Tomorrow, the Cato Institue will release a new paper on the policy implications of self-driving cars. Antiplanner readers can download a preview of the paper today.
In a nutshell, the paper argues that self-driving cars combined with car sharing will put public transit agencies out of business. The average cost of transit, including subsidies is $1 a passenger mile. Self-driving cars should cost far less than half of that. This means there will be no reason to continue to subsidize transit except in a few very dense areas such as New York City.
The paper also points out that most of the effects of self-driving cars can’t be predicted today, so Congress should give up on the idea of having states and metropolitan planning agencies write long-range transportation plans that we know will be wrong. Transportation agencies should solve today’s problems today and prepare for autonomous vehicles by keeping roads in good repair and following consistent sign standards.
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The Cato Institute will hold one or two policy forums on this subject in October. More about those forums will appear here in a few weeks.
Thanks to The Antiplanner for handing us a major tool to oppose him, e.g., “Waiting for Robocar” in the same manner as “Waiting for Godot.”
I’m afraid I am finding it harder and harder to take The Antiplanner seriously with this latest technophillic dreck.
An actually rational stance on this issue is here:
http://www.technologyreview.com/review/513531/proceed-with-caution-toward-the-self-driving-car/.
I agree with this author that more driver aids are good for improving safety, but don’t solve the myriad of other problems caused by the gross underpricing of driving.
Hello msetty,
I think you mis-state the issue when you assert that driving is under-priced. The issue is not one of underpricing but of cost allocation and equity. The costs of driving are not allocated fairly or equitably. Remember that the costs of driving includes the capital outlay on the vehicle, maintenance, fuel, insurance, and even pollution control measures. Those costs are born one-hundred percent by the vehicle owner. Those costs also make up the majority of the cost of driving. The single cost of driving which is not born equitably is the net rent due to the road owner for the vehicle use of the road. That is an easy problem to solve, simply toll the vehicle owner by the mile for his use of the road. To make it truly equitable make the toll proportional to the axle weight of the vehicle. This will take proper account of the varying degrees of wear and tear on roads which any given vehicle creates. A motorcycle would be tolled less than a Toyota Corolla which would be tolled at a lower rate than a Lincoln Navigator which would be tolled less than a dump truck which would be tolled less than a tractor-trailer combination. It is that simple.
Jardinero1, driving is grossly underpriced for none of the reasons you point out. I agree that the costs of road maintenance and air pollution can be covered by proper pricing of vehicle axle weights, but the problems go way beyond that.
Driving has many negative side effects that are not borne directly by the act of driving, individually or collectively. Society and the environment as a whole bear these costs, which if monetized would greatly exceed the direct costs borne by drivers, e.g., well over a trillion dollars per year, just in the U.S. See the mountains of work by Delucci of UC Davis for a starting point.
Could you please break out the trillion a year, into its component parts, for the benefit of the readers who don’t have time to do the homework you suggest.
No, I won’t break them out because I don’t have time to do this today.
However, here’s a fairly new document that is short and to the point (18 pages; page 8, Figure 2 in particular), and addresses the issue of optimal pricing: http://www.vtpi.org/ITED_optimal.pdf. The VTPI website also has a huge online library on this and related topics.
Driving has many negative side effects that are not borne directly by the act of driving, individually or collectively.
And yet even though mshitty™ believes there are SOOOOOO many negative side effects to driving, mshitty™chooses to live somewhere where he must drive to get anywhere. Go figure!
which if monetized would greatly exceed the direct costs borne by drivers, e.g., well over a trillion dollars per year
This old tripe again. It’s an imaginary number. We’ve been over this. Just like we went over the false assertion that Amazon paid for half the South Lake Union Trolley.
mshitty™ continues to make shit up.
Call me a Luddite if you wish…more precisely, a “Neo Luddite”
From an interview of Kirkpatrick Sale by another guy with a scraggally beard, Jan Lundberg (http://www.culturechange.org/issue9/kirkpatricksale.html.
