Is Waymo Way More than Google Cars?

Google has spun off its self-driving car programs into a subsidiary called Waymo (which is apparently short for “a new WAY forward for MObility”), and Forbes celebrates by claiming that this is “waymo” than just a car. In fact, the real significance is that, by moving self-driving cars out of the company’s X Lab research division, Google is signaling that its technology is sophisticated enough that it is ready to start working on sales and not just research.

Uber has gotten headlines by starting a self-driving car-sharing service in San Francisco without getting permission from the state. This was supposed to be similar to the service it has going in Pittsburgh, where it is legal. The state of California immediately ordered Uber to shut down its service. (When someone documented Uber vehicles running red lights, the company blamed it on the drivers, not the self-driving technology.)

This is ironic because California’s self-driving car law was passed at Google’s instigation to allow for experiments like this. But the state passed regulations that were stricter than Google expected, so now even Google is doing most of its experimentation in places like Texas, which hasn’t passed a self-driving car law. Legal scholars say that operating a self-driving car is legal in most states so long as a licensed driver is behind the wheel ready to take over if necessary (which is how Uber is running its trial in Pittsburgh and planned to do it in San Francisco). But the California law is much more stringent.

Continue reading

Not Clear on the Concept

Retired General Motors executive Bob Lutz ruminated recently about the future of self-driving cars. He imagines “they’ll look like telephone booths laid down” and they won’t need to be streamlined “because they’ll be electronically linked in a seamless train on the freeway moving at say 200 mph.” This will happen in 15 to 25 years “depending on how quickly governments are willing to invest in the road technology needed for a fully automated. . . system to work.”

What Lutz is describing is Futurama, not the television show but the General Motors exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. That exhibit imagined that highways would have embedded infrastructure that vehicles could electronically read and follow to get to where their occupants wanted to go.

But that’s not how most auto and software manufacturers are designing their self-driving cars. Instead, as the Antiplanner has noted before, they assume that the government will provide no infrastructure other than what is already in place, and all of the electronics and software needed to guide the cars will be on board the vehicles themselves.

Continue reading

The Feds Regulate Self-Driving Cars

The Department of Transportation says that it plans to issue a series of rules for self-driving cars that will potentially preempt state laws and regulations. This comes after lobbying by Google, which was disappointed when a state law that Google had supported led the California Department of Transportation to issue rules that forbade the use of cars that didn’t allow human drivers to override. Since Google was planning cars that didn’t have steering wheels and other controls that drivers could use, the state rule conflicted with Google’s goals.

The Antiplanner has urged against federal regulation, fearing that the feds would be as likely to get it wrong as the states, whereas if the states were left to regulate, at least a few states would get it right and the others would emulate their examples. Federal regulation wouldn’t be bad if the rules were perfect, but how likely is that?

For a more detailed free-marketeer’s view of the Department of Txansportation’s proposal, see Marc Scribner’s analysis. Here, I want to focus on one thing: the debate over fully autonomous vs. semi-autonomous vehicles.

Continue reading

Self-Driving Cars Edge Closer

People who remain skeptical of self-driving cars simply aren’t paying attention. The biggest news in the past week is that Ford’s chief executive, Mark Fields, has pledged that his company will have “fleets” of totally self-driving cars–with no steering wheels or pedals–in American cities by 2021.

His wording makes it appear that Ford will not only sell the cars to consumers, but offer Uber-like car-sharing services itself. To help it reach this goal, Ford recently purchased SAIPS, an Israeli company specializing in machine learning and sensing.

General Motors, meanwhile, spent $1 billion acquiring Cruise Automation, a company that the Antiplanner considered to be pretty fly-by-night. This company had promised to turn any 2012 or later Audi into a self-driving car for $10,000. I think all it really did was add adaptive cruise control and lane centering, so cars could drive themselves on freeways, but not on city streets, nor could they navigate from one place to another. Yet GM appears to have been impressed.

Continue reading

Transit Versus Self-Driving Cars

Two years ago, the Antiplanner predicted that self-driving cars would put most transit agencies out of business. So it’s not surprising to see push-back against self-driving cars from transit supporters. What’s surprising is that it took so long.

Cities need more public transit, not Uber and self-driving cars,” says Kevin Cashman, a policy analyst with the progressive Center for Economic and Policy Research. “We don’t need self-driving cars — we need to ditch our vehicles entirely,” argues California writer Rebecca Solnit in the Guardian.

Cashman’s argument is that self-driving cars won’t be “affordable,” while public transit is. Excuse me? In 2014, American transit agencies spent $59 billion to move people 57 billion passenger miles (see page 106). That’s more than a dollar per passenger mile.

Continue reading

Don’t Count on Shared Mobility

The OECD has published a fairly realistic report about the effects of self-driving cars on urban transportation. However, the report contains some implicit assumptions that may not come true.

