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Dashcam footage shows driverless cars clogging San Francisco (wired.com)
298 points by gorbachev on April 10, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 497 comments



Anyone ever think about what a nightmare driverless cars will be if they actually work? Right now our crumbling infrastructure is loaded with traffic. Imagine if the max amount of driving a human can endure is removed entirely as a final constraint on the total utilization rate of this infrastructure and is replaced with a relentless driving machine that never tires or gets frustrated and has no fear of death.

People would commute up to 4 hours one way, napping in their cars, maybe even longer. Delivery vehicles running all hours of the night, perhaps with no one ever in them at all. People sending the cars to go pick things up or people that they otherwise wouldn't have time in their day to do.

Even if you don't want to live in your car that the pressure will still be exerted on you because you'll be competing with people that do. Cars instructed to circle the block in areas with no parking clogging the streets. You'll need a self driving car yourself to even get a spot since you'll never defeat all the robot vultures.

People will forget how to drive entirely of course so there will be no going back. The whole thing will feed on itself, people will need more self driving cars to get back the time stolen by other self driving cars.


I think it's important to realize that part of the reason self driving cars are so hard is because there is a necessary period of coexistence with human drivers.

In your hypothetical future, where no humans manually drive anymore, it opens up the possibility of completely redesigning our vehicle infrastructure without having to worry about the training and compliance of a mixed human/AI population on the road.

My optimistic hope is that with fully automated vehicles, mass transit wins out on sheer efficiency in order to negate the wasteful deadheading inherent in personal vehicles.


Even in that hypothetical future the cars would still have to deal with pedestrians, road workers, construction, weather, road damage, flooding, and many other random situations that are much more complicated than just staying in your lane and maintaining a two car lengths gap from the car in front.

How does a self driving car deal with a blizzard with white-out conditions or a complete loss of traction due to ice? Yes, humans get into a lot of accidents in these conditions but as a percentage of the time the rate is still remarkably low.

If you want to eliminate large classes of those adverse situations then the best approach we have right now is to switch to rail transport. Public transit is truly the way to go!


Those policepersons randomly waving hands and emitting incomprehensible shouts on Manhattan crossroads ... AI will replace openai CEO before it can handle that.


they're due to be replaced: huge capital drain on the company. Esp. for folk making decisions based on reports generated by (mostly) automated systems.


My brother in christ, it's called a driverless metro. It has existed for decades and isn't even slightly like a google owned surveillance drone "accidentally" causing delays for ts competition.

Excommunicating humans from all public space and drawing a moat of monopoly owned robo taxis around every block and every destination isn't a utopia, it's a complete nightmare.


I remember the day when the car I'd been driving in college finally broke down sufficiently that the various repairs exceeded the value of the car. By that time, I'd been working for well over a year, and my 18 mile / 25 minute commute by car was, for that one day, affected as follows: 1. I was working at NCEP at the time, which was still located in Camp Springs (off 495 Branch Avenue exit 5), which was about a mile away from the last stop of the green line metro. Walking a mile isn't bad, but it does add about 15 minutes to the trip. 2. Because of the way the green line is set up, taking the metro from college park to branch ave is in effect a 45-60 minute ride (nearly from one end of the line to the other end, even though the distance around the beltway is only about 15 miles, or less; the problem is, the green line makes a huge detour through DC). 3. This was compounded by the fact that I had to get to the metro station in greenbelt first. I could either walk there, which would have taken about an hour, or I could ride a bus--which, as it turned out, took 50 minutes to traverse the same ~4 mile distance. Why? Because a) it had to worm its way through the labyrinthine neighborhood of Greenbelt, with very frequent stops.

In short, what took 25 minutes door to door on any given day before ended up taking ~two hours on the way to work. And for reasons I can no longer remember, getting back home ended up taking twenty minutes longer.

In other words, a total commute time of ~50 minutes (max) was turned into a ~4.5 hour commute due to having to rely on public transportation.

I also remember the specific reason why I went and bought a new car that same weekend (fortunately this happened on a Friday): it was the realization, upon arriving at home (after said ~2.5 hour commute), that I had forgotten my apartment keys at work.


That's not an inherent issue with public transit vs. individual transport though. You are comparing a really bad public transit implementation with a good implementation of individual transport. In many European cities, getting from A to B by public transit is much faster than by car since they don't focus so much on car infra, with all the downsides it brings (huge areas reserved for 10-lane highways and parking everywhere, air pollution, cost of owning/leasing/insuring, ...). If you get good public transit infra, life has one issue less to worry about.

It's pretty neat, I've moved to a European city recently myself and I'm slightly horrified at the prospect of moving back.


Bad busses that snake because there aren't enough routes and get stuck behind broken driverless cars are bad. This isn't news. Nor does it mean you shouldn't male a good transit system instead.


>... completely redesigning our vehicle infrastructure...

The eternal pessimist within me looks at how difficult it is to get anything with infrastructure accomplished, both at a reasonable pace and reasonable cost, in the US and can't help but expect this sort of thing to not play out as wonderfully as that sounds.


You are completely ignoring the existence of pedestrians, bicycles, animals, construction, fallen trees, rain, snow, ice, and on and on and on.

We are nowhere near a future where cars exist in hermetically sealed tubes, completely walled off from the rest of existence.


We can, and have, crested such tubes at various times in the past. While expensive and require dedicated fixed routes, they can also move lots of people very quickly with nearly no congestion. A shame we can never build these anymore.


Congratulations, you’ve reinvented a metro subway but with extra steps.


With the rate AI has improved over just the last year, I expect a lot of these problems to go from "impossible to solve" to "trivial" pretty quickly at some point within (pessimistically) the next 5 years.


Well I hadn't yet thought about a possible outcome of driverless cars being better mass transit, that makes sense to me though. Once personal ownership is removed, and as atomicity is slowly reduced in exchange for efficiencies/cheaper rates to the customer, certaim areas would be analogous to mass transit.


Good fucking luck making company A driverless cars communicate company B to cooperate...


> Cars instructed to circle the block in areas with no parking clogging the streets. You'll need a self driving car yourself to even get a spot since you'll never defeat all the robot vultures.

Why do you think this would happen? Self-driving cars are poised to dramatically improve parking overall. One can be dropped off exactly at their destination, and the car can then go elsewhere. Even an elsewhere of "somewhere 5 minutes away" is a large amount of potential parking in a typical urban environment. Additionally, any existing parking lot that chooses to only accept self-driving vehicles instantly gets additional capacity: self-driving cars could cooperatively pack/unpack themselves into space efficient configurations.

And if your counter is "a minority of selfish entitled people", the answer to that is "laws and regulations". Self-driving cars will have to follow the laws of wherever they're driving. If your "circling the block" apocalypse comes to pass, the mitigation would literally be a law/regulation that self-driving cars would have to obey.


Not to mention, if self-driving taxis were ubiquitous and cheap, people would be far less likely to take their own car downtown--or own a car at all. In retrospect, the idea that there's a car sitting idle in a parking spot right in the middle of downtown all day for nearly every person in the area will seem downright insane.


Congratulations, you just reinvented public transit.


Not really. A lot of people simply don't want to commute in a space shared with others.

Cars are not going anywhere.


What is a street if not a space shared with others? Worse, everybody else on the street (pedestrians, cyclists, ...) who is sharing the street with your car is suffering from you using the car by taking up disproportionally much space, needing disproportionally much maintenance and causing disproportionally much noise.

Imagine an inner city without cars. Cities in which this is a reality are a bliss to be in. And people get in and out just fine.


Well, first, mrshadowgoose has a point: I know a lot of people who would love to take a self-driving car but wouldn't got near a bus.

But also, while I'd love (love!) to see much better, European-style public transit in US cities, it would take a fantastic level of political will, lobbying, and pitching to even begin to happen. For all sorts of reasons, public transit is wildly unpopular in the US, and construction is wildly expensive.

But a company like Tesla could (if they could figure out the FSD part) just roll out self-driving taxis after a few legal tweaks. It's achievable in a reasonable timeframe (once the tech is in place).


The total cost of driving around people individually in cars is substantially higher than the total cost for public transit with similar convenience and significantly higher throughput. (This is including upfront infrastructure investments and maintenance.)

Seems Americans are just too used to staring at a 2 ton steel can in front of them.


> Congratulations, you just reinvented public transit.

Reinvented, but much better. It's the difference between Circuit-Switched vs. Packet-Switched in networking. Trains are extremely inefficient use of resources. They require a dedicated and very expensive path, cannot re-route around problems (e.g. broken tracks or obstructed tracks), and frequently travel at a fraction of their capacity. Properly sized and routed electric vehicles are much more efficient in terms of cost per mile, travel time, and almost any other metric.


Trains are also much safer, more energy efficient and have lower TCO than a car fleet with similar capacity.

> frequently travel at a fraction of their capacity.

The average occupancy of a car with 5 seats is only marginally above 1. So, 20-25%? The average occupancy of a European streetcar is far above that.

> Properly sized and routed electric vehicles are much more efficient in terms of cost per mile, travel time, and almost any other metric.

Just as much as you can optimize those factors in electric cars can you optimize them in trains/trams/buses/...


> Why do you think this would happen?

It was already starting to happen in NYC with Uber's exponential growth before they capped the number of cars permitted. They were a year away from carmageddon.


> Self-driving cars are poised to dramatically improve parking overall.

And interestingly, all of the parking lots in a city, in theory, will be obsolete, opening a whole bunch of opportunities for new urban design. The idea behind self-driving cars is not to own the car, but to rent it...which is why some people are super bullish in the long term on Uber.

The cutover to autonomous cars will be a huge PITA however, and I think this is really what the OP is getting at.


>self-driving cars could cooperatively pack/unpack themselves into space efficient configurations.

I've had this same thought, but haven't seen it discussed much.

Parking lots essentially switch from random access (which requires expensive unoccupied 'lanes') into a slowly snaking space-filling curve. Cars can crawl slowly from entrance to exit, moving like water through a pipe. The paths can even branch and merge to make efficient use of the entire surface area.

If you also want to charge the cars stored in the parking lot, your solutions fall into two broad categories:

1.) Arrange the parking lot with rows of chargers that automatically plug in. Cars choose the appropriate row based on state-of-charge, twith he algorithm making sure the entire row finishing charging at roughly the same time. This minimizes unnecessary disconnect/move forward/reconnect cycles. Or,

2.) put wireless charging under the parking lot. This would be a lot more feasible than electrifying large swaths of highway.

Personally I still prefer option 1, because the peak charging speeds can be much greater.


> Parking lots essentially switch from random access (which requires expensive unoccupied 'lanes') into a slowly snaking space-filling curve.

Why would they? You still need to get the car to unpark itself when the owner needs it?

Oh, you mean everybody shares cars with everybody? What about letting sections of that "snake" just drive around, stopping at different spots and let people enter and leave? And perhaps let them walk around inside? Congratulations, you've just re-invented public transit.


> self-driving cars could cooperatively pack/unpack themselves

This is unlikely to ever happen. Even in the human-driver world, there would be huge potential to have cars communicate directly with each other. Never materialized.


Where are you going to go that's five minutes away though? if you're in the inner city, like downtown Manhattan, it's all urban so it's not like there's anywhere to go.


just imagine when someone's driverless car get's into an accident 20 miles away from it's owner whilst it was looking for a park.


And? What exactly is the severe implication here? A PMV does not have 100% uptime in any case, self-driving or not.

If the concept of a remote accident is so appalling to you...just don't get a self-driving vehicle. But other car users are capable of processing statistical risk non-emotionally, and they will get to enjoy stress-free parking once these vehicles become available.

Anyway, in all likelihood, self-driving cars will result in a large pivot away from car ownership. The impact of "your car" being involved in a remote accident becomes moot if it's not even your car.


also commercially it is not in the benefit of the car to waste fuel circling around, instead of parking


Where I live the electricity costs of having an EV 'just drive around until I call you' would be an order of magnitude cheaper than paying for parking.


A natural consequence of this is congestion pricing like in London.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congestion_pricing


Electricity isn't the only cost of operating an EV. There's wear and tear on the drivetrain, suspension, and tires. And every mile driven slightly increases the chance of a collision. That's why insurance companies charge more for vehicles that are driven more miles per year.


Maybe, but fuel is cheap and so many people will want their car to circle close instead of parking 5 minutes away and thus being 5 minutes away when they are done. Even if it is a longer time inside they will have the car circle starting ten minutes before they think they will be done.


I can't imagine why I wouldn't send it home to be useful for other family members, or just sublet its unproductive time as a way to earn its keep as a ride share driver.


you are 30 minutes from home for a 15 minute appointment and do not like waiting for your car.

do you:

- send the car home

no, it would only get halfway home before the end of your appointment

- send it on a rideshare journey

let's say (conservatively, and according to some minimum regulations from the rideshare service) it gets assigned a job after 5 minutes to drive somebody 10 minutes away. it finishes its job at the same time as your appointment ends. you have to wait 10 minutes for it to return to you. again no.

- send it to a parking lot

assuming the parking lot is 5 minutes away and you can tell it to return 5m before your appointment ends this seems reasonable

- drive circles around your appointment

all the benefits of sending it to the parking lot but requires even less effort as you no longer have to remember to tell it your appointment is finishing.

now apply this logic to the general public. what is the most likely outcome?


Exactly. People are already occupying public resources for their private luxury (in the form of parking on public street in front of their house), nobody would think twice just letting the thing circle. Especially in places where parking costs money, which will then only be a thing for people who can't afford self-driving add-ons or need to charge the thing.


I recall many years ago Jonathan Hall (economist at Uber) describing a "traffic apocalypse" caused by empty self-driving cars flooding city streets. I think the notion was the operational cost of self-driving cars was so low that wasteful (empty car) usage would skyrocket without anyone directly paying the cost of time/road use. Today, the mean number of people per car on the road is at least 1, but with empty AVs that could plummet to <1.

I believe this scenario was discussed as an argument for congestion pricing, serving as a vital solution to the tragedy of the commons exacerbated by self-driving cars.


I've never forgotten a Hacker News comment about the same idea - might have predated Uber even. If parking costs increase, and self-driving cars can recharge cheaply, then we'll see them slowly navigating streets en masse while waiting for their next gigs. Like a molasses taxi rank oozing around with no urgency.


As someone who mostly cycles to get around the city, I would love this situation. I could get around everywhere so quickly between all the car-tar without the fear of being killed by a careless human driver. But if this thought experiment teaches anything, it's that we should give public pathways over to non-car users way before we ever get to this stage. We've already gone way too far out of our way for cars. Make most roads bike/train/tram only and save one or two lanes max for delivery trucks and maybe buses.


Not gonna happen...next idea?


I already had this experience where i had to wait 30 minutes for someone to come pickup a car. Driving it around was cheaper than parking it for 30 minutes


haha, I experienced this myself. My friend fell on some hard times, and it was actually a net financial gain for me to have him sleep on my couch and pay for his food, since he'd drive me to/pick me up from work in downtown Seattle and save me $30/day on parking (or 60+ minutes a day in crappy bus commuting)


I’m going to call my 60s cover band Molasses Taxi Rank


Liner notes credit please. (Are there still liner notes?)


The best I can do is an ID3v2 mention.


Sold


We’ll do a vinyl release as a tribute to your nominal brilliance


At the same time you'll have a dramatic drop in car ownership (since it'll be far cheaper to be taxied), meaning less waste overall as each car is fully utilized for potentially dozens of people a day, rather than sitting on a concrete pad 20+ hours a day doing nothing but aging.


I think people are too optimistic about the personal car as taxi approach. For anyone with families, I’ll have car seats installed, often you have personal items which I guess I would have to remember to always lock in the trunk. You will have passengers make a mess in your car, smoke and vape, even have sex (no driver!), and then I’ll pick up my kids and take them to soccer on same seat?


