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A crowd destroyed a driverless Waymo car in San Francisco
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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So in your world, planes, trains, and buses pick you up and drop you off at your doorstop? How cute.
Nah. Unless you live literally at the station, which happens but is rare, doorsteps are the domain of collect taxis.
Which btw are the most economical option in rural areas as you don't have to drive empty buses around all the time. In cities they should be limited to people actually needing them, also open bicycle paths for microcars for people with mobility issues, not everyone wants or needs a powered wheelchair.
This is what I mean, you'll never get rid of enclosed motorized vehicles for a variety of reasons, and if we're going to have them around, it would be better if they were self driving and killed fewer people than human drivers.
These are not the kind of enclosed motorised vehicles you're thinking of.
Those are great but how are you going to deliver goods to people's homes? Transport furniture? Home Reno materials? Kids + their sports equipment?
How are you going to get the last mile to a home down a country road in winter with rain, sleet, and snow?
Yes, we can minimize our usage of cars, but as you scale up the capabilities of a cargo bike you just reinvent the car.
With trucks, minivans, cargo bikes, and backpacks and hand carts. The first two are commercial vehicles, the last two private, the one in the middle either.
With your tractor? Rather pointless to buy a car just for that distance and if you don't own a tractor what are you doing out there.
Cool, regardless of whether they're commercial or or private, it would still be better if they killed fewer people than they do today.
I don't think you've spent much time in the country, most people don't own tractors. It's not just farmers as far as the eye can see, they still require a huge community / support system of electricians, mechanics, plumbers, shops and suppliers, entertainment, etc.
Then build streets that take pedestrians and cyclists into account and make sure that people don't have to commute by car. That's the coffee-drinking mobile-swiping distracted drivers thinking their Tesla can drive for them.
...in a village, which means bus stop in walking distance, not in single home with a five kilometre driveway. Also electricians, mechanics, plumbers, shops and suppliers all have commercial vehicles, entertainment the fuck do you mean? If there's a cinema in the village chances are the operators live in the same building, if it's a circus troupe they have wagons because itinerant.
Cool beans bro, you can do that, you'll still have cars for the reasons I listed above. There is literally no city in existence where an elderly person can get to their doctor's appointment in the middle of snow and rain without a car.
Lmao. No it doesn't. You're not going to have a machine shop or feed supply shop in a village, it's the size of a lumber yard and not zoned to be in a residential area.
Again, what's your point about commercial vs private. Do you think self driving technology cares? Also that Waymo taxi they trashed is a commercial taxi.
Restaurants, theatres, rinks, stadiums, etc. You know, stuff people do for entertainment.
Also, lmfao at this specifically:
It's not 1920 with a projectionist living in an apartment beside the projection room.
Your health insurance doesn't pay for a taxi or transport ambulance if you're immobile? What kind of 3rd world shithole do you live in (don't say I know the answer: America).
That's not a village that's a farm.
What's the point of self driving when the car doesn't need to move without someone in it?
On your farm with ten kilometre driveway?
Then what went wrong?
A taxi, you mean like a car? You mean like the Waymo taxi that was trashed?
We're discussing how there are people in the country who don't own tractors.
Because self driving cars have the potential to be safer and less dangerous than human drivers. Waymo's safety record is already better than the average human on a per mile basis.
The people who work those jobs, also live out in the country.
Yes. I never said that those things have no place.
Then either they should have a bus station in walking distance or be covered by a collect taxi service.
The average human is not a good driver. You have to compare performance, and not just safety but also route efficiency, flexibility to unforseen events etc. not against the average driver, but professional taxi drivers.
Why the fuck don't they live at the farm. What's it with USians trying to make everything as hard for themselves as possible.
Then why trash an autonomous taxi?
Lol. You do not understand the distances involved.
Until we live in your made up fantasy world where the only drivers allowed on the road are professionals, then sure. But we're not, we're discussing real world performance today.
Because they're not farmers, try and keep up with the conversation.
