The New York Times has a story about what may be a more likely future of public transportation.
A small electric bus chugged along at a slow but steady seven miles per hour when a white van, entering the street from the side, cut in front of it. The bus slowed, as if its driver had hit the brakes, and got back up to speed after the van moved out of the way.
But this bus has no brake or accelerator pedal. It has no steering wheel, either. In fact, it doesn't have a driver — it operates using sensors and software, although for now, a person is stationed on board ready to hit a red "stop" button in an emergency.
At a time when self-driving cars are beginning to make progress — most notably with a trial program that the ride service Uber began in Pittsburgh this fall — the bus represents a different approach to technologically advanced transportation.
I say a more likely future because of the following:
A driverless car, after all, is still a car, carrying at best a few people. By transporting many passengers on what could be very flexible routes, driverless buses could help reduce the number of cars clogging city streets.
Few advantages accrue from driverless cars if the streets and highways are clogged with them. The passenger(s) can curse the vehicle up ahead instead of its idiot driver. My take: The idea has some promise, especially in places where people do not have long distances to travel.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Nuke on Monday November 07 2016, @05:46PM
This is because they will remove a long-standing deterrent to using cars in cities - finding (and paying for) somewhere to park. People will drive into the city and send the car back home until recalled - thus not only adding to the cars driving into the city, but making that a double journey as well. Or they might just tell the car to keep circling the block for the next 30 minutes, or drive to some random other point in the city and back again while their owner does his business.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday November 07 2016, @05:53PM
Or just take the bus or train. I'd like to see more light rail.
(Score: 2) by BK on Monday November 07 2016, @06:06PM
Seriously, where? Can I put it in your yard? Not the station -- I'll make sure that the bits that you could use are at least 3 miles away -- I mean the bits that make noise when you want to sleep and that obstruct your path to the nearest market so you have to travel 3+ miles because the tracks are between you and the market 100m away (yes, I just used miles and meters in the same run-on sentence.).
I want to see light rail with a station 100 yds (not meters dammit) from my front door that does non-stop to the place where I work 15 miles away. Door to door. I also want a direct line to the place(s) where I shop. Through your back yard. And at your expense of course. Is this reasonable?
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday November 07 2016, @06:16PM
have... have you ever lived next to a busy street?
I've lived in an apartment complex where one side of the building was light rail, and the other was a main artery road for the city.
Living there, I had to listen carefully to hear the noisiest thing the light rail did(ringing their bell approaching intersections), but would often be disrupted by that asshole who thinks a unmuffled motorcycle engine is their right, or cranked their damned bass up in their ugly pickup, or some stupid asshole driving a semi truck be impatient at a red light and use their giant air horn. (regular horns were not bad, comparable to the light rail).
The complaints you're making are entitled whining, and the GP would be entitled to fair compensation for the use of their land in your "evil" scenario because that's how imminent domain works outside of libertarian fantasy land.
(Score: 2) by BK on Monday November 07 2016, @06:36PM
yup. And with tracks fairly close. Actually it was an intersection/crossing. Train driver liked to blow the horn when approaching the crossing. I used to think think train horns were loud when I heard them from 2+ miles away... 300yds was a real treat. I guess that's heavy rail though?
And yup with fags [youtube.com] too on the roads.
The difference between tracks and the road is that I can generally make use of the road. The road system connects(ed) directly to my apartment. The roads go to just about anyplace I could want to go in a given day. While not non-stop, I generally don't have to change vehicles or wait outside my vehicle for 10-30 minutes part way to my destination when using roads. And that's a good thing too because nobody in my apartment building worked in the same place as I did.
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday November 07 2016, @07:06PM
Yeah, they're not adding new freight lines in cities though. It's an unfair comparison. Light rail is... well... light. Much less noise. I could hear the "heavy" trains about as well as the light rail, and those were, rather than right next door, 4 blocks away.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday November 07 2016, @10:18PM
Actually it was an intersection/crossing. Train driver liked to blow the horn when approaching the crossing.
That's likely because trains are mandated by federal law to blow horns at all public crossings, 24 hours per day.
Exceptions can generally only occur if a local municipality establishes a "quiet zone," which requires installation of a lot of extra safety measures. In that case, the train should only be sounding a horn in an emergency.