If most cars on the road are taxis, this means a few things. 1) It'll be much cheaper than owning a car. 2) There will always be a car within a minute or two to pick you up when you're ready. 3) There will be cars of every configuration available, including ones with car seats for kids (although it's not a huge deal, my twin's car seats take less than a minute to install). 4) These cars will be checked daily, and if you do happen to get a dirty car, you can just report it and get another one in the next few minutes. They'll likely have cameras in the cars that will know if someones smoking or having sex in there, so not many folks will do it if they don't want to pay a huge fee or get banned from the service.


traffic apocalypse

I think this would ultimately be for the best. If the streets clogged up so severely with traffic then the value of owning a car would drop precipitously. Even if car owners lobbied successfully to widen all the streets the traffic would just expand to fill the available capacity.

People would finally be forced to seek alternatives!


One thing I’ve learned is that unless the option absolutely disappears, people usually won’t search for alternatives when something goes to absolute shit. They’ll just complain and accept it.

It’s more likely that roads will be widened and traffic will grow to meet that supply than it is that cars start to go away. Cars only go away when governments announce near immediate bans.


Or they'll vote the driverless vehicles out of their city like the Parisians did with the e-scooters.


HOV lanes for 1+ passenger cars.


I guess it's the season of AI fear. Humans don't rarely drive to their endurance levels now, so why would removal of a rarely-used limit affect much?

8 hours (4+4) spent in commuting, driving or not, is an entire life. This isn't a realistic concern, but something pulled out of a cyberpunk novel.

Cars can park away from you and come back to pick you up. This should alleviate parking problems, and reduce parking-space-search based congestion on the street.

Learning to drive was never that hard.


> 8 hours (4+4) spent in commuting, driving or not, is an entire life. This isn't a realistic concern, but something pulled out of a cyberpunk novel.

You poor innocent child. Spent a couple of years of my life doing pretty much that, in crowded trains with a thousand others doing the same. Some did it for many, many years. It's a thing. (OK, I was lucky about where I worked and only had a 3-hr commute each way.)

Related data point... my commuting choices were

a) drive all or most of the way (saving 45 minutes to an hour each way);

b) drive 15 minutes to a park-and-ride, take a commuter bus;

c) drive 45 minutes to train station, take train in (extra 30 to 45 minutes each way, exta $$/mo).

Often did (b) for practical reasons, much preferred (c) for comfort. Didn't do (a) too often. (d) "black car" (private driver) was an idle astronomically expensive dream. But if it was only a relatively small premium over normal car ownership? I and 100's of thousands of my fellow commuters would have given our left kidneys.


In the Bay Area in particular it is known commutes from Sacramento, Gilroy, and elsewhere happen. To say nothing of traffic and closures (devil's slide is STILL closed between Pacifica and Half Moon Bay) creating 3+ hour commutes from what google maps may indicate as < 2 hour commutes.


I've had a coworker who used to commute from Fresno to Palo Alto daily.


Respectfully, some people drink motor oil, that doesn't make it a realistic concern.

I drove 90 minutes each way in/ around Atlanta and that was considered long; I had friends in NYC who were on the train 90 minutes each way and that was considered long.

I can't think of anyone I knew who had 2 hours each way, every day. (Some days, yes, but not as the norm.)

I do know folks who drive/ ride/ fly and then stay locally for some days, then commute back for the weekend or their WFH days. And most are for 2-3 hour driving commutes, not 4.

I agree with them 8 hours a day of travel "isn't a realistic concern".


> Cars can park away from you and come back to pick you up. This should alleviate parking problems, and reduce parking-space-search based congestion on the street.

I know this sounds nice for just a moment, but if you consider it longer, it's awful. It won't decrease congestion, it will increase it. Why?

1. Cars will still be searching for parking: many people will prefer to have their car nearby. It's not as if every car will altruistically drive to a far-off area. Since self driving cars have more patience than humans, they'll be on the road much longer searching for their parking. It may be more efficient to keep the car circling the block, which is even worse.

2. Parking availability is a major inhibitor of car trips, especially in cities. This is a good thing. If it becomes easier to "park" (ie leave your car driving on the street or send it away), that will induce more car trips, and more car trips means more congestion, until there's a new equilibrium (maybe a 7-minute parking search is eliminated, but it's replaced with 7+ minutes of traffic).

3. Pick-up and drop-off in cities is already difficult with rideshare services. If all personal vehicles are doing it as well, they'll definitely congest the curb lanes more. This is definitely a more solvable problem than the first two, but still an annoyance.

And for what it's worth, the 4-hour commute may be a bit far fetched, but it's hard to deny that many wouldn't mind an extra 20 minutes of commute time in traffic if they can relax, nap, read, watch a show, etc. People will chose that option more, adding more trips and more congestion, until an equilibrium is reached. Maybe it won't be 4-hour commute times but it will be a major increase and added congestion.

All of these extra miles traveled searching for parking, and adding extra congestion, are disastrous to cities and neighborhoods. Sure, the fossil fuel emissions alone would be awful, but suppose (charitably) that all autonomous vehicles are electric, and assume that their electricity generation is emission free (unrealistic for decades). The weight of EV batteries will dramatically increase road wear and tear, and they'll increase the pollution due to rubber tires, which are already the major source of microplastic pollution. And of course, it's a dramatic waste of energy from the power grid. And all of this is ignoring that dedicating that much road space storing to idling and parked vehicles is a no-good, terrible, awful way to utilize public space in a city or neighborhood, when it could be used by some efficient public transit, parks, and safer infrastructure for personal vehicles when necessary.


Price the spots by location (or bid) and make their availability known through a web service. The parking trip is a straight shot and spot congestion is managed better than today. Another benefit of automating a manual process.


Sure, fair market pricing for parking via bidding would be amazing. Of course, there's decades of subsidies for parking built-in, but the price would still be much higher than you'd expect. (Check out "The High Cost of Free Parking" by Donald Shoup for a great overview of the huge public subsidy we already give cars, paid for by non-drivers).

You'd then need to price the time a vehicle spends on the road without an occupant. Otherwise you're just pushing people to send their cars around the block for an hour to avoid paying market rate for parking.

But it's hard to enforce the "unoccupied vehicle" rule, so it would be much better to just charge for all road use time in high congestion areas. Maybe... congestion pricing?


In many European and Asian cities this is a solved problem. You buy your own parking spot, lease one by year, or pay for the expensive hourly lots. Those are your only options.


Tolled roads and market parking are likely to come, just with different names. Bay Area terms are "demand-responsive parking pricing" and HOT.


I'm not seeing the downsides.


Congestion pricing and market rate, unsubsidized parking _should_ be the default already. So let's start with those policies now :)


Everyone pays for free parking, not just non drivers.


Exactly. Which means drivers are getting a great discount thanks to the people who don't use a car, and the non-drivers are getting a markup on all the prices they pay. And the non-drivers were already paying a huge amount to maintain car infrastructure (at least in the US) because the gas tax doesn't nearly cover it.

Now don't get me wrong, I understand the value of a public good. Grocery stores receive food via trucks on roads, so even non-drivers get the benefit of the road. The parking subsidy, however, is insidious because it's so much less visible. It's not a government investing in a public good: the city instead requires businesses to maintain off-street parking, and they pass that cost on to everyone. It lets everybody believe that parking, and driving altogether, is much cheaper than it really is, because the (actually enormous) parking costs are hidden away and subsidized by those who don't use it.


>the city instead requires businesses to maintain off-street parking, and they pass that cost on to everyone

I'm not sure how generally true that is where I live relatively nearby (Boston/Cambridge). There are some businesses that have generally fairly crowded/small parking lots. (And places like hospitals certainly do though you generally have to pay for them.) But in general you have to pay for metered parking or find a garage.


Much of this depends on the particular city's rules and when development happened. Off-street parking requirements have become far more common since the 1950s. Places that developed prior to this (and didn't dramatically re-develop) may not have this as much, since the rules would only apply to new development. I think a fair bit of the US northeast may fall under that category.

And, for instance, San Francisco has no required off-street parking, and has limits to off-street parking instead: https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/san_francisco/latest/s...

However, plenty of other places in the US are different. The rest of the Bay Area is quite sprawled, as are the areas of the Midwest I've spent time in.


In San Fransisco, it's too "costly" to park on the street because your car will be broken into, with full support of the people of SF and law enforcement.


Not sure how many cities' economies can get get by just with their population buying locally, but if your parking is too expensive, I'm not visiting, and I'm not patronizing businesses. I don't actually know how sustainable a policy of "we don't accommodate visitors" is for a large city.


The entire point of a city is it to be a nexus of industry! Any place worthy of the name can get by just fine — the restaurants patronized by the locals, staffed by the locals, who have jobs in other locations. It’s not as if NYC needs your income (tourism accounts for about 7% of the economy). Not having a bunch of people clogging up the streets is a good policy.


Tourists in NYC generally don't drive their own cars around manhattan.


Now, they don't. When cars are self-driving?


Non drivers benefit because workers at the businesses they patronize don't have to pay for parking, delivery people don't have to pay for parking, visitors don't have to pay for parking, etc.


That's an argument that's pretty hard to justify. Most zoning rules with parking minimums attempt to meet peak demand for free parking. Subsidized free parking means that all the extra spaces are paid for by the business regardless of whether they're used. So the business (and thus the customer) is always overpaying for parking, compared to some hypothetical business with no free parking, but reimburses all market-rate parking for visitors and employees. Of course, that hypothetical business could only exist in a dense or very pedestrianized area, and not all businesses are suited to zero-parking.

The point I'd make is that mandating minimums of free parking is absurd: businesses and developers could instead decide how much parking they anticipate their business would need. They could come up with many creative solutions somewhere between the extremes of zero parking and plentiful free parking depending on the area. In most towns and cities across America, except for a few dense urban cores, we mandate one extreme and the result is higher prices for everyone (including the non-drivers, who get to help pay for all that unused parking as well).


> 1. Cars will still be searching for parking: many people will prefer to have their car nearby.

You're not thinking with an open mind.

If I own a robot car and I know I'm going to be at dinner for 2 hours, I will send the robot car to do a few Uber rides while I'm eating. Or it will go and charge. It doesn't have to just drive around in circles like a human. It can coordinate will all the other robot cars in the area and pick a place where it won't create traffic, or they can distribute traffic among each other. Maybe it can park-share, where if there are 3 cars and 2 parking spots, the 3 cars can coordinate and rotate who goes driving around.

Maybe robot cars will be fungible, so you don't own a specific robot car, but you own a time share, so all the cars are basically like Ubers, and you can call the one closest to you.

The possibilities are endless, don't think that a robot car will just emulate a human.


If I own a robot car and I know I am going to be at dinner for two hours, I will send the car someplace where no dirty person whom I have never met can possibly find or enter my car, because I am not a destitute person looking to monetize my own personal property. If you live in this world, bless your heart, but you are absolutely positively not allowed in my car and I suspect a fair number of people agree with me.

If all cars are Ubers I’ll just move to some other place that isn’t the ninth circle of rent seeking, sharing economy, dot com nightmare dystopia.


I mean, for sure there are some cool moonshot ideas. However I think it's pretty important to have some proof of concept or even a technical idea of how that would work before dismissing all of the concerns around congestion. Waving around "tech will save us" is really easy to do. (Especially when the solution to congestion already exists and is criminally underfunded.)

You're right that I did predicate that little rant on the idea that the majority of AVs would be personally owned and not part of a fleet. I'm sure that car share will come into play to some degree, but I do think it's tough to convince people who are used to their car being a personal, (relatively) private space that they can store nearly for free on public roads, to give that up. It's especially hard to convince the automobile industry that the incredibly profitable 1-2 car per household model should be pushed aside in order to manufacture fewer, shared vehicles. Cruise (i.e. GM) will not cannibalize their personal car sale business: they're using this as a way to get test data to build personal AVs. Maybe car share will increase over time, but we're not about to witness some revolution, especially if it reduces consumption or profit.


> (Especially when the solution to congestion already exists and is criminally underfunded.)

I presume you mean mass transit, but that's disproven by induced demand: cars removed from the roads will be replaced by others, either drivers who were previously taking other forms of transportation or by new trips. Removing cars frees up capacity, which is effectively no different than new capacity from expanded roads.


Then you add mass transit and make driving your own car expensive enough to dissuade this induced demand.


I’m not sure why the idea that the cars will talk to each other is so “moonshot”. We have much more impressive pieces of infrastructure in place already. What might be moonshot is my proposal that it should be run by the US Postal Service.


I think it's a moonshot because it expects that we will have shared, open standards and protocols for all of this, which will either need to come from industry, or from regulators. Neither feels very likely. But then again, it could happen :)


They can't even get a standard way to cast your phone onto the screen in the car. It's just a fucking touch screen, and we can't figure that out because Apple and Google just can't let some portion of the money go and make their user's lives better. They have to have all the money or none of the money, and if they can't get all of it, then fuck you. Car manufacturers also won't even put in any sort of standards just so that I can upgrade the terrible stereo that comes in even the nicest of cars. God forbid they put a 2 cent RCA jack on the back of the stereo, maybe give you a read-only connection to the CAN-bus to display some data, and a rectangular hole in the dash (where the ugly ass screen is going to go anyways).


That won't happen. It sounds good, but the details kill it. Someone will trash your car and now it isn't acceptance when dinner is done. Someone will take a longer than expected trip and you won't have a ride when dinner is done.


Having a car come pick me up and take me to/from work would be great, and with no human to pay would be cheaper than owning a car for that purpose. But the family car packed with backpacks, jackets, sports gear, etc is gonna make owning at least one car per family that can afford it a reality for a long time. But self driving taxis will revolutionize how we get places and get stuff delivered, and ultimately for the better.


I think "coordinate with all the other robot cars in the area and pick a place where it won't create traffic" is pretty unlikely to happen. Tesla will do their own version of that which only negotiates with other Teslas, GM will do one that sends all cars to the wrong city, and Waymo will have their cars perform some optimal algorithm that is somehow incompatible with any human drivers they encounter.


Or, your car parks in the spot you yourself would park in, the ones building codes require the restaurant to provide.

No one wants their $60k+ self driving car casually risking accidents. And I certainly don't want to end my date night with drunk/messy Uber patron roulette for like $10 profit. Not hating if you do.. just not for me.


If there was already plentiful parking at your destination then the whole "cruising for parking" discussion is moot anyway, right? The concerns were about congested commutes to denser downtown areas where parking is difficult, or the date night into the city from the suburbs, etc. Difficult/expensive parking disincentivizes car trips there, and shifts them to public transit, ride share, and commuter rail, which are better suited for cities. If you weren't encountering difficulty finding street parking or paying steep garage prices, then of course you wouldn't suddenly be sending your AV on a joyride around town or letting random people use it as car share.


> Or, your car parks in the spot you yourself would park in, the ones building codes require the restaurant to provide.

In that case it sounds like the self-driving doesn't matter and we're no worse off.


agree. there's a lot of neo-luddite FUD on HN about self-driving.

plenty of actual academics project that autonomous vehicles improve occupancy of city streets by 40% and highways by 80%.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8317654


I've seen those, but they make a lot of assumptions that I do not think are reasonable. Only time will tell.


> If I own a robot car and I know I'm going to be at dinner for 2 hours, I will send the robot car to do a few Uber rides while I'm eating.

I mean assuming I don’t want to leave my sunglasses in the car, or anything else.


I don't think it's 8 hour commutes so much. But that I could now take the 75-90 minute trip into the city that's about 50 miles away for dinner/show without thinking about it too much. I've really cut down on casually swinging into town to meet someone or do an activity on a weeknight because it's just a hassle to drive with all the traffic and driving back home when I'm probably getting a bit tired.

Of course, it still costs money and if everyone does that now maybe it's 2+ hours in a car each way and I still won't mostly do it.

I'd also routinely take the car into the city for a work event of some sort rather than dealing with non-trivial hassle of multi-modal driving to the train station and 2 different forms of public transit.


    I've really cut down on casually swinging into town to meet someone or do an activity on a weeknight because it's just a hassle to drive with all the traffic and driving back home when I'm probably getting a bit tired.
This sounds like age, more than anything. Your energy levels fall, and you tell yourself "next time". In reality, next time comes less and less.


In part that's probably true. I've also been working from home most of the time since well before the pandemic and it both takes longer and has a higher "activation energy" to do something in the evening when I'm not already out and about. That said, the driving time has also increased 15 to 30 minutes over time.