“Single-occupancy car use generates individual and collective benefits,” admits the report, “but these are eroded and, in some cases, obviated by environmental impacts, loss of transport system efficiency due to congestion, social inequity and exclusion, as well as road crashes and strong dependence on fossil fuels.” Except for congestion, however, most of these problems are exaggerated and even congestion is technically easy (but politically difficult) to solve with congestion pricing.

“Typically, the response to the negative impacts of car-dominated transport systems,” continues the report, “has been to promote public transport.” But this “comes at a heavy cost,” and despite many cities paying that cost, “public transport continues to lose market share to private vehicles in most developed economies.”

Continue reading

First Self-Driving Car Fatality

Tesla announced yesterday that one of its self-driving cars was involved in an accident in May that killed the occupant, who was in the driver’s seat but letting the car drive itself at the time. The car was on a Florida expressway and, instead of stopping when a large tractor trailer crossed its path, attempted to drive under the trailer. The low height of the trailer sheared off the top of the car.

Last March, Duke University roboticist Missy Cummings testified before Congress that auto companies were “rushing to market” before self-driving cars are ready, and “someone is going to die.” She didn’t mention Tesla by name, but since that is the only car company that has produced a car capable of not just avoiding collisions but passing other cars, she must have had it in mind.

The person who was killed in the Tesla crash, Joshua Brown, had posted two dozen videos on Youtube showing how his self-driving Tesla responded in various situations. One of them received 1.7 million views for showing a near collision that the car avoided when a truck pulled into the car’s lane.

Continue reading

Ignorance and Bias About Self-Driving Cars

The National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) has issued a policy statement regarding self-driving cars that betrays ignorance about the technology and bias against cars in general. This summary boils down the policy statement to five recommendations, a few of which make sense but most of which do not.

First, NACTO wants to forbid the use of partially automated vehicles on city streets, allowing them only on limited access highways. “Such vehicles have been shown to encourage unsafe driving behavior, with drivers reading more, texting more, and generally being inattentive while the vehicle is in motion.” Maybe so, but the real question is: do partially automated vehicles increase safety even if drivers are less attentive? Since partial automation measures (such as adaptive cruise control, lane keeping, and collision avoidance) are aimed mainly at increasing safety, banning them without considering the safety implications is being deliberately ignorant.

Second, they advise cities to “rethink. . . currently planned expressway expansions” that could become “white elephants” when self-driving cars effectively increase road capacities. The Antiplanner has actually offered the same advice, suggesting that new highways be built only where populations are growing rapidly. But the Antiplanner urges that the same advice be applied to transit projects, which are far more likely to become white elephants than highways, yet the city officials remain mum on this subject.

Continue reading

Columbus Wins $90 Million Burden

Columbus, Ohio won the competition for a $40 million “smart transportation” grant from the federal government (plus $10 million from Paul Allen). The city must match this with $90 million in local funds, so it is questionable who is the real winner: Columbus or the cities that applied but didn’t win.

Columbus’ application is somewhat vague. The specific things it proposes hardly seem worth $140 million, and many of them could be done by the private sector without any government prompting.

For example, the city proposes to create an app that would allow truck drivers to find the most congestion-free way to reach their destinations and another app to help tourists reach sporting events and other popular destinations. Don’t we already have such apps in Google maps? And if not, isn’t it likely that private developers can or will make such apps without huge government incentives?

Continue reading

Self-Driving Cars to Make Housing Affordable

An article in the Wall Street Journal points out that self-driving cars will give more people access to housing that is affordable, particularly in urban areas where growth-management regulation has driving up housing costs. Unfortunately, that’s not the overt message in the article, which is instead headlined, “Driverless Cars to Fuel Suburban Sprawl,” as if that’s a bad thing.

You’d think that a writer for the Wall Street Journal would realize that sprawl is a good thing, but it gives people access to more affordable housing and less traffic congestion, and most importantly allows people to live in the way most people prefer: in a single-family home on a private lot. But this article by technology writer Christopher Mims seems to assume that everyone knows sprawl is bad, even though it doesn’t say why. In fact, the article reports, in a shocked tone, that “half of Americans live in, and are perfectly fine with, suburbs.”

Mims admits that no one really knows how self-driving cars will change the world. But he joins others in assuming that nearly everyone will give up owning a car and rely on car-sharing instead. After all, he and others point out, cars are actually used only 5 percent of the time–what a waste! Hey, Mr. Mims, the toilet in your house is probably used only about 5 percent of the time. Are you willing to share it with anyone who can download a smartphone app?

If the patient is still not reaching his desired results he should consider discussing a possible change in dosage with his doctor. sildenafil generic india is a product basically used for treating erectile dysfunction. In case of cheap cialis overnight , the case is completely different. Although, there is nothing wrong about it, it’s just that their primary motivation is not to hurt, but to give themselves something they think (sometimes at india tadalafil a very deep subconscious level) they need. So if you regencygrandenursing.com viagra canada deliver are feeling embarrassed and want to get embarrassed in front of your partner in bed, then go for one and only vigrx plus. Continue reading