If trains regularly sounded their horns at that crossing, chances are that you were not living in a place recognized as a "quiet zone," either because your community didn't apply for one or because they refused to install the safety measures necessary for one (which can be costly).
(Score: 2, Funny) by khallow on Monday November 07 2016, @06:53PM
Can I put it in your yard?
We should do this for everyone who has ever disagreed with me about anything. The rumble of the light rail in your backyard would serve to gently remind you of your blasphemy of arguing with me about boll weevils on June 13, 1998 (you know who you are) and your long, hard trek back to sanctity as you meditate at the sacred altar of the Golden K and lay out burnt pizza offerings so that one day you might again be worthy of posting on the internet.
(Score: 2) by Sarasani on Tuesday November 08 2016, @03:40AM
That argument ("Can I put it in your yard?") could be used for a lot of things:
And so the list goes on.
I get your point, but we do need to look at the bigger picture when we're talking about proper city planning. Personally I don't think a lot of cities have been planned all that well. Some of the bad design decisions may be attributed to the "car is king" concept that societies have entertained for far too long [theguardian.com].
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Monday November 07 2016, @07:04PM
Light rail works, when cities have grown up around it and are relatively dense. If either of those is not true, light rail is a pipe dream.
I say this as someone living in Switzerland: We have "light rail" (we call them trams) in most of our larger cities. It works, it's great. But our cities meet both of the conditions above.
I've also lived in the US, and the cities there are far too sprawling. You would spend a fortune putting in enough tracks and enough stations to make any sense. Or you wind up with light rail only in the innermost city, meaning people have to drive their cars to "park-and-ride" stations, and then change - basically, the worst of both worlds.
On top of that, US cities did not grow up around the light rail lines. Here, the lines have existed for (in some cases) centuries. Guess where all the businesses are, that need to be near a line? In a city without trams, that will not be the case. You'll put the lines "somewhere", and then have to hope that the city adjusts over the course of years or decades. Or, you'll do like Edinburgh, put in too few lines (costing a fortune), in order to give clueless progressives crowing rights: "We have light rail! It's useless! We nearly bankrupted ourselves! Aren't we great!".
N.B. For those who don't know, Edinburgh installed a single line from the airport to Waverly [theguardian.com]. It parallels a long-standing bus line. The bus line still exists, runs more frequently, and is both cheaper and faster. Edinburgh is also about $1 billion poorer. This experience is utterly typical of cities that want to add light rail to their infrastructure. Phoenix, Arizona is another example. [coyoteblog.com]
tl;dr: Unless you are planning a new city, just stop with the light rail stuff. Buses are better: they are more flexible, and they are a hell of a lot cheaper.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Monday November 07 2016, @09:08PM
Except they get stuck in the same traffic that bedevils regular car travel. HOV lanes don't help.
I think a combination of what Chicago did with the 'L' and what Montreal did with its subway would work pretty well. The elevated part Chicago did avoids the very expensive excavation and right-of-way issues with subways and new light rail lines. The subway cars on tires part that Montreal did avoids the noise and wear and tear on rails that railcars incur. Personally, I favor maglevs because I love the smooth, silent ride, but then you get the wags singing out, "Monorail!" from that stupid Simpsons episode, as if that were an authority on that form of transportation...
That's for longer distances. Shorter distances are served pretty well by protected bike lanes. Extremely cheap to implement, and have so many benefits.
Many people assert that such options wouldn't work in American cities, but they worked before. The car companies worked hard to buy up the (then) private transit companies and shut them down so that people would have to buy cars; The Twin Cities are one famous case of that.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 08 2016, @12:12AM
Thanks for the advice, Portland, OR will tear down it's very successful light rail program because the city isn't dense enough for europeans to think it would work.
Granted, the Phoneixes, Dallases, and Tampas of the country would have problems, but that's more due to car culture than anything.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 08 2016, @05:13PM
Light rail works, when cities have grown up around it and are relatively dense. If either of those is not true, light rail is a pipe dream.
It's a good thing that London is such a young city that could grow after the invention of subways. Imagine how bad the mass transit would be there if it had been founded thousands of years ago. And New York. And Tokyo. And...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 08 2016, @08:35PM
subway is underground light rail (and shitty sandwich).
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday November 07 2016, @06:09PM
Indeed, most major cities charge so much for short-term parking, that sending your car to idle even a mile away will be totally worth it.