So it is a combination.


> 8 hours (4+4) spent in commuting, driving or not, is an entire life

There are already people who live in their vans anyway, if they didn't even need to drive them anymore perhaps areas with overzealous zoning laws that circumvent supply & demand would see an influx of small moving apartments instead.

It would be like a land yacht, and economically sound so long as the price of gas is lower than the price of rent.


This is my plan. As soon as self driving tech is available I'm putting it in a school busy mini-house. Punch in any destination and then live my life while I head there. It'll basically be teleportation in my lifetime.


What you describe is basically how my wife and I treat the model Y on road trips, except we speak the destination instead of punch it in.

But you'll still want to wear a seatbelt because although self driving cars don't tend to cause accidents, they very much are the victim of them.

And consider the electricity demand of keeping your big skooli heated and cooled compared to that of a small and tight modern vehicle, you'll likely be forced into charging last thing every night and first thing every morning while on the road, while for us it is about 25% of battery on the worst nights so we can camp anywhere.


This debate reminds me of one of the funniest hacks ever: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drzymała%27s_wagon


> 8 hours (4+4) spent in commuting, driving or not, is an entire life. This isn't a realistic concern, but something pulled out of a cyberpunk novel.

What if that time is spent sleeping? Maybe you don't even need a house, so you'll have more money to spend on a nice car.


If you don't have a house, and sleeping when you're in the car, then why would you bother commuting at all?


Maybe you're the next generation of digital nomads - working from a nice location for a day, then sleeping in your car while it shuttles you to a new nice location for tomorrow.


In many places within the USA it is illegal to sleep in a car.


That just digs deeper into cyberpunk distopia.


lol

It's really uncanny, every time, there it is, man must submit to the technology rather than have technology submit to us. Because a self-driving car is advanced technology, therefore men must move with self-driving cars. Even if that literally includes having to live out of your car.


Indeed this is how it works. Or, more accurately, man has to use the new technology to keep up with other men, as those who don't get outraced by those to do. The end result is a ratchet of progress.

It's ironic how people in software don't notice it, despite the fact that our industry caused several such shifts, and we're all living with (and whining about) the consequences. Myself I didn't notice it for close to two decades since first learning to code. The realization came to me with age - I'm at the point where I have more disposable income than free time, so all the "wonderful" self-service software enabled now grates and irritates me to no end.


> The realization came to me with age

same

> self-service software enabled now grates and irritates me to no end.

haha yeah, devil's bargain


Technology is a tool, often to make one group submit to another.


I've met several people who in pre-pandemic times were commuting from beyond Sacramento to San Francisco, which is about a 4-5 hour daily commute. You'd be surprised how far some people will go to have both a good paying job and the house of their dreams.


There are plenty of places between SF city and beyond Sacramento which would be just as affordable.

this kind of commute daily no less seems to be more of a stubborn personal choice than any economics forcing it .


Those dang irrational personal choices!

All models are wrong, but some keep your hopes closer


Almost anywhere in the world a one way 110+ miles commute one way is a personal choice that maybe makes sense to that person.

It is certainly not because of economics of rent or house ownership or any other reasonable criteria so not sure what point such personal outliers prove in this discussion


What the hell is the point? With that kind of commute assuming they work a full day they'll be home for a scant few hours a night sleeping (we hope, for the sake of other commuters) and the weekends for which they'll probably be dead tired.


Nobody actually does this commute 5 days a week, 45-50 weeks a year. It's either someone who does it sporadically but regularly (e.g. every other Monday or something for a few years) or briefly while finding something less insane (for a few weeks, maybe a month or two).

I had a job with an effective ~4-hour round trip commute, from one major city to another in both my car and a train, but only had to do it once a month.


I used to have a similar commute into NYC. I lived about a 10 minute walk from the train station and my office was another 10 minute walk from Grand Central Station. Round trip was about 4 hours. I did the commute about 3 days per week but saw tons of people on the train that did it every day. I saw a guy talking to the conductor saying it was his last time commuting after THIRTY YEARS. I imagine most of those people were driving to the train station and then taking another subway once they made it into the city, adding a considerable amount of time to the already brutal commute.

I only lasted a year before I went fully remote.


I take the 510 AM train from Albany to NYC about once a month. There’s a dozen folks who are on that train enough that I recognize them or chat with them. There’s a few who board at Hudson too.

It’s a mix of lawyers, construction guys and others like FDNY guys.


The OP was referring to a 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year dystopia:

"Even if you don't want to live in your car that the pressure will still be exerted on you because you'll be competing with people that do."

Which is why so many folks are mocking the idea.


If I go into the city for a customer visit (not frequent/not rare), I'm 2 hours going in whether mostly train or mostly car. And about the same going home by train and maybe more like an hour+ by car.

I did have a job that was about 90 minutes door-to-door each way (train schedules were a bit better then) but even then "only" had to do it about 50% of the time. Wouldn't have been long-term sustainable.


Now if only there were time to enjoy those things


How many cars are operating 12 hours a day?

With self driving cars, it will be like a NYC taxi, the goal is 24 hour operations.


Only if it's serving a lot of users.

So for those cars, the time on the road per user doesn't change much, but the need for parking greatly decreases.


>8 hours (4+4) spent in commuting, driving or not, is an entire life. This isn't a realistic concern, but something pulled out of a cyberpunk novel.

To paraphrase a certain fictional pirate captain, "You'd best start believing in cyberpunk dystopias... you're in one!"


> and is replaced with a relentless driving machine that never tires or gets frustrated and has no fear of death.

Listen, and understand! That relentless driving machine is out there! It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop... ever, until you are dead!

FTFY


I see self driving cars as a backwards compatible way for us to reimagine infrastructure.

Right now, SDC is operating in the real world, in non-trivial environments (San Francisco), without special road infrastructure to make them work. It’s beautifully backwards compatible, at the cost of not being generalized (the service areas are extensively mapped).

Once SDC take off we’ll likely start getting infrastructure and rules to support them. Think standards for communicating position locally - ie car A broadcasts its position and route to cars B, C, D within 200m, special road infrastructure to make lanes and corners more manageable for SDC, rules against aimless circling. There’s already a carrying cost in the form of gas or electricity plus wear incentivizing aimless driving, also the opportunity cost of not actively moving someone or something, but we can probably introduce some kind of toll or tax on a SDC operating with no humans inside it to further disincentivize this.

A very useful thing about SDC, and something I think people forget about rideshare and taxis, is that they let people move around independently without needing parking for those trips. In dense cities like SF and NYC that’s hugely useful. A single rideshare or SDC can move 10 people on custom routes without any of those people needing to find and pay for parking, and without using any parking infrastructure. That’s great because it disincentivizes wasting more space on parking in aggregate. Over time this should let us build denser.

Of course, public transit could obviate all these concerns, and I’m a big believer in funding way more public transit than we do already, but it will take a lot of time and political will to make that happen in the US. And it still does not offer the flexibility of SDC and rideshare. SDC is fully compatible with existing infrastructure and may give us a way to morph into public transit more smoothly with things like dynamically routed SDBusses and a reduction of parking infrastructure leading to denser urban environments that more easily support public transit. I think we can solve the “spending too much time on the road doing nothing” problem with congestion pricing, which we should really be doing already.


Sadly, no amount of amazing self-driving AI can compensate for geometry:

https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/ehq-production-austr...

That picture has the cars bumper to bumper, which is likely rather better than even the self-driving best case. Cars take up a lot of space.

I can imagine interesting and efficient ways to move large numbers of people that involve self-driving vehicles for part of the journey, but for high capacity at reasonable cost and space utilization, feet, bicycles, busses, trains, subways, etc are dramatically better.


I'm from NYC and very familiar with taxis. They produce quite a bit of congestion on their own, without needing to park regularly.

And stop calling for-hire cars "rideshare", because it isn't sharing, it's hiring or renting.


I've never been to a major city, especially NYC or SF, and thought "man this would be great if it was just a little denser."


SF could frankly stand to be 5-10x denser. It's not getting any bigger, but more and more people want to live there.


I believe the feedback loop is that so many leave due to bad living conditions (mainly driven by cost and commutes) that there are plenty of jobs to get which makes people want to move there.


In 2010, SF/Oakland + San Jose MSAs had 3.2 million people in the workforce.

Today, it's 3.7 million.

Austin in 2010 had 950K and now has 1.4mn.

Cities like Austin just felt like they grew more b/c they had a smaller starting point.


Cities like Austin feel like they grow more because 50% growth is a LOT more than 15% growth.


>I believe the feedback loop is that so many leave due to bad living conditions (mainly driven by cost and commutes) that there are plenty of jobs to get which makes people want to move there.

GP's implication was that SF has abundant jobs because so many people leave and I was clarifying how that is a misconception.

Your point is different entirely, but thank you for making it.


The most enjoyable cities/suburbs I've experienced around the world have been fairly dense in terms of narrow streets and multi storey buildings. 3-6 storey buildings on average. NYC and SF already have a good amount like this, though still dominated by roads. There'd also be scope to turn parking lots into actual parks or multi-purpose areas for events, food stalls and so on. Parking lots are just grim.


Funny, that's my prime complaint about SF (which I otherwise love). I'd like it to be like Tokyo's inner districts.

I believe it's quite common. In about 50 y this place will look very different.


> I see self driving cars as a backwards compatible way for us to reimagine infrastructure.

Which may be.. but backwards compatibility doesn't absolve you of actually doing maintenance on your legacy systems. Unless the upgrade is free.


What I'm hearing is that I should do a self-driving startup whose fleet heads out in the morning to take all of the prime parking spots in the city and then have an app for people to bid in auctions for access to the spaces come prime shopping/restaurant/bar hours!


There were companies that enabled "selling" the parking space that you currently occupy, but cities successfully argued that on-street parking specifically (and city-owned parking generally) belongs to the city and these companies were issued cease and desist orders.


Please sir, where do I send my money?


The solution to this is the same as for human driven traffic:

Road Pricing

When a scare resource is given away for free, it becomes overused. Somehow we have a hard time seeing that for road access, but it's true anyway.


This isn't even necessary; between fuel and wear & tear on the vehicle, you'll be paying a small fortune for those daily 8 hour commutes.


Well, this ensures a non-zero price.

It's very unlikely that it happens to be the optimal price.


Corporations want all the rights an individual wants but no social, ethical and financial responsibility towards the humans they are meant to serve. It is time we rethink the concept of corporate personhood and legal protections an individual's get for acting via such entities, as they are getting compensated generously, the risks they take are miniscule to the entitlements they actually enjoy for their decisions and their consequences on the society.


Corporate personhood really has nothing to do with the idea that scarce resources should be allocated via prices.


Cars that never have a driver could be much smaller. Eventually what we need for this scenario in congested areas is a driving decision protocol that's based on consensus with neighboring cars, some kind of leader election algorithm, etc. If all cars were full self driving they could in some situations drive at super high speeds as a swarm, you wouldn't even need stoplights.


I love your optimism. I predict the GP is correct though, since everyone will want one of those Mercedes megavans to set up a comfortable bed or office while stuck in traffic. There's no way I'm going to sleep or work in a tiny self driving smartcar.

Since they'll autopark or circle anyway, their size no longer becomes a limiting factor for most people.


I'll save money and get there faster on a bicycle. There won't be any human drivers, so they will all yield to me even if I treat them like slalom poles.


    There won't be any human drivers, so they will all yield to me even if I treat them like slalom poles.
I genuinely laughed when I read your post, but there is some truth to it. Most of these posts here are "doomers". Ignoring that for a moment, no one (except you) has talked about pedestrians or bicyclists. One "hack" that sounds great as a walker/rider: In a world of 99% self-driving cars, just walk/ride anywhere you want. Literally, casually cross a ten lane expressway. All the self-driving cars will bow dutifully to you!

This thought experiment sounds like a performance art dream. Do you remember the artist who created a Google maps traffic jam in London by filling a wagon with mobile phones and walking slowly? Ref: https://www.simonweckert.com/googlemapshacks.html

Another thing: You can sabotage self-driving cars by putting traffic cones everywhere. Or sit in the middle of a major intersect with ten of your friends and read the newspaper (or pick your nose!). The passengers will be furious, and the self-driving cars won't know what to do.


> All the self-driving cars will bow dutifully to you

Well assuming no minimum stopping distance per vehicle momentum. Might want to be sure about that first lol


Note: that is illegal.


What’s a small fine versus how funny this is?


Wouldn’t want to be in the car swarm that had a Byzantine fault.


I imagine someday we'll see a protocol like this - autonomy in a controlled situation, such as clearing out a traffic jam


>replaced with a relentless driving machine that never tires or gets frustrated and has no fear of death.

Listen, and understand. That car is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶d̶e̶a̶d̶ reach your destination.


And thus the motor vehicle takes his rightful place at the top of the food chain: King of the concrete jungle. May he reign forever, tire never, and render his enemies unto the road.


Gosh, if it gets to the point where cars never stop circling because there's no parking ... we could like, make the cars bigger, and longer, and then people can just hop on and off as needed ... maybe even make a few of them go underground and such. Could even give them a cool name - like Timed Rides Around In the Near Streets or something like that. If we put these things on rails then they would even cause far less wear and tear on the road.


Yes, if cars continue to just massively decline in performance and quality of life, become entirely a shared resource, and lose all their advantages, than they could rival trains.


If the road is full and cars are circling because there is nowhere to park, then performance doesn't matter, quality of life is already low, and cars no longer have advantages.


I suspect a lot of people won't want to own self-driving cars, especially if you're right and people forget how to drive themselves. We could drastically reduce the amount of parking we need, at least within cities, meaning there probably won't be many cars idly circling blocks.

Personally, I'd be down for a driverless Uber-like service.


> I suspect a lot of people won't want to own self-driving cars

If it involves the car having a data link to someone else's server, then I have no interest whatsoever in self-driving vehicles.


This view will have a negligible effect on the market. You and the dozens like you can still have cars and a lot of other people can use the self driving ubers


> You and the dozens like you can still have cars

Until they don't, because of prohibitive insurance premiums or some accelerated phase-out of HDC bill. That's the blessing and the curse of the technology market: you don't get to keep your old toys if most of the market has moved on.


The rest of society will not accept recklessly controlled death machines around them because some sovereign citizen didn't want a networked car.

You might think that viewpoint is extreme, but that's exactly how it will look when cars have been made completely safe with new technology. You'll be made to take your manual car to private property to use away from other people.


> but that's exactly how it will look when cars have been made completely safe with new technology

"completely safe"

No, they won't be completely safe. They might be safer than the current median driver, they might even be safer than the top 10% driver, but they won't be completely safe.

> The rest of society will not accept recklessly controlled death machines around them because some sovereign citizen didn't want a networked car.

Our "recklessly controlled death machines" are doing pretty good today. In fact, automobile related death rates are down in most Developed nations, sometimes down in raw numbers.

But hyperbole will certainly solve all of our problems.


I'm always curious when these "your preference is irrelevant" comments pop up.

Yes, you're probably right. So what? I wasn't even remotely asserting otherwise.


I'd say it's an important reminder, especially that even here, people still cling to the view that you can "vote with your wallet".

Also, it's more than just having "a negligible effect on the market" - if your preferences diverge too much from the main trend, they'll simply not be met at all. In this context, it means that with large enough self-driving car adoption, you won't get to keep a regular car - they'll eventually stop being sold, but by that time you won't be allowed to legally drive one anyway.


> people still cling to the view that you can "vote with your wallet".

Not only can you, you do. Every dollar you spend is a vote telling the company that you approve of how they do business and should continue doing what they're doing.

But my comment isn't that. My point about not purchasing self-driving cars isn't that I'm trying to influence companies to stop making their cars spying platforms. It's just that such a product is not one that I'm interested in owning.

> you won't get to keep a regular car - they'll eventually stop being sold, but by that time you won't be allowed to legally drive one anyway.

I'll get to keep my regular car for sure. By the time the used car market dries up to the point that getting an old used car isn't a realistic option (or that they're made illegal), I'll have died from old age.

It's the younger crowd that may not have the choice. But they may not care.


