Submitted by AdmiralKurita t3_yuuf17 in Futurology
rodchenko t1_iwbl5br wrote
Reply to comment by AdmiralKurita in Waymo’s driverless taxis keep making incremental progress, while others flounder by AdmiralKurita
Driverless cars may be "a" future, but they're not "the" future. A much better future would be one with efficient public transport and cities that are safe for walking and bike riding. Given the increasing rate of urbanisation, moving people around cities in cars is extremely inefficient, and autonomous vehicles don't change that.
Exel0n t1_iwbpvj2 wrote
the average car spent like 90% of the time parked. a AV is active most of the time. average human-driven car are way way more wasteful of resources than AV.
Boxofcookies1001 t1_iwbqmnn wrote
Yeah autonomous vehicles won't lower overall emissions but it will increase the efficiency of car usage and space utilization.
Now if they move to electric AVs this will be a huge game changer.
noitstoolate t1_iwbww9h wrote
Which seems like a no brainier if this is a business. EVs are both cheaper to operate and cheaper to maintain. Assuming the break even time is less than the service life of the vehicle, it would be a good business move to go to electric.
Unshkblefaith t1_iwcfr26 wrote
They would only improve space utilization in terms of parking. You still need the roadways, which are more problematic in terms of space, maintenance, and walkability of cities. Then you also need to account for the increased production and maintenance costs associated with replacing parts like this and drivetrain components on vehicles that are active for most of the day.
Unshkblefaith t1_iwce7yu wrote
Increasing the up-time isn't necessarily a good thing. That just increases energy usage and wear on wearable parts like tires, drive trains, etc. Cars aren't just inefficient because of down time. Hell parking is only one of their space considerations. Roadways are a significantly more important space consideration in which low- occupant cars are highly inefficient. This is because roadways replace walkable areas for pedestrian traffic.
rodchenko t1_iwg4u6e wrote
Can you imagine trying to walk around a city with millions of autonomous cars constantly driving around?? Horrible! Like you say, there's the tire wear (and that rubber doesn't just disappear), but also the noise. I can't think of a future I'd like to live in less.
The alternative; an efficient underground metro, trams and buses, safe bike and walking, it would be so peaceful and lovely!
rodchenko t1_iwg4h68 wrote
So a fleet of driverless cars constantly driving around a city... How do humans exist outside of a car in this situation, with constant traffic flow? Also, how many cars per citizen, on average? Let's say a city of 5 million people, are there 2.5 million cars constantly driving around??
akmalhot t1_iwbn8cu wrote
It's it's all autonomous, yes it will
rodchenko t1_iwdhemk wrote
It doesn't change the basic geometry of a car. If you want to move X million people in a city by car then you need space for that many cars. They don't fit.
Architechno27 t1_iwe4nqy wrote
But everyone wouldn’t own their own car and ideally they could drive bumper to bumper like a train. So way less space when human error and spacing is removed.
intentionalfuture t1_iwfpp6w wrote
You need to apply some critical thinking to these industry driven narratives. No one is going to redesign our whole infrastructure for a second best solution. If we get to point where society is capable of that kind of coordination we might as well rely on public transport and make our cities walkable.
rodchenko t1_iwfq4mo wrote
thank you! Honestly this idea that autonomy will save us from traffic by making traffic more "efficient", such bullshit!
oiseauvert989 t1_iwg9a6w wrote
Bumper to bumper is a myth told to people who desperately want automation to solve congestion but we already know it won't.
This isn't a problem limited by automated systems. This is a problem limited by the physics of all the moving parts including tyres and breaks.
Paris metro line 14 is full automated and breaks in perfect timing every time but it needs 60 seconds between trains anyway. It has a reaction time of zero seconds but still needs 60 seconds between trains because of physics. For cars this time might be less than 60 seconds because they are smaller but added together it adds up to very large spaces between vehicles.
That will not change at any point in our lives. An automated car would actually make congestion worse because it makes additional journeys while empty every time the destination from journey1 doesnt line up exactly with the start of journey2. Realistically most people in sprawling locations will buy their own so it probably wont solve parking either.
The solutions to these problems involve re-allocating space away from roads and parking. That's where the really exciting changes are happening.
PoliteThaiBeep t1_iwc3vhc wrote
Public transportation is too centralized. It's efficient to move large masses of people all at once long distances - like a plane, long distance train or medium distance bus. But last mile transportation nothing beats small vehicles like cars.