The connotation of Luddism is “taking us back,” while it is human nature to progress, to build on and go forth.
To believe that what has happened to humankind in the last 200 years is “progress” is to fall into an industrialist trap of: “Anything new is better and everything is better tomorrow than it is today because we have more material advantages and more ease and speed in our life and this is good.”
The Luddites did not want to turn the clock back. They said, “We want to cling to this way of life; we don’t want a life in which we’re forced into factories, forced onto machines we can’t control, and forced from village self-sufficiency into urban dependency and servitude.”
A modern Luddite is also trying to hold to certain elements of the past to resurrect the community. A modern Luddite would say that, of the array of technology around, we should choose what we want and what we don’t. [emphasis added] And we will do so in a democratic basis within this community and within this bioregion on the basis of the economic, social and environmental costs. Neo-Luddites wish to resurrect some values of the past such as communitarianism, non-materialism, an understanding of nature, and a meshing with nature. These things have been largely taken from us in these last 200 years and we must fight to preserve them.
Frank, I didn’t write this, but it brilliantly describes you and your lying Internet Troll ilk perfectly.
All Time Insults For Trolls (author unknown).
You swine. You vulgar little maggot. Don’t you know that you are pathetic? You worthless bag of filth. As we say in Texas, I’ll bet you couldn’t pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel. You are a canker. A sore that won’t go away. I would rather kiss a lawyer than be seen with you.
You are a fiend and a coward, and you have bad breath. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you. You are a bloody nardless newbie twit protohominid chromosomally aberrant caricature of a coprophagic cloacal parasitic pond scum and I wish you would go away.
You’re a putrescence mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon.
You are a bleating fool, a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world. An insensate, blinking calf, meaningful to nobody, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling beasts who sired you and then killed themselves in recognition of what they had done.
I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, a malformity. I barf at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell?
If you aren’t an idiot, you made a world-class effort at simulating one. Try to edit your writing of unnecessary material before attempting to impress us with your insight. The evidence that you are a nincompoop will still be available to readers, but they will be able to access it more rapidly.
You snail-skulled little rabbit. Would that a hawk pick you up, drive its beak into your brain, and upon finding it rancid set you loose to fly briefly before spattering the ocean rocks with the frothy pink shame of your ignoble blood. May you choke on the queasy, convulsing nausea of your own trite, foolish beliefs.
You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You are grimy, squalid, nasty and profane. You are foul and disgusting. You’re a fool, an ignoramus. Monkeys look down on you. Even sheep won’t have sex with you. You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot.
And what meaning do you expect your delusionally self-important statements of unknowing, inexperienced opinion to have with us? What fantasy do you hold that you would believe that your tiny-fisted tantrums would have more weight than that of a leprous desert rat, spinning rabidly in a circle, waiting for the bite of the snake?
You are a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a disease, you puerile one-handed slack-jawed drooling meatslapper.
On a good day you’re a half-wit. You remind me of drool. You are deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go.
I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid so stupid that it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. Your writing has to be a troll. Nothing in our universe can really be this stupid. Perhaps this is some primordial fragment from the original big bang of stupid. Some pure essence of a stupid so uncontaminated by anything else as to be beyond the laws of physics that we know. I’m sorry. I can’t go on. This is an epiphany of stupid for me. After this, you may not hear from me again for a while. I don’t have enough strength left to deride your ignorant questions and half baked comments about unimportant trivia, or any of the rest of this drivel. Duh.
The only thing worse than your logic is your manners. I have snipped away most of what you wrote, because, well… it didn’t really say anything. Your attempt at constructing a creative flame was pitiful. I mean, really, stringing together a bunch of insults among a load of babbling was hardly effective… Maybe later in life, after you have learned to read, write, spell, and count, you will have more success. True, these are rudimentary skills that many of us “normal” people take for granted that everyone has an easy time of mastering. But we sometimes forget that there are “challenged” persons in this world who find these things more difficult. If I had known, that this was your case then I would have never read your post. It just wouldn’t have been “right”. Sort of like parking in a handicap space. I wish you the best of luck in the emotional, and social struggles that seem to be placing such a demand on you.