The poor people can take the automatic slow bus. Actually, if you make it slow enough, make it cheaper by just having a platform. Poor people don't mind a bit of wind and rain at 15 mph. It like a roller-coaster at the Disney resort that they can't afford.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07 2016, @06:42PM
Something like 30% of downtown city traffic is literally just people driving their cars around looking for an available parking spot.
So if autonomous cars drive into the city core, drop off their passengers, then drive away, those cars are not looking for parking spots so we should expect to see an overall reduction in downtown traffic rather than an increase. We also no longer need to dedicate as much downtown real estate for car storage so that space can be repurposed for something more useful.
(Score: 2) by julian on Monday November 07 2016, @07:02PM
That's true only if each person owns their own car and denies its use to anyone else. Uber will be the omni-present taxi service with automated electric cars. They drop you off and then go pick up someone else, no idling or returning home because the car isn't owned by the drivers its owned by Uber.
Of course this requires people to give up the idea of personal car ownership. But if shared cars are cheap and available I think it'll work out.
(Score: 2) by quintessence on Monday November 07 2016, @07:53PM
Yeah, I envision a Johnnie Cab future where the vehicles should be cheaper as they don't need to be designed with aesthetics in mind. Two facing bench seats and enough hardware to make them operate is all you need. You don't own it, so it doesn't matter what it looks like.
And if we have vehicles trading information with each other, it essentially operates like a large bus with individual pods that can break off the main route to individual destinations. After a few years of operation, you'll even have good logistical data to ferry pods to busy areas before they are needed and a reasonable idea of how many pods are needed. That helps immensely in keeping routes clear of traffic.
(Score: 2) by jimshatt on Monday November 07 2016, @09:04PM
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday November 07 2016, @09:26PM
If the car detects vandalism, it can automatically lock the doors and drive you to the next police station.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by jimshatt on Tuesday November 08 2016, @02:00PM
(Score: 2) by julian on Tuesday November 08 2016, @01:51AM
Your identity and credit card are on file and your use of the vehicle is logged. So vandalism is probably a non-issue since you can be charged for it. There will probably be cameras in the car, too.
Unfortunately this brings up obvious privacy issues. The Government WILL have access to this data; all of it, all the time, immediately, and forever.
(Score: 2) by jimshatt on Tuesday November 08 2016, @02:03PM
(Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Tuesday November 08 2016, @08:50AM
And where does the concept of privacy fit into all of this? Can I pay these automated Uber cars with cash so I don't have to give away my personal details? Do the Uber cars run proprietary software or conduct surveillance? Any of these ideas that fail to take into account privacy are non-starters.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Tuesday November 08 2016, @02:48PM
> And where does the concept of privacy fit into all of this?
Same place as always - what you do in public isn't private. Your privacy is waiting for you at the boundary of your property, right where you left it.
Unless, somehow, you are living in a world where you can rent cars without showing id, where cars don't have id plates that are registered to an owner who is legally obliged to identify the driver at any particular time, where taxi drivers never notice or remember who is in the back, where public transport is somehow not-public, where you can't be watched on the street. It's always been this way, it's just that now the watchers' jobs (like many others) have been automated by robots - cameras and card processing - and they are legion. The principle, however, was conceded long ago.
If you're really asking where does anonymity and untraceability fit into all this, that too is in the same place as always - in the dark, in the alleyways, on foot or on vehicles without plates, behind sunglasses and masks, false papers, fake cards, behind clothing changes and disguise, and in crowds, always in crowds. Right where it's always been.
(Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Tuesday November 08 2016, @07:03PM
Same place as always - what you do in public isn't private. Your privacy is waiting for you at the boundary of your property, right where you left it.
It's easy to repeat nonsense like this without thinking about it, but much harder to think about the implications this has on society. For one thing, there are different kinds of privacy; there is privacy that keeps others from seeing you (something that doesn't really exist in public places) and privacy from mass surveillance (something that could easily exist in public places). Automated mass surveillance allows governments to accurately record tons of information about individuals in the long-term on a scale that was never before possible, and it is far, far cheaper than hiring humans to do the same job. This type of surveillance allows governments to harass lawyers, dissidents, politicians, activists, whistleblowers, and journalists, and therefore threatens democracy. [gnu.org] This is almost entirely different from a taxi driver or someone else having a vague recollection of your existence, because their memories aren't perfect and aren't transferred to a powerful authority, hiring humans to do the work of a massive surveillance engine would cost far too much, and so on. The effects that mass surveillance has on society are totally different from the effects of someone spotting you in a public place, so comparing them is ludicrous. We can ban automated mass surveillance, even in public places.
