
The Insanity of Driving - duncanriach
https://medium.com/@duncanr/the-insanity-of-driving-5289f9bb8bba?source=friends_link&sk=0414cd0419d8df009f594268c0286cf1
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salawat
A couple things to point out that the good Doctor seems to have left out of
his musings.

Corporations don't REALLY care about people. They aren't going to invest large
amounts of money to acquire and develop nearby property to be lived in by
transient workers. Doing so would represent a huge assumption of liability on
the company's part, the cost thereof most likely would be passed on to the
employee. Work is soul sucking enough as is. Living in a company town with all
the strings attached that would entail would likely make matters even more
depressing.

Self-driving vehicles are nowhere NEAR "basic-AI". It takes a well-developed
teenager of a ripe 16+ years to even get to the point we as a society are even
comfortable TRAINING them to drive, and God help the one's with a Y chromosome
come time to pay the insurance.

And finally, think of the freedom gained by one who learns to operate a
vehicle. You unlock a form of mobility unmatched by any mode of locomotion
naturally evolved. You have opened to you the collective infrastructure built
by man to enable you to travel and transact. If there is any question that
should be asked with regards to automotive travel and work, it should be, why
don't we travel more for our own edification, rather than for someone else's?

For the current generation at least, the answer seems to be wage
stagnation/stratification. A phenomena uniquely addressable from the very same
corporations whose altruism is being appealed to in this article.

~~~
gaius
_God help the one 's with a Y chromosome come time to pay the insurance_

In the UK gender discrimination of this kind is illegal. Are you in the US? I
am surprised your very vocal activists have not tackled this.

 _think of the freedom gained by one who learns to operate a vehicle. You
unlock a form of mobility unmatched_

A car is a powerfully democratising technology. Any regular person can have at
his or her disposal a machine that can take them and their friends/family and
stuff anywhere they want to go at any time and act as a base while they are
there. It’s people who socialise entirely online, get their entertainment via
streaming etc who have the unhealthy lifestyle, not the ones who drive to the
coast at weekends...

~~~
duncanriach
and ... one can waste time and money for a few hours every day in it driving
to and from work, so that one can then complain about having a shitty life.

~~~
gaius
Or do the same journey by other means? In a car you have a seat, your choice
of temperature and ambient sound, your stuff secured, etc. Infinitely more
pleasant that being crammed in like a sardine on the train.

~~~
timellis-smith
I commute daily to work. By car it would take about an hour. Taking the train
takes 1:15 (of which 40 minutes is train). However, I can use this time
productively (in my case studying). Because of this I'm most of the way in
getting the AWS certifications.

Taking the car just makes me really grumpy at other cars and people, such that
I've often found I'm arriving home in a bad mood.

Each to their own, but I wouldn't rule out public transport (even with
terrible rail operators).

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petermcneeley
Yes rush hour driving (and many other modern behaviors) is a form of
collective insanity, however this behavior is individually completely
rational. So each individual is doing a great job maximizing their own
utility, yet the result tends to be totally unoptimal.

Western countries appear more and more dysfunctional as an emerging result of
their citizens inability to collectively take action. The illness is not in
the mind, its between the minds. It is a social illness.

~~~
trophycase
> Western countries appear more and more dysfunctional as an emerging result
> of their citizens inability to collectively take action

Well said. I feel like people have slowly been taught to fear standing up for
themselves.

~~~
adrianN
I think people stand up for themselves just fine, they just have a hard time
standing up for others.

~~~
noobermin
The thing is it isn't that we need to stand up for others, but by standing
together that we can alleviate society's ills, including our own on a personal
scale.

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temp-dude-87844
The author paints a few overwrought scenes and meanders around a point, but
never quite makes one that truly stands out, and doesn't deliver meaningful
insight.

Countless people have wondered, amateurs and professionals alike, why so many
people commute even when jobs and housing are available in proximity, and not
just concentrated in the employment centers like SV, but it always boils down
to the same basic setup: supply and demand feeding into pricing, disposable
incomes feeding into pricing, zoning and regulations feeding into issues with
the demand-matching supply, and a bunch of individuals trying to optimize
their circumstances given several constraints.

~~~
justboxing
> Countless people have wondered, amateurs and professionals alike, why so
> many people commute even when jobs and housing are available in proximity,

Can be explained by this.

> Moreover, the use of motorized transport is no longer optional. Since the
> introduction of motorized transport the arrangement of our cities has
> changed in such a way that the majority of people no longer live within
> walking distance of their place of employment, shopping areas and
> recreational opportunities, so that they HAVE TO depend on the automobile
> for transportation. Or else they must use public transportation, in which
> case they have even less control over their own movement than when driving a
> car.

Source: [1995] Prof. Teddy in [https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
srv/national/longterm/unab...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manifesto.text.htm?noredirect=on)

~~~
duncanriach
Getting rides with Lyft or Uber give me even more control over my own movement
than driving a car. I get a built-in chauffeur and valet (no time or money
spent parking), plus I don't need to pay for maintenance costs or spend time
refuelling. Why would waste time and money driving?