P.S.: You are hypocritical, greedy, violent, malevolent, vengeful, cowardly, deadly, mendacious, meretricious, loathsome, despicable, belligerent, opportunistic, barratrous, contemptible, criminal, fascistic, bigoted, racist, sexist, avaricious, tasteless, idiotic, brain-damaged, imbecilic, insane, arrogant, deceitful, demented, lame, self-righteous, Byzantine, conspiratorial, satanic, fraudulent, libelous, bilious, splenetic, spastic, ignorant, clueless, illegitimate, harmful, destructive, dumb, evasive, double-talking, devious, revisionist, narrow, manipulative, paternalistic, fundamentalist, dogmatic, idolatrous, unethical, cultic, diseased, suppressive, controlling, restrictive, malignant, deceptive, dim, crazy, weird, dystopic, stifling, uncaring, plantigrade, grim, unsympathetic, jargon-spouting, censorious, secretive, aggressive, mind-numbing, abrasive, poisonous, flagrant, self-destructive, abusive, socially-retarded, puerile, clueless, and generally Not Good.
There are real limitations with automated cars. When mixed in with manual driven cars (which is likely to be for a long time, since we still have horses on British roads and E-type Jaguars), the automated car has to behave like a manually driven car – exceeding the speed limit, in order to keep up with other cars – delaying for a second before applying the brakes, so the car behind doesn’t go into it. So, where are the capacity and safety benefits, when the car is programmed to drive like a car driver?
As for cars whizzing around without passengers in them – can people really not see the congestion right now? Now imagine the same traffic flow, but with additional empty driverless cars running errands, parking outside the CBD, etc. We need effective transit to remove car trips.
Many of Antiplanner’s views on light rail are valid, but automated cars are a dead end.
“automated cars are a dead end.”
He opines.
Dead end, just like motrized carriages and airplanes.
msetty, your free not to embrace autonomous vehicles. I’d ony ask that you give others the right to make their own choice. I don’t know how autonomous vehicles will work out, but you’d have to be blind not to see the tremendous benefits that are possible. It is however easy to how autonomous vehicles can be upsetting to those intent on bringing back 19th century transportation and a 19th century way of life.
What effect autonomous cars have is highly dependent on politics. Right now in many cities you have marked and unmarked crosswalks where pedestrians have the right of way every intersection. Today cars routinely ignore pedestrians attempting to cross the street legally, and illegally drive through. They use their large vehicles to bully vulnerable street users into submission. How will people tolerate their car stopping as the law requires to allow pedestrians to cross the street, perhaps every block during rush hours? And continuing to stay stopped until the pedestrian clears the adjacent lane too? Or driving the speed limit? Maybe in some cases on a highway autonomous cars speeding would be justified, but on streets that pedestrians are allowed to cross speeding is dangerous and destructive. Having cars follow the rules of the road as written in many cities would be a terrific boon to those who walk and bike, and could easily lengthen trip times for those in cars, at least for those who spend considerable time off the highway. In other cities that have laws more hostile to pedestrians and cyclists you could have the opposite.
Autonomous cars offer a bounty of sorts. Politics will decide who benefits. That’s a discussion worth having, don’t you think?
The problem with car sharing is that everyone wants to use a car at the same time – to go to and from work. While Joe Commuter would probably love to charge someone to use his car between 9 AM and 5 PM, it won’t reduce the number of cars on the road during the peak period. In fact, car sharing increases transit use by allowing people to use a car when driving is the preferred method but avoid all the fixed charges of car usage at other times.