Having lived in the boondocks on America, I'm confident it will remain legal to sell and drive regular cars, both for practical and ideological reasons.

It may be that those cars are prohibited in big cities or are prohibitively expensive to insure in a city, but they won't go away entirely.


Well, the conversation is mostly about the impact of new technology on large-scale trends. When someone makes a prediction about how "a lot of people" will react to new technology, it's understandable that a reply of "I won't react like that" could be seen as irrelevant.

Like if someone says "a lot of people will buy the new iPhone" and someone replies "I will never own a cellular phone or even a cordless landline phone" I can understand why that could seem irrelevant to the conversation.


In this case, I was replying to a speculation that a lot of people won't want to own self-driving cars by saying I'm one of those people, and why. My response was on-topic and relevant.

Replies to comments such as mine saying "you don't matter" strike me as interesting because they come off as overly defensive, is all.


So it doesn’t matter if a small number of people defect from self driving ride share. Enough people will use it to decrease parking needs.


This also implies that some nontrivial amount of the driving on roads will be cars with no humans in them, which may also be worse than the status quo.


It's possible.

I wonder if we would see as many idle/empty self-driving cars as we do idle/empty human-driven cabs and Ubers/etc. I could see a self-driving system being a lot more efficient because it doesn't have to keep a car on the road for a driver's entire shift.


I think we will see more. If just keeping them running circles around blocks with most expected demand is nearly same cost it will happen. Specially if they are EVs with automatic charging.


Damn. I never thought of SDCs as being particularly dystopic, but this would be squarely in that area.


This is Jevon's Paradox: increased efficiency increases usage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox


> Anyone ever think about what a nightmare driverless cars will be if they actually work?

Actually, yes. However, my take is a bit different from yours.

The future driverless car will not at all look like a Tesla.

It will be a moving office or comfortable room for family trips. This does not mean it has to be massive. Something of the size of a modern minivan could be fantastic if you did not have to worry about driving at all.

In other words, I actually see future driverless cars giving us more time rather than taking it away by being stuck on traffic paying attention to stay in a lane, press the brake or accelerator.

As for people forgetting how to drive. Well, maybe in one or two more generations?

Nobody really likes driving. People either need to go from point A to point B or want to (vacations, eating out, etc.). I enjoy driving, not on the street, on the race track. I do that with some frequency. Driving on the street is boring, dangerous, time consuming and stressful. I hate that kind of driving. I can't wait until I don't have to do it any more.


> Anyone ever think about what a nightmare driverless cars will be if they actually work?

The scenario you outline was part of Mega-City One's landscape in the 2000AD/Judge Dredd comics: cars on the road all day every day, with people living out of their perpetually moving RVs; something similar was depicted for Termight in the Nemesis the Warlock series.


This was tested empirically by giving people access to a chauffeur temporarily. Not having to personally drive your car nearly doubles vehicle miles: http://www.joanwalker.com/uploads/3/6/9/5/3695513/mustapha_e... The study is a pretty small sample though, so I would take it with a grain of salt.


Actually my experience with self driving cars is the exact opposite.

After giving control over to an AI, suddenly I don't care at all about saving 3 minutes by picking the perfect lane, getting the best spot on every merge, maxing out the speed limit threshold where the local police will pull me over.

That kind of gamification with no tangible reward actually generates the anxiety. When you're no longer the player, there's no more anxiety about those weird time optimizations.

If streets are "clogged" it saves me a few pennies and gives me less reason to worry about a human cutting across to risk my life for no reason. It's actually kinda relaxing.

But you are wrong about one thing: AI have a fear of death. Every aspect of their training is hyper focused on a paranoid level of death avoidance.

When I picked up my father from the airport last month, I did your worst nightmare, my car circled the terminal for about an hour while I jammed out to progressive rock. 90% of the time I was in bumper to bumper on a closed access road with no entrance or exit. From a traffic perspective it was irrelevant whether I was there or not. On the 10% when I reached the terminal on the loop, surprise, I was blocked by loading cars in front of me... The same blockage the car behind me would face.


Why can't you just drive like that yourself?


Once you buy the self driving car, you will want it to be on the road as much as possible, you want return on investment.

What will happen is:

Companies will buy fleets of self driving cars.

The best self driving cars will be too expensive for most people to buy.

People will just pay one of those companies for transportation services.

The transportation - serving companies who will use the cars in the most efficient way will survive. They will use AI to optimize the usage of the fleets.

Regulators (governments) will tax the companies per km / time interval / peak hours.

People will pay more if they want to travel alone or want to travel in a straight line. They will pay more if they want more exact timing.

Roads will be safer because they will communicate with the cars and the cars will communicate with other cars.

There will be manned vehicles that will help relieve any obstructions.

In other words, given proper tax rules, transportation will regulate itself in effective and efficient ways.


> Once you buy the self driving car, you will want it to be on the road as much as possible, you want return on investment.

This is not necessarily a given; after all, most Americans have other little-utilized equipment that nobody bothers to try to "rent out" to maximize usage. Think - washing machines, dish washers, lawn mowers, snow blowers, etc. In fact, there's an entire industry built around storing little-used equipment (storage units).

And we have high-usage vehicles transport already, they're called taxis and they're at use in most major cities; the AI cannot save MORE than the cost of the driver without some magical accounting.


Most of those things are dirt-cheap compared to a car. A better analogy would be a boat or an RV in a northern climate. Even those tend to be priced roughly in line with a higher end car (where you're more likely to find full self driving).


> Once you buy the self driving car, you will want it to be on the road as much as possible, you want return on investment.

I don't really follow the argument. I don't think of my car as an "investment." In fact quite the opposite, I think of it as an extremely depreciatory purchase that is partly a necessary cost of living (commuting for work, shopping) and partly for leisure (visiting friends and family, going out on the town, road trips). It makes very little sense to me to "want to be on the road as much as possible," especially considering that most of the depreciation for when I eventually sell it or trade it in is likely going to be based on the odometer rather than the calendar.


> I don't really follow the argument. I don't think of my car as an "investment." In fact quite the opposite, I think of it as an extremely depreciatory purchase that is partly a necessary cost of living (...)

This means you'll end up not owning a car at all. Like with housing, those who look at it as investment game outcompete and drive up prices for those who just want a place to live in and call their own.


Except there needs to be natural demand and short enough supply. You’re viewing them like its early 2020 where people were buying up cars and selling them used at a marked up price somehow. People really be trying to treat everything as a profit nowadays


> ...given proper tax rules, transportation will regulate itself in effective and efficient ways.

And if you mix together "modern American government" and "billions of dollars at stake for mega-corporations" - just how close to zero is the real-world probability of those "proper tax rules" being made and maintained?


Shortly after we get self-driving cars widely available, most municipalities will have trolly busses that run the grid so that the most you need to wait is like 2 minutes. At which point, a substantial amount of people aren't going to pay $20 to get from A to B when you can get there slightly slower for $2.


The wages of the driver are hardly the limiting factor of busses right now. We could easily have many more in operation, but we don't, because running an empty bus is very expensive.


Is this true?

That's a legitimate question I haven't done the research on this. It would seem though that usually it's a municipal employee, probably a union job, so probably paid pretty well (relative to say an uber driver). Also that cost for the driver would be double if you half the size of the bus and run them twice as much which would be a better experience for passengers. It would seem like the cost of drivers could be a real impact but this is me being handwavy I haven't crunched any numbers.


It's completely false. Bus wages and pensions are the majority of expenses and BY FAR the largest line item.

The average bus only drives less than miles in cities like NYC, Chicago, and LA per day.

They get >6 MPGe. Fuel is about $65 per day or less. The cost of the vehicle financed probably averages less than that - and should definitely be less than $85 per day. Maintenance and insurance are peanuts. Parking should be quite expensive, but they usually have pieces of land worth tons of money they already own and aren't going to sell. Practically, it's close to $0.

A driver for 12 hours per day costs >$360 without factoring in pensions. With a pension it's >$450.

The reality of the situation is bus fare is currently less than $2. If you get rid of the driver, it's gonna cost a lot less than $2. If you can make trollies ubiquitous, a huge potion of the population isn't going to take taxis anymore (or drive themselves).


According to the NYC MTA[1], there are close to 6k buses in the fleet with 1.2M riders per day. That's over 200 riders per bus per day. With each paying a $2.75 fare, you are making about enough to cover your estimated costs.

I think the problem is not the cost of the bus but the organisation of the city's infrastructure. The bus could be a viable option for a lot more people -- far more than 200 per bus per day -- they just don't structure the roadways to maximise bus use but rather to minimise it. If there isn't a dedicated lane for buses (physically separated since NYPD cannot or will not enforce painted separation) then buses will go at least as slow as traffic, along with regular stopping, making it a less attractive option to driving or cabbing. It's pointless to operate the system this way and very cheap to fix it, where fixing it would make everyone's lives so much better as explained in this video with the extreme example of the Bahamas [2]

[1] https://new.mta.info/agency/new-york-city-transit/subway-bus... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdz6FeQLuHQ


> Shortly after we get self-driving cars widely available, most municipalities will have trolly busses that run the grid so that the most you need to wait is like 2 minutes.

On what are you basing this?

I grew up in NYC which had the most frequent buses I've seen anywhere in the US, and 10+ minutes on a route was common, far far more on off hours. Plus, that route would only get me so far, so I'd have to change buses.

My ~2 mile trip from my apartment to my elementary school required at least two buses, often three.

> a substantial amount of people aren't going to pay $20 to get from A to B when you can get there slightly slower for $2.

NYC MTA trip fare is $2.75. Atlanta is $2.50.

Are you Chuck Wollery? How are you doing 2 and 2?


As you pointed out - the bussing infrastructure even in NYC is not good - because busses are too expensive, because drivers are the biggest expense by far.

Comparing to a current system limited in service by the cost of the driver to a future system that won't have this meaningless.

And I've got news for you. Your $2.75 ticket wouldn't be $2.75 without a driver.

Additionally, the vast majority of transit rides are covered by a monthly pass, and the average trip price is less than $2.75.


IDT that's the future, and here's why: if you go to any modern skyscraper you'll find that elevators ask you which floor you're going to rather than just which direction. Applying this in 2 dimensions, it becomes obvious that the future is something like Zoox's 4 passenger car running point to point a la Uber pool.


That would be true if you could only have one car on the road per lane. But you can have more...


Even individual companies will drive it to the bottom. Humans out of picture they will drive price to few percentage of margins. Or if we get VC money involved beyond that.


Yeah, I think a lot of people don’t recognize that SDC technology can eventually be applied to busses or smaller transit vans. You can get fancy with dynamic routing (with my fleet of busses and customers asking me to take them from A to B, how do I route the busses to serve the most customers the fastest?) but even just running a SDBus on a fixed route could be pretty convenient. It would basically take us back to the “streetcar suburb” paradigm.


Honestly I think by that point owning one won’t even be a thing. You’ll rent it from the manufacturer on demand or via a subscription with your subset of features enabled just for your trip.

They won’t park, they’ll just move from one job to the next (like taxis and ubers).


I think that's naiive. There's a reason why taxis aren't couriers. There will certainly be specialization. There will still be buses, with AI drivers instead of humans, to get a lot of people from A to B, there will be delivery vans, with maybe delivery robots, maybe there will be taxi's, long haul, etc.


I completely agree they can change our relationship with vehicles. Let's look beyond a subscription service though and think how it can be part of a stand-alone auto insurance policy, or offered by your apartment complex as part of your monthly rent, or the HOA and paid for as part of your dues the same as landscaping is. SDCs will be services that are offered as part of a larger relationship/service.


Interesting take. Would my HOA be controlling utilization and maintenance? If the car has a flat tire or my neighbor monopolizes the usage, would the larger relationship/service be responsible for fixing the issue?


Sure it would, just as any other service provided for by your condo/HOA fees or what have you. BTW I think having a HOA do anything beyond landscaping is probably more of a headache than it's worth, but still...

I think the possibility is more around SDCs becoming not simply a business to individual customer service or subscription, but rather SDCs being offered by organizations the individual customer is already a member of as part of that organizational offering. This can begin at large and wealthy retirement communities first (like Sun City Grand in Phoenix), but there's no reason why it couldn't be implemented elsewhere or why an organization that is already setup to handle customer and vehicle relationships can't offer it as well. Think AARP or your auto insurance company.


What will really happen is that ownership of vehicles will dramatically drop, as it's cheaper to simply rent an automated vehicle to get to your destination. This means a lot less waste, as you have far less vehicles sitting around being utilized maybe one or two hours a day. Folks aren't going to be interested in daily 8 hour drives if the wear and tear on the vehicle is going to force them to buy a new car every 3-5 years, on top of the fuel cost (even electricity). Same goes for if you're renting, since you won't want to pay a small fortune on your daily commute.


This seems much closer to the reality. With LiDAR's, imaging radar's, a host of other sensors, more custom calibration and crazy high development costs, these autonomous vehicles are going to be the price of a Lamborghini for a long time. The idea that A/V's like this will clog streets across America because every worker will keep 2 in their garage is unlikely.


Something I’ve realized is that people have been saying this for a long time.

I used to write them off as over the top worries of uninformed people.

More recently as Elon Musk’s failure to deliver has been made clear, I’ve realized that I was myself taken in by a lot of hype.

Now when I go back and look at some of the cyclical content around self driving cars that has been around for years, I realize that a lot of it makes sense. The most damning criticism is that automobile-focused infrastructure sucks, and self driving cars won’t change that. We need to invest in traditional forms of transit. But in a world with cheap money (the last decade) and winner-take-all mentality, we get huge investment in individualized technology like self driving cars instead of better urban design and transport infrastructure.


It was supposed to improve allocation (less people trying to find a parking spot etc) but I guess it may trigger the usual perverse effect.


The "usual perverse effect" of policies (aka "risk compensation") almost never happens, people just say it's going to happen and then it doesn't.

This is a disease of the soul caused by reading Freakanomics which makes you think everything that's counterintuitive must actually be true.


> Imagine if the max amount of driving a human can endure is removed entirely as a final constraint on the total utilization rate of this infrastructure and is replaced with a relentless driving machine that never tires or gets frustrated and has no fear of death.

Sure!

An entire class of accidents and injuries will be entirely gone, saving countless lives. Insurance will get cheaper for everyone. Cities will be able to adapt and grow more quickly, since traffic management can finally happen in realtime and at scale. Pollution will plummet.

Cars can get smaller and smaller, focusing only on having a safe space for passengers and eliminating all the extra "driver" nonsense. With so many cars on the road, you'd always be able to catch a ride, anywhere, anytime.

Each car could have a delicious sandwich compartment, so that it's always doing double-duty for carrying both passengers and sandwiches. (Every car would have a couple drones it could dispatch to pick up and deliver sandwiches, so that passenger trips can go on uninterrupted.)

People will forget how to drive entirely, of course, so there will be no going back. The whole thing will feed on itself, and we'll enter a golden era of cheap transportation and ever-faster sandwich delivery.


Ok you lost me at the first part but then came in for the win with the sandwich compartment and drone delivery.

I for one welcome our autonomous sandwich delivery overlords.

Joking aside I'm more curious on the negative aspect of self driving vehicles as I'm not entirely convinced they will explode into the market quite the way it's been pitched.

In the long run however you can't ignore the productivity increases and the cultural changes that will come with it being a net positive.

Governance and ownership is the sticky point for me.


There may be sandwiches but there will definitely be ads.


While I immensely enjoy driving "the human way", I think a total-ai roadsystem would be much more efficient and do away with the clogging.. A lot of clogging comes from humans being terrible at merging and driving in general.


Of course, like anything there will be major societal changes. But consider a few brighter possibilities:

* Cars are all electric, since the one downside major downside (a long time to charge versus gas) is reduced if they can go charge themselves. So less pollution and noise.

* The number of cars may increase, but so will the capacity of roads due to faster speeds and higher density. So a city could possibly only have a couple of car accessible roads.

* Parking can also get denser, as cars can presumably park themselves and coordinate. So you could build a few massive parking garages (for example) to serve thousands of cars, or require them to park outside of the city.


> Cars are all electric [...] So less [...] noise

Tire noise dominates at speeds above roughly 30 kph (20 mph), so on reasonably fast roads not really.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Propulsion-noise-the-tyr...