With carpooling in mind self driving cars are the most efficient way for transportation for distances 50 or below miles. It has a potential to be like 5 cents a mile with self-driving EV's
Urbanization is at it's all time peak right now as more and more opportunities for remote work open up to people.
Which means people are moving away from ultra expensive urban areas to inexpensive areas away from urban centers.
Excessive centralization around urban centers was a nessessary evil when there was no way to do things other than moving your physical self to do things. It is already changing rapidly accelerated by pandemic.
oiseauvert989 t1_iwgbclo wrote
It was supposed to change due to the pandemic. That prediction turned out to be wrong though. The pandemic made a much smaller than expected change.
In the last couple of years I learned that urbanisation hasn't been knocked off it's long term path and if Covid couldn't do it, probably nothing will. 2 years ago I expected something quite different. I think one of the reasons was that many rural and suburban places were hit hard by Covid. If rural areas had escaped Covid, then I think the effect would have been stronger. Remote work changed a lot of thing but this aspect is turning out to be a much smaller and shorter lived change than I expected.
PoliteThaiBeep t1_iwggp8k wrote
Really? I was saying that people would move away from cities for years and it was very slow before the pandemic, but the pandemic blew up my best expectations out of the water.
I never expected this mass exodus, certainly not at this rate (I am talking about San Francisco for example) even though I did expect people to move away from metro areas, but I expected slow gradual transition not massive shift like what is happening.
oiseauvert989 t1_iwgiqyk wrote
Yeh SF isnt really representative of most cities in that sense. Even there, the only year with a significant drop was January 2020 to January 2021. SF has big barriers to building houses which creates all kinds of problems.
Some cities will stagnate, some cities will grow strongly but no cities are heading for big population drops except for places like Japan where the whole country is disappearing. Even there it is the rural areas that are becoming depopulated first. That is a much stronger trend over all and we are going to see much more of it in a lot of countries.
Well, we wont see it in person because we wont actually bother to visit those places but statistically it will be recorded more and more.
rixtil41 t1_iwcucch wrote
Your missing the point any robot or machine that is capable of navigating in a dynamic environment is very important.
flossypants t1_iwfpa4i wrote
Autonomy is helpful for all transit scales. When I see an essentially empty bus go by, I shudder at the waste. Other times, I cannot use public transit because they stop running to avoid travelling below a reasonable capacity. More frequently, public transport cannot handle first and last mile because it's inefficient. Transport must handle all these problems and the solution is likely a mix of higher- and lower-capacity vehicles working together. A "car" may drive you to a be picked up by a "van" and, for longer trips or during rush hour, on to a "bus", and then, as you get close to your destination, back to a "van" and a "car". There may be less need for large transfer stations and instead they'll be distributed so dynamic inter-vehicle transfers can happen almost anywhere with minimum wait between dropoff and pickup.
The complexity of having all these vehicles work together so dynamically is beyond human capacity, hence the need for an integrated system with extensive autonomy. Yes, a human could and will drive some of these vehicle but the system will work far better with many, most, or nearly all of them being autonomous.
aitorbk t1_iwbvdls wrote
Public transport cannot be good for most people It can be adequate at most.
It can even be demonstrated mathematically for a specific city, but in short: They go from where you don't live to where you don't want to go. Lost time, energy and investment to different degrees. They have to constantly stop and start. They require massive amounts of infrastructure, and space, unless it is a subway. Trains require stations, rights of way... And buses effectively occupy a ton of road space as they constantly stop and block a lane for up to a minute. Even if 30 seconds, assuming a 30kmh or 20 mph zone, that is 250m plus bus length plus safe space. Or like more than 25 cars. The frequency has to be 5 min max for a service to be acceptable, but then you get plenty of empty space on off peak. Buses get bunched together on peak traffic.
Most of my life I could beat the public service using either my car or my bicycle. Sometimes even walking. And not just in time, also in cost, and the car is a subsidy to the government in Europe. Moving people around in electric cars would be way way more efficient in energy than most electric trains or buses, not to speak of diesel ones. But there would be a space problem in the center of large cities, as they would not be able to accept so many cars. That is the main benefit of subways, they move a lot of people,and can use tunnels, plus onboarding and outboarding is so much faster.
A solution to that is mixed working from home for those who can, and mixed used districts. Having residential, office and retail districts is a misuse of land, space and resources in general. Mixed use is walkable, human, and way more useful. I am not saying that you should live 20 meters from a refinery, but you could have an office building in front, and your building could have a supermarket at street level.
