Driverless cars were the future but now the truth is out: they’re on the road to nowhere::The dream of these vehicles ruling the roads remains just that. Focusing on public transport would be much smarter, says transport writer Christian Wolmar
Self driving cars have always been a solution to the wrong problem.
The problem isn’t really “I don’t want to steer this car”. It’s “I want to fast+safe+cheaply get from where I am, to where work/school/fun is”. So you could spend billions on machine vision and car tech to try to accomplish that, and maybe you will eventually. Or you could invest in historically proven solutions that have incredible side benefits like public transit and better zoning. Because having your self driving car cart you around suburban sprawl is still going to suck. Living spaces that are built for humans first instead of cars are better on like every metric.
I heard this guy going on about this amazing machine a company had invented to sequester carbon. They were not happy when explained that a tree does the same thing and they grow like crazy just about anywhere.
We already know what we need to do but people don’t want to do it.
We already know what we need to do but people don’t want to do it.
That’s the thing that gets me about AI solving global warming or whatever. You think a computer telling you that you have to get off oil is going to make a difference?
Unless you can take a dead tree and prevent it from decaying, you’re just moving around carbon and not actually sequestering it. We would basically need to grow billions or plants and turn them into coal/oil and then just leave those fuels sitting around. Good luck with that.
Uhhh, I think you’re confused on what carbon sequestration is.
The primary source of green house gas isn’t deforestation, it’s fossil fuels pulled up out of the ground.
Yes, you can think of trees as solar-powered CO2 crystalization, so more trees, more CO2 removed. The problem though is that this is a temporary solution. When trees die and rot or burn (forest fire), they ultimately release most of that CO2 back into the atmosphere. Even worse, that carbon may be released as methane instead, if it decomposes anaerobicly.
There’s only so much biomass the earth can sustain to naturally store carbon. The page you link is correct in that we definitely shouldn’t make the problem even worse by reversing what carbon the biomass does store.
But it is in no way the solution to putting carbon we mined out of the earth back into the earth. Well trees as a carbon sequestration did already happen: it just took millions of years for buried biomass to be turned into oil and coal.
I didn’t propose a solution. I simply corrected wrong information presented by the other user. Trees sequester carbon, even if with volatility, as explained in the links.
I agree, it’s not a solution.
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You missed part of the problem. It’s actually,
“I want to fast+safe+cheaply get from where I am, to where work/school/fun is, and I want to do it without sharing transportation with anyone else who might be sick, annoying, crazy, or a member of an ethnic group or economic class I don’t care for”
The good solutions for transit do not account for how much people hate being around each other. My city has phenomenal bus infrastructure, that often gets you to your destination faster than driving. But people drive anyways, because there are sick people and crazy people on the bus.
You’re not wrong, but I don’t really think society should bend too far to the whims of it’s most antisocial members.
Like, if they don’t want to share the bus with a black person they can leave. And I don’t want to subsidize their selfishness by ceding space to cars, for example.
Also that’s a bit of induced demand, probably. People drive because it’s easier. Take away the subsidies or internalize the costs of driving, and people’s habits will change.
The problem is not that driverless cars won’t be viable. The problem is the same as several other tech developments where a few startups promise tech that hasn’t matured yet, taking in billions of ‘stupid’ money from investors who are greedy but not knowledgeable about the underlying viability of what can realistically be done in a decade.
One hundred years from now? Driverless cars will be old news, so common or maybe even surpassed with something newer. But investors want a 10 year explosion of cash, not a 50 year investment.
One hundred years from now, it’ll probably mostly still be cars. Aerotaxis for the rich, maybe
Aerotaxis for the rich already exist: helicopters, Gulfstream, etc.
Or a 747 with everything inside gold plated if you’re a Saudi Prince.
Can’t land a helicopter at the club without a bunch of pansies whining about “public safety”, as if a few heads on the street is such a big deal.
Aerotaxis would still be aircrafts.
I don’t know why people imagine that making an aircraft the shape of a car suddenly landing would be as simple as going to a parking lot.
It’s just a joke, friend.
Air taxis are sometimes helicopters or quadcopters, and while they aren’t parking in parking lots for cars, but could still end up landing in what equates to a parking space. In New York City, they are already presenting plans to expand an air taxi hub on a pier in lower Manhattan to transport people and goods to and from the city, and it looks like a bunch of parking spaces with a logistics facility attached.
Hahahahah.
You cut off a few pansy heads and everyone gets all upset.
A century from now humanity’s population will be lucky to number in the 6 digits.
And we will all be merged with cars.
It is because the tech is dumb. All cars should exist on a network together like ants don’t make them respond to bullshit other people do it will never work and it will always make mistakes with judgement.
Or you know just give me fucking trains and trolleys
If only there were a way for people to take an automated vehicle from A to B safely and consistently.
Shame no one has ever designed one of those before.
And it’s a damn shame no one has ever designed such a thing on multiple occasions only for it to be shut down by bullshit dreams of a nonsense technology only devised to maintain a transport monopoly that depends on people spending the equivalent of a small house every 10 or so years.
“ Artificial intelligence is a fancy name for the much less sexy-sounding “machine learning” “
This article is just a plug for this guys book and if the quote above from the article is anything to go by then I doubt the book will be anything more than a poorly researched 300 page opinion piece.
Yeah I’m mega anti-car and not at all optimistic about self-driving but this article says very little of substance.
Funny how, if we had weight and trip class segregated traffic infrastructure, walkable cities, car-free areas, etc. Then we would probably already have several successful self-driving taxi companies. As indeed, a point A to point B exclusive use highway would definitely be cheaper for mid and low density traffic areas than trains. But since everyone insists travel to be from front door to front door, then the transport network is just too complex and dangerous for the machines to deal with.
Nobody with a functioning brain thought they were the future
I don’t really understand why you’re getting downvoted, if you ever genuinely thought about them and how they’d possibly ever be implemented you would’ve figured out it was a dumb idea very quickly.
Because blahaj.zone disabled downvotes I can’t even see them lol
Waymo seems to be the best and most successful robotaxi service. My friends in Pittsburgh and the Bay speak highly of them.
But it’s a shame that none of the other robotaxi companies in the US were able to succeed.
We had a thriving robotaxi scene in Pittsburgh (R&D, no actual taxis), mostly because of CMU. But most of the work has shutdown since the pandemic (Uber ATG, Aurora, …). Waymo still seems to be doing well here though.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
Moreover, the recent withdrawal from the market of a leading provider of robotaxis in the US, coupled with the introduction of strict legislation in the UK, suggests that the developers’ hopes of monetising the concept are even more remote than before.
The attempt to produce a driverless car started in the mid-00s with a challenge by a US defence research agency, offering a $1m prize for whoever could create one capable of making a very limited journey in the desert.
In 2010, at the Shanghai Expo, General Motors had produced a video showing a driverless car taking a pregnant woman to hospital at breakneck speed and, as the commentary assured the viewers, safely.
It was precisely the promise of greater safety, cutting the terrible worldwide annual roads death toll of 1.25m, that the sponsors of driverless vehicles dangled in front of the public.
The trouble is there are an enormous number of potential use cases, ranging from the much-used example of a camel wandering down Main Street to a simple rock in the road, which may or may not just be a paper bag.
That is why it is clearly a misplaced priority on the part of the government, headed by tech bro Rishi Sunak, to put forward a bill on autonomous vehicles while sidelining plans to reform the railways or legislate for electric scooters, which are in a legal no man’s land.
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