For people that will be able to afford them, autonomous vehicles will allow people that currently cannot drive mobility. To the extent that disabled people will be able to use autonomous vehicles it will be a huge cost savings for transit as federally required ADA paratransit service that can cost $30 per ride and up will be less necessary.
To the extent that autonomous vehicles will not need to stay with their owner, their advent will allow for even more density in desirable areas such as midtown Manhattan and downtown San Francisco as space required for parking will be lessened. Increased density will probably increase transit ridership. Unfortunately, congestion will increase as they drive around by themselves to a remote parking lot.
It sounds that far from being obsolete these changes may end up putting transit in a better position. Someone who rides transit because they are too poor to buy a car are certainly going to continue to ride transit because they will be too poor to buy an autonomous car.
Here comes someone else with absolutely no evidence whatsoever.
“everyone wants to use a car at the same time – to go to and from work.”
Prove it. As we’ve discussed here, most trips per day are NOT to and from work.
“While Joe Commuter would probably love to charge someone to use his car between 9 AM and 5 PM”
You assume car sharing means an individual owns the car.
“car sharing increases transit use”
ANOTHER unsupported assertion.
“Increased density will probably increase transit ridership.”
Pure speculation.
“congestion will increase as they drive around by themselves to a remote parking lot.”
More bullshit.
“Someone who rides transit because they are too poor to buy a car are certainly going to continue to ride transit because they will be too poor to buy an autonomous car.”
Circular reasoning at its finest. Again shows black-and-white thinking that either people buy an autonomous car or go without. Hello!? McFly! Car sharing?! S-H-A-R-I-N-G? Means you don’t have to fucking own a car. You SHARE it!
Idiots will be idiots and will continue burying their heads in the sand or continue with the dinosaur thinking.
I’m guessing that autonomous cars will get very popular, very fast. There will be pressure to create separate autonomous vehicle lanes on inner-city interstates and other heavily used, many-laned roads. In the US it’s extremely unusual to see any kind of a horse drawn vehicle except perhaps in areas where the predominant religion forbids motor vehicle use. Not too may places like that so it’s really not an issue.
I agree that mass transit will become obsolete. I’m thinking that the automobile will go from ownership/leasing to a subscription service for most people, like cell phones now. You’ll subscribe to a basic plan that covers your commute (if any), add optional on-peak or off-peak time and/or miles for more money, and pay top dollar for unplanned on-peak trips. Perhaps the bottom dollar plans will include a car sharing provision, sort of like SuperShuttle’s business model. Instead paying massive capital funding and maintenance and personnel costs on mass transit, I expect travel vouchers will be distributed to very low income people who will use them as they see fit purchasing autonomous vehicle trips. The economic benefits of abandoning mass transit will be obvious to municipalities. And only very rich individuals will actually own cars.
@CapitalistRoader
“I’m guessing that autonomous cars will get very popular, very fast. ”
Why? They don’t actually do anything that a car driver couldn’t do themselves for free. It’s like saying that we’re going to invent a robot that can make repairs to your house, therefore DIY is finished. Why would you pay someone or something to do something that you can do just as well for free?
“In the US it’s extremely unusual to see any kind of a horse drawn vehicle except perhaps in areas where the predominant religion forbids motor vehicle use. Not too many places like that so it’s really not an issue.”
But as an example of how old technology isn’t going to vanish on demand? So that the automated car has got to fit in – delayed braking, speeding, etc? So where the safety and capacity benefits?
“I agree that mass transit will become obsolete. ”
I don’t, and people talking airily about fitting even more cars onto the existing roads will not make it happen. We don’t have enough road space as it is, without driverless cars wandering around the place because they have been summoned.
The ‘driverless car’ thing is clever, like hydrogen powered cars, but it’s an attempt to put off the day when cars go the way of the dinosaur. Transit works, because it has a higher passenger density than cars. If a fraction of the time wasted on driverless cars was spent on making transit work properly, to make it fit the needs and the aspirations of the public rather than whatever the transit people deem worthy – both expensive and pointless.
