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*and affordable. The trains by me are barely affordable, so I will only take them if absolutely necessary. It would be amazing if it was cheap enough that I could just pick a place to go and explore without needing a reason.
somebody should do a compilation including data about:
- the costs of public transport against private cars, for the whole city
- the space consumption for parking your private cars in a city compared to the space consumption for all public transport vehicles
and make a statistics and post it here
They have (I’ve seen them, but don’t have a link sorry) and car free or semi car free with good bike and public infrastructure is almost always cheaper and more efficient
Hell yeah!
Or even
Wait for it
SELF DRIVING TRANSIT
Which yes is already a thing too
And much easier to implement than self driving cars
Boring?
Yeah, public transit so common and part of day-to-day it’s unremarkable and boring.
I’m hearing you want continental Europe
New York City, Washington DC, Boston, MA?
*western continental Europe
* exceptions may apply
Shame that they don’t want me. ;_;
I’ve been saying for years “self driving cars are solving the wrong problem”. The problem isn’t that I have to steer my car. The problem is I need a fucking car to go anywhere worth going.
But then this problem will be solved for those who can’t afford it. This is simply not fair to those who are hardworking to earn their salary
/s
Obviously
Obvious enough, but people are crazy and I’ve seen people here with even worse opinions.
Normalize treating it as irony
I saw a video recently by a car enthusiast who hates the idea of self driving cars for a novel reason.
Even if self-driving cars are safer than people it won’t stop bad owners. People who drive with unsafe mechanical issues they can’t or won’t get fixed are still going to exist, and bald tires and worn brakes would eliminate any potential safety benefits of self driving.
And by further removing people from the operation of a car, you’re making them worse owners. They won’t know what a worn tie rod bushing would feel like because they never steer. Making cars into appliances just makes them less safe.
He also made a point that I agree with: If we get people who don’t want to drive off the road, the roads would be nicer for people who do want to drive.
People who drive with unsafe mechanical issues they can’t or won’t get fixed are still going to exist, and bald tires and worn brakes would eliminate any potential safety benefits of self driving.
In European nations we just inspect the shit out of every car to ensure safety. The car must be mechanically satisfactory and have adequate brakes, tyres, etc.
A solution to this would be if mechanics would come to every owner’s house, inspect the cars, and do repairs, but that’s not unique to autonomous cars. Plus, that’s super expensive. Not the best solution by far.
Alternatively, since the cars are autonomous, they could report to repair facilities on their own, and return to owners once repairs are complete. This might be a decent solution if the owner can program which repair facility the car should go to, likely based on what’s cheapest or well known.
These are the only solutions I can think of that don’t include a third party owning the cars themselves, with monitor where the cars are and can direct them to their own repair facility (or one of their choosing). Doesn’t really seem so far off from the owner’s having this control now that I think of it.
So many times watching a car crash video, someone hydroplanes through a puddle …. my first reaction is I bet they live somewhere without safety inspections and those tires are bald
If we get to the point of self-driving cars, it’d make sense that the car would refuse to drive if it’s unsafe enough
How would it know? Might be able to figure out that it has reduced braking capacity but most everything else could either just be seen as road conditions or require about a thousand pounds of sensors that may still not be able to figure it out. And that’s not talking about the person who will “fix their car” in the most unhinged ways possible, like the video I saw of the guy that replaced his brake lines with clear plastic hose.
I do all the work on my car myself, and can pretty confidently say that a lot of stuff just isn’t even possible to monitor. There are ways to monitor a lot more than we do right now but diagnosing issues is pretty complicated and without certain information it can be downright impossible. I took a friend’s car for a drive be auss he said it shook only when turning one direction and I nearly immediately clocked it as something loose with the outside wheel(it was the lugnuts) but for something like that a computer just couldn’t know.
You need to use propietary tires with propietary air, that resets a counter when replaced, if you choose to use generic air your car may randomly stop working
Back when I used to agree with Mush, he said something I still agree with, “you don’t want flying cars, because you don’t want a poorly maintained car to fly around and lose a hubcap”.
I somewhat disagree with this. If you can feel worn tires, brakes, or suspension bushings, it’s easy to imagine the car feeling them and raising a service alert, and locking out if not appropriately serviced.
Vendor lock-in and enshittification, baby.
Certain things are fairly easy to detect like wheel imbalance vibration or a bad muffler sounds. but there’s so many “vibes plus experience” things that I don’t think software will catch. The human brain is exceptionally good at picking signal out of noise, and “feeling” a bad set of tires or an old timer being able to “hear” how healthy your motor is, aren’t really things you can teach an algorithm.