I'm not American, and it took literally thousands of years of development to turn Europe into what it is today, so maybe try and have some perspective on the feasibility of your "solutions".
You mean why did homeless people trash an autonomous taxi? I'd say because inner-city liberal techbros care more about fancy tech toys than providing stuff that people actually need, such as shelter and healthcare. At least that's the usual logic of riots and vandalism.
So if you work at a farm, but are not a farmer, you can't live there? You are legally required to have a 20km commute based on a law to preserve the integrity of farm life or something? What kind of bullshit is that.
Uh, you can watch the video, it wasn't homeless people.
Again we're not talking about people who work on farms. We're talking about people who work in farming communities in jobs that are necessary to support farmers. Most of them don't even work on a single farm but service multiple farms. Stop trying to act like you understand country life well enough to reshape it, you're just as arrogant as every European colonizer before you.
Elsewhere in the thread someone who knows the city well better than me (or probably you) said that it's an area known for mobile home encampments. Yes, that's homelessness, even if it's upper class homeless.
So your electricians etc. which I already said have their commercial vehicles which don't fall under individual transport. They're also lugging means of production around.
I invite you again to imagine city roads without commuters. That single change, and nothing else. It's like 98% of traffic in car-dependent cities.
Merging the threads because I'm getting tired of it:
No. Use autonomous technology if you want. Just don't hail it as the silver bullet it isn't when there's much more deep as well as tried and true solutions to the issues we have. You're taking attention away from the actual solutions in favour of gadgetry unaffordable for most which need to drive in places like the US. Pedestrians won't be safe no matter how good the tech becomes, as long your average burger flipper still needs a car to get to work and can't afford that fancy stuff there's going to be distracted commuters out there. You could get all of them off the street, pretty much instantly, by having proper public transit.
Millions of road deaths which don't need autonomous technology to severely curtail. Have a look at statistics US vs. Netherlands.
Not many pedestrians out there getting run over either, though, are there? Yes of course if you live 100km away from the next power pole you'll need some form of individual transportation, but you're also statistically insignificant.
So how do you push a car out of the way with your fire truck if you aren't driving?
It was in Chinatown during a Chinese New Year's celebration. I'm done with this conversation. You seem to want to believe that the rest of the world will magically densify into Europe faster than we'll develop self driving cars that are safer than human drivers.
Good luck! I mean that earnestly, because it would be a better future, but I also don't mean it remotely earnestly because that's not how the world works and that's not going to happen. That's a problem that is solved on a generational timescale. Self driving cars is a couple decade timescale.
LA urban area is a bit more dense (2888pop/km^2^) than Hamburg (2506) your objection is completely nonsensical: Having more space between cities doesn't mean that your cities must suck. The difference is that one is a couple of high rises and then endless car-dependent single-home sprawl, while the other is almost entirely stuff that's illegal to build in the US. Changing building codes to allow such uses wouldn't just solve their housing crisis, it would also densen up suburbia to allow for rail-based public transport. Plop down stations, zone a radius around them as medium density, also make sure have a grocery store, doctor's practice, daycare, cafe and restaurant there, crucially no car parking -- but make space for cargo bikes so that suburbanites within the catchment area but outside of walking distance can use all that infrastructure. You won't recognise the city in 10 years, it'd totally transform, very much for the better.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
stuff that's illegal to build in the US
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Bruh, it takes ~10 years to plan and build a single major infrastructure project in America. Again, the timelines you're talking about are nonsensical. Yes, building out transit and reorienting communities like that is the ultimate solution, but the idea that that will happen so much and so extensively that we'll have no need for autonomous cars in even 20 years is absolutely absurd and detached from reality.
That kind of stuff is already happening and often on much shorter time-frames.
Salt Lake city went from rough political discussions in the early 90s, starting at literally zero, with practically no prior art in the US, and finished its first tram line in 1999, a year ahead of schedule of two-year construction, it's since been expanded a lot. If you bring on experts who know their stuff (probably from abroad because you can't really study public transit in the US, universities haven't caught up yet) you can get the first wheels on the track in 2-3 years, thereabouts. In those 20 years you're talking about Salt Lake City built a network spanning most of the valley.