“If a fraction of the time wasted on driverless cars was spent on making transit work properly, to make it fit the needs and the aspirations of the public rather than whatever the transit people deem worthy – both expensive and pointless.”
Except autonomous cars are being developed entirely by the private sector, so it is responding to customer demand; if it is offering a product that isn’t demanded, the market will punish the investors and manufacturers.
The same can’t be said of the “if you build it, they will come” mentality of government transit planners.
And if transit truly works, why are passenger rail trips only 1.2% of passenger car trips?
“Except autonomous cars are being developed entirely by the private sector, so it is responding to customer demand; if it is offering a product that isn’t demanded, the market will punish the investors and manufacturers.”
Sure. Meanwhile, development of other things, including transit, is put onto the back burner. Chasing the illusion of progress will have real damaging effects.
“And if transit truly works, why are passenger rail trips only 1.2% of passenger car trips?”
I suspect the reasons are numerous, and vary with the locality. In the UK, the cash machines dispense £20 (~$30) notes, as this means that they need to be filled less often. It also means that you find that the only money in your pocket is a £20, and bus drivers can’t find change for a £20. (Even though taxi drivers can. Odd, isn’t it?) So you wait for a long while (no real time bus information, sorry) and then when the bus arrives, you can’t use it. Of course, the bus companies could provide electronic payment (TfL does, Southampton University did when I was there), but the private bus companies can’t be bothered. Why should they? The alternatives to buses are so hopeless that they have a captive market of the young, the old and the poor. I am wealthy and middle aged – I don’t use the buses. I prefer to walk.
Of course these problems could be fixed, it anyone could be bothered. “entirely by the private sector, so it is responding to customer demand” – or something.
Ironically for the Antiplanner, car sharing works best in high-density cities. This is why you see such a variety of cars-for-hire services (Uber, Lyft) ,and car-share services (City Car Share, Zipcar) in San Fransisco and Oakland, less than you do in the lower density parts of the Bay Area. The Antiplanner should keep that in mind as he works to prevent upzoning, depriving people of the freedom to choose high density living arrangements, or “stack ’em and pack ’em zoning”, to use the denigrating term that the American Dream Coalition uses.
“Sure. Meanwhile, development of other things, including transit, is put onto the back burner. ”
Is it?
Can you show that resources that are going to the private sector to develop autonomous vehicle technology are affecting “development of other things, including transit”?
Or are you just opining?
“Chasing the illusion of progress will have real damaging effects.”
That’s one of the finest generalizations I’ve ever read.
Frank the Antiplanner is advocating just that. Putting transit onto the backburner because driverless cars might be useful at some point in the future.
Where transit is used heavily what reason is there to think driverless cars could replace it? Where buses are run as a social service providing mobility only to those who can’t drive smaller autonomous vehicles might work better and be cheaper, depending on the application. But in any city where buses run full you’d be replacing each one with a block full of cars. The geometry doesn’t change.
It’s not obvious driverless cars will improve capacity of streets at all if they are required to follow the laws that human drivers regularly break, such as yielding to pedestrians.
The intellectual dishonesty of the technophobes is telling. Not only can the technophobes not back up their assertions with anything other than hysteria, they ignore the potential economic benefits driverless cars could bring:
The societal and economic benefits of autonomous vehicles include decreased crashes, decreased loss of life, increased mobility for the elderly, disabled and blind and decreases in fuel usage. The large potential savings, which they estimate at $1.3 trillion per year should accelerate the adoption of self-driving vehicles.
They outline five key areas where the cost savings will come from: $158 billion in fuel cost savings, $488 billion in annual savings will come through a reduction of accident costs, $507 billion is likely to be gained through increased productivity, reducing congestion will add a further $11 billion in savings, plus an additional $138 billion in productivity savings from less congestion.