I’m sure somebody will try to predict failures, but it might not go well. Surely it will be used to gouge consumers, and of course the owners of self-driving cars won’t know any better.
Could we stop saying that computers “could never do” things? It always gets proven wrong. Anything we can detect as humans has some physical reason that we can detect it. Sensors can detect it more effectively. To suggest that you can’t program a computer to know what those sensors are supposed to be reading is just absurd.
Airliner engines are getting to ludicrous reliability numbers (the latest generation appears to be closing in on 10M hours between inflight shutdowns) largely through predictive maintenance performed far in advance. We’re well past ‘most pilots never see an engine failure’ and approaching ‘most airlines don’t see an engine failure’.
And there are few locations more abusive to sensors than the hot section of a turbine engine.
Worn tire is almost impossible to detect if without any physical inspection, and sensor just can’t cut it. Sometime it worn on the side because of bad alignment, sometime it’s the middle, sometime it’s uneven for whatever reason. Unless you want your car to be all sensor, which is the reason recent car is such a nightmare to maintain, you wouldn’t want a tyre wear sensor that you have to clean the sensor once in a while, which that time could be used to physically inspect your tire.
Imagine having sensor all over your suspension, tierod, tire, and one fault is detected mean it’s towing time. That would be a nightmare of a nightmare.
And yet people can feel the difference between a worn tire and a new tire. Accelerometers and the torque feedback on the motor drives (both of which are already widespread in cars out of necessity for other equipment) can feel when the tires are on the edge of losing traction.
One of the changes in automation over the last decade or two is a move away from having many specific ‘sensor for monitoring X’, towards interpreting a smaller number of better sensors in novel ways to provide the same data.
I’ve been in the industry for 15 years and i’ve never heard of anyone that can feel if their tire are worn or not, most can tell the difference between a worn and new right after they changed(mostly psychological, as they asked it to be change and know it’s new), but never feel it in their daily commute. They will only know when they check. Same as machine, if the change is gradual and slowly over a long period of time, they will only interpret that as something normal and calibrate it accordingly. It’s the same reason your car won’t bitch about throttle body service because the parameter is “off”, or bitch about alignment because your steering is slight off center, because they deem it as “normal” and calibrate as such. They only throw up signal if the change is sudden.
Secondly, said tech already been used as a way to tell you about tyre, yet more car use tps anyway, because it’s more precise and accurate.
Thirdly, people already and should rotate their tire regularly, at that time you should know how much thread the tire still have left, having an extra and unreliable “warning” would totally piss people off.
It’s a feature that doesn’t benefits from redundancy.
Yeah, I’m always a little skeptical about the ‘feel it’ claims. But computers don’t have to adapt to progressive wear; I’m sure you could configure the ABS/traction control to indicate that in dry conditions consistently slipping below say 0.3g (number pulled out of ass) of applied traction implies an excessively worn tire.
Once you get below a certain level of performance, all the braking/steering assumptions involved in self driving start breaking down too.
Imagine getting in your car and it refusing to drive you anywhere because the wear sensor on the brake pads is bad, but everything else is fine.
It’ll be like MS windows. "Service needed " message will pop up as soon as you get in, then it’ll drive straight to the nearest service centre , however many 100’s of km away, and keep you hostage inside 'til you pay the bill.
That seems relatively easy (and cars already have it with the little bit of metal that makes the brakes squeal when worn):
From the sensor being triggered, you have say 1-2000km to get the sensor or brake pad (whatever the issue is) fixed.
Also having worked in the industry the “if” in “Even if self-driving cars are safer than people” is carrying the weight of the sun. You might be able to get them safer than humans in a specific subset of circumstances but I would never trust one.
If they could have made anything self driving already it’d be trains, but we still don’t have fully automated trains
Maybe you don’t, but in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia, we have it for decades.
Yes we do. REM in Montréal, skytrain in Vancouver
I think the Sydney metro partially is too. But that is easier because it doesn’t cross any roads, or have many branching connection.
SEATAC has em, that was an interesting experience 10 years ago.
Self driving buses though can be very useful!
No labor cost to drive the bus means it suddenly becomes a lot cheaper to operate buses with less capacity. Meaning, more frequent buses in low density neighborhoods.
If they are electric maybe. Busses are loud as fuck.
My city in Florida just started a self driving bus system…its a pilot program of course. I should go downtown just to take a ride.