One crucial mistake they didn't do is trying to re-invent the wheel: They invited European experts, ultimately had Stadler build the trams which they're doing in Salt Lake City (some parts still come from Switzerland) and now they've got a new industry in town, building e.g. FLIRTs for TexRail.
That's probably all news to you, presumably because the techbro scene isn't interested in things actually moving forward, what you're interested in is jerking off to gadgetry, not public transport. It's not "I'm interested in public transport, therefore I like autonomous cars", it's "Autonomous cars are cool, let's find ways to shoehorn them into everything".
So, gain: Please tell me how you're going to make it so that burger flippers can afford those autonomous cars within 20 years. Tech won't solve that issue. Public transport circumvents it completely.
No, I have youtube as well, it doesn't make you a genius.
Lol. I'm interested in reducing our millions of road deaths in whatever way possible. You're interested in jerking yourself off in the fuck cars subreddit cause it sounds simple and edgy and you're frustrated.
It's "let's not be dumbasses and trash autonomous cars on the off chance your public transit paradise doesn't materialize".
They literally can through a taxi service that splits the costs amongst users, called Waymo. Car shares also already exist. The cost of sensors and computers will also come down both through mass manufacturing and technological improvements (like solid state lidar).
Honestly, let's make a bet and check back in 20 years, does your public transit paradise exist or maybe just maybe, the actual political and infrastructure realities of the US mean that cars still exist?
Those services are necessarily more expensive than the likes of trams, that much is simple physics. Also, you're going to get the burger flipper fired if you make them rely on waymo, to wit, all those waymos blocking traffic because they don't know how to continue on, having come across something unforeseen. What if there's a game in town and our flipper needs to get to work but can't afford the rush pricing waymo introduces because unlike public transport, their prices aren't regulated and the hedge funds owning waymo would never accept a situation in which they can get less than 20% ROI on every single vehicle they put out there. While getting subsidised by tax payer money in the form of the streets they're using.
Why are you so insistent on rubber on asphalt over steel on steel? Automation is much easier and further along on tracks. Why such a fanboy for private capital over the freedom of a municipality to come together and solve a problem in a cheap and affordable way?
Also please don't tell me that 10-lane highways are easier to cross for pedestrians when the cars are autonomous.
Lol, you so insistently want to believe that I'm a car loving tech bro that you're literally not reading anything I'm writing.
I'm pro public transit, I agree that it's more efficient and produces better cities and communities than ones built around cars, I tend to vote socialist, and don't own a car and have no love for them or what they've done to society, however, I'm just not delusional about how long it takes to a) built enough mass transit that people don't need cars and b) move everyone to live and work near that mass transit and c) to solve for every edge case like the elderly, people driving out to remote cottages, deliveries, the sick and elderly, getting around in inclement weather, etc.
Even if you had the public and political willpower to enact those changes (which you very very very clearly don't), it would still take longer to do all of that, by like an order of magnitude, then it will to improve self driving cars and make them widely available. Self driving cars we're talking like a decade, the kind of societal changes you're describing take a generation. You literally have to wait for every suburban stick in the mud to be willing to move out of their home or die before you can achieve your car-free dream.
The kind of changes I'm talking about are happening, even in the US, right now. It's you who's lobbying against them by saying "can't be done", "not fast enough" completely ignoring what's happening in actual cities all over the place. How about "hey why are the Mormons of all people more progressive than our city", instead?
Also for an purported supporter of public transport you ripped into /r/fuckcars quite a lot. WTH are you even doing over on the snoo site.
No. Railcar suburbs once existed and existing car-dependent single-home suburbs can be turned into them by, as I already explained, densifying around the stations. Which has been done, and is being done, and would come soon also to your city if you bothered to argue for it.
As to me personally: I never owned a car. Never needed one.
Learn how to read.
Learn how to read.
You can support something and also think that others who support that thing are childish and naiive.