~~~
khedoros1
Well, you're paying for someone else's maintenance and fuel costs, their time,
and the company's profit. Plus, spending your time waiting for the ride to
show up every time you need it.

Maybe that makes sense for your situation. It doesn't for mine, even beyond
the social awkwardness I feel in using services like that.

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tbrownaw
If people spend a great deal of resources on something that's obviously
stupid, you probably don't understand their reward function as well as you
think you do.

~~~
duncanriach
That's a great point. I think that most people and organizations are
identified with victimhood and poor performance.

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Falkon1313
In the cities, there are buildings with shops and restaurants on the ground
level and apartments above. Sometimes even in towns you see buildings like
that, where the people who run the business live above it. It's possible, even
if a physical presence is needed, to have housing and commerce/industry within
walking distance.

My first jobs were all within walking distance of where I lived. After that I
got jobs on the bus route. But that didn't always work out great - miss a bus
by a couple of minutes, or if they miss each other at the transfer station,
and you're an hour or two late from waiting for the next bus.

Eventually I ended up in a place and career where commuting was pretty much
necessary - jobs were spread over a wide area across multiple towns/cities.
And intercity transit is far far worse than local buses. Carpooling to the
rescue. The commute sucked, but we had each other's conversation and the
audiobooks.

Now I work from home, and I wouldn't have it any other way. I've gained 2
hours a day. The company gets the best of me, instead of me tired and frazzled
from transit. It's cheaper and safer. It's a win-win.

Being on a remote-oriented team, it's been said multiple times by people in
the office that we talk more than they do to each other. And that matches my
experience from having worked in an office.

Driving is insane, especially for commuting, and doubly-so if the job can be
done remotely. Cars are extremely expensive not just to buy but to maintain
and operate, and yet they spend almost all of their time just sitting in a
parking space doing nothing but wasting space. It's a total waste. We can do
better.

Someday we'll be explaining to our descendants how we used to spend half our
income for a giant box that you had to drag around everywhere you went and
constantly pour money into, and then you would just sit in it for hours
wishing that you weren't, because that was the fad back then.

------
FrozenVoid
On the surface car culture exists because public transport isn't affordable or
entirely absent. A few train routes can relieve thousands of cars off the
road. A bus carries the equivalent of dozens of cars. In almost all situations
public transport is safer and more environmentally friendly.

The situation in US is that public transport doesn't reach suburbs/exurbs,
because the routes are generally low in passengers due lower population
density - thus not profitable. There are of course more reasons why people
choose living without public transport.

The psychology of suburbs/exurbs is against public or shared utility like
public transport, because it forces social cohesion and interaction will all
of society layers(while private transport is segregated by location and
limited to those who have vehicles). Its ingrained in US culture that personal
homes, cars and guns are symbols of independent life - a certain brand of
lifestyle that diametrically opposite to city life.

People should understand this lifestyle has costs and inefficiencies that
exist solely due spreading the population too thin to support services such as
public transport. Any business or organization will naturally form to service
large concentrations of users, focusing on cities-first, because this
simplifies logistics and transport.

People complain often that their area is only serviced by one company(e.g.
internet) or even none. They don't really understand why there isn't
competition or diversity of service providers for their needs. Their lifestyle
teaches them its normal and everything else must accommodate it.

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kisstheblade
I think that for these big corporations the value of individual "knowledge
workers" isn't that great, so they can afford to keep them in rush hour
traffic and not have them operating at their peak (see also open office
plans). I mean they don't need so many highly skilled and innovative
individuals. That's why I don't get the relatively high salaries at eg.
facebook. They need maybe a handfull (10-100) of extraordinary people, the
rest can be mediocre at best and get the job done. I mean it's a website and
selling ads for christs sake :)

~~~
duncanriach
I don't agree. You pay someone a few hundred K and you can get x or 10x or
100x out of them if you know how people work. It's much better to get 10x or
100x out of all of your employees if you want to maximize profit.

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YokoZar
This was a rambling, uninteresting read without any new insight or humor.

Summary: Author doesn't like commuting, wonders why companies expect people to
do it, then hopes for a self driving car future as though this somehow solves
the problem.

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atomical
Agree. Upvotes are probably being gamed.

~~~
duncanriach
I'm also amazed that this article is doing so well. I didn't think it was
anywhere near one of my best. If upvotes are being gamed, and I'm not gaming
them (which I'm not), then I wonder who is doing it, and for what reason.

I'm also wondering if people are seeing, or appreciating, something about this
article that I'm not.

~~~
3131s
HN comments are often not relevant to the specific article posted, people just
want to discuss the topic in the headline.

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purplezooey
_" Recently, I was driving back to the South Bay from San Francisco when I got
caught in some stop-and-go traffic, which is a common experience in the Bay
Area..."_

Understatement of the century.

