Self-driving technology will overtake average human ability with regard to safety within a decade, but the biggest hurdle will be public acceptance. The AI will not make the same kind of mistakes humans make. So while the aggregate number of accidents will be (likely much) lower without a human at the wheel, the AI will make deadly mistakes that no human would make, and this will terrify the public. A intuitively predictable crash will always be scarier than one that makes no sense to our minds. The only way self-driving tech will ever succeed is if the AI can be limited to the same kinds of mistakes humans make, just fewer, and that's a VERY hard technical nut to crack that I do not believe will be solved anytime soon.
That said, I still believe that the ubiquity of cars is inherently a problem, human operator or no. If we put more effort into self-driving busses and autonomous trains—which have regular schedules, routes, and predictable speeds—I think we would see much greater dividends on our investment and far fewer "unintuitive" errors. Our collective fixation on cars blinds us as a society to this option unfortunately. More cars just clog up the road even more, demand more parking, and otherwise monopolize land use that could be more productive otherwise. More idling/circling driverless cars adds to the blight rather than relieving it. We need to transport more people between points in higher density, not lower, and cars are the lowest density transportation options available.
We could legislate around this very irrational/human fear. Personally I’d feel much safer if the roads were primarily filled with drivers that don’t get emotional and are objectively safer. Even if a few accidents confuse me and seem avoidable. I think what your analysis is missing is that most human accidents are also 100% avoidable. Why aren’t we looking at the incredibly dumb things humans do and asking the same hard questions? Why doesn’t it spook us when a human doesn't see a red light and t-bones cross traffic? Or when a multi-car pileup happens because a large pickup truck with a big car complex is tailgating someone at 85 mph and a sudden stop is required?
The problem is it's not totally irrational to be freaked out by this. Think about the distribution of the error rate.
A lot of fatal accidents can be attributed to inexperience, distracted driving, running lights, drugs, alcohol, asleep at the wheel, medical events or extremely aggressive driving.
The distribution of unsafe driving is not even. Personally I had 2 accidents in my teens and 0 for the following 20 years.
Your typical taxi driver will be fired/fined/reported over time if they drive this way. Further, if you are in a taxi where you notice a driver making you uncomfortable, you can end the ride early (I have).
However, imagine a robodriver that is 4x safer, however every single vehicle on the road has the same probability in any instant of invoking the same "no human would make this mistake" driving error fatally.
An analogy would be that at any moment, your calm, courteous, focussed spouse behind the wheel suddenly transforms into a 17 year old teen in a Mustang.
There's a difference between "I'm 4x safer", and "I'm expected to be 4x safer than the average person is now".
The GP is arguing that there is a way to actively become safer than the average person by avoid getting into "dangerous" situations. This may or may not be 4x safer than average though. There's this element of control that is lost when it comes to AI driving.
The relevant point to you is, if you already have good driving skills, always drive responsibly, and generally avoid driving in areas/times that have more drunken drivers around, then you might not actually benefit 4x.
Yes, this is the point I am making. If you do not engage in risky behavior, and are not distracted, you are likely already 2-4x safer than an average driver. So AI driving may not make your driving better.
Next problem is everyone else's driving!
It's like an arms race / tragedy of the commons issue as well.
Your safe driving doesn't matter if other people are still running lights / driving drunk / etc.
In absence of near-perfect AI driving, followed by government mandates to take everyone else off the street.. it doesn't matter.
And this is never going to happen.
It makes no difference to the pedestrian, cyclist or any other party in a crash. One does not choose whether one crashes with/gets run over by a novice or an experienced driver.
It doesn't require government action. Insurance will see computers causing fewer accidents, requiring lower payouts and adjusting rates accordingly. Penalties for drunk drivers might become harsher because they now have an alternative. Ditto for old people. Commuters will like having their hands and eyes free. Robo taxis will also make a dent in the market. Over time the number of human-driven vehicles will decrease on its own and it'll make less sense to get a driving permit in the first place.
My understanding is that that is a punishable offense in most states, so that's a matter of consistently enforcing existing laws rather than introducing any new ones.
