Comment by black_puppydog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by black_puppydog | Hacker News Reader

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As someone who kinda-somewhat understands this tech (vision/ML person by training but not automotive) I find watching the self-driving progress to be cool tech, but really a solution in search of a problem.

For me, the problem with cars is that we have too damn many of them.

And making cars better is not gonna make there be fewer cars, at least not at scale. Yes, there might be some secondary effects from self-driving cars being available on-demand in a fleet, and then you don't need your own car anymore, so you're overall less likely to take a car except when you really need to. The same argument also applies pretty much the same way to Uber though, just with potentially with a slightly higher price tag because you have to pay the driver. And do we see decreased car ownership through market entry of Uber?

In the end, cars are a problem for many reasons. Pollution (at usage time for IC, at production for EV), noise, accidents, the unspeakable hell-scape that is car-centric suburbia, loss of public space for humans, you name it. Having to actually drive them is not one of the problems besides safety. There should be fewer cars in total. Which would also largely cover the safety issues.

So that's why the self-driving future for me is... kinda irrelevant really. Yes, the cars we will still have in the future might be cooler if they're self-driving, and I hope they are. But I don't get what all the fuss is about, really.

This is not to offend anyone here of course; I get it. It is cool tech.

The reason why there are so many cars is because people find them convenient and there are many objective benefits to owning a car compared to whatever you propose (sharing cars or public transport).

You personally might not find these benefits useful, or they might not outweigh the disadvantages (which BTW are subjective). But every person is different.

But the reason we find them convenient is that, at least in most of the US, cities are built for cars. Before cars became common, Los Angeles was zoned for higher density and had trolleys that extended all the way into the city's NE reaches. Same goes for São Paulo, the largest city in the Americas. In the case of SP—which is still way serviceable via public transit than LA—an urban planner/mayor built a series of radial avenues & encouraged people to move out of the city center to its new peripheries. That, plus other "improvements," cut the population density of the center by at least 50%, and exacerbated patterns of residential segregation that began after abolition.

This is all to say that cars aren't solely a matter of personal choice. Car culture was been imposed on us by urban planners with tremendous power. For more on this, even in NYC, see the introduction to Robert Caro's Pulitzer Prize-winning book on Robert Moses.

> But the reason we find them convenient is that, at least in most of the US, cities are built for cars.

A subtly better way to frame this is to say that American cities were destroyed for cars. Streetcar tracks were ripped up. Roads were widened at the expense of sidewalk. Neighborhoods were demolished and replaced with parking lots, freeways, and car dealerships. Many municipalities stopped maintaining their core inner cities and bet the house on big-box stores on the outskirts. It cost hundreds of billions of dollars collectively to subsidize the car in the U.S., which had the side effect of cannibalizing passenger rail and metropolitan transit, as well as building places that are prohibitively dangerous to cycle or walk in.

One illuminating exercise is to find photos of Houston from the 1920s and compare them to the 1970s. You would think that someone had carpet-bombed the city.

I live in a city that is awful for cars (Buenos Aires) and has kind of serviceable public transport (it's the method of transport for most people). Yet people that can afford to own a car will do so. And they'll use it whenever the situation allows it (mostly pparking related).

Remember that owning a car doesn't ban you from using the subway or whatever if it's a better choice for that trip.

And public transport will never have the privacy that a car has. Comfortable heated seats. Setting the AC to your liking. Blasting your music. Having a quiet conversation with your partner. Not worrying about others people COVID or whatever. People selling you stuff or crazy in general. Leaving from your driveway and arriving at the destination's doorway. Which is a big deal if it's raining, if you're with your elderly parent, if your carrying something heavy, etc. And if you're a nocturnal beast like me, cars are so much better in general.

BTW I much preferred living in LA when I lived there, to the few stays I had in NYC Manhattan, and to Buenos Aires.

To solve a wide variety of problems we face we really should suck up to it and bare some minor inconveniences. Especially regarding climate change.

Living in a walkable city is extremely convenient. I would much prefer to do so than drive. For short trips parking is a significant time sink that's not necessary with other modes of transportation.

However that ship has largely sailed in North America so you're not wrong. Given the pattern of city planning we're stuck with cars are not going to be replaced any time soon.

Yes and no. They are very convenient in most of the built environment we have in the US (I’d go further and say they’re _necessary_). But we can also build environments where they’re not needed, or even a nuisance for the owner.

There’s a reason most New Yorkers don’t drive.

I think ideal progression would be:

1st step: Everybody have their own cars and drive them manually (current situation, too many cars)

2nd step: Minority of the private individuals now own self driving cars (next step)

3rd step: Majority of the private individuals now own self driving cars. (almost all cars are self driving now!)

4th step: Commercial entities enter the self driving car sharing market as an option to privately owning a car, you pay for a subscription and have access to a fleet of cars.

5th step: People stop buying cars and the only cars on the road are owned by commercial entities, which can be rented at will.