We shouldn't have license plate readers tracking your location everywhere, shouldn't have central records of who drove where and at what time, and shouldn't have massive spy agencies spying on or collecting your communications. We should also try to use cash as much as possible and push back against efforts to create a cashless society. That is, if you want freedom and democracy to exist.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Thursday November 10 2016, @12:08PM
It's easy to repeat nonsense like this without thinking about it, but much harder to think about the implications this has on society. For one thing, there are different kinds of privacy; there is privacy that keeps others from seeing you (something that doesn't really exist in public places) and privacy from mass surveillance (something that could easily exist in public places).
If it's legal to do something once, using a person, it's legal to do it many times using a computer, there is no difference in legality or rights, just automation and scale. What you are saying is that using a computer to do something somehow makes it fundamentally different, it doesn't, despite people trying to patent 50yr old stuff all over again by adding "using a computer", changing the tool you use does not change what you are doing.
far cheaper than hiring humans to do the same job.
Humans are cheap too, in the right circumstances, and en-masse, see Mechanical Turk and consider if (as you hold) it is legal to do something by human but not but automated machine, is it legal to do it by (lots of) humans pretending to be an automated machine?
This is almost entirely different from a taxi driver or someone else having a vague recollection of your existence, because their memories aren't perfect
The taxi now has a camera to augment the driver's memory. Most people on the street have a phone to do the same. Many road accidents are now recorded in far better quality than cctv by multiple dashcams and helmet cams. Is all that footage individuals taking control and in some cases holding authority to account, or is it mass surveillance? At some point in the future we'll probably all have eye-cams and augmented memory for perfect digital recollection - and mandatory memory erasure after going to a movie...
Tools and technology change, but that is all it is, they can all be used for good or evil. Cops are now aware that everyone has camera phones so they try and confiscate or prevent filming or demand erasure - but people adapt. So now we have live streaming and soon that will be ubiquitous too, you can view that as a response to authority, a guarantee that the citizens' footage cannot be captured and suppressed or altered, or you can view it as a tool for authority to get all the footage onto a central server where it can be easily searched, but it is just a tool, that is all.
(Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Thursday November 10 2016, @03:04PM
If it's legal to do something once, using a person, it's legal to do it many times using a computer, there is no difference in legality or rights, just automation and scale.
Unless the law says otherwise, you mean. Are you saying it's simply impossible to write a law like that?
What you are saying is that using a computer to do something somehow makes it fundamentally different,
It does. It has drastically different implications for society, since levels of surveillance never before possible become possible, and the government is then able to use that surveillance to efficiently crush its opponents. I don't see how you can just ignore the actual degree to which something affects society, but it is foolish.
despite people trying to patent 50yr old stuff all over again by adding "using a computer", changing the tool you use does not change what you are doing.
The purpose and effects that patents have on society and the purpose and effects that mass surveillance has on society are totally different. Patents are about innovation, whereas highly efficient mass surveillance threatens democracy and freedom.
Humans are cheap too, in the right circumstances
Please tell me how the government could hire enough people to replace countless automated license plate readers (for example) who are both efficient and accurate enough to record countless license plates every single day (number, time, location), and then send that data to a central authority. If this is really feasible, then I would only say that that too should be banned, so you're getting nowhere fast.
Many road accidents are now recorded in far better quality than cctv by multiple dashcams and helmet cams. Is all that footage individuals taking control and in some cases holding authority to account, or is it mass surveillance?
Are those cameras all controlled by the government, or does the footage necessarily end up in the hands of the government? If so (which isn't true), then we should stop the government from getting all the footage.
Tools and technology change, but that is all it is, they can all be used for good or evil.
And it's patently obvious that the government will use mass surveillance for evil, seeing how often they use regular surveillance for evil. Who knows, maybe they'll actually be able to succeed in getting the next MLK to commit suicide, or be able to stamp out whistleblowers activists before they even have a chance to make their move. Also, mass surveillance necessary violates our rights, so I would oppose the practice no matter what.