Anyway, the mechanisms I have listed can still drive adoption of self-driving cars and reduce the number of human-driven cars on the road which also reduces the number of fatalities if the self-driving ones outperform humans. And if we look at QALYs instead of fatalities there may be additional benefits.
Here's a sensible way to make that transition – driving is treated as a privilege. If you are a dipshit on the road more than a certain number of times (driving drunk, running red lights, driving recklessly) then that privilege gets taken away, and you have to use an autonomous car. Over time the safety of everyone on the road goes up regardless of what they are driving.
That only works in parts of the world where there is a viable alternative to driving. Speaking as someone who has lived most of their life in the rural south US, that’s not a reality for most of the world.
See earlier note about the public not accepting autonomous vehicles while they make errors humans consider nonsensical. The actual aggregated stats don't matter. The logic doesn't matter. All that matters is the video of a self-driving car veering off course suddenly and slamming into a school or bumping a pedestrian at high speed on video. It won't matter that no kids got hurt or that the pedestrian survived with minor injuries.
It will feel more dangerous and untrustworthy, and that has always been more than enough to kill a promising solution in this country.
If we can overcome that and actually follow the numbers instead of our guts, we won't need most of the cars in the first place—autonomous or otherwise—because the numbers say mass transit is the better option on all metrics: economic, environmental, safety, land use, etc. Cars are at best a backfill option.
The general public doesn't have to accept anything because they still have a choice to use whatever car they want. It's only the drunk drivers being forced in those evil autonomous cars, and they would have otherwise killed themselves/others anyways if left on their own. And then over time the safety numbers, convenience and more will speak for themselves and convince you to switch.
>> But what’s the point? Why do individuals need level 5 cars?
Because there are places that public transit will never cover? I've been places in the American West that are 50+ miles from the nearest paved road, stop sign, or restroom. I don't think they're getting bus or train service any time soon.
No, but you could have public-rideshare in some of these places.
Level 4+ cars may be quite expensive for some time. Operating costs of L4+ vehicles will likely be low compared to human-driven vehicles (counting the cost of the driver). So, it could lead to car sharing in situations where we don't accept it currently.
> that are 50+ miles from the nearest paved road, stop sign, or restroom.
US population density is lower than most of the developed world, but what you describe is a tiny share of miles driven and can be effectively ignored for now.
Ah, you’re correct I did miss that. I’m not sure how I’d feel about a federally mandated solution like this… but I have to admit, it’s A SOLUTION to an otherwise big problem.
It does spook some people, but sufficiently large portions of the population also like to engage in the very things that cause those collisions, such as using their phone or being distracted, driving inebriated, driving fast, tailgating, etc, such that most people feel okay with others being risky, since they are being risky too.
Of course, when a collision does happen and damages have to be paid, the injured party will of course start advocating for full liability even if they previously had no issues engaging in the risky driving themselves. Which is why this is not reflected at the polls when voting for a politician who would promise cracking down hard on moving violations, with things like cameras and increased police stops.
And all because of our over reliance on cars in urban and suburban environments. Mass transit basically eliminates the need for moving violations, traffic citations, parking problems, cameras, and police stops. No more need for stroads, toll booths, etc. Our cities might actually be livable again. Walking and biking wouldn't feel like putting our lives at risk. Fewer parking lots means more stores and other amenities closer to where we live.
It's the cars. Autonomous or not, cars are the problem.
But just like health care, we keep choosing and voting for the absolute worst option because it's what we're used to and fear-mongers selling us a story about how any change will inevitably lead to a socialist hellscape. Fear: it's a hell of an addictive drug even as we witness our own obvious decline.
America is huge and its people are very spread out. Its cities are sprawling and low density.
For what it's worth, I don't actually shop at the supermarket closest to my house that is within walking distance because they don't offer good prices.
America does not have an even population distribution. East of the Mississippi is similar to Europe in population density, as is the far west coast (within ~100 miles of the Pacific). There is a lot of land between the Mississippi river and the Pacific Ocean, plus Alaska that few people live on that brings density down. However if you just focus on where people live density is high enough.
Even the sprawling suburbs are dense enough to support greats transit - but since they don't have great transit everyone drives creating a death spiral that is hard to break out of.