Of course, self driving cars might also mean slower cars, because the drivers are less impatient, and if that is true then noise would go down. On the flip side, self driving cars might end up meaning faster cars because they can coordinate better, increasing noise levels.


I honestly cannot imagine self-driving cars until trains never crash and trucks are automated.


> The number of cars may increase, but so will the capacity of roads due to faster speeds and higher density.

As someone who enjoys walking and biking, this strikes me a serious negative, not a positive.


Good news! Nobody is around to give you a hard time for chucking a brick through an unoccupied car's window.

(Group parking spots are typically better monitored than streets.)


Not to say I'm a current enthusiast of self driving cars, but I assume many of the issues you outlined would get better rather than worse. Ownership of car will become continually less rational with hyper effective rented transport. With fewer cars overall parking should be much better especially on busy areas. Cars of the far off future may be more predictable and thus more rational when traffic increases. Networked cars open up a lot of possibilities.

None of this is coming soon as far as I'm aware mind you. I just don't think the end game of self driving vehicle is bleak - just the long mid game :)


> Ownership of car will become continually less rational with hyper effective rented transport.

Why? Attrition on a car is mainly miles based. Sharing a car won't make it last more miles. Not accounting for vandalism.


I love cars and I love driving them (I used to take mine rallying and on the track etc).

But even today, even in north America, they're barely rational. Most people don't mentally add up the purchase price plus insurance plus gas plus maintenance etc. And the inconvenience of garage and parking and clearing driveway and snow etc etc.

The reason we have them is convenience. Public transit in North America with our huge suburbs is on average crap.

I firmly believe that for modern generation, car is increasingly a liability not pleasure. So if we / they can exchange it for a self riding car that magically shows up when needed but also magically buggers off when not, we / they will.


Storage of cars is extremely expensive


Maybe.

On the other hand, ride sharing could mean less cars overall and less car ownership. Electric cars mean fewer or no emissions. Totally automated traffic management could enable vastly higher throughput, and otherwise congested roads could have dynamic tolls applied so people won't use them unless they really need to. Delivery vehicles can batch shopping pickups and dropoffs to use less vehicles than currently.

If problems arise, they can be fixed through policy and incentives. Otherwise, traditional economic incentives for efficiency continue to apply.


Tires emit a fair amount of micro plastics. There's no such thing as zero emission cars.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/11/car-tire...


All the more reason to shift to a pay-per-use model rather than the high-fixed-cost model of car ownership, which incentivizes uses your car for as many trips as possible once you've made the initial expenditure to buy the thing. If these get good enough and cheap enough that significant numbers of people can get away with ditching their cars, those people will probably end up in a situation where transit (including kinds with no tires) will be cheaper on a per-trip basis where it's practical, and robocars will make sense for the remainder.


All the more reason Americans should just try learn and adapt to public transport.


public transport as implemented in Asia and Europe, especially for last (couple) mile sort of uses is an antiquated idea in a world of self-driving. In a city like San Francisco you could literally ban cars in downtown and have the local transit authority run something like Uber pool of cars that fit 4 passengers comfortably and do point 2 point transit with optimized routing 24/7. The reason buses/trains are so large is to amortize a bunch of things, not the least of which is the driver.


Bodies needing to go anywhere might become an antique idea very soon… the only reason roads exist is so you can go do work and pay taxes and make wealthy people more wealthy.

After that isn’t important, let’s see how much priority roads will get.


that too, in the long-term, living in meatspace will be an expensive privilege reserved for the wealthy


Which is funny because it’s exactly the opposite to what Silicon Valley is selling to us…


I'm definitely not disputing that, although I think "emissions" are generally understood to be airborne. Micro plastics that run off the road into storm water are pollution for sure, but "emissions" seems misleading.

And obviously fewer/no emissions is also referring just to operation, not manufacture or disposal or power plants either.


From the linked article: "A study published in July suggests that vast quantities of tire fragments find their way into the ocean not just via rivers and waterways, but also through the air. Swept on the wind, they drift far from where they were shed. The study warned that so many tire particles are landing in the Arctic that they pose a climate-change risk."


I mean, driverless buses (or perhaps minibuses or vans, depending on density) are the way to go.

But... there's another dimension here. Would you share a car with a random stranger with no "trusted" third-party (i.e. the driver) present?


I would if the "bus" was small, traveled more like an uber pool (to my destination rather than along a corridor with 30 useless stops a block apart), and if the identity of those strangers was known to a system that could then remove their ability to hail future rides if anything went down.


But what about the dystopian flip side? You commit a crime once and suddenly you aren’t allowed to travel, otherwise the other passengers would feel unsafe? Or your transportation costs increase by 5x to account for you needing private-only accommodation?

Sounds like a great way to isolate someone and make sure there is no chance of rehabilitation, being shunned by the car swarm and isolated away


totally, I think the social credit score system in China, background checks for employment, no-fly lists are all things we should look at when building such systems. Ultimately though it's not going to be fair, I don't really care for subway performance arts as practiced in urban metro systems and I'd vote to eject and ban the artists, whereas someone else might find that to be an authoritarian overreach


but how would the driverless vehicle know that something went down? reports from other passengers? What if the other passengers are lying? Or simply don't like you? So the vehicle will have to surveil the passenger conversations and actions and beam it up to Waymo or Cruise (ok, that's fine, a human driver would do that too). But who will look at the surveillance? An algorithm? And, what if they say you are smelly? The microphone and camera won't pick that up...

And the smelly (or messy) passenger problem doesn't even require ridesharing! Who will clean the previous passenger's McNugget crumbs off your seat?


all of these are pre-existing problems with public transport that have solutions along the anarchy<->totalitarianism spectrum, with US, European and Asian mega-cities' transit agencies serving as illustrative examples of tradeoffs of various approaches. I'm not sure how self-driving changes the game, ain't nobody helping you when the foil and torch lighter comes out on BART late at night.


Well typically you're not the only other one the train (at the very least there's an operator). Somehow sitting in a small car next to someone else feels different.


I'd love to see a black mirror episode on this.


Easy to solve: Price time on the road quadratically.


Surely all these points are food for thoughts, but it seems that in this scenario we solved the energy cost/production problem first


Eh you don't really see people commuting for 4h en masse in places with excellent trains. Also don't forget pedestrians exist


Self driving cars will completely collapse when pedestrians are factored in. You'll just walk out on the street and expect all the cars to stop. You don't do it now because someone inattentive could kill you. But when the tech works well, all car traffic will just be locked in stand still.

Hopefully we can use this moment to purge inner city areas of cars.


On the other hand, we will see a sharp decline in human-driven cars on the streets. Who would do it themself anyway? At every moment we will have on the streets exactly the number of cars to serve current demand. They will not clog curb parking places - there's no point for driverless car just to stay there for nothing. They will not roam free - there's no point for that too. They will stay in the cheapest, ergo most inaccessible for humans places waiting for orders.


Congestion tax will solve that in a hurry


If the current approach does not change, we'll never ever see that day.


[flagged]


Or drive circles around the block... At current parking rates might be the cheaper option. And it probably doesn't consume that much power when all the cars are doing it and whole thing is gridlocked.


If cars could talk to each other you'll get better utilization of the road because you could cut follow distance to a few feet.


Sounds good in theory. I’m not optimistic about all the car makers cooperating on an industry standard, though. Plus the failure scenario seems pretty catastrophic to overall throughput. I hope some bright thinker figures those problems out; it does seem like a great opportunity


It doesn't seem like you'd need an "industry standard" beyond the actual rules of the road. In the same way that normal human-operated cars with better visibility can change lanes on the highway more safely and efficiently, any improvements in sensor ability, reaction times, etc. in self-driving cars (and even automatic safety features for human-operated cars) should make traffic safer and more efficient.


what do the actual rules of the road say the braking point should be for an 8 person minivan with 5 passengers in dry weather? what about 8 passengers in the wet at night with ice on the roads?

old argument i know, but if a human gets that wrong and plows a pedestrian they wear the consequences, will an auto manufacturer do the same?

my guess is no, and the result of that is that even if we can get a majority of cars to be self driving they are probably not going to be pushing the limits of road capacity any time soon like GP suggests, more likely they will continue to drive super conservatively and fail fast like the videos in the linked article.


No, because physics is not affected.


Instant reaction time to what the car is doing in front of you. What physics are you talking about?


Reaction time isn't really significant.

The variation in brake performance between vehicles will more than outweigh the effects of reaction time.

My old Citroën CX will easily outbrake a Tesla. If you are driving too close, even if the Tesla could brake at the same instant as I do, it will still hit me.

How long is it going to take to communicate between cars? How do you see that communication working? How will it respond to interference and packet loss?



Which just proves my point. Shaving 1% off the total stopping distance by making it react a little quicker isn't going to help.


You mean 1 second which at 60mph is 88 feet. Tesla stopping distance at 60mph is 150 ft for comparison.


Say the car in front of you runs into a stationary object, or something travelling the other way. Instant reaction time wont help as there is no way to decelerate as fast as a colliding car.


Stationary object? Like a tree or a light pole?


More like a Tesla that randomly freaks out and emergency brakes to a dead stop in the middle of 70mph traffic for absolutely no reason at all.

As happens surprisingly frequently.


Wouldn't the car in front detect the stopped tesla, the lead car would hit the brakes and the cars behind it would hit their brakes at the exact same time?


I'm not convinced it would detect it significantly faster than a human.

We are surprisingly fast, and the slow part is that we have to perceive that the thing in the road is no longer moving past the landmarks in the road.


Assuming most cars have similar stopping distances. There would be no rear end collisions if we had instant reaction time to cars stopping in front us. Rear end collision is the most common collision and attributed to follow distances. Standard safe follow distance is 3 seconds. Standard reaction time is 1 second which means at 60mph you travel 88 ft. Most modern cars can stop from 60mph around 150ft.

https://www.qld.gov.au/transport/safety/road-safety/driving-...


I've been held up longer by side shows at intersections than driverless cars here. Not that SF is the lawless hellscape the media pretends is the case, but I do think it's a bit rich that city officials are pointing fingers at fairly remarkable services using paid permits that work well 99% of the time while failing to enforce laws that are broken more frequently.


Same. As a pedestrian in SF I very frequently get put in danger by impatient human drivers at 4 way stop signs. No self driving car has ever put me in danger, and I interact with them quite frequently.

The national media of course wants to produce content confirming the biases of people who are (in the back of their minds) anxious about the prospect of SDC but don’t have exposure to them. I have a lot of exposure to them - not as an employee though - and think Cruise, Waymo, and Zoox are all doing a great job at being cautious and respectful with their testing programs. Sure they do get stuck sometimes, but human drivers disrupt traffic too, and honestly SDC are already better at being safe drivers around pedestrians and other vehicles than humans IME. It’s just that they are so cautious sometimes they just stop and create situations like this.

Most people who haven’t been living with SDC for years like we have in SF want to hand wring about them based on articles like this, but the reality is quite different. You’ll note you don’t hear much about the cars injuring people or getting in accidents despite the appetite for negative SDC media coverage.


It's interesting to hear your experience as a pedestrian, because it makes sense that cautious self-driving cars would cause fewer problems for pedestrians than for traffic. After all, a pedestrian has no problem dealing with a stationary car--just walk around it.


Do they have pedestrians or bicycles in San Francisco?


I am guessing you've never been there. It's like any other big American city in that regard.

On top of that they have a bunch of electric scooters and electric skateboards and such.


> It's like any other big American city in that regard.

If so, then the answer is "largely no".


Huh? Most big American cities have a lot of pedestrians and cyclists.


You can argue how many cyclists and related vehicles there are in the grand scheme of things but there are a fair number of pedestrians at least during the day in (most?) US cities--that are meaningfully cities and not effectively suburbs that have a mayor.


Do they? Excepting for New York and "last mile" pedestrians, I haven't noticed that tendency much.

Although I also haven't been to any major cities in the southeast, so can't speak to them, and I haven't done any studies, so my impression could very well be mistaken.

Big cities I've been to in Europe, though, tend to have a lot of pedestrians and bicyclists.


SF proper is more like New York in that respect, it's much more dense and walkable than the average US city. The other bay area cities not so much.


Most big American cities have no pedestrians and minimal biking.


Source?


I tried walking around sun belt cities. Would not recommend. Just looked at the top 20 american cities by population. I would consider 6 walkable or bikeable. Maybe 7 I've never been to columbus.


I think this gets at the point I was going to make - Wired probably spent untold hours combing through video requests to find incidents involving driverless vehicles, but tossed out every incident they found where an offending vehicle had a driver. Then they wrote an article about their cherry picked results. I would be curious to see both sets of data.


According to the article, the transportation authority started recording incidents involving driverless vehicles, so Wired didn't have to comb through videos at all. They just requested videos for incidents with driverless vehicles.

As to how many such incidents there were, it wasn't a lot. Quote from the article:

> Agency logs show 12 “driverless” reports from September 2022 through March 8, 2023


Ah, thanks for that. I read through the article but somehow I missed that. So kinda half true.


For others like me who didn’t know the term:

> Sideshows entail street stunts in which parties perform “doughnuts,” or high-speed circles, burn-outs and other risky maneuvers.


And they can last 20-30 minutes, or more.

In the summer, I can hear side shows in Oakland, which are miles away. Because the night air is still and the particular acoustics of the terrain, I guess, it sounds like it is a few blocks away. I once laid in bed for almost an hour listening to it.


They are very common in parts of San Francisco (not to mention Oakland).

You will see weird speed bumps that form a circle that are designed just to stop people from doing these.


Thank you! I hadn't heard the term before and made a guess as to what it meant. I guessed wrong.


I have never, not once, been held up by a side-show in San Francisco. I did have to wait 5 minutes to cross the street to get to the farmer's market at the Embarcadero while a motorcycle brigade zoomed up the street.

The only side-shows I have seen have been in Oakland and even further into the East Bay.

With that being said, I have witnessed Cruise cars lovingly tapping j-walking pedestrians and traffic abiding cyclists around the lower Haight. I have also seen self-driving cars block buses and the street car.


I wasn't trying to be hyperbolic, I've only been delayed by a side show once in my neighborhood by the Chase center -- I've never been blocked by a self driving car. I'm sure everyone has different experiences, but the characterization the article tries to make that these vehicles are a menace to society strike me as overblown and contradictory to many people's lived experiences here. At least these folks are paying money to treat the city like a playground. I haven't seen anyone get love tapped by one of the self-driving cars, but if that's happening regularly it seems like a pretty serious problem.


I moved out of the state during the pandemic when I bought a house in the PNW, however, I am mostly surprised to hear there are sideshows happening in SF after living there for over a decade.

As for the Cruise cars, I believe they were still being trained so were not carrying passengers yet. They might have ironed out the kinks.


There are lots of sideshows in the Mission, Castro, Potrero Hill, Mission Bay, SOMA, but yeah not as many in the Haight area.

> I have witnessed Cruise cars lovingly tapping j-walking pedestrians

I live in the lower Haight as well and have never personally witnessed that, but don't doubt that it happens. The non-self driving cars here don't interact with the Wiggle super well either though.


The only side shows in the Mission I can recall happened when I first moved to San Francisco. The streets were closed for the annual street fair though.


In a similar vein, the driverless cars are actually useful to me biking, since they have predictable and safe behavior. When I see one, I take the lane, and it will follow at a reasonable distance, and block other cars behind from aggressively squeezing past.


This article is making a mountain out of a molehill.

The crux of the article seems to be “wow! If you block traffic it really adds up to wasting people’s time!”. Duh. Lots of things do this, many less valuable than driverless cars.

As an example, Seattle’s drawbridges sound like much more of a disaster than whatever time is being wasted by Cruise vehicles. Sailboats can’t even make it under the Fremont bridge, so every rich dude with a boat blocks traffic (including multiple bus lines) for 10 min when they sail by.


> Sailboats can’t even make it under the Fremont bridge, so every rich dude with a boat blocks traffic (including multiple bus lines) for 10 min when they sail by.

