Comment by codyb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by codyb | Hacker News Reader

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I'm very much looking forward to the future of transportation. Here in NYC traffic can be awful. And of course the smell of the gas, vehicle fatalities, lack of parking, and the emissions which cause increased rates of cancer near toll free bridges and heavily trafficked roads are ever present.

Autonomous electric vehicles can offer a solution to all of those issues and they can also allow this city to reclaim a tremendous amount of the space currently used to park vehicles which are just sitting and doing nothing. I like to imagine more bike lanes, more trees, wider sidewalks, and trash piles farther from pedestrians. Ahh, and with air so clean, it shall be a wonderful new beginning for the city if it is executed properly and implemented well with a focus on improving pedestrian life.

A technology like this could mean that autonomous cars would rarely have to leave the road, making them even more useful. Perhaps here in NYC it could just be main drags which can wirelessly recharge the vehicles as they drive over.

As a side note, if they kept the roads green like in the concept picture, that'd be awesome too.

Is there really a measurable increase in cancer rates at toll free bridges versus tolled bridges?

I've heard it before (with a map). I'm having trouble locating that same map but I suppose it'd be possible to come to a conclusion based on a map of high traffic areas in NYC and the rates of cancer using the cancer maps provided by NYS [0].

Unfortunately, I'm at work so that 30 minutes isn't readily available at the moment.

[0] - https://apps.health.ny.gov/statistics/cancer/environmental_f...

It still doesn't solve the problem that private vehicles require n times more space than a fleet of busses or bicycles.

Perhaps people will decide that the flexibility and comfort of private vehicles, especially in a context like the one described where they create much less noise and pollution, is worth them taking up a little more space.

It's easy to fall into the trap of deciding that buses/bicycles are somehow morally better (or worse) than private cars. This is not so -- we should dispassionately judge the tradeoffs instead, ideally with an eye towards allowing individual people to make the choices that fit their needs best.

Electric cars still cost energy (i.e. coal and associated emissions) and private vehicle ownership costs space. If space is at a premium, then your parking space makes the city a little less livable for everyone else. If your power source isn't wind, solar, or nuclear, your emissions are just a few miles outside the city instead of in your tailpipe.

And perhaps the ability to go wherever you want, whenever you want, in comfort, as opposed to having to wait for a bus or ride a bicycle in the snow, is worth more to the people in the aggregate than a little extra space saved by not parking cars. You're assuming everyone has the same preferences that you do.

(And anyway, since we're talking autonomous vehicles here, you could park them together in central locations and then even the space argument mostly goes away.)

Well This is more an ethical problem. Yes, I agree I much rather sit in my car and go wherever I want. But the amoubt of energy required to do this (producing, operating and disposing of the car, and maintaining streets, managing accidents etc.) seems out of proportion, and can't possibly the right of every living person on a planet with 8-10 billion people. And you just have to look at European cities to see that transit can be the more convenient option when space for streets is limited. E.g. i'm living close to a soccer stadium that has no parking lot. Hard to imagine in the US. But the city is criss-crossed wirh subway lines, and it ishence often the fastest way to get to a destination. Then the argument for cars breaks down.

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