Yes, there is much work to be done. And it will have to be done to move forward. We've eroded sidewalks and put driveways along major stroads. Parking lots often match or exceed the size of the businesses they serve. We've reached maximum density with car-centric city planning.
There are some software decisions that worked well up to a certain point, but simply won't scale reliably to the current level let alone what you need for the foreseeable future. At some point you have to bite the bullet and refactor. Refactoring takes skill, and you need the right folks for the job, but it will get harder and more expensive the longer you wait. It typically doesn't have to be done all at once. Just fix as you go and stop following the older patterns. Have a plan and work toward the goal one step and a time. One commit at a time. One stroad at a time.
Folks may believe in the whole "personal freedom" with a car, but how personal or free are you sitting in bumper to bumper traffic? Cars = Liberty is a pernicious lie.
I live in a Czech city called Ostrava. You can look it up on Google Maps.
We have excellent public transport, but it is slowly becoming too expensive for the municipal budget. Given that the city is historically not compact (there are either old industrial brownfields or rivers with adjacent floodplains that are unsafe for residential buildings), trams and buses need to cross kilometers of mostly uninhabited territory before reaching dense parts of the city again. Of course, that costs money in fuel or electricity, extra wear and tear on the vehicles, plus the polycentric character of the city does not allow for a simple network of lines meeting downtown. You need more of a triangle.
And there is approximately nothing that can be done about it. The floodplains are dangerous to build in, the rust belt of brownfields would be too expensive to redevelop, the economy of the city is far from stellar and won't support any extensive redevelopment anywhere; we are already losing population, though not dramatically so.
I'm not sure what bullet we have to bite and why. I'd rather the personal freedom to just drive across town and shop. Our sidewalks are great, we have bike lanes, lots of parks. What we don't have here is a lack of space. We're surrounded by miles of farmland, as are all of the other cities near me.
There is only so far as you are willing to drive. In theory I have the freedom to drive to New York city for my shopping, but that is a 17 hour drive (best case, not counting stops!), so I would never do that.
Even for cities of normal size, the total distance across means you would not want to make it a regular event to shop on the other side of the city. So if we add transit, and increase density you can find there are more places you within a reasonable range for whatever activity even though you lost the freedom of the car.
Of course if your activity isn't shopping - something a city excels at - but instead camping far away from other humans: then a car means freedom. When the activity you want to do is something a city excels then doing it via transit should mean even more ability to do it and thus more freedom. Of course this freedom via transit only works out when there is great transit and high density. Getting there is often difficult.
It’s difficult for mass transit to ever beat a car in direct speed; even in Rome where the train literally goes from the airport to a block from the hotel my Uber with luggage beat the coworker who rode the rails, and he didn’t even wait very long at all.
Are you also including finding your car in the parking lot and finding a parking spot at your destination? I find a lot of folks neglect that part of the time taken.
When in Manhattan, the subway can 100% beat a car over the length of the island. (Car can beat the busses going cross town though unless of course you add parking back to the equation.) Getting to Queens seems to be faster on the subway than taking a car across the bridge too.
D.C. and San Francisco are both towns I'd also rather take mass transit than drive.
Of course if’s best to avoid dangerous conditions, but you must realize that weather changes fast and a clear road can become very low visibility in the matter of minutes. There are also urgent and emergency situations where it’s rational to take the weather risk and drive much more cautiously than the alternative. Finally the issue is not strictly visibility it’s more the pavement condition. Autonomous drivers can’t “feel” the road the way a human can, at least not yet, so conditions that a human could safely cautiously navigate just aren’t safe for a non-human right now.
> the AI will make deadly mistakes that no human would make
you'd be surprised what kind of mistakes humans make.
Anyway, snarky comment aside. The biggest reason for optimism is that a world full of AI cars will remove the reptile-brained jostling for position that's 90% the cause of all crashes today, and that it will overall _slow down_ traffic. Slower, calm, tepid moving traffic, a bunch of electric golfcarts puttering around the city. That's a future of AI-only traffic worth signing up for.
It's amazing how many people seem to not see further up the road than the cars directly in front of them. Even when driving tall SUVs or trucks.