I've dreamt of a reverse-toll system where those folks end up paying drivers, pedestrians, and bus passengers some token amount for the delay (not enough to encourage lolligagging but enough to encourage boats to find better travel times or coordinate to spread the tolls.


Amusingly in almost all jurisdictions, based on ancient law, the boats have right-of-way over the bridge.

Special laws sometimes are passed to have "boat times" so the boat has to wait until the top of the hour or similar.


The irony being that the ship canal in Seattle was created after the roads and cars already existed, so it’s not like boats were there first and drawbridges came later.

There are some special laws about when the bridge can open during the week, but not on the weekend.


> As an example, Seattle’s drawbridges ...

Those bridges don't open 7-9AM and 4-6PM, which shows that we have and should continue to regulate to mitigate disruptions!


The main anecdote- where the issue is that busses are not allowed to backup without a supervisor- seems to be an equal indictment of bus rules as it is about a driverless car that won't back up without a supervisor.


Some rich dude should sail his boat under a bridge, then immediately turn around and sail it back under, and repeat this over and over all day long, just to screw with drivers.


Gives me some strong cat asking to be let out energy ala [0].

[0] https://pbfcomics.com/comics/sir-leopold/


Substitute "bus" for "ambulance" and maybe the problem becomes more apparent. The fact you can't issue a "reckless driving" ticket to a corporation is going to become a problem. There isn't a mechanism to force them to address the problems they create.


Not sure what you mean? You could still fine the corporation, or block/revoke approvals.

Unsafe/stupid driving is accepted as inevitable and rarely enforced against for human drivers (outside accidents). Not a good thing, but definitely the reality these days. Tbh, it’ll likely be much easier to enforce rules on a self driving car, since almost everything is tracked and recorded. Every mistake can be scrutinized for a self driving car, in ways that would never be required for human drivers.


> You could still fine the corporation, or block/revoke approvals.

If the purpose is to spot bad behavior and then correct it within these systems, then this is as far from achieving that goal as you can get. I'm not interested in penalizing the corporation, I'm interested in getting the best performance we can.

What natural incentives are there otherwise? If users come to expect that their self driving cab "breaks a few rules" to get them there faster, then how do you balance that?

> Unsafe/stupid driving is accepted as inevitable and rarely enforced against for human drivers

What is your source for this assertion?

> it’ll likely be much easier to enforce rules on a self driving car, since almost everything is tracked and recorded

If the car can't correctly drive itself, then what help is this? How would you sort through this data without the very type of automation which is in the car itself?

> in ways that would never be required for human drivers.

There's much more to roadway enforcement than what the U.S. currently does. China has an entirely different system of police and thus traffic enforcement. European countries love speed cameras. Several U.S. states are big on red light cameras.

Self driving vehicles confidently drive down one way streets and block other vehicles offering no recourse to solve the problem for the other driver. We don't have an enforcement mechanism for this because this hasn't happened before.

Whether this technology is "better than humans" or not is beside the point. It's using roadways designed and still majority occupied by actual humans. This is not being properly accounted for.


Do SF and other municipalities collect fees that compensate the public for these kinds of externalities? It seems absurd that companies performing driverless research can hobble public services and infrastructure without providing some form of compensation, ideally directed towards improving those services.


Fines? For stopping traffic? Hahahahhahaha.

You can steal ~899$ worth of shit and the cops don’t show up. Open air drug markets, people shitting in the streets, thousands of homeless people. But yeah let’s pontificate about fines for someone disrupting traffic.

You gonna fine the person that runs out of gas, causes an accident or just mechanically breaks down?


>You gonna fine the person that runs out of gas, causes an accident or just mechanically breaks down?

I'm much more interested in fining the crap out of the people who don't have an "excuse" for their bad traffic performance.


Who is the judge of the “excuse”? What you’re talking about is a two tiered justice system. Just because xyz conglomerate causes an issues “zomg fine them1!1!1!1” but when it’s someone that runs out of gas or mechanically breaks down “well they’re poor so it can slide”. This doesn’t work. You’ll waste more money prosecuting and collecting the fines from xyz conglomerate. If the poor person gets the fine too then it puts them in an even worse position. How do we know the poor person didn’t run out of gas intentionally hoping some Good Samaritan offers a couple gallons or road side assistance helps with a couple gallons paid for by tax payers.


You're making this more complex than it actually is: the scenario in question is a self-driving car that's already known to the local government and is explicitly being used for testing/research purposes. It's difficult to imagine an innocent or unlucky citizen who would be ensnared in a fine structure designed to disincentivize traffic problems caused by experimental self-driving cars.


I think you read to fast or are projecting.

OP clearly refers to a fee on autonomous car companies using public infra as a testing ground. Causing traffic jam is but a tiny part of it


The Traffic Congestion Mitigation Tax is designed for exactly this purpose.

https://sftreasurer.org/business/taxes-fees/traffic-congesti...

https://www.sfcta.org/funding/tnc-tax


The idea of fining the companies involved is proposed near the end of the article:

> As driverless cars keep racking up the miles, San Francisco transit advocates propose a variety of measures to lessen their impact. Jaime Viloria of Equity on Public Transit, a grassroots group of riders in the Tenderloin neighborhood, says companies operating autonomous vehicles should be fined for causing delays.


Seems fair. If a manually driven car were to block a streetcar like that surely that would result in a fine? This shouldn't require any sort of special treatment for self driving cars one way or the other.


Haha, not in San Francisco, no. We've stopped enforcing traffic laws.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/bayarea/heatherknight/article...


What if a manually operated car mechanically breaks down, runs out of gas, or causes an accident are you going to give them a “traffic delay” fine?


Maybe? Seems like a good incentive to keep your vehicle well-maintained, fueled, and to drive carefully. You could use the funds to pay for services and infrastructure designed to mitigate traffic delays.

Obviously not every breakdown is going to be a result of something under the driver's control, but it's probably more under their control than it is under the control of all the other people the breakdown is inconveniencing.


Whether we do or not, it doesn't have to be tied to the same law.

If the driver just stops driving of their own volition, while in the way, that can be its own kind of ticket.


Wouldn't that apply to the bus in the article as well?


If the bus doesn't have right of way, it should be given it.

But "ticket both" would still be an improvement.


that is an edge case.


Not really. In the Tidewater area of Virginia, the area with the most per capita tunnels, AT LEAST once a day someone runs out of gas or breaks down in one of the 7 tunnels causing 30 minute -hour delay. Definitely not an edge case.


In any other locality, the compensation would be a bunch of highly paid tech jobs, paying fat stacks of tax and pulling money from all over the world into the local economy - both from the jobs directly working on the cars' software, and by bootstrapping a technology hub.

Of course, in the case of SF you could argue they have far more highly paid tech jobs than the city can support already, and no need to bootstrap a technology hub....


This isn't a strong argument for externalities: no municipality in the world would (should?) accept toxic waste being dumped in its water supply just because a small fraction of its tax base is paid handsomely to do so.

Put another way: the value proposition for SF (and other tech cities) exists above and prior to these companies being allowed to treat the city's streets as a testing ground.


Cities allow road users to mess up traffic all the time.

Got a large vehicle that blocks multiple lanes while turning? No problem. Heavy 18-wheelers that fuck up the road surface? We're pro-business. Trash collectors need to stop to collect trash? Of course they do. Customers trying to parallel park block a complete lane of traffic, in addition to the lane of on-street parking? No worries. Taxis want to stop traffic to pick up customers? Sure thing. Delivery drivers want to double park? Well, you gotta deliver somehow, just make it quick. Parked vehicles blocking the cycle lane? Well you'll just have to go around. Slow cyclist in a narrow street? They've got every right to be there. Hire scooters all over the sidewalk? Yeah, that happens.

I'm not sure the comparison to toxic waste dumping is really warranted.


At least in NYC, nearly all of these have corresponding taxes, levies, or outright bans. For example, the city charges additional taxes against both taxi operators and riders to compensate the public for the congestion they induce[1].

Similarly, 53’ trailers are outright illegal in NYC (because they destroy the road surface, as you mentioned, and can’t navigate the city safety). Enforcement is currently poor, however.

The point is this: using city streets to trial-run experimental technology is something new and distinct, and it isn’t immediately clear to me why the public shouldn’t be compensated for the bother.

[1]: https://www.tax.ny.gov/bus/cs/csidx.htm


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Because the government then uses those fees to build or upkeep a public good and the public is spared from having to pay the taxes to do so.


When exactly did that imaginary, completely made up "sparing of taxes" ever happened?

This is San Francisco. The only thing I ever hear from politicians is an additional tax, on top of all the other taxes.

But prove me wrong: when in the last 10 years did San Francisco "spared" or lowered taxes?

San Francisco has a budget of $14 billion dollars.

Paris, France: €4.4 billion euro.

The issue is not lack of money but mind boggling, ineffective, corrupt spending of the money.


Taxpayers are "spared" when a new tax doesn't get added on top because a project got it's funding elsewhere.

I can't speak for the city level taxes in sf because I don't pay those, but I know that in California sometimes taxes can expire and the voters don't renew them.


I know you're being inflammatory to make a point, but calling this "fascistic" is really out of line and dilutes the concept.


That horse left the barn a long time ago. Over the past several years, the word "fascistic" (and "fascist", obviously) has become so overused that now it just means "something I don't like." Just like "awesome" now means "pretty good."



I don't understand why they don't have a big red STOP button on the roof or something to immediately call for either a driver or why don't these have remote control take over so they can be quickly moved out of the way? Imagine if one of these parks itself in front of an ambulance or fire truck?


They call home when this happens, one of the reports mentions a Waymo employee showed up after less than a a minute.

What they seem to be missing is a “get out of the way” path-planning mode when it doesn’t know how to proceed.


I believe they actually do have that kind of mode. When you are riding in one of these cars commercially they have an “end ride” button that cancels the route and gets the vehicle to pull over.

I think most clogs are when cars are mapping so I’m not sure if they either don’t have enough data to offer that when they get stuck (depends on how much they depend on mapping to implement the feature). It could also just be that they figure a stuck car is too messed up to reliably pull over without causing more problems, so to err on the side of caution they don’t use that feature.


I was thinking the same thing. The car on the tarm/light-rail track clearly don't have any concept of being in the way. It seems to be the same case with the car blocking the bus in the first example. Neither of those systems seem to have a notion of reversing or pulling over to make space.

The ability to "read the road" seem to leave a lot to be desired.


>The car on the tarm/light-rail track clearly don't have any concept of being in the way.

That sounds the same as most human drivers.


I’m sure I’m not the only one who would be tempted to hit that button every time the Corporate Robocopmobile stops at a light.


I'm surprised by this too. If I were running an operation like this I would definitely have a team of remote operators in racing sim setups (steering wheel, pedals) who could "jump" to a car and take control in one of these situations.

Slack notification comes in: a car is stuck. Click link, get jacked-in and take manual control to move it to a safe location for further debugging.


> Autonomous cars in San Francisco made 92 unplanned stops between May and December 2022

So about one unplanned stop every 3 days? Seems a bit of a stretch to call it "clogging" San Francisco.


Not long after viewing the story, I walked down to 9th and Irving and saw that the N Judah was stuck.

By a regular old delivery truck.

Better statistical data on these incidents is called for.


Now this surprised me.[1] Cruise AV rear-ended a Muni bus at slow speed. Clear, daylight, dry. That should not happen.

[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/file/cruise_032323-pdf/


What I'm loving is how they put the "Clear Form" button right next to the "Print" button, so it's easy to press it by mistake. MWAHAHAHAHA.


Drivered cars are causing the majority of the clog. I don't see more of a problem with driverless cars. Externalities are already taxed in the form of gas tax, but if they want to target electric vehicles as well, they can make every road a toll (with today's cameras it's not hard to do, without even requiring drivers to stop and pay).


Does SF Mini have a zero tolerance, "you block us, we tow you" policy? Tow companies are super eager to answer calls, because they get a cut of the impound fees. The free market at work! :)

I think after a few times bailing their cars out of impound, these companies would find a way to "return to profitability".


The cost to send a person out there to rescue the car is already expensive and towing fees would be a rounding error compared to the vast amounts of money being spent on engineering/development right now.


No.


The self driving taxi companies will be very happy that minor traffic inconveniences are the only thing people are complaining about at this point.


A few days ago, my mom told me how a day or two before she was driving in the city (San Francisco) and a Waymo pulled up in the next lane to her. It started merging into her lane right beside her, and she thought she was going to be hit by it. Fortunately not, but afterward she attempted to get the driver's attention and realized there was none.

Not sure what you do in that situation, honestly.


you get hit and sue


Or just threaten to sue and get hush money - I would bet that many of these companies will pay a pretty penny to make you not talk so they can handle the PR on their own terms.


How much of this is unique to the cars being self driving rather than being taxis that have to pick up and drop off people without well designated areas for doing that? Because if it’s the latter, it sounds like these vehicles don’t have problems different from manned Ubers or taxis. But then again, at least in the latter cases the drivers can respond better to context.


I wonder if this scenario will play out on a large scale when driverless semi-trucks start displacing jobs. Where some people might sabotage the system in various ways to make a point. Not just drivers either, as it eventually affects things like roadside gas stations, restaurants, hotels, etc.

Not pushing a luddite agenda, just curious how it might all play out.


Dear manufacturers of driverless cars: let's see how they do in Boston. We'll be here anytime you're feeling brave.


I live in SF, I’ve been seeing driverless cars in the Bay Area for 4 years, and recently I’ve started riding in them commercially because I’m opted into their public testing programs/commercial riding.

I don’t think they’ll have much trouble in Boston. The current Cruise service area includes a lot of steep hills, narrow roads with parking/pedestrians on each side, and some winding streets. Driverless cars are typically pretty cautious around hazards like this, sometimes a bit too much (like driving up to a stop sign too slowly), but matching what I would want a “safe driver” to do.

I took a Cruise in the rain a few days ago and the rain didn’t seem to cause any problems at all. Even though you can only take Cruise at night, between 9 and 12 pm there have still been plenty of situations where it had to deal with pedestrians walking across middle of streets, opening and closing doors of cars parked on the street, cars stopping in the middle of the road to unload pedestrians, etc. and it’s actually handled all of them well.

When the cars get stuck, I am pretty sure it’s because they are in “mapping mode”. I think it’s weird and likely unscaleable for an entire service area to need to be mapped before opened commercially, but once the cars are actually “working” they don’t get stuck much.

Anyway, I think the only real problem with Boston would be snow and ice (on the ground, I think the rains and fog in SF are close enough that cars could handle snow and ice in the air).As far as I know, no self driving car company has tested much under snowy/icy conditions.


it's 10PM - 5:30AM to be precise


As a human driver who has navigated both Boston and SF, they're both equally terrible. Once you're in the middle of downtown for either city, you should abandon your car, your plans and hope. Just walk.


The weather in Boston is considerably more challenging than SF though.


For all its reputation, I'm not sure Boston is clearly a lot harder to drive in generally than a lot of San Francisco is--given Boston weather for maybe 8 months out of the year. However, after a big snowstorm (admittedly not much this year) it's a whole other game. And while it's easy to say just don't use self-driving if there's a snowstorm or if lanes are partially blocked by snow, that's not ultimately a driving system that can be depended on. And I guarantee people who maybe only drive a few dozen times a year in the worst conditions will be an absolute menace on the roads.

(And "just don't drive then" isn't an option for a lot of people in a lot of circumstances.)


Well, as an example, last year the lights at the intersection outside my apartment went out during a heavy rain storm. I also tend to have a lot of driverless cars in my neighborhood. I watched how cars were dealing with the blacked out intersection. I saw two different Waymo cars stop at the intersection as CA law requires. Then I saw a Cruise car approach the intersection. As it did it slowed a little but then seemed to speed up as it blew through the intersection. I could only imagine the nightmare during a bad nor'easter!


I don’t think any self driving cars have been trained for snow yet, but it does rain (sometimes pretty hard) in SF, and because we have wet/dry seasons rains are more hazardous in some cases due to months of oils all being disrupted at once. It can also be quite windy in SF, it’s common for gusts to reach >20mph on random sunny days, especially this time of year. So aside from snow and ice( big exceptions, for sure) I think they can handle Boston weather.