Even in some hypothetical future where cameras are everywhere and we have augmented eyes that record everything, we should not allow the government to simply collect all of that data. Government mass surveillance should be banned. Period. What a shame it is to see someone defending something that so fundamentally threatens our freedoms and democracy.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Thursday November 10 2016, @01:54PM
Also should point out that the concept of paying an Uber in cash to preserve your privacy, after you have used your phone to log into a server and given it your location and destination, is not really well thought through....
(Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Thursday November 10 2016, @02:46PM
That's why I don't use Uber.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07 2016, @07:15PM
Drone delivery will reduce the need for as many vehicles on the roads.
And clog the skies!
(Score: 2) by chromas on Tuesday November 08 2016, @10:56AM
Skies are three-dimensional though.
But hey, at least once we have human-delivering drones, ISIS can finally have their own stealth bombers!
(Score: 2) by art guerrilla on Monday November 07 2016, @09:59PM
good points, nuke, and it reminded me of yhe discussion here a little bit ago which was talking about how pedestrians would take advantage of self-driving cars to jaywalk in front of thrm... dont uou think the same thing will happen with drivers 'taking advantage' of self-driving cars to worm in front of thrm, and generally 'bully' them as you woild NOT do to other real drivers...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07 2016, @11:34PM
>"People will drive into the city and send the car back home until recalled ..."
Probably not so much. What will happen instead is that people will get dropped off conveniently close to their destination, and their car will go park itself up to a few miles away in a large parking structure. The parking system can be automated as well so that a space can be reserved before the car starts off to park in it. This will eliminate one of the biggest causes of congestion in cities: searching for parking. Since automated cars will make proximity a second order consideration in selecting parking, there will be little concern over whether the car goes to one lot or another.
Also note that since the major cost of a taxi ride is the driver and artificial scarcity that is justified as a means of providing drivers a decent wage, automating taxis will make them significantly cheaper than they are today. When people are simply commuting to work, they will often opt to take an automated taxi instead of their own car so that there is no need for parking. In fact, the lower cost and enhanced convenience of renting a taxi will mean that more people choose to forgo owning a car.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by BK on Monday November 07 2016, @05:51PM
If I was designing a society to adapt well to buses, it'd look like stacks of company towns... A 7-10mph bus is great if everyone lives within about 2 miles of their place of employment. That in turn only works if housing comes with employment. New job? New home. Change jobs? Change homes. Lose your job...
City to city transit using trains works well in such a system. Trains link the company towns. Remember - these aren't to commute but to travel.
Between the company towns... farms or something. Maybe a couple of farmer families. Just like the company towns, housing for the permanent hands. Shanties for the itinerants. Gonna need a shotgun for the wandering unemployed.
Am I missing something?
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Burz on Monday November 07 2016, @06:36PM
I don't think any city can adapt *well* to buses.
What you're missing (for starters) is that cities should be districted for plenty of mixed-use areas where housing is mingled with shops and offices. Then peoples' daily routine becomes a lot more walkable and bike-able. Lightrail can be incorporated for longer trips very efficiently... http://www.carfree.com/district.html [carfree.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by zafiro17 on Monday November 07 2016, @09:03PM
I happen to think these things will change in tandem. People are dead tired of the 90 minute each way commute - San Fran, Washington DC, NYC are among the many cities suffering - but we're coping with the design decisions made in the 1960s when we chose exurbs and cars and roads and the American dream, etc. The newest generation is eschewing personal cars, opting for bikes and public transportation and car sharing and all that other good stuff. I'm older than the Millennials but those are my choices, too.
Cities will be forced to adapt - mixed zoning, retail alongside rural, and so on. It will take another 20 or 30 years, but the forces for change are all pointing in the same direction. We certainly can't keep going the way we're going - it's unsustainable, and the mental/physical consequences of spending 3 hours per day in your car just to go between your good paying job and the closest place you can afford to own a home are beyond calculation.
The only thing remaining to push this utopian wet dream into reality is enlightened political leadership that will ... oh shit, I just saw the flaw in my reasoning, ha ha. Oh well, enjoy the bumper-to-bumper traffic, folks!