My favorite scenario is when someone super impatient pulls around (often suddenly without signaling) a car not noticing:
* The car in front of them is actually going the same speed as the car in front of them
* The lane they were all in is actually going faster than the lane they just pulled into
* Everyone is about to pass a slow person up ahead in the newly selected lane
Person predictably hits the gas to race ahead only to get stuck behind the slow car while the cars they thought they were passing proceed ahead in the lane they just left.
Sometimes frustration and increasingly eratic behavior ensues.
This is a genius reply. I 100% agree intellectually as well as from personal experience. I have a British co-worker. When he goes home for the holidays, he is always terrified of how fast people drive on two lane countryside roads with sharp turns and limited visibility. Another Swiss co-worker said the same about snowy local roads in the mountains. Locals drive very fast. As soon as AV is trained on those roads, it will drive much slower, and probably safer.
Why would you think people would drive slower with AV?
They will drive even faster thinking their AI will protect them.
I know this because Tesla has “ludicrous mode” and all other EV manufacturers are bragging about their insane 0-60 and 0-100 mph times, and owners love to show off.
Why would traffic actually be slower? Have you driven much in busy cities? Usually in California for example, when traffic conditions allow such, the actual advice given in things like drivers ed is to keep with the flow of traffic including in situations like freeway driving where traffic might be going much faster than the posted speed limit. Certainly ai might drive slower in places flagged as actually necessitating it, but if anything I'd think the advantage of a fleet of ai drivers is that cars could go even faster than before because suddenly there's nobody stubbornly slowing a lane down unnecessarily out of either panic or simply obstinance that they're in the right because they're going the posted speed limit.
> the actual advice given in things like drivers ed is to keep with the flow of traffic including in situations like freeway driving where traffic might be going much faster than the posted speed limit.
That's awful advice. It's something that feels right, but in reality only exaggerates the push-pull accordion effect of too fast, too heavy traffic.
> If we put more effort into self-driving busses and autonomous trains ... we would see much greater dividends on our investment and far fewer "unintuitive" errors.
Everything you said made sense, except focusing on mass transit for FSD, for two reasons:
The intent of focusing on bus/train automation comes from an illusion of control (we can control the lane/track, thereby) – hence we tend to rudimentarily attribute easy outcomes to it (low risk, high value).
If we ignore the control part and properly think about it – mass transit actually higher risk for lower value.
1. Lower value: For something that involves 100+ people on dense economic centers, it's already running at an economy of scale where a human driver just makes sense. I live in Germany where the metro trains & trams are already crazy automated. There is a human driver there just in case, more as a supervisor for the people riding (controlling hooliganism, jammed doors, helping challenged people, dealing with emergencies, etc). I see German trains as already running on FSD4. FSD5 full automation is a waste of time here. Using buses for last mile coverage for few passengers, aka treating buses as "big taxis" is probably worse environmentally than actual taxis.
2. Higher risk: By the same logic you said for cars – "far fewer unintuitive errors" – at a much higher capacity of mass transit – is far more catastrophic. Imagine a self-driving train had just 1 accident in 10 years, but it affected 1000 people. It's sheer terror. Who is liable for it? Government. The problem with going down this mass-transit-first route is, one error means legislating away the entire sector.
Cars are actually lower risk (individual choice, individual liability, accidents don't deter others from adopting) and higher value (last mile, moving away from the dense urban city plans that come with high rents and chokepoints which are crippling even to my beloved, beautiful German cities where even with all the urban sprawl, last mile is still a problem outside A zones).
German trains are not known for being automated. I'm sure you have some, but not as many as you think. No tram in the world runs crazy automation, they all currently have a human on board. Only grade separated trains run fully automated. There might be some automation on your trains, but it isn't fully automated.
Your second point is completely wrong: we have trains, and have been running them for more than 100 years. We have real statistics to show in the real world they are much safer than cars. Sure you can imagine anything you want, but when real science has real data why would anyone look at your imagined data.
I think you got the context of the second point entirely wrong, so it's better to read the comment to which it's replied. As I said before, my entire family are proud, satisfied users of the German metro & public transit system – and we are proudly anti-car. Nothing more to prove when we practice rather than preach.
As for the first, it would be worthwhile taking the AI-tinted driverless-only FSD glasses off, and re-read the original comment and response.