I didn't even say I was on it, I implied that you were childish like they were. Learn how to read.
Learn how to read.
I didn't ask and I don't care.
Yeah that's not how to argue. What am I supposed to read in that context? You're deflecting.
You said this:
No, it's not a dream. No, I'm not living in the city centre, either. You're, again, deflecting in a desperate attempt to deny reality, denying the change that's happening even in places that are culturally extremely car-centric.
Touch grass.
It means reread what you wrote and then reflect on what might have already been explicitly contradicted. Maybe reflect on what I've said about my political views instead of injecting the car loving stereotype you've made up.
Congratulations bro. There are still cars all around you and you would still be safer if they were autonomous.
Nah I don't think you're a petrol head, I think you're a techbro. I've accused you of it amply, and you have never even tried to give off any other impression.
Statistically speaking I'm vastly more likely to fall off a ladder changing a lightbulb than getting hit by a car. But I'm sure you have a technology for that, too.... don't you? Because you want to focus on the issues that actually affect people?
Well like I said, you're a dumbass who judges people on stereotypes in their head instead of reading what they wrote so go fuck yourself for thinking you know literally anything about me.
If you think I'm a tech bro I will repeat what I've already said, learn how to fucking read. Jesus fucking Christ you're an idiot.
First of all, about ~300 people die from ladder falls a year in the US, and ~35,000 people die from traffic incidents, so no, you absolutely fucking are not more likely to die from a lightbulb unless you're a shut in obsessively changing their light bulbs every 3 months.
Second, engineers invented these little things called LED light bulbs, and you only have to change them once every 10-15 years instead of a couple times a year. There are also these little things called fall arrests harnesses that are mandatory for all up high work in any commercial or industrial setting. And guess what, engineers even invented light bulb changing poles so you never have to be up high.
Now that we're done with your dumb analogy that you didn't think through, back to the topic at hand, as long as cars exist, they will be safer if they're self driving, so present your plausible plan for getting all of the world to give up cars in the next let's say even 20 years, or shut. the. fuck. up.
And thanks for the reminder that even people with extremely similar political views to me, can be arrogant dickbag idiots.
From what I've read from you you're fanboying automated driving quite a lot. See it as the one and true thing to solve all the issues even though I gave you plenty of examples of things it can't solve, even if it did work. You addressed none of them in a convincing manner, instead dug your head in the sand, indicative of a closed world-view.
"techbro" is simply shorthand for that.
Good job missing the point. Then I'll fall off the ladder cleaning windows or shoving winter clothes onto the top shelf of the cabinet. Changing a smoke alarm battery. Point is: Household accidents aren't exactly rare: In 2022, 2.776 people died in Germany due to traffic accidents. Domestic accidents: 15.551.
...and you're going to make people use them how? Put a police officer in every household to make sure people are sticking to occupational safety principles?
I'd say if those companies put even just a tenth of the money they spend on automated driving research into domestic safety, even just ad campaigns, they could save a lot more people. But they of course won't you can't make money with that unless you're the state.
As soon as you give an actually good argument how you're going to replace every car we currently have with an automated one, sure. As soon as you tell me how to square the circle of automated cars not running over pedestrians but still being reliable enough to actually go where you want them to go. As soon as you admit that you've been constantly ignoring those problems because they contradict your faith.
I very much doubt we have the same opinion on whether capital should be running basic infrastructure.
300 people died falling from ladders in the US, while 35,000 died from traffic fatalities. So shut the fuck up with your cherry picked stats and shifting from a single problem (ladders) to all household accidents once you tried to look up stats and realized you were a fucking idiot.
WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? You asked for a technology that helps prevent ladder falls, THATS WHAT A FALL ARREST HARNESS IS. YOU FUCKING IDIOT. Here's another one: light bulb changing poles!
Yeah, because you're an idiot who can't fucking read and keeps slotting in a tech bro stereotype. You're a judgemental, inaccurate, dumbass.
planes don't pick you up from your doorstep? since when? but they can fly?