Vox:
The full-on driverless car could be an order of magnitude safer than the human-driven variety. Despite generations of driver education, traffic policing, highway building, and automobile safety regulations, nearly 40,000 Americans are killed in motor vehicle crashes and another 2.5 million are seriously injured annually. Safer cars, like safer airliners, are a good thing. But since Vanderbilt’s time, the controlled risk of driving has been an antidote to meaningless work and passive leisure.
Driving is dangerous, and we like it that way. We may never love driverless cars the way we love the recklessness of being behind the wheel.
This is an overly romanticized view of driving. The vast majority of people generally hate it and will be more than happy to become passengers in autonomous vehicles.
It seems more sensible to enjoy driving in settings more suited to that than everyday commuting. Race tracks can provide a much better “driving thrill” and sim racing is becoming a really good way to enjoy the thrill of driving in a much safer setting.
May I suggest pouring this money into trains, buses, and other transit that already exists and can serve far more people for much cheaper, while also being much more climate-friendly? A car is a car, self-driven or not, and all the problems with cars are still problems with autonomous cars.
No one wants to ride in mass transit.
Autonomous cars will first kill feeder (for the trains) bus routes.
Then, they will start to eat into regular bus routes.
At some point, it will be cheaper to give poor people “car ride” vouchers than “bus passes”.
Most rail transit systems will be demolished by 2070.
“No one wants to ride in mass transit.” That’s a very broad generalization, and it’s wrong.
Multiplying the number of single-user cars on the road doesn’t scale well, ride-sharing notwithstanding. The growth of big cities has been demonstrating this for decades.
The problem with the transit uber alles approach is that transit doesn’t work well when either or both ends of a trip aren’t near a hub. For example, I needed to get a haircut today. Driving, the trip takes 20 minutes. On the bus? 1 hour, 14 minutes.
That would mean just under 2 hours extra time out of my day to take the bus. Now, in some cases, routes could be improve to make this more competitive but not in all.
Transit excels at moving people who live along a relatively dense route to a city center or other dense working destination. It works much less well moving people from one neighborhood to another (think small business trips, etc).
It was pointed out to me, that despite expectations, autonomous vehicles do not have to be perfect. They just have to be BETTER THAN US. And the more of us monkey people we remove from behind the wheel, the less random and safer the roads will get.
Not too sure how I feel about that. In several states, Long Haul Trucker is the leading good paying blue collar job left standing.
Transit ridership is falling in many cities.
Denver is one of them.
When I lived in Brooklyn, Coney Island, actually. To visit a friend in eastern Queens, by bus and subway the trip was two and a half hours. Into Manhattan and back out to Queens. But the ride was 25 minutes on the Belt Parkway.
Another job had me commuting to Edison NJ from Brooklyn, which was “against the flow”. 3 Hours plus each way, and gods help me if I missed the few inbound trains in the evening. Driving through Staten Island – 1 hour, 15 min.
So still a few glitches in the system.
On the flip side, when I moved to the suburbs. The bus was actually faster than driving, and far less costly, as I was not springing for insanely costly parking in Midtown Manhattan. But I still had to drive to the bus stop from my house.
Statistically, Americans show an aversion to autonomous driving.
And much of the challenge here and in other cities where cars have dominated is that growth patterns have been molded according to cars. Cities that have had good to great transit have seen growth molded by that. So my friends and a lot of the small businesses that I frequent aren’t easily accessible by transit because they’ve grown up without it around, meaning that the nearest efficient transit stop might be 1+ miles away.
That means either a) we force transit to use the routes cars do (probably not a good idea) or b) we construct efficient transit routes and wait for growth patterns to adjust and businesses/housing to grow up around the new transit patterns. The latter doesn’t address what happens in existing neighborhoods where we’d not naturally put transit.
Sadly, the time to really lay down transit here was in the 70s and early 80s before the Eastside growth and a lot of the growth north and south of Seattle proper.
Yes, the much bigger lift in terms of creating a climate-sustainable way of living will also mean rejecting the car-centric suburbs we’ve built that trap people in cars. Don’t know if it will ever happen.
Autonomous buses maybe. Cars that can carry 5 people max are not going to replace mass transit. If you think it’s a great futuristic invention to replace one bus with a massive traffic jam of seventy autonomous cars, I question your thinking process.
it’s easy to say “reject the suburbs” but that’s meaningless in the real world where millions live in those areas now. You buying my house? What about the businesses who have sited there because that’s where people are? Platitudes and slogans need to give way to solutions that will work in the real world.
Simply arguing for increased density ignores things like cost of housing )in Seattle people are moving farther away because housing in Seattle is pricey) and the fact that some people want to live in a house vs a condo or apartment. So, while density might be a partial solution it’s never going to be the entire one.
Here’s one way I see this moving forward:
Right now, transit only really makes sense to move people from and to dense central areas. You can pick people up along a route, but they all need to be going to roughly the same place (in Seattle, we might be talking from Ballard/Sunset Hill into Downtown). If you don’t live along one of these routes transit is MUCH less convenient… but what if you could order up or even schedule a small, driverless electric care that took you to a stop and back? Boom the convenience of a park and ride without you driving and without the park and ride area needed. A riff on this would be autonomous shuttles that looped on routes and did much the same thing.
I’d say that the Vox article is a bit of a romantic take on autonomous vehicles, which are at least 50 years away if they are possible at all. Caveat: “autonomous vehicle” includes the use case of navigating a neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago (or equivalent in Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh) after a snow storm topped with ice.
That is arguable untrue due to liability issues. If an incompetent driver hits my car I require him to pay or can sue him (yes, certain percentage of uninsured motorists; I have extra insurance for that). When an autonomous vehicle which is a 75% percentile driver hits my car I can do what? Who is responsible? Who was controlling the vehicle? The owner? The company supplying the vehicle? The software developer? The last mechanic who installed a firmware update?
if i can do other stuff and get where i need to go, bring it. i can rent a car when i want to road trip.
incorrect. they won’t need to do all things in all places. like most tech, it will roll out gradually. early commercial flight could not check all the boxes of modern commercial flight.
Unfortunately it is virtually impossible to replace piecemeal a complex system which has grown organically over a long period of time (180 years for motorized road vehicles). Either autonomous vehicles work on the rugged streets of the old Los Angeles industrial district in heavy traffic during a thunderstorm [1] as well as the smooth empty roadways of a Valley corporate campus or they don’t work at all – there is no in between.
[1] a combination I experienced last year – good thing I learned to drive in the Midwest.