The whole industry feels like the cart leading the horse to me.
Not having a track to follow on/in the road (magnets, sensors etc.) Not mandating all cars talk to each other, working together like a mesh/hive/colony.
I understand that has its own set of self starter issues, but it can be built in WHILE also doing what is currently happening. The fact that roads are being replaced TODAY and still nothing is going in them to help cars drive themselves, baffles me.
I am convinced that this will come later. If anything, "hive mind" AV cars will allow them to drive much faster on high speed roads. Imagine if one lane is protected (walled) and reserved for AV cars on an expressway. They could drive crazy fast as a team (150km/h+). Expand that over the years. In 50 years, all expressways might be AV-only and cars driving very, very fast.
I agree that the fixation on cars in urban/population dense areas is a problem and the overall use of cars in these areas should be offset by public transportation.
I feel like the one in five Americans that live in rural areas is left out of the conversation though. You can't eliminate cars for those 60 million or so people.
When you suggest 80% of people live in urban areas, that statistic has a threshold of 2,534.4 people/sq mi. That isn't very dense. You're leaving out a lot more than 20% from the conversation when you talk about eliminating cars.
And, really, that understates it. I'm technically urban per the Census--ex-urban per ESRI. But the idea that anyone near me could reasonably get by with just public transit is laughable. And I actually live quite close to a commuter rail station and there is a small regional bus system.
Sounds like you and your fellow community members should vote for folks who will prioritize public transit rather than widening stroads. Poor transit options are a policy choice, not an inevitability. The best time to start advocating for livable cities was a decade ago. Second best time is now, so that ten years from now, you and yours will have more options than they have today.
Folks need to be transported at higher and higher densities as a city's population grows. Cars are the lowest density carrier available. Think of how many cars fit on a four-lane road on a mile stretch. How many people are in those cars? How many trains or busses would be needed to move that many people? Now visualize the space taken up by those cars versus the space taken up by busses.
That's how you solve traffic problems with a growing population, even for the folks who still need their cars because their destinations are sufficiently irregular. Mass transit helps those who need their cars too!
As a byproduct, you don't need so many and so large parking lots. Think of all the parking lots around you, which I'm sure there are many. Imagine 80% of them were replaced with housing, retail, office space, parks, meeting places, etc. Then convert the remaining 20% to multi-story parking.
I am 50 miles outside the nearest major city. I'm on a busy but 2-lane total country road where my two nearest neighbors are on 10s of acres. There are no nearby businesses (much less stroads) until you get to a nearby small (20K) person city. I don't know how you solve that with mass transit. And it's considered urban as the US Census defines it.
You may not approve that such places exist but they do. And folks like to live in them.
Okay, so where you live is classified incorrectly. That's fine. Mass transit doesn't work without the "mass" part, which you clearly don't have. I have no problem at all with your vehicle ownership or your choice of place to live.
Well, the census has a binary definition and, for different purposes, it makes various degrees of sense although I can fairly easily go into one one of the largest US cities for a day or evening. I'm not in the boonies but I'm also clearly not in a location where car-less public transit can remotely work. And I'm not sure there is a reasonable mid-definition because at that point you're judging what degree of inconvenience is acceptable--which is pretty much the case with the regional transit system around where I live.
Houston and Phoenix are 2/5 top 10 cities in America and both have a lower population density than the small farming city I live in of 50k people. America is just huge.
Yes, car-centric land use is horribly inefficient and the core of the problem. You can either throw good money after bad as a matter of public policy, or you can start strategically increasing density.
But it's a choice. There are a lot of folks out there in the "good money after bad" camp who focus too much on what is and what was rather than what could be.
We’re also only talking about “good weather” regions. There’s no way an autonomous vehicle is capable of handling diverse weather, gravel roads, especially snow and ice, at the moment (my Tesla does not). The conversation is very myopically optimistic at the moment (which is fine, it should be, just pointing it out).
Bet you we could make an autonomous vehicle that handles snow and ice conditions better than the average Seattle driver. Most people aren't any good at driving under those conditions. And half of Seattle forgets how to drive in wet conditions after the summer is over.
