Comment on Tesla Robotaxis Are Crashing More Than 12 Times as Frequently as Human Drivers
MimicJar@lemmy.world 2 days agoI mean the US is heavily car centric. Self driving cars are an attempt to adapt to what the reality of the world currently is.
We should absolutely be doing things to make cars less of a requirement by improving public transit and creating more livable spaces that don’t require cars, that can even be the primary goal, but it won’t eliminate cars completely, and if it does it will take A LOT longer than self driving cars.
Self driving cars are a great idea, but they aren’t a fix everything solution, they just one part of an overall solution.
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 2 days ago
Why are they a great idea? What are they making better? How is it worth the real and opportunity costs?
MimicJar@lemmy.world 2 days ago
They’re safer than human drivers. Tesla cars absolutely are not. But Waymo cars? They do seem to be.
npr.org/…/why-one-trauma-doctor-sees-self-driving…
It’s still early. We still need more data. They should be closely watched. But self driving cars do appear to be safer. That’s why they are a great idea. They are making driving and roads better.
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 2 days ago
I don’t have the means or motivation to do research now from the couch, so I’ll concede you may be correct. However, I think it might be even safer to take those same billions of dollars and invest them in mass transit and other infrastructure changes. That would mean fewer car accidents, less pollution, nicer spaces, healthier people, healthier economies, etc. private car ownership cannot be the long term solution. If it’s not an outright dead end, it’s certainly a side street instead of high speed rail (if you’ll pardon a strained metaphor).
johntash@eviltoast.org 2 days ago
While I’d absolutely love better and more public transit, it just doesn’t make sense in a lot of areas that are too spread out or don’t have enough people per square mile.
MimicJar@lemmy.world 2 days ago
To be fair I don’t have 100% confidence that self driving is safer than human driving. I just believe that based on the current data, it seems to be. If new data comes out tomorrow, then I’ll look at and evaluate that data.
I also don’t believe that investment is a zero sum game. We should absolutely be investing in both. Both are valuable. You don’t have to only invest in one.
jj4211@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The challenge is one approach only needs to modify the transit infrastructure. The other means having to tear down and build new commercial and residential properties and force people and businesses to relocate in order to have a vaguely sane transit system. My area desperately wanted to do transit but even with rather significant hypothetical funding, they could only service about 10-15% of typical trips. They’ve settled on a plan that is much less money, but only serves like 5% of trips. To go with that plan, they are making restrictions around zoning to force mid density mixed use construction only, favoring one of the two chosen transit corridors.
They are trying but just people are distributed very awkwardly for mass transit.
Cybersteel@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I believe china has self driving trains.
xthexder@l.sw0.com 2 days ago
I’d actually be genuinely curious to see how it compares to taxi drivers, bus drivers, or ubers. Since they drive professionally, you’d hope they’d drive a bit safer than the average human.
I’m sure nothing will be able to complete with the safety numbers of trains or just being close enough to walk though.
GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Paradoxically, the large scale deployment of self driving cars will improve the walkability of neighborhoods by reducing the demand for parking.
One can also envision building on self driving tech to electronically couple closely spaced cars so that more passengers can fit in a given area, such that throughout of passenger miles per hour can increase several times over. Cars could tailgate like virtual train cars following each other at highway speeds with very little separation, lanes could be narrowed to fit more cars side by side in traffic, etc.
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 1 day ago
How will it reduce demand for parking? Do you envision the car will drop someone off and then drive away until it finds a parking spot that’s farther than the person would want to walk?
That sounds like a very hard problem , and people wouldn’t be happy waiting 5-10 minutes for their car to navigate back to them. Or it would just cruise around looking for parking, causing more traffic.
Once again reinventing buses and trains
GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Plenty of high demand areas use human valet parkers for this issue. The driver drops off their car at the curbside destination, and then valets take the vehicle and park it in a designated area that saves the car driver some walking.
Then, the valet parking area in dense areas has tighter parking where cars are allowed to block in others. As a result, the same amount of paved parking spot can accommodate more cars. That’s why in a lot of dense cities, garages with attendants you leave keys with are cheaper than self-park garages.
Automated parking can therefore achieve higher utilization of the actual paved parking areas, a little bit away from the actual high pedestrian areas, in the same way that human valet parking already does today in dense walkable neighborhoods.
As with the comparison to valets, it’s basically a solved problem where people already do put up with this by calling ahead and making sure the car is ready for them at the time they anticipate needing it.
Yes! And trains are very efficient. Even when cargo is containerized, where a particular shipping container may go from truck to train to ship, each individual containerized unit will want to take advantage of the scale between major hubs while still having the flexibility to make it between a specific origin and destination between the spokes. The container essentially hitches a ride with a larger, more efficient high volume transport for part of its journey, and breaks off from the pack for the portions where shared routing no longer make sense.