The authors indicate the $1.3 trillion is a base case estimate and indicate a bear case scenario of $0.7 trillion savings per annum in the United States and a Bull case scenario of US$ 2.2 trillion per year.
Such a waste of voluntary investments! /sarc
Well, we can go ahead and rip out all the rails lines and scrap all the busses now. We can always buy some new ones later if the AP’s projections turn out to be overly optimistic.
“Frank the Antiplanner is advocating just that. Putting transit onto the backburner because driverless cars might be useful at some point in the future.” ~Walker
It’s not about putting transit on the back burner. It’s about questioning the accuracy of planning around transit projects. Even recently done plans, such as the Met Council’s completed this year, do not take into account any driverless cars.
To me it’s a bit like buying a house. If rumors at work are rife that they’re shutting down the plant and consolidating operations in another town, most folks would say it’s foolish to go out and buy a new house today. They’d advise waiting awhile and seeing how things shake out.
“Well, we can go ahead and rip out all the rails lines and scrap all the busses [sic—using a browser without spell check, are we?] now. We can always buy some new ones later if the AP’s projections turn out to be overly optimistic.”
Oh the poor, poor gilfoil. Can’t even use HTML tags. Or use a browser with spell check. No wonder he’s a technophobe. He, like others here, are afraid of new technology, so he, like others here, cling to obsolete forms of technology out of fear. Their precious choo-choo trains make them feel safe in a rapidly changing world that is leaving them behind.
As for buses, there is no need to scrap them. Keep using them, but eventually replace them with autonomous buses. Singapore is researching this:
One of the ideas they will explore is the feasibility of having driverless vehicles, such as buses, for a mass transport service that operates on fixed routes and scheduled timings.
Another would be a new mobility system for intra-town travel using a network of customised and demand-responsive shared vehicles, which could “pave the way for towns that are less oriented towards car-based mobility”, it stated.
Autonomous buses. Sounds great. No need to pay someone inflated salaries and benefits or to prop up a corrupt union.
As for trains, no need to rip out the rails. Just pave over them. Again.
But gilfoil, if it wasn’t here to troll, could look these things up about autonomous buses on Google. If it wasn’t so phobic of modern technology.
Frank, if you weren’t aware, Singapore is a socialist country with stack-and-pack housing. There is no American Dream there. Only nightmares – stack and pack, socialist, nightmares. It’s the last place we’d want to emulate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore
“Since Singapore is a small island with a high population density, the number of private cars on the road is restricted so as to curb pollution and congestion.”
Obviously these are people who are not regularly reading the Antiplanner. It’s exactly the kind of hellhole that planners are trying to foist on us.
Nice red herring. The technology developed in Singapore can be developed elsewhere.
The fact remains that you have distracted away from the empirically studied potential economic benefits of autonomous vehicles.
The fact remains that you have distracted away from the potential for autonomous buses and multi-passenger vehicles such as shuttles. In other words, no need to scrap current buses. (Note that buses has only one ess.)
Oh, and thanks for the CTRL-C CTRL-V of a Wiki link. You have mad research and hyperlinking skillz.
Troll on!
The origins of Singapore’s Mass Transit boondoggle:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_Rapid_Transit_%28Singapore%29
“The origins of the Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) are derived from a forecast by city planners in 1967 which stated the need for a rail-based urban transport system by 1992.[4][5] Following a debate on whether a bus-only system would be more cost-effective, Parliament came to the conclusion that an all-bus system would be inadequate, as it would have to compete for road space in a land-scarce country.”
Sounds like a few unenlightened planners in the Far East haven’t read the latest papers from the CATO institute. It’s hard to imagine the human suffering that goes on over there. Imagine life with no American Dream (TM).
Man, the troll just can’t let go of the red herring’s bone. The troll can’t address the evidence, so the troll keeps on trolling.
Hey, gilfoil. Address the facts. Or STFU.
Imagine taking advice from a country that replaced a perfectly good bus network with rail. It’s just…Unamerican.
