this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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This is why I personally am looking forward to fully self-driving cars. Weβre a long way off, but when self-driving cars can completely replace the human element, I think the world will be a much safer place.
This is short-sighted. We need to entirely divert away from using cars as our primary mode of transportation.
Now there's an unpopular opinion
'just' 49β¬, and that's the problem.
What are you talking about, that is cheap in regards to monthly transportation costs.
That all sounds very German, lol. I'm mostly just speaking from my America-centric perspective. It would be nice to have reduced road traffic here and make riding more fun, but a lot of the people that support public transit typically hate motorcycles just as much as they hate cars so I feel like I have to oppose them even though I don't own a car myself.
Because if there's one thing everybody needs, it's to either triple their daily commute or live in a pod.
Cars are popular for a reason.
Naa, I think self driving cars will fix most of the negatives of cars.
How about spacial inefficiency? A car only carries 1-6 people compared to a train which carries dozens or even hundreds. Or a bus which carries dozens.
Explain to me how self-driving cars will fix that
Traffic and parking are the biggest issue i see with cars and space efficiency. Both can be significantly improved on with self driving. Especially if most people opt for public ownership of cars and not private. Something think will become more popular as self driving takes over and lowers the cost of taking the self driving equivalent of a taxi or Uber.
By the way i think self driving cars will make trains more popular. As trains suck at first and last mile transportation. Self driving solves the first and last mile issues.
If we're going to opt for public ownership then why would you choose the less efficient single passenger method over already-established public infrastructure like trains and trams and buses which have been proven to work well in other countries?
Also please elaborate on how self driving cars will improve parking issues. And as for traffic, while self-driving cars will be less likely to cause accidents and jams, hundreds of independent low-capacity vehicles are in no way more effective than a single locomotive carrying those hundreds of people in a smaller space.
You're allowed to like self-driving cars, but buses and trains are objectively more efficient in the large scale and all you have to do is acknowledge that. The more people realize this, the more room there is for us to make progress
Simple we have already chosen cars in the US. It is far easier to use the existing roads to our advantage then try and redesign the entire country to fit a train and tram and bus model.
In a public car the car will drop people off and drive away to pick up other people. There would be no need parking at all. Just a small drop off and pickup location.
Now this won't work as well if we are talking about private ownership cars, but it would be better as the car can drop you off and then drive to a centralized parking location. This would remove the need for street parking or parking lots next to restaurants and stores. Or if your planning to stay a long time for exmaple if your going to work for 8 hours. I think many people might want rent out their car during the day. Car drops me off at work and I tell the car to join the "public car" network for 8 hours and it can go find some people to transport.
Oh sure it won't be as effective but it will be much better then what we have now. And there are benefits cars have over trains. For example after a the world pandemic scare I find traveling in my own space a much more pleasant experience then sharing with many other people. Also I really like listening to music in a car as full volume very enjoyable experience that you just can't do on a public train :). A car will be a single vehicle to my destination, I can get in a fall asleep if I want. Buses and trains are usually multiple vehicles and you need to be some what alert to know when your stop is.
what you say makes sense, not saying you're completely wrong, but your whole argument is based off the fact that we have already chosen cars. But simply doubling down on a worse solution just puts us deeper in to the hole, instead of making the more difficult decision of redirecting some of our massive amounts of GDP in to larger scale projects (yknow instead of wasting billions on military spending & corporate bailouts) such as making the investment into the development of a proper rail network BESIDE our existing infrastructure, like china has done for example. (not supporting china but it is true that they have made massive progress in public transportation across a country equally large as ours, in a relatively very short time)
I just have no confidences in the US to make a national rail system. Every attempt it seems to have failed dismally for some reason or another.
Every other country that has succeeded in making a mass rail system is an order of magnitude smaller than the US.
Or just a good public transportation system, really. I would never drive if I could take a bus to every place I need to go.
On the flip side Iβm worried about manufacturers realizing that the continuous revenue stream from autonomous vehicles is more profitable than selling vehicles outright thereby increasing the cost of buying a vehicle to the point where ownership becomes functionally obsolete except to the ultra-wealthy. This also makes it much easier to restrict the movement of people. Self driving car companies could easily disable the ability to travel to entire areas either because they say theyβre too dangerous or not profitable enough to operate in. I can imagine entire cities and rural areas becoming ghost towns. While personally I think autonomous vehicles, in a vacuum, have the potential to save countless lives, the reality is that in time we will be giving the companies making these vehicles the ability to dictate where we can and cannot go.
I think this is spot on.
Adding onto this, city driving is just... different, in a way that I think a human element is always going to be needed. Sometimes you need to take a risky left, or cut across the double yellow lines into the other lane past someone, or run a yellow. Are these things unsafe? Of course. But when it's rush hour you have to be a dick just to get through it sometimes. In 2016, Uber built and tested their self-driving cars in my city of Pittsburgh, because we notoriously have some of the worst and most confusing spaghetti messes of roads in the country. They stopped whenever a car struck and killed someone. I rode in one one time because I was just tryin to call an Uber for a concert, and since it couldn't go on the highway it took the worst way through downtown, and got stuck at a red light for over 5 minutes because the car was waiting to take a left, and everyone was going around us and not giving us a break.
Also, all these new cars with their auto-correcting features scare the shit out of me. What happens when you go across the double yellow to go around someone riding a bicycle and it swerves you back into their lane?
You could call these bugs to be worked out but I feel infinitely safer when I'm the one doing the driving. In a perfect world maybe our infrastructure and transport would've been planned differently but I swear half the roads around here are based on deer trails or something, winding through crazy hills in the woods. I've heard self-driving cars do best on roads specially designed for them. We can't even get the city to fix our thousands of potholes, or crumbling infrastructure. We had a major bridge collapse a couple years ago, and the way it was rated during inspections was pretty close to the other ones around here. So how on earth are self-driving car roads going to be put in?
That's probably going to happen with or without self-driving.