Comment by wolframhempel
3 years ago
I think the goal is to solve public transport by having a fleet of autonomous vehicles that pick you up where you are and drop you off where you need to go and would roam freely in between - basically driverless, electric ueber.
As cars need charging, they would congregate at some charging plot outside the busy areas.
Personally, I rather like this vision as it combines the best of public transport and car traffic. Especially, if the existing, personally owned cars that just stand around 99% of the time vanish over time.
This isn't going to work for the most obvious case: rush hour. Which is the case that is the root cause of most issues.
If you're still stuck with peak road usage nearly equivalent to that today, your goal isn't to solve prominent issues today.
If you have a networked grid of cars you can run them much closer together and increase road capacity. (Even with failures, likely less dangerous than leaving critical decisions to individual human drivers.) You can also automate away the poor behaviours that contribute to delays.
This would require collaborative networked/distributed self-driving, which is not the same as the let's-use-this-as-an-excuse-for-AI-research individual self-driving we have today.
But really most people shouldn't be commuting anyway. WFH should be much more of a thing, even if it's not full-time.
Yes, exactly. The whole premise of self-driving removing peak load rests on arguments which exist in theory, but are stupidly difficult to create in practice. The costs made today will pale in comparison to the costs required to get this off the ground.
Meanwhile, we have solutions which work today, several of which can be done today. WFH, incentivizing working outside peak hours, building more densely and closer to cities, investing in public transport, and more. We just don't want to do it.
We see this in The Netherlands. Public transport has gotten noticeably worse, car usage is going up as a result, and roads are expanding to compensate. In a country where housing is a massive problem, which means people will move to less desirable places (read: places further away from work hubs). Now we have a chicken-and-egg problem with regards to public transport, and increased car usage is pressuring space which could be used to create more homes and remove cars from the peak.
We simply don't need to wait another 10-15 years for self-driving to finally be a thing. What needs to be done, is accepting that things will suck for a bit to then get better eventually. Continuing on the same path with self-driving cars will only stall the problem instead of solve it, anyway.
Brilliant option, we could cut the front off one car and the back off another and weld them together, think of the room saved for more people! Talk about a dense network!
> much closer together and increase road capacity
So you are assuming there are essentially no more humans driving?
Also, if you want to improve capacity, how about bicycles and buses?
> Even with failures, likely less dangerous than leaving critical decisions to individual human drivers.
You know what's even less dangerous, like essentially no danger, train.
> This would require collaborative networked/distributed self-driving
So the most complex possible solution that is 100% unproven and even in the best cases is far worse then having a city optimized for walking, biking and trains?
Like I just don't understand. Why do you start with the most inefficient solution possible, and then try to apply (expensive) technology to try to make it better.
How about you start with the most efficient, cheapest technology and apply that in 60% of the cases. Then solve the next 35% of the problem with existing technologies that already solve these problems.
And then for the last 5% you can try to solve them with some amazing future tech.
Its quite simple, design cities to be walkable. Make that safe and a priority. Then extend that by the most energy efficient (and space efficient) mode of transport, bicycles. Then use trains to connect different walkable parts of the city with each other.
Then at the very last step, maybe have some fancy self driving cars for a few special cases.
We know this works. It has been done. And its not expensive, it in fact safes money.
This is true but the gains are surprisingly limited. From Algorithmic game theory there’s the concept of “the price of anarchy” it measures the gap between cooperation (a centrally designed or coordinated solution) and competition (where each participant is independently trying to maximize the outcome for themselves). Selfish routing basically what we have now has price of 4/3. This means the greedy status quo is only 33% worse than perfect coordination.
I’ll quote from one of my favorite books Algorithms to Live By:
“It’s true that self-driving cars should reduce the number of road accidents and may be able to drive more closely together, both of which would speed up traffic. But from a congestion standpoint, the fact that the price of anarchy is only 4/3 as congested as perfect coordination means that perfectly coordinated commutes will only be 3/4 as congested as they are now.”
I guess it's just a question of capacity. If you can cram a lot of travelers into a subway train during rush hour, you could just as well imagine an uber pool type function where clever route finding combines riders into a single car during rush hour.
Carpooling failed because people prefer having everything under control in the face of how cheap car-based travel is already. Thinking self-driving cars will fix a luxury problem is a pipedream.
Whether it is self-driving with an incredibly optimized algorithm (good luck with that) or manual carpooling, the same problems are still going to bubble up. The solutions already exist. We, as a society, just don't want to deal with the consequences.
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> As cars need charging, they would congregate at some charging plot outside the busy areas.
Great so you have constantly cars driving form the city center to outside of the city, that for sure will cause no traffic at all.
Will be fun when people proposes new elevated highways out of the city so the self driving car can go outside of town to the coal power plant to charge.
The only thing worse then having vehicles driving around with 1-preson, is vehicles with 0-people. Its literally the most inefficient use of space ever.
It makes traffic worse, not better and it makes the city worse, not better.
How about this, a city optimized for walking and biking, where different parts of the city are connected threw buses, trams, subways or regional trains.
> Especially, if the existing, personally owned cars that just stand around 99% of the time vanish over time.
Turns out that cities where people can, walk, bike and take trains they don't own cars. Shocking.
I too rather like rainbows, unicorns, chocolate waterfalls and free happiness growing on trees as a solution to all problems.
I feel that this one is a rather realistic solution. It uses existing technology (cars), existing infrastructure (streets) and existing data infrastructure (cloud providers) to solve a massive problem. The "only" thing that's missing is the self driving part (the only being in very large quotes of course).
This means its much less of a stretch to get this scenario working than proposals like Hyperloop, Flying Taxis or other things that require a lot more innovation and infrastructure work before they become feasable.
Here is an idea. Take 2 lanes of that already existing street. Block them off from cars and make dedicated bike lanes. Then take another 2 lane and make a dedicated bus or tram line.
> It uses existing technology (cars)
A technology that kills a huge number of people and destroys the environment.
> existing infrastructure (streets)
Infrastructure that when uses for cars is very expensive to maintain and a safety risk.
> existing data infrastructure (cloud providers)
This computation not fixed, if you want to use it you have to pay more then somebody else is willing to pay. Its note like an unused road at all. So sure it exists, but its not idle.
The “only” thing missing, is to get the best engineers, and pay them double what they normally make.
Source: https://youtu.be/DkGMY63FF3Q