Comment by xyst | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xyst | Hacker News Reader

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Should just abandon the fully automated self driving venture, especially in crowded urban areas.

Waymo cars have a shit ton of sensors, cameras, audio sensors, dedicated battery, cpu, cooling systems. Yet even that system is not perfect. Requires a human behind the wheel.

Let’s not forget the Cruise debacle. Tesla system is just a straight up disaster. That system is not worth the price tag.

Stop investing in cars. Let’s reinvest in the urban core, rollback the terrible car infrastructure that has invaded this country, and put significant federal/state/local dollars into public infrastructure and redesign of cities.

I traveled to NYC recently and using the public transportation system was amazing. No need to rent a car. Every destination was accessible by train/subway, ferry, or can rent an e-bike or walk there.

The only thing terrible about NYC was… the cars. Taxis and ride share drivers frequently running lights, blocking the intersections, or blocking the streets for emergency vehicles or commercial drivers. The noise pollution was mostly from drivers honking (whoever invented ANC, thanks bro).

Cars contributed heavily to the poor air quality as well. Tail pipe pollution. Noise pollution. Tire wear pollutants. Brake dust pollution. It was worse than the human contributed aspects.

End the trillions of dollars (indirectly and directly) given to building suburbs.

Waymo’s model is already safer than human driving alone, and I see the requirement for the human behind the wheel as being more a symptom of human irrationality than Waymo’s deficits. Tesla is a boondoggle and yet it’s hard for me to not see them being in a much better position ten years from now than they are today. I think the potential value self-driving is massive though, just because of the potential of cars driving with nobody inside them at all opening up a massive rental/ride-share/taxi market. That’s not oppositional to a world with public transit, that’s complementary, it’s a world where less people need to own cars and a high wattage EV hookup.

I do generally agree though that the electric car is not the future, more likely we will see much higher usage of cheaper more efficient technologies that don’t require special charging infrastructure like e-bikes in the consumer market. I think things like electric commercial vehicles are more interesting. You aren’t going to transport pianos or logs on the subway.

Endless densification has its own problems, especially considering it may not even be viable to densify somewhere as much as New York which has ideal conditions for building both ports and skyscrapers. New York itself is famously expensive. I’ve used public transit in suburban areas beyond the point most would find reasonable, there are tons of edge cases which can triple travel time compared to a car, and getting rid of those edge cases is outrageously expensive and non-viable. Although one thing that would make it far more viable is drumroll self-driving, as all public transit infrastructure becomes cheaper without the need for drivers.

None of the waymos I've been in had a human behind the wheel.

There was still a wheel, I assume as a cheaper-than-a-tow-truck for if it runs into certain issues, and waymo wants to turn the self driving off til it gets to the shop

This is just poor anti car attitude infecting actual judgement of the technology.

Waymo doesn't require a human behind the wheel. They roam all over metro Phoenix without drivers and without issues.

Tesla FSD works fine with appropriate monitoring on city streets and virtually autonomously on freeway driving. Comma and open pilot aren't far behind.

The US is built for cars and thinking that is going to change is a pipedream.

This... People really do love to latch onto a few select loud voices in the media with alternative motives to bash things like waymo and tesla... I've had FSD for 3 years now and its infinitely better than it was and the issues i have with it oddly aren't FSD's fault theyre the manually calculated things like navigation... navigation is 100% non AI driven and its the main issue with path finding for the FSD currently.

The actual driving day to day i'm in FSD almost 90% of the time, without issues 99.5% of the time, everywhere i go doing 400-800 miles a week, and the few issues i have when in AP tend to be nav telling the car its turn is earlier than it is, or it being a bit more cautious than i want it to be but thats preference not a fault of FSD.

> Stop investing in cars. Let’s reinvest in the urban core, rollback the terrible car infrastructure that has invaded this country, and put significant federal/state/local dollars into public infrastructure and redesign of cities.

What do you want to do, demolish entire metro areas? It’s not like the suburbs are in the cities. How do you address the fact that retrofitting public transport has proven to be astronomically expensive?

Ending the massive subsidies for cars and pollution would go a long way. Most cities have huge amounts of space dedicated to subsidized car travel and storage, simply asking drivers to pay for what they use would go a long way towards improving the balance, as would removing legal requirements for continued subsidy. In the United States, even a bar owner who doesn’t want to encourage DUIs is still usually required to subsidize driving.

Much of the cost to transit and active transportation projects is often also car-related as those projects are forced into complicated engineering challenges to avoid taking any space from driving. If you want to roll out transit easily in almost any North American city, converting a single street parking lane into a dedicated bus lane is very cheap, and the revenues from less-subsidized off-street parking will pay for much of it.

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