don’t want to continue with the idea that the suburbs are ok.
Cars being parked idle all day isn’t necessarily going to be a bad thing, most Vehicles self driving out there are EV’s and even if it’s a standard combustion, those have migrated over to an engine off when stopped ideology where it just doesn’t run until someone presses the gas. It wouldn’t be infeasible for the company’s developing the technology to have an electronic climate control system that just auto-offs when there isn’t a passenger in the seat, a sensor that would be a hard requirement for a self-driving vehicle anyway. Which means that it’s very likely that the vehicle could even if it was a combustion engine be idle for extended period of time without it taking up too much more resources.
That being said I do believe that electric vehicles would be the optimal vehicle for this, as the only thing it would need to do when it didn’t have an order would be have the radio transmitter on which shouldn’t take all that much electricity which means it shouldn’t drain the battery and furthermore there could be designated charging stations that the car can idle at near these population hotspots like described.
You have to remember as well that once Society transitions to a system that’s like that, there is going to be people that don’t bother having vehicles themselves so I believe that there’s going to be more space freed than space used by doing this change
Cars being parked idle all day isn’t necessarily going to be a bad thing,
My complaint specifically was about cars parked on the street where I’d rather have a bike lane, wider sidewalk, outdoor dining, or almost anything else other than a parked car taking up that space.
Yeah but specifically they usually would have been parked in a designated parking area due to the fact that they would need to charge in between uses as well so it’s unlikely that those Vehicles would be parked on the sidewalk like standard consumer vehicles are
I’m team Waymo. They seem to be the leaders and to be following a path I most agree with. Basically and taxi model like uber except Waymo owns the cars.
I still follow /r/waymo and /r/selfdrivingcars on reddit if you fancy reading more.
Currently people drive all the way to the destination and all the way back. If taxis funnelled them to trains that is a huge improvement if nothing else. And like you say parking gets freed up and that land can be used for more density, more parks and more cycling without losing roads then all good. (Roads should be reduced I’m just saying politically it will be easier to turn an unused carpark into a park than to turn a road into a park).
It terms of cost. I think that will be a huge boom for the economy. High milage, electric cars fueled by cheap renewables is going to make upfront costs non existent and lower per milage costs. That will increase riders verses personal cars.
Then I think that will cause a higher density per car. Ride sharing with uber works but it isn’t great. The more people that use it the higher likelihood you have of people going to the same area so the time cost of ride sharing will decrease as usage increases. The UK actually experimented with on demand buses (Demand Responsive Transport) which I really liked but the uptake hasn’t been as good as hoped. Think this will be more common.
All these factors I believe will make walking/cycling/ trains safer and more accessible and allow for more infrastructure and better cost per rider.
But it can’t be the end-state. We should still be working towards denser, walkable, living spaces. I don’t want to continue with the idea that the suburbs are ok.
I agree but the political will isn’t there. Getting rid of parking and a lane here or there is achievable on the current trajectory. Once that’s done, I hope more change like you mention comes.
But it’s also the built it and they will come factor. Who wants more cyclists? People that cycle. If the self driving car makes more cyclist more people will want more cycling. I’m really hoping for a self feeding cycle grown from the self driving car.
That seems… Fine, on a skim. Plausible.
But like… are we sure we come out ahead spending decades on machine vision and self driving versus just having more human taxi drivers, and spending the money on the end goals we actually want?
I guess that’s a shit job, driving taxis at weird times and places, and doesn’t scale super well. But machine vision and self driving seems to be a decades long project.
Related: I’m not really comfortable with critical infrastructure (eg: transit) being privately owned and operated. So that might be a problem.
Though the political will being absent for anything good remains a problem, too.
But like… are we sure we come out ahead spending decades on machine vision and self driving versus just having more human taxi drivers, and spending the money on the end goals we actually want?
Human driving cost is forever. A self driving programme cost is for today only.
The money has been spent. Waymo is operating without a driver in Phoenix, LA and San Francisco.
Ultimately it’s private money. No public money is being spent on it. The government can (and should) invest in public transport also. But how alphabet spends their money isn’t up to the government.
Anything can be nationalised.