This feels like a straw man to me. If someone who works in construction, works a ranch, tows a livestock trailer, manages a farm, etc. wants an F-150 or F-250 or whatever, I don't think the vast majority of us will even question that decision. Rural residents and (sub)urban residents on average have very different needs and goals, and I have no problem with that. I for one am not fixated on the 20% because by and large, they aren't the problem. They don't greatly contribute to overall traffic congestion, traffic accidents, or even emissions. They also shouldn't block policy directed toward the 80%.
I'm talking about segments of the other 80% that wants a dually truck because it makes them look "alpha". Folks buying huge SUVs to feel "safe" while being more prone to rollovers, less able to avoid collisions, and far more likely to kill others—especially pedestrians—in a crash in addition to monopolizing greater and greater proportions of limited land resources.
You live three miles from your nearest neighbor? Feel free to indulge in a raised pickup with 3 tons of bed capacity and 5 tons of towing with my blessing.
You live in one of the major metropolitan areas in the US? Don't buy a Hummer, Lexus SUV, or F-150, especially if safety is your goal. In fact, those large vehicles should require a new class of drivers license due to their size and performance characteristics just like school busses require a class B and motorcycles a class M due to their different structure and place within our highways. Buy a transit pass. Per capita, folks simply don't die in car accidents when they ride the bus or take a light rail. Don't have good/fast public transit infrastructure where you live? Time to vote for folks who will make it a priority.
Because widening stroads has been tried. It doesn't work. They have never worked. They don't make traffic better, they don't make us safer on the road, they don't get us to our destinations safer, and they certainly don't make the most efficient use of land. It's time to move on. Dump all the stupid, oversized, single-level, paved parking lots and replace them with mixed-use housing, retail, and office space with a public transit hub.
Make just enough parking so that the 20% folks who actually need their daily-use vehicles can visit easily. Preferably they can park in the park-n-rides at the outskirts and hop on a train to the city center so the parking fees are as cheap as possible. Let the 20% decide whether they want self-driving vehicles or not. The 80% should leave them alone and embrace the self-driving busses and trains for themselves.
> the biggest hurdle will be public acceptance. The AI will not make the same kind of mistakes humans make. So while the aggregate number of accidents will be (likely much) lower without a human at the wheel, the AI will make deadly mistakes that no human would make, and this will terrify the public.
I'd argue safety is not a concern. There are a lot of "safe" things we could do, but don't. A significant percentage of the country doesn't even vaccinate its children. Self-driving cars aren't suddenly going to make us aware of our own mortality in ways that life itself hasn't already.
The real fear is lack of accountability. If a drunk plows into a crowd of pedestrians, he will be dragged out of it and (metaphorically) lynched. Justice makes us feel better about circumstances beyond our control. If North Korea test-launched an ICBM that erroneously hit Japan, we'd declare war over their typo. But when a self-driving car erroneously mows down pedestrians, we're told to just accept it, nothing we could do, mumble-mumble-training-data, and tragedies like this happen so we can be safer.
Nothing is going to condition us to resent the idea of Safety more than having our personal agency and sense of justice taken away from us in its name.
What do you think about a separate set of laws that determines pay outs from AV companies to people injured in AV accidents? It seems reasonable to me. For over 50 years, (life) insurance companies have offered specific pay outs for injuries. In some sense, a framework already exists. Also, if you want to make the system "bullet proof", require AV companies to put a certain amount of money on deposit with the state (or buy insurance from a separate company). (In a sense, this already exists for insurance companies through strict balance sheet regulations.) Then, you cannot have terrible AV company with many accidents that goes bankrupt from fines and cannot pay.
To be clear: I do think, in my lifetime, AV will become normal in many places. Some horrific accidents will happen that result in massive fines to the companies. As a result, some of them will go bankrupt.
Personal agency and justice are not provided by cars. To that point, how much agency do you feel you have in standstill bumper to bumper traffic. How much justice do you feel sitting in traffic, focused on the bumper stickers in front of you versus other actually productive activities while the bus or train are in motion.
Cars != Liberty
They never were. They have always been rapidly depreciating assets that are useful for one-off destinations and horrible externalities with regard to city planning.