Due to the socialist, planned nature of Singapore, based on moving a captive population around in obsolete, subsidized, rail boondoggles, its economy is in a shambles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore#Modern-day_economy
“Along with Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan, Singapore is one of the original Four Asian Tigers. The Singaporean economy is known as one of the freest,[64] most innovative,[65] most competitive,[66] and most business-friendly.[67] The 2013 Index of Economic Freedom ranks Singapore as the second freest economy in the world, behind Hong Kong. According to the Corruption Perceptions Index, Singapore is consistently ranked as one of the least corrupt countries in the world, along with New Zealand and the Scandinavian countries.”
Wow. Instead of address the issue, someone can CTRL-C CTRL-V from Wikipedia.
If you can’t address the facts, copy/paste/distract. And don’t bother waiting for a reply. 35 minutes after trolling, troll again even if no one takes the bait!
@FrancisKing
They don’t actually do anything that a car driver couldn’t do themselves for free.
Except crash. I think we’ll find that autonomous vehicles don’t kill their occupants nearly as much as drivered cars. ~ 34K people are killed in car accidents every year in the US, another 2.3 million are injured, and car accidents are the leading cause of death for people 15- to 35-years-old. Massively reduced accidents will create a tipping point. Once that tipping point is reached, drivered car will be banned first from inner cities, then from crowded interstates, and eventually from entire metro areas. I’m guessing that within 20 years people will look back and be amazed that we allowed the average person to pilot his own vehicle on crowded, urban roads.
I do consider that autonomous vehicle usage will be different in different countries. Mass transit just isn’t very useful in the giant, spread-out US whereas in geographically small countries like the UK and most of the Continental counties it does work. I’ve rarely rented a car in Europe. It’s a necessity in most every part of the US.
And I have a strictly selfish reason for the success of autonomous cars: I regularly drive from Denver to St. George, UT. 630 miles which takes about ten hours. I could fly, but the flights take about two hours, plus an hour layover, plus two hours to get to the airport/get through security, and another hour to get from the airport home: call it six hours. In either case it’s entire day wasted and if I fly I’m limited on how much stuff I can take with me. Now consider that I-70 from Grand Junction to I-15 is the loneliest interstate in the US and it’s one third of the drive, while the other third to St. George is none too crowded nor challenging. And although the speed limit is either 75 or 80mph, I would rather sleep, read, surf the web, or work instead of driving that tedious drive. An autonomous car would be wonderful and safer to boot. I can’t wait.
Due to being forced into pack-and-stack housing, Singaporeans live short, stressful lives:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy#List_by_the_World_Health_Organization_.282014.29
#4 84 years.
US:
#34 79.8
Life expectancy stat’s are a funny thing. Take instantaneous fatal injuries out and the numbers tell a different story:
National Life Expectancy 1980 to 1999, (with and without fatal injuries
The US is a big, racially very diverse country. Lots of people driving cars, lots of conflicts between demographic groups, the Second Amendment result in ots of fatal injuries, both accidental and intentional. Singapore on the other hand is tiny and fairly ethnically homogeneous: 75% Han/13% Malay/9% Indian. And 100% urban. 5.6 million people packed into 265 square miles, about one-fifth the size of Rhode Island. I enjoy visiting Singapore but sure as heck would hate to live there. Very authoritarian. Kinda’ have to be, with so many people packed into such a tiny plot of land. On the other hand its people enjoy a stunning degree of economic freedom. The world’s Galt’s Gulch. Even more so now that the CCP idiocracy clamped down on Hong Kong’s elections.
@CapitalistRoader
The automated cars need to have two features, so that they fit in with existing cars – they speed, in order to match the speeds of existing cars – and they have to delay braking, in order to match existing cars. So, how are they safer? If a child chases a ball into the street, the car is going too fast, and cannot brake immediately. Just like a regular car.
