
Still no flying cars? The future of transit promises something even better - prostoalex
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/nov/02/transportation-self-driving-car-google-uber-lyft-waze-low-emissions
======
lumberjack
>even better

It's the polar opposite of what flying cars promised. Flying cars promised
unprecedented degrees of freedom. You could hop into your private aircraft and
fly everywhere you want unimpeded by the usual hurdles of road traffic.

Self driving cars take the common freedom of owning a personal vehicle away
from the individual. Private transportation will be transformed from a thing
you own to a service that you subscribe to. You probably won't even be able to
choose your preferred route anymore, at least not without addition expense.

I'm not being negative. Just pointing out the difference between the two.

~~~
shostack
That's the crux of it alright. I myself am completely torn.

On the one hand, there's something to be said for owning your transportation
outright and being able to do whatever you want with your vehicle.

When you rent it on-demand, there's major tradeoffs. Safety will likely
improve dramatically with self-driving vehicles. That's an amazing thing. But
it will go under-appreciated by anyone who gets a vehicle where the previous
occupant smelled funny, left crap in the car, etc. Basically all the downsides
of a cab will be translated to your personal vehicle.

~~~
zanny
> anyone who gets a vehicle where the previous occupant smelled funny, left
> crap in the car, etc

This technology will be pervasive and interconnected. If the previous
passenger damaged the car or disrespected the future occupants, a good ride
sharing company would discontinue their service after a number of infractions.
It is in their interest for profit to insure their riders are happy, and bad
apples ruining the experience destroy their reputation.

You will probably be able to, from your phone, flag the previous driver as
negligent. Depending on the degree of confidence the company has in you and
automated tools, they may face consequences without human involvement. Or
maybe someone needs to review surveillance footage to confirm the infraction.
Either way, that person is told to stop or lose their service. If you false-
flag, you can face your own consequences.

That also means there is a market for companies that respect their customers
in that way and those that do not, that would be cheaper since they cannot
attract wealthier clients.

The same applies to airlines and busses. If you are disrespectful of your
fellow passengers you can easily get yourself banned from future service.

~~~
shostack
I agree that it seems likely there will be mechanisms for rating/handling
passengers who damage a vehicle. Where those will fall woefully short and will
still result in the issue I cited are situations like:

\- Someone who smelled funny, had bad gas, etc.

\- Baby threw up and the mom wiped it down best she could but the entire car
has a whiff of puke

\- Dirt and grime being tracked in. Different people have vastly different
standards for cleanliness in their vehicles

\- Water/snow/sludge. Something to be said about going from an indoor garage
to your vehicle to an indoor garage at a destination during bad weather. If
the vehicle is picking up other people, etc., there's likely to be lots of
water/dirt inside.

\- Food smells and perfumes can set off allergies, sensitive noses, etc. I
sure as heck don't want to be in a vehicle where someone was just transporting
McDonalds, or where an old lady with way too much perfume was sitting for the
past hour

\- Wrappers, etc. can be left and often times dropped without any sort of
onboard camera picking it up

\- Germs. Dear god the germs. How many sick people will be in these things
without any way for future passengers to know? If I had a child, I sure
wouldn't want them in such a vehicle. I personally would also not want to be
in such a vehicle. Worst case scenario, someone with a serious disease
transmitted via blood or bodily fluids (read: HIV+, STDs, etc.) could leave
hard to detect amounts on various surfaces. What is the company going to do?
Require a blood sample and medical testing from all passengers?

So there's a whole host of things that are hard to track/place blame on people
for without being a technological/legal/political nightmare. And I totally
realize some of these are a bit on the extreme end of the spectrum. Point is,
when owning a vehicle is no longer possible, you won't have a choice about
being subjected to this.

And worth calling out specifically here is the whole surveillance aspect of
it. Forget your vehicle knowing where you are. Between traffic cams, license
plate readers, OnStar, Google Maps/Waze, etc. I think the war on tracking your
location has been lost. What hasn't been entirely lost yet is privacy within
the vehicle. I fully expect there to be invasive cameras and sensors watching
everything I do in these self-driving cars in the future.

Ad-supported ride? Eye-tracking software will monitor whether you are watching
the screen when the ad plays. Temperature/pulse monitors in seats could
measure your response to such ads. And that's just scratching the surface of
the privacy invasion.

I'm trying not to sound like I am wearing a tin-foil hat, but I think the past
few years have proven that these things aren't just possible, they are likely
and maybe even inevitable.