I’ve been saying this since the 90s. Fewer cars, more mass transit in urban regions. But people are stupid: they would rather sit in traffic for 2-3 hours a day than give up a “freedom” that actively restricts them. The paradox is the size of a galaxy.
There’s no evidence to suggest that a system of self-driving vehicles are safer. The solution won’t come from the US because there are way too many red tapes. It’s coming from a smaller country perhaps Japan/Korea.
No lol we won't have fully self driving cars in our lifetime. We would need cars to fully understand human speech and understanding and be able to react with 100% accuracy 100x faster than humans.
These already exist in Hongkong, Singapore, and Paris, but they are crazy expensive. And, AV bus sounds harder than AV car due to boarding and fare payment issues. I disagree with your ideas for early AV applications.
I think you're assuming a city bus needs a fare. It doesn't. Santa Cruz County, CA has just passed a resolution where all busses in the county will be free to ride. It already is for folks working downtown, anyone under 18, anyone at the university, and for a small per-semester fee at the local community college.
This not only makes it more convenient to get around without worrying about buying transit tickets ahead of time, it means the busses can load from the front AND the back, making the time spent at each stop shorter and schedules easier to keep.
Much easier problem for autonomous setups when you remove fares and just have to monitor if anyone's in danger.
Public mass transit never breaks even from fares. What it does very well however is free up the money folks would have spent on gas, parking, car maintenance, etc., so they can move around and spend it more freely in the community.
You see this spectrum in various cities. Some cities make you pay depending on how far the light rail travels, so you naturally condition riders not to ride any more or further than they absolutely need to go. Places like New York City on the other hand just sell you a pass; taking an extra trip to the Met or to Central Park doesn't cost extra, so folks do it, socializing and stimulating the economy along the way.
New York's biggest transit mistake in my opinion is keeping the fares. They'll spend HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of dollars on NYPD overtime to catch turnstile jumpers when they could spend less just letting people ride for free.
https://gothamist.com/news/nypd-overtime-pay-in-the-subway-w...
According to a quick Google search, the NYC subway has fare recovery ratio of about 20%. Do you really think "NYPD overtime to catch turnstile jumpers" is 20% of the cost to run NYC subway? Not even close -- surely much less.
- What happens when all of the infrastructure gets built up around self driving cars and peoples first hand knowledge of how to drive diminishes. Once a near monopoly/duopoly is attained by a select few SDC vendors, it will become a utility. Then what fallback does society have if the likely enshittification happens. Do we just have to live with it?
- Its all fine when the companies able to do this are part of the most elite, technology first companies - but what happens when companies known to take short cuts (like the ones who can barely get bluetooth working for their audio infotainment system) start try to enter the market by focusing on lobbying the SDC oversight board.
Regarding your first point… 15 year olds learn the basics of driving in a day. Generally speaking, it’s not that difficult. A scenario where humans forget entirely how to drive and are unable to learn again is incredibly far fetched.
If you're building a new city just do public transit instead of all this inefficient nonsense. Either way it's not a naturally growing city so if you're going to plan one plan one that makes sense
Self-driving technology will overtake average human ability with regard to safety within a decade, but the biggest hurdle will be public acceptance. The AI will not make the same kind of mistakes humans make. So while the aggregate number of accidents will be (likely much) lower without a human at the wheel, the AI will make deadly mistakes that no human would make, and this will terrify the public. A intuitively predictable crash will always be scarier than one that makes no sense to our minds. The only way self-driving tech will ever succeed is if the AI can be limited to the same kinds of mistakes humans make, just fewer, and that's a VERY hard technical nut to crack that I do not believe will be solved anytime soon.
That said, I still believe that the ubiquity of cars is inherently a problem, human operator or no. If we put more effort into self-driving busses and autonomous trains—which have regular schedules, routes, and predictable speeds—I think we would see much greater dividends on our investment and far fewer "unintuitive" errors. Our collective fixation on cars blinds us as a society to this option unfortunately. More cars just clog up the road even more, demand more parking, and otherwise monopolize land use that could be more productive otherwise. More idling/circling driverless cars adds to the blight rather than relieving it. We need to transport more people between points in higher density, not lower, and cars are the lowest density transportation options available.