It’s far more likely that we will see progressive changes towards lane keeping, cruise control, emergency braking.
Airlines. Of the journey times, only a small proportion is flight time. There’s nothing to stop these times being slashed.
So, how are they safer?
They don’t take their eyes off the road to change the radio station/look at their phones/check on their kids in the back seat/check their hair/check out the cute blond in the next car over. They don’t drive drunk/tired/drugged/distracted.
Driverless cars are simpleminded machines with one job: drive. In all sorts of conditions, constantly monitoring and anticipating changes in both the vehicle’s condition and the external environment. You’re right, there will be incremental steps towards autonomy from a human driver, a description of which I stole from some gearhead website:
Feet Off: Adaptive cruise control, which continuously controls the accelerator and brake
Hands Off: Adds lane centering to adaptive cruise, meaning the vehicle continuously keeps itself within its lane
Eyes Off: Vehicle automatically drives itself from point to point, avoiding obstacles and reacting suddenly to all safety hazards
People Out: Vehicle can drive itself to a given point without occupants
Once that third step – Eyes Off – is implemented, legislators and insurance companies will have mounting evidence that autonomous driving at that level is N times safer than drivered cars, and start changing insurance contracts and laws and infrastructure to encourage and eventually mandate autonomous driving. I don’t know what value N will be but I have a feeling that it won’t get past 2 to start seeing some big changes in how vehicles are piloted on the road.
“So, how are they safer?”
If you bothered to read the evidence posted, you wouldn’t have to ask stupid questions:
“According to the US DOT, these accidents resulted in over 2 million injuries and 32,000 deaths. Morgan Stanley indicate that human error has been the main determinant in over 90 percent of these accidents.”
So this week I drove from Portland to San Diego to install new equipment, and train the technicians using it – two days of driving down – one day of installation and training – and three days driving back – it was a long week. I would have flown, BUT I had to bring the old equipment back with me, and it was less expensive to drive, stay in motels, than pay for me to fly down and back and have the equipment shipped back here by moving van. Having an automated vehicle would have saved money and time.
Read this report as one of many that have determined car sharing increases transit ridership: http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/tcrp/tcrp_rpt_108.pdf . Common sense: if you use car sharing you are less likely to own a car (if you own one at all). If you don’t own a car you need to take those trips in other ways. While car sharing is less expensive than a taxi, it is still expensive. If poor people cannot pay to take a taxi everywhere now how will they be able to pay the slightly less fee for Uber or Lyft? If poor people could afford car sharing we would see them using Lyft, Uber, Zipcar, etc. a lot but right now the people that use those are generally urban yuppies.
Where are the autonomous cars are going to go? Either they will have to go in a parking lot or “cruise” around looking for their next fare. More crusing = more congestion.
I don’t have time to cite common sense. If you don’t think there is higher transit ridership in higher density areas visit downtown San Francisco, Manhattan, Hong Kong or any high density place and compare transit ridership with Oklahoma City, Wichita, or other similar places.
Transitboy, yes, it’s interesting that car sharing is more frequent in areas of high density..I wonder why? Funny how car sharing works best in large urban areas where the evil planners hold sway..
“The US is a big, racially very diverse country. Lots of people driving cars, lots of conflicts between demographic groups, ”
@CapitalistRoader, yep, if it wasn’t for those damn minorities everything would be perfect..
“if it wasn’t for those damn minorities everything would be perfect..”
Oh, God no, it wouldn’t be perfect. It would be Europe. Boring as hell and whiter than white. Or China, boring as hell and Han’er than Han. Or Japan, boring as hell and Japanese-er (?) than Japanese.
It’s easy to get along with everyone when you look, talk, and probably think just like each other. Easy to come to a consensus about wealth redistribution because, really, it’s almost as if you’re giving you wealth away to your own family. It’s a whole lot tougher in a truly racially and ethnically diverse country like the US…but the US is WAY more fun because of it.