Though to be fair that San Francisco fog is famous for a reason too. I'm sure that doesn't help.


That's basically what these cars do in SF, apparently. They get themselves into a situation with no way to figure out a way forward and they shut down.


Let's step it up, let's see how it fares in a city from medieval times, like Coimbra (Portugal) or Avignon (France).


When I was on vacation there earlier this year, I drove right into the middle of the old walled city in Avignon until I noticed people giving me wired looks and a confused cop asked me how I got in there.


Out of curiosity I looked up Avignon on google maps, and sure the roads are skinny as hell but they exist and there plenty of cars. The whole place is viewable on Google Street View, presumably taken from a car. Maybe you were just in a restricted area?

Cars in Avignon Old Walled City: https://www.google.com/maps/@43.9491327,4.8100308,3a,75y,99.... https://www.google.com/maps/@43.9493463,4.8114883,3a,75y,328... https://www.google.com/maps/@43.9482465,4.8084919,3a,75y,3.4... https://www.google.com/maps/@43.9476804,4.8115635,3a,75y,126...


Huh maybe it was just restricted during those hours? I did see some parked in there so maybe they were residents or employees with special permits.


Let‘s see how it fares in Marrakesh or Delhi.


That's super-hard mode!


Just geofence it to the land that was water before about the 1800s and it'll work it fine ;)


Ever since I got a GPS, I don't mind driving in Boston.


I won't say I don't mind. But, for the relatively few occasions I drive into Boston proper, it's certainly an improvement over balancing a map in your lap and trying to figure out where you are and where you're going. It can still be tricky and it's fairly to miss turns but much easier.


Driving is an exercise in line following, until it isn't. This problem isn't solvable until AGI is invented, or we (again) limit automated vehicles to closed circuits where exceptions are less likely to cause cascading faliures.


if you define driving as a binary “solved” v.s. “unsolved”, then it’s simpler to just say that driving is “unsolvable”.

humans have been driving for a century and we still have 30,000 traffic fatalities per year in just the U.S.: human-level automation (AGI) doesn’t solve that. sure, you could tune the driving parameters to significantly reduce that count — but not for free and not without creating new (but hopefully smaller) problems. at some point it just mirrors any other unsolved human system, where you’re left debating values and tradeoffs. think the Ford Pinto memo [1] but where the tradeoffs are “do we tune driving parameters to achieve 10 fatalities/year and 10M man-years of travel time per year, or 1 fatality and 11M man-years of travel time?”

personally i think the tradeoffs in this article are overblown. 99% of us accept that traffic lights are stupid and will delay every 2am no-other-cars-on-the-road trip by a few minutes. but when it’s a new autonomous system suddenly those delays are to be treated as unsolved problems? don’t get me wrong, i like when people acknowledge that there are things around us that ought to be improved, but the distinction here just seems arbitrary. it’s just some weird status quo bias that seems to carry more weight than i can justify.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Cost–benefit_analys...


Roads where drivers and machines share the road give us the worst of both worlds — humans who get drunk, fall asleep, and get distracted, and machines that can’t communicate with other drivers in exceptional circumstances. The issues don’t get better when you mix them together, you just get more types of issues on the same road.

Self driving vehicles which run on their own closed circuits have existed for a half century in production. They work so well that they’re downright boring.


The bit in the article about being unable to communicate with the car made me think of the LLM wave. A screen on the front and back of the car could provide feedback about what it’s currently trying to do in a situation like this rather than just blinking hazard lights. Using voice recognition to feedback it can interact with people yelling at it, giving at least a qualitative feedback loop to other users on the road. The dispiriting nature of encountering a blocking car and not knowing what it’s planning to do or responding to honks etc is something that can now be fixed.


These sound like expected growing pains for such complex software, and that there are rapid and effective iterations in progress. I salute SF and its residents for putting up with this and suffering such delays, making a sacrifice that improves it for the rest of us. Their tolerance will eventually save lives as well as improving mobility all over.

I just hope that they will continue to extend that tolerance to still allowing human drivers for a long time after automated ones are more safe. It's almost inevitable that there will be a story like this someday about the hazards of letting humans disable their auto-pilot.


It is tragic and foul for technology to make things worse in this way, IMO.

The bus- / train-riders have no choice in the matter.

It adds hours onto the driver's day.

It's a shame the mitigation takes as long as the article claims it does.


While his companions softly keened a dirge to Horvy and Phipps and quietly mopped up their blood, he frowned and shook his head.

"They oughtn't to let old ladies carry magnums," he murmured.

Witherspoon-Hobbs nodded agreement across the front-seat corpse. "They oughtn't to let 'em carry anything. God, how I hate Feet," he muttered, looking down at his shrunken legs. "Wheels forever!" he softly cheered.



As a victim of these “driverless cars” when they decide fuck it I’m done in a one way street at late night..

Literally spent close to half an hour stuck like this once in SOMA behind one of these.


I’ve always wondered about a hypothetical South Park episode where it feels 100% South Park and yet they play the entire thing straight with no exaggeration.

This could be that.


this is incredibly frustrating.

look at the dashcam footage. What's taking up space?

The driverless car, or the long lines of parked cars on each side of the road?


I am not surprised a transit agency cherry picks data to try and make their competition look bad.


I’m not quite sure driverless cars solve an actual problem. I mean it’s cool, but it feels like a massive, near AGI level effort to reach what, driving a car? What else can it do?

It seems so limited. If I had to bet I’d say we solve general AI first and then driverless cars are somewhat of a byproduct. Like many oldskool specialty AI’s get owned by general purpose LLM’s nowadays.


>That left the Muni driver in a bind. “I can’t move the bus,” the driver said to one of two riders on board. “The car is automatic driving.”

my problem with busses is that they are huge and, in my experience, mostly empty. they create traffic and their weight damages roads.

as far as public transportation goes, busses are as braindead as it gets.


The article says there was 83 minutes of disruption caused by autonomous vehicles.

I wonder what amount of disruption was caused by homeless and mentally ill people during the same period.


The homeless and mentally ill don't pretend that they're solving society's transportation woes.


Do you honestly believe the world WILL NOT transition to autonomous vehicles in the future, even if that future is far down the road?


Yes I believe that and I will actively work toward a future that does not contain (most) autonomous vehicles.

Pick any date in the future and I will wager that my 16yo son can more intelligently navigate a tricky driving scenario and deal more effectively with tough edge cases.

In addition to our human superiority at driving we also owe it to each other to enter these driving transactions with literal skin in the game. I need to know that your driving strategies are backed up with "... or else I will be dead".

The solution to our societal woes is not the further over-production of personal autos and autonomous driving - it is the investment in real mass transit (the kind that runs on rails).


I only see this taking over if it's force fed down the publics throat by authoritarian regimes (China style). The public at-large doesn't want an algorithm to completely remove the steering wheel...Needs to be a fluid mixture of human and algorithm with these self-driving designs (Tesla style). Sorry.


It probably will be for the first few years.


On 6th street in SF they do.


I feel like San Francisco is NOT a good city to test autonomous vehicles. Flat, grid cities would make better test grounds, preferably without streetcars.


What? No. Please tell me this is not how you test your own code — only cases for “happy path”, ignore exceptions, no corner case coverage. Line coverage goals of 10% or so.

Waymo has a lot of miles in quiet suburbs with broad streets and light traffic. How has that helped them when they get to SF?


"Happy Path" gets all of the love.


But… does it? :) Why would you assume there is only on logic flow :) Testers must be evil-minded white-hats.


Didn't Waymo start testing without backup drivers in Phoenix, which is exactly as you describe (and also has clear weather nearly every day)? I think they only moved on to SF after deciding things worked well enough there.


If subjects aren't passing tests, the solution is to make the tests easier?

(Remember this the next time someone says "teachers are the reason our kids are dumb".)


it is dispiriting and disempowering,” he says. “There's no one there to communicate with at all.”


what a time to be alive


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Wow, found the WEF conspiracy theorist :)


I like to pretend that the city officials aren't just dumb and there's some sort of overarching method to their madness. Yeah, I did string together a bunch of stuff, but I like the idea of roving crackheads keeping people from leaving their fifteen minute cities and forcing them out of single family housing which is otherwise enormously popular.

All those commercial buildings downtown that have been emptied out will get converted into "safe" residential apartments and then the whole sunset and outlying areas can slowly get turned over to the roving crackheads attended to by legions of government employees with enormous pensions who make sure their open-air drug markets proceed in an orderly fashion while the normies get chased out of their nice single family houses into high security "sustainable" pods.


Standard should be relative to human


For reference, the human standard is <1 death in every 100 million miles driven.


It doesn't seem like you're including classic and obvious externalities. What about causing traffic that prevents vital organs or rescue personnel from reaching those in need in time?

Disruption of economic activity (qua output) can be significant in places where traffic is substantial and solvable yet unsolved.

In my personal experience (I've spent significant time in the neighborhoods around Nvidia's headquarters) approximately 3 cars fewer get through any given stoplight if an autonomous vehicle is in that lane. I can imagine how in a place like SF this could cause real, measurable negative impacts.


I think my comment has been read as being "pro self-driving", whereas I intended it to be anti.

Self-driving cars have already killed many more people than 1/100mill -- it's about 1 in 1 mil iirc.

My comment was to frame the saftey of driving in the relevant units: amount of driving. When scaled by the right factor, "human driving" is incredibly safe by comparison.


You have to be including Tesla's not actually self driving to get to that statistic for self driving cars.


Ah, the great American tradition of having the public play guinea pigs for those looking to make money.


I'd imagine that's the world's tradition for thousands of years and any thing different is a recent development and rather exclusive


Does the article compare these incidents with similar cases of disabled cars that did have drivers? No? Then nothing to learn here.


I'll probably be downvoted, but city infrastructure needs to be a partner in this. I've always thought driverless vehicles are a losing proposition unless road infrastructure engineering and transit is upgraded along with it. If SF is just ignoring it until it causes problems, well they're part of the problem.


Are the manufacturers going to pay for that? Or is it going to be a regressive transfer from the rest of the taxpayers?


Are bike manufacturers going to pay for bike lanes? Or is it going to be a regressive transfer?

What about Big Walking Shoe, are they going to pay for these sidewalks or are we going to continue to subsidize their profits?


I don't know if you've ever been to a walkable city, but they pay for themselves. Because people don't spend all of their time driving to and from the place they want to be, they get to spend extra time shopping and growing local businesses that pay taxes for infrastructure to stick around.

Car lanes are paying money for people to skip those places and only go to one place at a time without drawing them to other places in the same area. If I'm driving to the store, I'm driving... To the store. I'm not going to walk around outside of the store after I'm done. This has no benefits for adjacent businesses.


Source? I can easily make the other argument.

Car lanes bring more customers from far away locations etc. etc.


I believe this is the video I was going off of to extract the info from.

You can make the other argument... but can you bring the other data for it?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI&ab_channel=NotJu...


Can you? You just linked a StrongTowns video.

(I was 100% expecting that lol).

Let me spell it out. I was looking for peer-reviewed publications. I am not going through an ad-infested StrongTowns video to hunt for references.

He has links to his Patreon, paid-subs on Nebula, and donations but zero links to any peer-reviewed articles. That says a lot.


Oh, cool, still more evidence than you've provided. And honestly, you can Google for peer-reviewed publications just as well as I can if you're just going to complain about my sources.

Where are your "peer-reviewed publications" that prove I'm wrong. How about let's see that first, since you've provided nothing (not even an argument) for why I'm wrong. You just stated you could make the argument, and you yada yada yada'd your way through the rest of the point:

> Car lanes bring more customers from far away locations etc. etc.

How about you fill out the etc's with some peer-reviewed publications?


>I am not going through an ad-infested StrongTowns video to hunt for references.

You don't know how to install an ad-blocker?


> Are bike manufacturers going to pay for bike lanes? Or is it going to be a regressive transfer?

The fact that there are less cars on the road already is a HUGE benefit to them. Less cars => less parking lots and less noise pollution => less maintenance costs => savings for tax payers.


Also, huge one... How many cyclist -> pedestrian fatalities are there?

I would bet dollars to donuts that 99.9+% of cyclist fatalities are cars hitting cyclists. (As opposed to cyclists hitting pedestrians. If there are any driver deaths from cyclists hitting cars I will eat my shorts)


Do bikers pay usage taxes or registration fees?


Flipping things around, do drivers pay enough in usage taxes and registration fees to cover the cost of the road they use?

No. Usage taxes and registration fees only cover ~37% of the cost of the roads.

"In 2020, state and local motor fuel tax revenue ($53 billion) accounted for 26 percent of highway and road spending, while toll facilities and other street construction and repair fees ($22 billion) provided another 11 percent. The majority of funding for highway and road spending came from state and local general funds and federal funds." - https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...

The remaining ~63% comes from other sources, including property taxes, sales taxes, and income taxes which bikers pay either directly or indirectly (eg, through rent).


What on earth makes you think that autonomous driving that alleviates a driver from having to drive (and park) in some of the least pleasant to drive in conditions will result in fewer cars? Having to drive into the city that's about an hour away is a major consideration for me not doing it more frequently.


I was writing about why bike paths are a net positive for everyone, rather than a regressive transfer. Even if just by reducing the amount of cars.


They aren’t a net positive for everyone when valuable transportation lanes are lost for bicycles. I’m not taking my four kids to the doctor on a bicycle. In an emergency, I’m not going to pedal my way to the emergency room. When it’s pouring rain, or baking hot, I’m not going to ride a bicycle. If I’m buying groceries for a family of six, I’m not going to carry a week’s worth of groceries in a backpack. A bicycle trip of 15 miles takes a whole lot longer than a car trip of the same distance. How about transporting young babies on a bike? Bikes are far more unsafe than cars.


It's only valuable lanes you're concerned with, right?

That is, you are okay with giving up low-value car transportation lanes for valuable bicycle lanes, yes?

You may be interested in Braess's paradox. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox describe it as "the observation that adding one or more roads to a road network can slow down overall traffic flow through it."

That Wikipedia entry gives a few examples where closing roads helped automobile throughput, and links to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand for more details about how building more highways fails to reduce congestion. ("the more highways were built to alleviate congestion, the more automobiles would pour into them and congest them and thus force the building of more highways – which would generate more traffic and become congested in their turn in an ever-widening spiral that contained far-reaching implications for the future of New York and of all urban areas").

Thus feels very much like there are net-negative transportation lanes which can be replaced by bicycle lanes and improve your transit rates.

Are you against removing those lanes? Are you against experiments to determine where those lanes might be?

As for the rest of your comment, you live in an area designed for cars, so of course cars are essential for your daily life. If you don't know what you're missing, it's easy to overlook how other solutions exist.

I happen to live in a walkable part of my city. Our health care center is 4 blocks away. The urgent care center is about a mile away. Both are walkable, even with two stroller-age kids, which we've done.

When we've needed to get to the hospital in a hurry, we've used a taxi. The savings in not having a car more than pays for both a bus pass and the occasional taxi.

We've got a good bus system, so when the weather is horrible, people switch from walking or bikes to buses when going to work.

We get our groceries delivered - again, the cost of delivery is less than the cost of owning a car.

And since we live in a walkable area of the city, we used strollers to move babies around, including on the bus, and to get to preschool. (We had several choices within walking distance.)

The big box store is about 10 minutes away by bus, and it's 5 minutes to the bus stop. When we've bought something big, we pay for delivery and removal of the old item, but car/truck rentals are also possible.

Nor must one be without a car to live here. We have several neighbors with a car, parked in the parking garage on our block. Instead, we've made the choice to not have a car.

While you don't have that choice. You are stuck, just like most people in the US. It's no wonder you interpret any talk about opening other possibilities as a diminishment of your life.

But on the other hand, having everyone's life organized around the way you personally want it diminishes the ability for people who want a car free life, and for those who for whatever reason cannot drive.

Consider that in a few years your kids will need you or another adult to drive them to all the places they want to go. The proverbial soccer mom is an unpaid chauffeur, and likely needs an extra vehicle for that purpose.