~~~
zanny
I'm sure in the same way many people can own and ride horses, or own their own
boats while most travel on communal naval vessels, the option will still exist
to own your own private auto. The technology needs to advance to the point
where it can handle human drivers, and at that point it will be more than
sufficiently capable of handling peer autos who behave much more logically.

It will just be way more economically efficient to have the subscription model
so you maximize vehicular utilization, so you just pay the premium difference
of that efficiency. I cannot imagine they will be significantly more expensive
than a Tesla is today.

------
Animats
Platooning has been demoed.[1] CALTRANS had a huge effort in the 1990s,
resulting in a 1997 live demo on a San Diego freeway with dedicated lanes.
Nothing came of it. Platooning works, but the long road trains that result are
a headache for everything not part of the road train. It's a solution to the
problem of long-distance travel over roads with few exits with very high
vehicle density. But that's not where the congestion is.

(It's also a job that trains do better than trucks, which is why there are so
many long trains loaded with double-stacked containers rolling through the
midwestern US.)

Partial automation of driving may be a big mistake. At the point where the
driver can take their hands off the wheel, the manufacturer must assume
financial responsibility for accidents. Volvo's CEO accepts that, Google
agrees, and other car companies are starting to come around. NHTSA Level 2
systems (smart cruise plus lane keeping) must require hands-on-wheel. Hands-
off driving requires NHTSA Level 3 (where Google currently is.) Systems which
allow hands off driving need to be at NHTSA level 3 or 4.

Cruise (YC W14) and Tesla's autopilot are Level 2 systems pretending to be
Level 3. This is scary; I've called it the "deadly valley". It's pretend
automatic driving, just good enough that drivers tune out but not good enough
to use hands-off. Tesla is already removing some of their autopilot
features.[2][3] This sort of thing [4][5] is why.

[1]
[http://www.path.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/documents/i...](http://www.path.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/documents/intel63.pdf)
[2] [http://www.autoblog.com/2015/12/11/tesla-autopilot-
feature-c...](http://www.autoblog.com/2015/12/11/tesla-autopilot-feature-
changes/) [3] [http://www.teslarati.com/tesla-beta-firwmare-7-1-adds-
autopi...](http://www.teslarati.com/tesla-beta-firwmare-7-1-adds-autopilot-
restrictions/) [4] [http://www.autoblog.com/2015/11/09/why-tesla-needs-update-
au...](http://www.autoblog.com/2015/11/09/why-tesla-needs-update-autopilot-
video/) [5]
[http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3d5k7b](http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3d5k7b)

~~~
usrusr
Platooning really needs to to be taken one step further to convince: not just
dedicated lanes, but dedicated right of ways with optional use of tramway-
style integrated rails and electrification. If robotic driving is solvable,
then a robotic, on-the-fly mode switch between road and rail wheelsets should
be easy in comparison.

The vehicles traveling hybrid routes like that would probably be seen as
(much) better railcars ( _) rather than as slightly better trucks /buses. Your
point that those won't directly reduce congestion on urban road networks is
certainly valid, but i am convinced that the increase of long distance
passenger service quality (many single-car direct connections instead of
switching between few long trains) would have a network effect spillover
influencing the modal split in favor of public transportation also on the
urban level. So indirectly urban congestion might still drop.

(_) benefits of the "better railcar": frequent, nonstop hub to hub connections
for passengers, door to door transport for freight, easy fallback to regular
roads for maintenance or incompleteness of the hybrid network, fallback to the
road wheelset for emergency braking power, for switching tracks and to climb
gradients much too steep for rail traction. Because of the much more relaxed
gradients, a hybrid network might even be cheaper to build than a pure rail
network when the terrain is not perfectly flat. Of course "hybrid" would only
mean optional rail use for increased efficiency with heavy loads, not mixed
use including rail-only vehicles.