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday November 07 2016, @09:29PM
That sounds right to me. Even if we assume that all cars in the future are self-driving EVs, the carrying capacity of the roads is not infinite. If we suppose that we have approached that limit, then we have to expand the road capacity or eliminate trips that need to be made. Expanding the road capacity is very expensive. Eliminating trips is a zoning change to create the mixed-use area you're talking about.
That doesn't have to be destructive. It can be done through attrition. Urban planners can identify residential lots in subdivisions that have optimal placement and mandate that the zoning of the lot change to commercial (to accommodate a grocery store or retail) upon sale. Before long you have an area in miniature that provides what many have in the city now, which is everything you need, want, or desire within 10 minutes' walk. Baby boomers would fight that tooth and nail because their idea of suburban life was cast in stone in the 50's, but Millenials and younger, who have demonstrated little interest in a car-centric life, would probably go for it.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday November 07 2016, @09:17PM
Heliports for the important people, varied housing density, overall acknowledgement of the "class system" that has been ever-present in society and will continue to be so as long as those at the top control things.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07 2016, @06:10PM
The future will not be either self-driving cars or self-driving buses, but both self-driving cars and self-driving buses.
Self driving buses are great in cases where many people have the same way at the same time. They are bad in cases where and when few people have to go a specific way.
There is a reason why today we have both buses and taxis. Those reasons won't go away when both start to be self-driving.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07 2016, @11:22PM
>"There is a reason why today we have both buses and taxis. Those reasons won't go away when both start to be self-driving."
This is correct. What will happen is that self-driving cars will make taxi rides much cheaper, so there will be little need for fixed bus lines. While there will be some fixed bus lines to serve very popular routes, most bus traffic will be sporadic or ad hoc: special service for large events and so forth.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 07 2016, @06:46PM
It's like they're not even trying here to come up with a useful situation for automated driving systems.
Maybe we should be thinking about why urban bus drivers in the US are supposedly so expensive and do something about that instead?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07 2016, @07:33PM
Maybe we should be thinking about why urban bus drivers in the US are supposedly so expensive and do something about that instead?
Because they are human beings? Also, you don't want drivers (who are responsible for a lot of lives) to be disgruntled because they are paid shit wages like a burger flipper.
"But anyone can drive! If people want to work for less then let the magical market fairies work it out!"
Yisss massah
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday November 07 2016, @07:36PM
Why do you think the system would be more expensive than the human driver?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 07 2016, @10:24PM
Why do you think the system would be more expensive than the human driver?
1) Lot of gear for very few vehicles. We're not speaking of just the automated gear on each vehicle, but also the command and control gear for the whole system. And it would be modding vehicles costing up to a million dollars apiece.
2)Challenging routes.
2) Everyone who touches the automatic driving system inherits liability, including the municipality. That's going to be an expensive cluster even in a European court IMHO.
3) What happens when the system goes down? Either you don't run critical routes or you have emergency drivers who probably will be full time employees drive those routes. There will probably be other inefficiencies in the system at the beginning too.
If you can get the costs (including hidden ones like liability) to under a few million dollars per bus, it might work out. For example, if your effective labor costs of drivers are $25 per hour and you want these buses running for 6000 hours a year without any drivers, then that's a labor cost of $150,000 per year to displace or $1.5 million over ten years. If say you're a moderate sized city with 100 50 passenger buses, the system would need to cost you less than $150 million over ten years. A big problem here is that one really big bus accident could blow that budget (and it might not even need to be one of your own buses! A jump in insurance from accidents in related systems might do it alone).
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday November 07 2016, @10:45PM
I don't know where you get the idea that the equipment is expensive. George Hotz has been working on a system that fits on certain Honda models and is based on a Raspberry Pi IIRC. Many modern cars all have the necessary hardware built-in: forward-facing radar, electric steering, electronic throttle and brake control, etc. All you have to do is add some cameras, and small cameras these days are dirt cheap (just look at the cameras in cellphones). The most challenging part about building a driverless car now is the software, mainly because it has to be absolutely correct.
The "command and control gear for the whole system" is a simple server on the internet. That's not expensive, and doesn't require anything too beefy if you're talking about a "moderate sized city with 100 50 passenger buses", unless you have some team of absolute morons building the thing and bloating it beyond belief (which is indeed a valid concern these days, considering how much horrible and bloated software is out there).