5th step would be ideal, as this also eliminates the need of parking spaces within the city! Whenever their services are not needed, the autonomous cars can just navigate to a parking facility/hangar in the outskirts of the city. The amount of cars on the streets can be increased and decreased at will.

>For me, the problem with cars is that we have too damn many of them.

have you sold (to the wreckers for scrap value obviously, otherwise it would still contribute to the problem ) yours yet?

have never owned one. yes, I'm a city dweller. I get it, that's easy here. In a very walkable european city on top of that.

yes, I know what it's like in the countryside. i come from a village in germany. very difficult there without a car. the point is that it could be much, much better.

Well, the reason you have so many of them is because the cars are dumb and need to be linked to a specific "smart" operator. Thus everyone who needs go places also needs to have a car, a 1:1 mapping. If you move the smarts to the car, then you can change the ratio.

But isn't this public transit? Yes and no. Public transit solves this ratio by at the cost of transfers and fixed lines and lack of comfort. Only autonomous EVs can have the rider to driver ratio of public transit, but the point to point and seating comfort of cars. Autonomous EVs can work with cities as they are, not as a minority would wish them to be.

The problem isn’t so much the total number of cars overall (although that’s a problem) but the number of cars _in use_ at any one time. It’s not really solvable to have individual cars once you reach a certain density, you simply don’t have room for everyone. Density has lots of advantages, so it emerges nonetheless, leaving you in a bind.

Well, public transit solves this by having the vast majority of riders stand and pack very tightly during these times. No reason you can't be cramped into autonomous EVs, other than people don't want to do that.

This is the issue with comparing transit to cars - the amazing capacity numbers touted by eg subways are based on great rider discomfort.

The total number of cars is still a problem - they take up street parking, they require large parking structures to store during the day, etc, etc. You should think of autonomous EVs as red blood cells - constantly circulating and carrying useful loads everywhere, not sitting idle 90 percent of the time.

Public transit will always be able to fit more people per space taken (in use and otherwise), so any problem with being packed like sardines will be multiplied tenfold in autonomous EVs.

It’s 100% possible to run service often enough that people aren’t packed, even during rush hour. Some of that is by automating subways so they run every minute and closer together all day long. That’s a solved problem though, thankfully, so it’s simply a political problem not an engineering/space constraint one like autonomous individual cars.

Automated subways are just autonomous cars that work in a highly constrained environment. Ie, this is that Tesla and Boring Co are attempting to build. The difference between tunnels and streets is the complexity of the environment.

Let's step back and deconstruct the train. A typical LRT car has 5 segments, 50 seats and a total capacity of 250. At rush hour, this train will come every 5 minutes. What if instead, each segment came once per minute? What if instead every 6 seconds a five person vehicle rolled by? The throughput would be the same. With 5 people per vehicle instead of 250, it is highly unlikely that it needs to stop at every stop, so as long as you have a separate loading/unloading zone you can get transit capacity, seating for everyone, less waiting etc. THAT is your autonomous EVs based transit system.

The reason you can't do this with drivers is because the costs of running 50 vehicles instead of one train are astronomically higher, because you need all those extra drivers. Saying it's "political" is correct, but a misdirection. Nobody is gonna pay for such a setup.

> Automated subways are just autonomous cars that work in a highly constrained environment. Ie, this is that Tesla and Boring Co are attempting to build. The difference between tunnels and streets is the complexity of the environment.

No, they’re really not, just like trains aren’t just cars that operate in constrained environments. They have a number of advantages, including feasibility, max speed, efficiency.

The main reason I know this is a poor comparison is that they are already in use in many countries (and they look nothing like cramped tunnels with traffic jams).

> A typical LRT car has 5 segments, 50 seats and a total capacity of 250.

The Paris metro has two automated lines, one built that way and one retrofitted. The retrofitted line, line 1, uses cars with capacity for 722 people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP_05 (by comparison, an NYC train can carry around 2,000 people, they are longer).

During rush hour, they have headway of 3 minutes (I’ve seen less in other subway systems, as little as 1m30, indeed it looks like line 14 has an 85 second minimum headway for safety).

> What if instead every 6 seconds a five person vehicle rolled by?

You’re going to struggle to embark in 6 seconds. If we solve that problem (with magical thinking or otherwise), subways are even more advantageous, since that’s where they waste tons of time!

> it is highly unlikely that it needs to stop at every stop, so as long as you have a separate loading/unloading zone you can get transit capacity, seating for everyone, less waiting etc. THAT is your autonomous EVs based transit system.

Turns out tons of people go to the same small set of stations, so you’re going to have a large problem embarking and disembarking in the given space. Same with time, everyone wants to move around at the same time.

Again, this is a solved engineering problem, there’s no need for train-like-but-not-as-good transit autonomous individual EVs.

Have you looked at the density of 5 person cars vs a 50 person bus? The bus is certainly not 10 times as long, cars don't scale (let's not even talk about the fact that people feel much less comfortable with sitting in a car with 4 strangers than sitting on a bus with 50). Funny you mention Musks tunnel venture, there are videos of traffic jams in the Las Vegas tunnel, even though the shouldn't occur.

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