Lets go a step farther and put that bus on tracks, which will make it even easier and safer to implement self driving.
Hear me out:
We give them road specifically for them, make them self driving, give them lidar and whatever sensor to be safe, paint a specific coloured line on the route, direct them to only self-drive on that line so no deviation = no worry with traffic, and call them well-trained bus.
If you’re gping through that trouble, lay the tram tracks so the next politician cant open that lane up to car traffic.
maybe we can connect multiple busses together and that way it can carry more on the same track!
Tram systems could be made that simple as adding capacity is just add another tram car to the link onto certain routes. We do also need trains but trams serve a more localized purpose, which often make up the majority of someone’s trips
But this would be eye wateringly expensive. Imagine all the towns and villages that buses serve and now lay rail on all the roads. But it would be even more crazy since the idea would be to increase frequency and variety of destinations.
Now you also need to buy expensive trams (relative to a bus), maintain both rail and roads.
Tracks are cool but kinda difficult to cover the suburbs with them!
in the city where i live, every trip by public transport typically involves 10 minutes of walking - 5 minutes to the bus station and 5 minutes from the bus station to the final destination.
if you think that’s a problem, think again. movement is good for your physiology, and public transport makes you move naturally.
You just need regular, quick service within bicycle/motorbike range. There’s unmanned platforms in Japan that have a daily ridership of literally 2 people, usually the same person taking the train to work.
I heard about one in Japan that had only one person riding it each day. They cancelled it after she graduated high school.
Japan is just about the most different society from the US you could have picked though. Japan is a very high trust society whereas the U.S. is in the process of transition to a low trust society. Many (even very mundane) government actions that people readily accept in Japan would be met with fierce opposition in the US.
There’s opposition in Japan too. They just break through it, by legal means, extra-legal means, and if that’s too slow, throwing a bunch of money at the problem. Same with Korea, same with China. Trust has nothing to do with the economics of being able to operate trains.
Opposition in those countries is a tiny fraction of what you see in the US, where half the population of the country fiercely opposes anything and everything the other half tries to do.
China forcibly relocated millions of people to build the Three Gorges Dam. I doubt you’d ever see that in the US today.
I mean we did it to build the hoover dam. The legal mechanisms to do so still exist. The political will doesn’t because mass transit is bad for oil and car manufacturers.
You know what, you’re right.
We should knock down the suburbs and use that land for sustainable energy generation, food production, or let it re-wild to support conservation efforts!
according to this map
approximately 1% of all habitable land on earth is used for housing and any kind of transport (streets, tracks) while 50% is used for agriculture.
the amount of land we use for housing is absolutely negligible. if you tear down all suburbs, you barely save any land area. it’s just not worth it.
though suburbs still suck, but for different reasons.
I’d be with ya except for one tiny issue, living in high density housing sucks ass
Could we/should we condense suburbia down? Absolutely. Should we get rid of it entirely in favor of high density? Fuck no
High density, which in my opinion starts with mixed use apartment buildings have business underneath them on the ground floor, are way better than suburbs.
Mixed use allows for businesses to integrate with the community in literally the same footprint, which adds walkability and drives commerce. Plus, the more mixed use you have, the easier it is to have laborers live closer to their place of work, reducing commute time and costs while promoting more balanced lifestyles.
Obviously mixed use is one solution of many, but there are so many benefits to higher density living compared to suburbia.
Don’t think we’re in disagreement, btw
My issue is more on the “apartment building” aspects. Apartments suck, sharing walls/floors/ceiling with others sucks. Lots of apartments means lots of opportunity for just one apartment to get infested with something that will quickly spread to others even if they do nothing to attract said pests (e.g. keeping a really clean place)
Or just one dumbass flooding the place or a fire breaks out
Apartments also means constantly having to worry about being too loud or dealing with others who don’t care
If there’s a version of high density that also allows for Single Family Housing for those who want it, id be cool with that
If there’s a version of high density that also allows for Single Family Housing for those who want it, id be cool with that
It’s called decent quality. All the problems you mentioned fall back on every corner being cut in our profit-driven societies. Just because you’re in an apartment doesn’t mean that ANY of that should ever happen. We somehow have giant buildings housing dozens or, rarely, hundreds of companies, and they have protective measures in place for fires and water damage.
High density housing comes in many forms, and all of them suck way less ass than suburbia.
Suburbs ditch all the convenience of a walkable, urban environment and replace that with all the transportation woes of living out in the boonies.