~~~
Animats
There's a long series of things tried for "intermodal" operations, dating back
to the late 1940s. RoadRailer [1] still operates trailers which can run on
both roads and railroad tracks. But standard shipping containers have won out
for freight.

For passengers, there's a long history of buses that can also run on
rails.[2][3] This has remained a niche product.

[1] [http://www.triplecrownsvc.com/who-we-are-and-what-we-
do/equi...](http://www.triplecrownsvc.com/who-we-are-and-what-we-do/equipment-
roadrailer-tofc-reefer-container) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road-
rail_vehicle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road-rail_vehicle) [3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guided_bus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guided_bus)

------
d0m
I think the future of transit is no transit. I.e. VR from home in a virtual
office where you interact with other VR-from-home coworkers. I don't think
people are ready for this right now, but maybe in 1-2 generations. It's not
uncommon for people to feel closer to chat friends than real-life neighbors.

~~~
mikehollinger
I'll just leave this here.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzm6pvHPSGo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzm6pvHPSGo)

Anyone remember the IBM "Flying Cars" commercial with Avery Brooks from Star
Trek DS9? Watch the whole thing, and wait for the punchline.

~~~
fapjacks
Ah wow thanks for the blast from the past! Your posting of this commercial
drilled a hole in my brain right to the year 2000.

------
digi_owl
The basic problem with flying cars is that flying is very energy intensive.

Birds are basically two massive chest muscles and some hollow bones, and not
much else.

Normal planes get away with flying because they make maximum passive use of
the air via the wings.

Now consider the Harrier, i think it has a hover capability measured in
minutes. And thats at full fuel load and no weapon load.

~~~
kashkhan
total energy = power * time

planes can give you greater mpg than cars. A 70 year old cessna can gives you
15mpg. A modern plane can give you 40 MPG. Hovering is inefficient (10gph) but
it can be only 2 minutes of a 20 minute, 60 mile VTOL commute.

The real barrier is cost, currently 50k per seat for a 4 seater. it would need
a 3x improvement to compete with teslas.

------
ilaksh
The sustainable solution is transport-oriented development. Replace suburban
with a sustainable urban that puts retail, office, and even agriculture very
close to modest but comfortable homes.

[http://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage](http://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage)

------
peteretep
When you have a fully automated motorway, with vehicles able to drive safely
at any speed, I wonder what the cost and physical limitations of driving very
very fast while still on the ground are, vs potentially flying.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Anything over ~80-90mph is going to be extremely inefficient due to drag
coefficient.

~~~
baldfat
Flew to Orlando from PA. Drive time would be 15 hours. Flight time is 2.25
hours. Left for airport at 7:30 am arrived home 8:45 pm (Traffic and just
getting there 1.5 hours early and a non-direct flight)

I saved 3.5 hours, but cost me hundreds of dollars. I think self-driving cars
will change the way we travel to things on land that are 16 hours of driving
or less.

~~~
Retric
It costs ~300$ to drive 1,000 miles. So, I don't think a few hundred is for a
ticket is actually more expensive.

~~~
Shog9
Not for gas, not in the US right now, unless maybe you plan to travel in an
old truck or some horribly inefficient sportscar. If you're factoring in wear
and tear on your car, maybe... But highway driving isn't particularly hard on
most vehicles either.

The time invested is probably the most expensive part of driving, and that's
where flying has been losing its lead for years.

~~~
Retric
There is a wide range of costs, but 30c/mile of highway driving is actually
fairly cheap if you include everything.

PS: "57.5 cents per mile for business miles driven, up from 56 cents in 2014"

"The standard mileage rate for business is based on an annual study of the
fixed and variable costs of operating an automobile, including depreciation,
insurance, repairs, tires, maintenance, gas and oil."

------
adam_klein
[http://www.aeromobil.com/](http://www.aeromobil.com/)