BTW, big-city bus drivers cost a LOT more than $25 per hour in total fully-loaded costs. Try more like $50-100/hour.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 08 2016, @03:54AM
George Hotz has been working on a system that fits on certain Honda models and is based on a Raspberry Pi IIRC. Many modern cars all have the necessary hardware built-in: forward-facing radar, electric steering, electronic throttle and brake control, etc. All you have to do is add some cameras, and small cameras these days are dirt cheap (just look at the cameras in cellphones).
You could do that, and it might even be capable of driving on a street, but it won't be legal.
BTW, big-city bus drivers cost a LOT more than $25 per hour in total fully-loaded costs. Try more like $50-100/hour.
As I noted, there's room to cut some costs before we go with automated driving. Doesn't require any engineering either.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday November 07 2016, @10:45PM
I agree that buses will likely be part of this, and it's really hard to predict exactly all of the unintended consequences that will follow widespread adoption of driverless cars (which I still think is further off than people think).
However...
Few advantages accrue from driverless cars if the streets and highways are clogged with them.
Agreed. And if they actually increase traffic, as some posts here argue, they may make the problem worse.
On the other hand, I'd just note that if the traffic volume stayed the same as now, driverless cars would likely have MAJOR effects on freeing up traffic. Why? Because humans tend to drive in very suboptimal ways, particularly in heavy traffic. They accelerate and decelerate rapidly. They maneuver around to fill every possible "gap" as quickly as possible. But this generally isn't the way to maximize throughput. Take your typical "stop-and-go" traffic on a highway at an exchange at rush hour or something. If everyone were driving at 25 mph, while maintaining adequate following distances to allow for lane changes by other cars as necessary, it might be able to flow freely at rush hour and have a reasonable throughput. Not as much as at less busy times, but still constant flow.
Now, you put in a bunch of human drivers who don't ever leave a gap (because they don't want to allow someone else to "beat them"), accelerate and break rapidly, causing those behind them to do similar things. And when you introduce an interchange or something into that mix, suddenly every car changing lanes is like someone "cutting someone off," thus causing chains of unnecessary breaking and people maneuvering in weird ways just to make sure they "win the race."
Suddenly, traffic is slowed to a crawl, with mostly stops or 5mph interrupted by periodic bursts of 35 mph then rapid breaking. More wear-and-tear on cars, and now effective average speed is only 10-15 mph instead of the 25mph it might be everyone drove more rationally.
Traffic simulations and even actual traffic data show that it only takes a relatively small number of cars driving more rationally to begin to break up such a logjam. Even 10-20% of more rational drivers really changes things. Unfortunately, people who drive like that now tend to be honked at, sworn at, etc. unless they're a huge truck or something.
Another example -- ideal merge behavior. What you really want is a "zipper merge" where each car leaves a gap big enough for the lane to merge in. And you use both lanes up to the merge point, "zipping" at the last moment. That doesn't happen because people merge in sporadically, introducing braking and sometimes even cutting people off when doing so (and other drivers don't want to "let people in," further compounding the odd behavior). Meanwhile, if enough people merge early, what you get is the "cheaters" zooming ahead at high speed in one lane, while everyone's going at a slower pace in the next. When these two collide at the merge point, you're bound to get lots of braking to avoid collisions -- the mismatch in speed is the biggest problem. (Ideally, if you see people speeding up the disappearing lane, the ideal thing would be to get into that lane and travel at the same speed as the lane you're merging too, which will help break up the jam at the merge. But try that in most places in the U.S. and probably someone would shoot you.)
Paradoxically, even when highways are relatively clear and there is plenty of room to accommodate a lost lane, stop-and-go traffic can still prevail for miles before a merge.
Bottom line -- self-driving cars could be programmed to do these things that human drivers are too irrational to do. They could thus actually improve traffic significantly and increase throughput in clogged areas, assuming no one vandalized them out of road rage first.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Sarasani on Tuesday November 08 2016, @05:57AM
Because humans tend to drive in very suboptimal ways, particularly in heavy traffic.
I remember a peculiar sight on a Dutch highway in morning peak hour with slow moving traffic: a row of cops, lined up along the shoulder, feverishly waving their arms in an effort to encourage road users to drive FASTER. I have never seen police officers do that anywhere else in the world. Don't know if they still do that though (this was a few years ago).