High density isn’t the only alternative to suburbia. Walkable villages — the way people lived pretty much everywhere in Europe outside of Paris, London, Berlin etc. — are not suburbs but they’re also not high density apartment blocks.
The difference between a village and suburbia is specialization. Suburbia is specialized to housing only whereas a village is a self-contained community with both housing, small businesses, an industry or two, and surrounding wilderness as well as agricultural land.
Villages are not sprawling, they’re fairly small, and they’re connected into a network of other villages as well as larger towns and cities. In the past, this connection was via a road network (usually unpaved dirt roads for walking or horses, but some cobblestone roads too). Today this connection could be via train and even high speed train.
The real problem though is that we can’t just start over. We’re stuck with the infrastructure and planning choices we already made.
“High density” doesn’t just mean high rise apartments. Your example of a small, walkable village with combined/mixed-use space necessarily has high density housing. High density housing just means housing options that reduce sprawl and make public services easily accessible, usually by foot.
So we agree that sprawl and specialization are the problems, which is the important bit. I was being hyperbolic when I suggested we knock down all the suburbs, but I do think that suburbs are a terrible way to plan a community, and we should stop building them now and convert the ones we have into denser, more walkable communities.
Or maybe we could rip all the car sewers out and put a nice park in instead. It would make high density housing a lot nicer, yah?
High density is pretty sweet. I walk outside and there’s like 3 groceries within a short walk. Sprawl and wastelands kind of suck
Have you seen any of the mixed use suburb development concepts? I think they’re really cool, basically a whole block that has a wide range of housing options and amenities all self contained from single family to apartments
If it’s high density with the option of single family housing integrated, I’m fine with that. I just hate apartments
While we’re at it, we might as well outfit everyone’s quarters with a replicator and install transporters in the buildings so we don’t need to bother with food prep or vehicles at all!
Self-driving cars would be real neat though to use the existing infrastructure. But that’s in addition to great public transit
Start with one city. Designate one city and allow everybody who wants public transport to move there. The city will be public transport paradise soon.
Downvoters, what’s wrong with that approach? You know Divide and Conquer. To make a change, resources have to be focussed. Have one successful city and others will want to follow.
There are many other factors than public transport that attract/attach people to a city or town. Like friends, families and jobs. And it takes a long time to build a city from nothing and even longer to rebuild an existing city. I don’t think it will be as smooth as it sounds in your comment.
It’s difficult but still the easiest path forward. It’s not for everybody. If public transport is not a priority for choosing a place to live then that’s ok. However everybody who has such a priority should meet in one place if they want it as fast as possible.
People are limited to where they can live by work.
Not remote workers, startups and the employees of expanding businesses that profit from the influx of motivated people.
It’s not a given but a solvable problem.
Good transit takes decades to build. Remote workers and startups can have it today if they just move to a place that does it better, while also solving other issues, such as insane rent and the prospective of being thrown into a concentration camp.
Better is not good enough. One place has to show the full potential of public transport, with the option for everybody to move there. That forces every other city to be equally good.
NYC?
That exists outside America, and where it exists within America, rent is too high because everyone wants to live there.
Other cities being more livable hasn’t made the landlords and small business owners who own city governments across America decide to allow public transit.
There are lots of other things where people say “there are millions of us let’s do x together” where nothing happens. As example, plenty of people likes old cars and wish that car companies will build cars like in the past and nothing happens.
I think it would be easier for existing cities to prioritize public transport in new areas that are being built in the city. It would be a smaller step, people can move there and still keep their job.
For the old cars nothing happens because there is no majority to change the regulations, which could be changed easily.
Likewise new areas could easily have public transport but there are no majorities for that.
It’s all about having the majority.
Jobs also go to where skilled workers are and there are remote jobs. The selection of the designated city is the big problem, not the jobs.
“just move to the middle of nowhere and then build your own integrated public transit bro”
If there was some movement like that, it would be both easier and more effective to just move to a city with good public transit, Seoul or Beijing or Shenzhen if you have a fetish for electric cars.
Designate one city
That’s not nowhere.
The big decoupling is coming. Moving to China is not an option for everybody who hates cars.
What about all the other political demands that are ignored forever? To make a change, actions have to be taken which require majorities. The easiest path would be to meet in one city. The frightening part is that it could be successful.
What big decoupling?
I want self driving cars to take me home at night when public transit is down or partially down.
This happens in major cities with big public transit network (Paris, Tokyo).
The people that need to move at this hour isn’t big.