I love trains, but there is a reason they are expensive to build, operate, and use. They are inefficient in many cases to move people. In some cases, they are great.
Kinexity t1_iwd300v wrote
There should limits to how much bullshit you can put in one comment.
>It can even be demonstrated mathematically for a specific city, but in short: They go from where you don't live to where you don't want to go.
- You can switch between many routes on PT
- That's not how PT works. It starts where people leave and goes through areas that people want to reach. That's by definition. If it's not like this where you live than local gov fucked up your PT
>Lost time, energy and investment to different degrees. They have to constantly stop and start. They require massive amounts of infrastructure, and space, unless it is a subway. Trains require stations, rights of way... And buses effectively occupy a ton of road space as they constantly stop and block a lane for up to a minute. Even if 30 seconds, assuming a 30kmh or 20 mph zone, that is 250m plus bus length plus safe space. Or like more than 25 cars. The frequency has to be 5 min max for a service to be acceptable, but then you get plenty of empty space on off peak.
And roads for cars take no space? Are they built and maintained for free? And you go max speed all the time? One bus takes the area of ~5 cars while taking in the amount of people that would otherwise occupy dozens of cars. You seem to be unfamiliar with the idea of a bus bay so your whole "bus blocks my lane" goes to trash not even mentioning that if people chose the bus they wouldn't be stuck in traffic. Acceptable frequency of service is 30 minutes not 5 and any higher frequency should be demand based. Frequency can vary throught the day.
>Most of my life I could beat the public service using either my car or my bicycle. Sometimes even walking. And not just in time, also in cost, and the car is a subsidy to the government in Europe. Moving people around in electric cars would be way way more efficient in energy than most electric trains or buses, not to speak of diesel ones. But there would be a space problem in the center of large cities, as they would not be able to accept so many cars. That is the main benefit of subways, they move a lot of people,and can use tunnels, plus onboarding and outboarding is so much faster.
Source: You made it the fuck up. Cars are neither space efficient nor energy efficient nor resource efficient. Trains and buses are efficient because they are big and bicycles because they are light and small. Cars are a huge costs to every government. The main benefit of subways is that they are trains which have frequent stops while being grade separated.
>I love trains, but there is a reason they are expensive to build, operate, and use.
Trains are expensive because they are big and operate for way longer while being produced in lower amount and with tighter tolerances. They are cheaper to operate than car infrastructure and are easily cheaper to use.
aitorbk t1_iwd9ftv wrote
You obviously don't like it. But think twice about it. 1.Can you switch routes? Of course. But the cost in time (and sometimes money) is big. Also the route tends to not be direct to your destination and require to go to the center. 2.It is very rare that you leave close to the pt and work close to the same.line of pt. I am lucky enough, but only because I work in the center and live near many bus line stops.
Roads take plenty of space. But a bus does not occupy the same.space as 5 cars because buses stop constantly at bus stops and either block a lane or require merging and plenty of free road space for a bus stop with stop space (way worse for the service btw). If it requires stop space that is about three bus lengths per stop, and about 30 seconds travel time as it blocks the lane.
The main benefit of the bus is that it does not need to park at the destination, and serves people who don't own a car, have no parking space, are disabled. Etc etc.
30.minutes.frequency. No, I would really not suffer that Plenty of yt channels now with city planners, or studies about that. Some say 5, some say 10. My personal experience is 5 is great, 10 will leave with. More, I would find another way of going if possible, but that is just me. A headway of 10 minutes or less is preferred for a service to be considered reliable.
Energy efficiency: I did not make that up. A full bus es efficient,a full european car is also efficient. And can be more efficient than the bus. A modern euro VI diesel medium car sits five and uses 5l/100km or 47Mpg If we go electric (and we should, both buses and cars) then energy efficiency goes 2.x higher as a rule.of thumb. But Tesla and some others are more like 3.5 to 4x as efficient for other reasons that would make this too long.
You say cars are a huge cost. I am guessing you live in the US. Here in europe we have way less km of road per car, way less parking, and about 60 to 65% of the fuel is taxes, plus plenty of other taxes on cars. So in Europe, as a norm, the cars are a money grab scheme for the government, not in the US. But cars are not space efficient because they spend most of their useful.life parked, or i the case of taxis, unoccupied and moving, even worse.
