I'm typically an autonomous skeptic, but I disagree. I think autonomous cars are decades away UNLESS we start designing roads specifically for vehicular autonomy. design lanes that are extremely easy for cameras to see. Traffic lights that are easy for computers to parse. Street signs like QR codes etc.
Obviously the cost of this is prohibitive. But at some point we have to get it through our heads that for a computer to excel at a task, the task needs to be redesigned.
This is a terrifying idea. Most of the US -- and its cities -- is already designed around the car over the people which make it up, and there's more than a few convincing arguments this car-above-all philosophy has been detrimental to the economy, sustainability, and overall health and happiness of cities, and, as Jane Jacobs would say, has all but destroyed the diversity of city life and replaced it with cookie-cutter "Great Nothingness".
I personally shudder at the thought of redesigning our cities any more around cars, and instead hope the next decade will continue the trend of adapting car usage to living in cities and not the other way around.
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Self-driving cars can and should be an amazing complement to city life: owning a personal vehicle would be unnecessary if the city were dense enough to support a fleet of ever-roaming self driving cars, allowing more space for pedestrians, residents, and workers to enjoy the city and reclaim all the land dedicated to street-parking and parking lots (Los Angeles proper has more area dedicated to on street surface parking than the entire city of San Francisco is big). That's more housing, more parks, more schools, more activity, more events, you get the idea.
Most of that promise would dissipate if we had to further redesign the city around the car, and for what: so the few of us lucky enough to own a self-driving car could live far away from everyone else and putter around on their phone while their car is stuck in traffic on ever wider and wider highways?
American city planning underwent a fundamental shift in the 1950/60s which prioritized cars (I'd argue for the worse), and I think it's past time we undergo another shift away from ever-extending sprawl.
Yep. Or they shouldn't even need to "see" the lanes. The roads could be enhanced with signal transmitters so that the car is "on rails", in a digital sense.
Of course that would require centralization and working with the government. The government has no incentive to do this because it would just create another problem for them (mass unemployment).
> The government has no incentive to do this because it would just create another problem for them
Actually the government DID try to do this. The U.S. DOT had an entire decades long program researching the following:
1) Costs and plans for updating roads with sensors
2) Upgrading traffic boxes (the things that control traffic lights and such) with a module to communicate back and forth with surround cars
2) Forcing manufacturers to install a module in all cars that would allow them to communicate with surrounding cars + road sensors + traffic boxes.
The problem was the amount of push back the government got from car companies was really absurd. And of course Republican funding games. Republicans love their private companies so they basically sapped the program's funds.
It was able to pick up momentum again from around 2012 onward though:
How about designing roads for people. All the problems you mention should be solved even if we don't have self-driving cars of any kind.:
start designing roads specifically for ease of use. design lanes that are extremely easy to see. Traffic lights that are easy to parse. Street signs standardized and easily readable.
Are there any companies currently trying though? I'd be interested in joining an effort to design self driving cars and the roads those cars would need. I've had the idea for a while but haven't heard of anyone doing it.
Obviously the cost of this is prohibitive. But at some point we have to get it through our heads that for a computer to excel at a task, the task needs to be redesigned.