Subways: I disagree. European subways, underground, do not destroy the city and provide great service. By no demolishing the buildings like 50s and 60s highways did, you get out of the station and you are on a walkable human place. Are they energy efficient? Subways.. some are, some not. The cost to build, maintain, man, ventilate, cool, etc are inmense. Tends to be bigger than the proportional cost of cars and roads, but provide amazing capacity to move people even if less energy efficient. Look at the cost per mile/km per passenger of the london tube.. extremely vost inefficient, but worth it because otherwise london would simply not work.
Trains are not cheaper to operate. Poor countries in general hardly operate them and that is because of cost. It is cheaper for a couple to go by car, paying 60% tax on fuel on toll roads for 450km roads that have a huge margin than to pay a couple of train tickets, that the government is paying a big part of. Ii can be more.convenient, and in the case of high speed train, simply better for.many cases, but not cheaper.
As in efficiency.. well, the train needs a right of way, transformers, etc etc. Plus not all seats are occupied in both the car and the train.
A german ICE does 19 to 33Kwh per km, a Tesla 16Kwh per 100Km. The ice seats 600, potentially say 400 in it, and 2 on the tesla (of 5 possible). So for a trip the ICE wins if we don't count the energy costs of the train employees, train stations,etc.
Me, I go on my bike, the human body is quite inefficient so an electric bike is actually less polluting than me (and I eat calories made.of food, quite energy intensive), but I don't pollute.in the city or occupy much space or pollute with sound. But I don't think mass transit is perfect or the best thing ever..I had to use it many years.. and sadly, many times it sucks, particularly in large cities.
To visit my brother, 90 minutes on the subway, 100 or more.on bus, 45 on bike,20 on car.
I can give you the toute in pm if you want.
Where he lives now would be even worse, but I no longer live in Spain.
isbtegsm t1_iwczysx wrote
The future is obviously autonomous drones, transport needs to enter the third dimension!
[deleted] t1_iwbuj5u wrote
[deleted]
noitstoolate t1_iwbxp9a wrote
Challenge flag! It's way cheaper for me to take the train between major east coast cities than it is to drive. And it's ridiculously cheap to take a bus, even between non major cities. Density is the name of the game though. Like you said, you can't have all this infrastructure and only 50% ridership.
QuantumQualia t1_iwc9e98 wrote
If you have an animal with you it’s not allowed though, unfortunately, and if you have a lot of items to carry it’s very difficult. We have a lot of thinking to do about how we want to handle public transportation before that is a viable sole option. I say this as someone that loves public transport and would love to see it flourish.
Test19s t1_iwco5of wrote
Which is why only radicals want to ban car use on a metropolitan or national scale. Moderate levels of car use in a walkable metropolis is the way to go!
oiseauvert989 t1_iwgc4aq wrote
Usually what is happening is that moderate changes are proposed and then described as "bans" by opponents rather than proponents.
Bans on vehicles are not effective at that scale. Removing parking and putting in filtered permeability is much more effective. Road diets, cycle networks, bus lanes, urban trees etc. are the way to go.
"Bans" can only really work in inner cities and usually include some built in exceptions. This type of policy effectively already exists in many cases and the only real change is that some cities like Berlin are proposing expanding the boundary of what they consider the inner city. These kind of pragmatic changes are very interesting and exciting for the future.
noitstoolate t1_iwcazk5 wrote
Sure, and you spend the same amount of money for 1 person as you do for the max capacity of your vehicle when driving but it would be 5x the price on the train. I totally agree we have a lot to work on but we don't have to account for every single scenario. The train between DC and NYC, and all the cities in between, is cheap, reliable, and fast and the reason is because ridership is high enough to pay for the service. Make a more reliable and comfortable local public transit and it will work the same way. Nothing will eliminate private vehicles but if you greatly reduce their need it's a lot easier to solve some of these other problems like traffic, parking, emissions, etc...
VenoMatter t1_iwcngma wrote
You don’t have to buy an entire bus to use public transport though, just pay for a pass or a couple dollars for the trip. The alternative is buying an expensive personal vehicle that you have to maintain. Cars also take up far more road space than buses do when transporting the same amount of people. Also using public transport does tend to be cheaper than owning a car since you don’t have to pay for the entire vehicle or maintain it like you do a car.
d_stills t1_iwcdhtu wrote
When this guy realizes that roads and traffic lights and highways are infrastructure too.
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