While my kids will be able to walk, bike, or take a bus, on their own, even as 10 year olds. I'll be able to send them to the store to pick up a missing ingredient for dinner. If they get bored they can walk 6 blocks to the library, or to a park to play, or to the local youth arts and culture center, or the swimming pool, or visit friends.

What will your kids be able to do?


It's worth noting that public transportation exists, not just bikes and cars. Designing city less oriented around cars would mean that you could take your kids to the doctor on a train/bus/walk, and that your grocery store wouldn't be 15mi away, and not need to buy a week's worth of groceries at a time.

Of course you could choose to drive anyway, but as long as people have the option to rely less on their cars it's a net win.


> I’m not going to carry a week’s worth of groceries in a backpack. A bicycle trip of 15 miles takes a whole lot longer than a car trip of the same distance.

The problem is solved by cars but only because it was created by cars. People used to have bigger families and walk to the grocery store.


Except that bike lanes often cut into lanes for auto/truck/bus traffic. Traffic has gotten worse over the past few years since a lot of bike lanes were put in. Maybe that's a reasonable tradeoff (probably), but bike lanes almost certainly didn't make things better for drivers. (ADDED: Around where I live I suspect bike lanes serve more as an alternative to walking and public transit than they do cars. Again, they're probably for the best but they don't really help drivers.)


Citation needed for "Traffic has gotten worse over the past few years since a lot of bike lanes were put in." For one thing, it's not even a causal statement, but you're implying it is.

For another bikes take up ~half the space of a car going in the same direction. So the inclusion of bike lanes and their usage would only improve traffic because it removes the actual cause of traffic (cars) from the road.


Not 1/2, closer to 1/10 (for the exact space of the car). Cars also need far more buffer space, parking space, overall road area for maneuvering around a city. If completely replaced, infrastructure area could probably be reduced by ~20-100x


I'm being real generous here that on a 4 lane road, if you want to add bikes I would just take away 1 lane of car traffic, and that would allow for bikes to be insulated from the cars in both directions.

But I definitely agree with you that we could probably 1/100th the size of roads (and open up a whole lot of space for property development), if everyone biked everywhere. (Not useful as a goal, just useful as an idea for space requirements.)


Depends. If 90% of the traffic is still cars, bike lanes make it possible for the 10% that is bikes. But the 90% now have fewer lanes.

You sound like you're assuming that, given more bike lanes, 50% of the traffic will ditch their cars and ride bikes. (At least, your logic doesn't work without that assumption.) I don't think that's a valid assumption.


I guess it depends on the location. More lanes don't equal better traffic. In my city, every road is pretty much a 2-3 lane highway for cars, and it seems like a huge waste of space. Invites speeding, crashes.

There's been road diets, where they've been reduced to single lane, and these had had no effect on travel time. Did reduce crashes a lot, less of that aggressive jostling for position, just cars chugging along calmly in single file.

There's been years long construction on a few big buildings, blocking whole lanes, forcing cars into single file; absolutely zero effect on travel times.

When there's snowfall, only middle lanes are cleared. Zero effect on traffic flow.

Imho traffic flow is pretty much determined by number of cars and number of intersections, and very little by number of parallel lanes. So much room for dedicated bike or bus lanes, it's really AND/AND, really everybody wins, and it's such a tragedy that my city just doesn't seem to understand that. All it takes is paint and bollards.


I was speaking of a specific city that has added extensive bike lanes. No idea of causality. Maybe a lot more people have decided to drive in and out all of a sudden.

I was mostly objecting to the comment up-thread implying that bike lanes are inherently win win. They can be a good idea on net while increasing driving times.


Yeah, your trying to hide your argument in specificity makes it an "anecdote" and not anything meaningfully contributing to the conversation. So you can either find specific sources that demonstrate more than that "you feel like traffic has gone up due to bike lanes in city X", and that would be an interesting content/addition to the discussion or you can mark it more clearly as an opinion, and people will be more likely to ignore it...


Bike and bus lanes have only improved traffic for me. But I don't have a car...


> Are bike manufacturers going to pay for bike lanes?

Are bike manufacturers operating the bicycles for profit?

> What about Big Walking Shoe…

Are they operating the shoes for profit?

Or is it the citizens, taxpayers if you will, operating the shoes and bikes as part of their “social contract” with the city?

Now, are the citizens of SF owning and operating robocars as part of this social bargain or is it for-profit entities 100% doing it to extract income from the citizens?

Not that I’m saying profit as an incentive is wrong but you do see the difference in these two things, right?


Pedestrians (aka everyone) pushed for sidewalks, long before cars. Cyclists (a much smaller voting block), pushed for bike lanes, and it took them much longer. What voting block is going to push for infrastructure improvements needed by self-driving cars?


Since money is speech, and this is SF, just a few rich VCs.


>>Pedestrians (aka everyone)

False, everyone is not a Pedestrian, I moved into my current home specifically because there are no sidewalks (and no HOA), and I resist any movement to add them to my street.

>>What voting block is going to push for infrastructure improvements needed by self-driving cars?

People that want to use and benefit from Self Driving cars, just like people that vote for sidewalks.

I have a feeling the number of people that want the dream of being able to have a car that just drives itself is FAR FAR FAR FAR higher than the number of people that utilize sidewalks. At least for my Geographic region...


>False, everyone is not a Pedestrian, I moved into my current home specifically because there are no sidewalks (and no HOA), and I resist any movement to add them to my street.

What the fuck!? Why don't you want a sidewalk? Why would any street even be built without a sidewalk, like how is that even an option. How is anyone meant to walk safely?

>I have a feeling the number of people that want the dream of being able to have a car that just drives itself is FAR FAR FAR FAR higher than the number of people that utilize sidewalks. At least for my Geographic region...

Where are you from, Mars? Cause you may as well be speaking Martian, I can't comprehend your mindset at all.

How does anyone go for a morning run? Walk their dog? How do kids get to their friends' houses? Even in a low density suburb people do these things.

"The number of people who use sidewalks" is like ... 99%. Everyone uses them at least a little, unless you're literally bedridden or something. Or out in the middle of nowhere.


> How is anyone meant to walk safely?

Only the poors walk and they drag down the property values by their mere presence.

And kids? Nasty little creatures.


>>How does anyone go for a morning run? Walk their dog? How do kids get to their friends' houses?

on the road, there is like zero traffic on my road, and I spend my entire child hood playing in the street.

>>Where are you from, Mars?

No the midwest... probably mars to you...

>>Why don't you want a sidewalk?

Because I do not want to maintain them, shovel them, or accept the liability of someone is injured on them.

>>Everyone uses them at least a little, unless you're literally bedridden or something.

Not bed Ridden, do not use sidewalks.

My vehicle goes from my drive to a parking lot, I walk from the inside of my home to the vehicle and then from the vehicle to the inside of a business on the tarmac of the parking lot. No sidewalks


>on the road, there is like zero traffic on my road, and I spend my entire child hood playing in the street.

Same in my childhood, but there were sidewalks (pavements) everywhere. A street without one is simply defective, like if it didn't have lampposts or adequate drainage. Cars go down the middle, pedestrians go on the sides, that's just how it works.

>No the midwest... probably mars to you...

I don't know what that's supposed to mean.

>Because I do not want to maintain them, shovel them, or accept the liability of someone is injured on them.

Why on earth would it be your responsibility to maintain the sidewalk? It's not yours! It's publicly owned and it's maintained at public expense, exactly like the road surface. I've never personally had to maintain any sidewalk outside my house, they're in adequately good repair because it comes out of my taxes. Does your council expect you to mix your own concrete to patch up cracks, or something? Like the backyard steel mills in Maoist China? Are you expected to fill potholes in the road too? And why would you have any liability if someone is injured? That's not how torts work, again cause it's not your pavement. You're just making up nonsensical reasons.

>My vehicle goes from my drive to a parking lot, I walk from the inside of my home to the vehicle and then from the vehicle to the inside of a business on the tarmac of the parking lot. No sidewalks

So every single little errand you have to do requires getting in a car and driving to a new destination? And you expect everyone else to live this way on your street? Again, how do kids or anyone who doesn't have access to a car at that particular moment manage to do anything?

Your entire world amounts to your house, your car, parking lots, and the inside of shops and offices. That's unimaginably sad to me. I could never live like that. Do you really never use the two legs God gave you, and never let your lungs breathe natural air, and never let your eyes see the beauty of the world unimpeded by a plexiglass windshield?


> A street without one is simply defective, like if it didn't have lampposts or adequate drainage.

My street has lights, drains, everything but sidewalks...

>I don't know what that's supposed to mean.

I suspected (and still do) you either live outside the US, or on one of the coasts.

>>Why on earth would it be your responsibility to maintain the sidewalk? It's not yours, it's publicly owned and it's maintained at public expense.

No, not it is not. Not anywhere I have ever lived. They are "easements" that are privately owned, and have to maintained by the home owner, at the home owners expense, and you will be fined if they are not maintained, shoveled, etc.

In some cases the city my pay for the initial creation of the sidewalks, but after that it is on the homeowner to maintain them.

>Does your council expect you to mix your own concrete to patch up cracks, or something?

Yes?... Or hire a contractor to replace them if they are disrepair.. Often times it is HOA that is responsible as well which comes out of the HOA dues you would pay. Rarely is it the city in area of single family home neighborhoods.

Example This is not my city, but my city is simliar... Peoria, IL ARTICLE VII. > DIVISION 1. > Sec. 26-231. - Declaration of disrepair; notice. [1]

>> " . The notice shall advise the owner that he must repair or contract for repairs of the sidewalk in need of repair within 30 days of the date of the mailing of the notice. The notice shall describe with particularity the location of the sidewalk in need of repair."

Now in Peoria, IL they do cover upto 80% of the bill but the owner still has to find, contract, and schedule the contractor, and the city can reject any bill they soley claim is "excessive" in costs and only reimburse what they fill is not excessive, Some / Many cities do not offer any reimbursement at all or offer a lower rate...

In either case it is still property that is owned by the home owner, the public has the right of access via an easement. Liability in those states and cities is on the homeowner.

[1] https://library.municode.com/il/peoria/codes/code_of_ordinan...

>So every single little errand you have to do requires getting in a car and driving to a new destination?

Most people in my city already do... I am the norm.

>Do you really never use the two legs God gave you, and never let your lungs breathe natural air,

Sure that is what Parks, Camping, Trails, etc are for. Not sidewalks on my street


It's too bad homeowners aren't responsible for maintaining the street in front of their home too.

(but I'm fine with streets with no sidewalks, as long as the speed limit is appropriately reduced to 10 mph or so to make walking safe. Otherwise how are kids to walk to school and back?).


>My street has lights, drains, everything but sidewalks...

Then it's defective.

>No, not it is not. Not anywhere I have ever lived. They are "easements" that are privately owned, and have to maintained by the home owner, at the home owners expense, and you will be fined if they are not maintained, shoveled, etc.

>Yes?... Or hire a contractor to replace them if they are disrepair.. Often times it is HOA that is responsible as well which comes out of the HOA dues you would pay. Rarely is it the city in area of single family home neighborhoods.

>Now in Peoria, IL they do cover upto 80% of the bill but the owner still has to find, contract, and schedule the contractor, and the city can reject any bill they soley claim is "excessive" in costs and only reimburse what they fill is not excessive, Some / Many cities do not offer any reimbursement at all or offer a lower rate...

>In either case it is still property that is owned by the home owner, the public has the right of access via an easement. Liability in those states and cities is on the homeowner.

That's insane. Stark raving mad. Completely, utterly barmy.

Such a byzantine, litigious system would deter one from wanting a sidewalk next to one's house. It is obviously broken. It should be reformed so that people's incentives are not aligned against basic standards of civilization, by taking sidewalks into proper public ownership (not this "easement" frippery) and allowing for coordination and economies of scale in their maintenance. Imagine if roads worked this way! A patchwork of (ir)responsibility, individualism pursued to a farcical extreme.

>Most people in my city already do... I am the norm.

How do people go places and get things done if they can't drive? Like being under 18, or elderly, or poor, or with vision disabilities, or mentally retarded, or their spouse needed the car for something else, or being drunk at that particular moment, or the car is in for repairs, or they had their license suspended, or any number of other reasons? It would seem one is utterly dependent on an expensive machine, a prisoner in your own home without it, having to pay an enormous ante just for basic participation in society.

>Sure that is what Parks, Camping, Trails, etc are for. Not sidewalks on my street

Those things I listed aren't special treats that you save for a holiday. They're supposed to be a normal everyday part of human existence. Your body needs a baseline level of exertion to maintain cardiovascular health. What you're describing isn't normal at all.


>> you save for a holiday.

UK or EU?

>> their spouse needed the car for something else

Most have a second car.... or even 3... hell for most of my adult life I had both a Car and Truck, I was single. I dont today just a truck but I have thought about getting an EV Car, It would not however replace my Truck but in addition to it.

Uber / Lyft has gone a long way for me not having that 2nd vehicle

>How do people go places and get things done if they can't drive? Like being under 18, or elderly, or poor, or with vision disabilities, or mentally retarded

Bike, Bus, etc.. But I am unclear why you think people under 18, the poor, or the elderly do not also have cars? People can drive here as young as 15, many poor people have cars... hell if you drive through some of the government funded housing / income restricted housing (i.e housing for poor people) some of them have newer cars than I do.

and the elderly drive all the time though I would like them to stop as they drive to f'in slow....

>> litigious system would deter one from wanting a sidewalk next to one's house.

and we have come full circle. see my first post in this subject.

>>by taking sidewalks into proper public ownership (not this "easement" frippery) and allowing for coordination and economies of scale in their maintenance.

I dont know if that is a good case either, the roads in many area;s or pretty shitty, and low traffic residential streets often never get replaced until you can no longer tell if the road as paved or is gravel, and there are soo many pot holes that looks like a photo from a bombing run in war zone.

"Economies of Scale" is not a thing with government project. No Bid Contraction to government preferred contractors aka corruption is ....

Most studies show governments massively over pay for road projects compared to if a private citizen were to simply hire the same company to do the same job. Companies charge the government MORE not less.


I looked up Peoria, Illinois. 2016 data[1] (the most recent I could find): 15.4% of households have no car at all.

This data[2] gives it by cars per property (not the same as household). Summing across both owner- and renter- occupied, I find 10.7% with no car, 35.8% with one car.

It's a safe assumption that many of those renter-occupied properties are apartments that comprise more than one household. So it's somewhere between 10% and 15% of households that don't have any car at all, and at least 35% with only one car. 1-car households are the plurality. Yet the average car ownership rate is 2, skewed by people who own 3 or more.

So: it's not some tiny eccentric sliver of households with no cars. It's actually a substantial minority. A plurality of couples cannot rely on the second car while one spouse is using the first, because they have only one car.

And in turn, it's an even greater proportion of people (not households) who don't, can't, or shouldn't drive. Children, teenagers, elderly, disabled, and so on.

Those poors with cars, do you really suppose they can afford it? Living paycheque to paycheque with a car loan that's underwater isn't what I'd call "afford". The auto loan delinquency rate in the county is 8% (twice the national average), and 26% among nonwhites: https://apps.urban.org/features/debt-interactive-map/?type=a...

As for buses and bikes: I searched for "peoria illinois bike lanes" and the top results were all about recreational trails. Never a good sign: it means the city government views bicycles as toys, not a means of practical transport. I looked on Streetview for ten minutes and I didn't see any bike lanes anywhere, protected or otherwise. The place seems to be full of 4-, 5-, and 6-lane stroads with 40+mph traffic. There seems to be no infrastructure whatsoever to make that safe to cycle on. I wouldn't dare bike down a road like this[3], to take a random example. And that's not even the worst one I found.

My intuition that the roads are unsafe is correct: in 2019 (the most recent non-corona year on the city-data page), the city of Peoria reported 7 traffic-related fatalities, out of a population of 113,150. In that same year, there were only 3 such fatalities in Cardiff (where I live), a city with a population of 480,000. Peoria's roads are 10x as dangerous by that metric. The story for non-fatal injuries is similar.

And here's blogpost[4] quoting local cyclists (what a hardy breed they must be!):

>Roads on these maps have been suggested by local cyclists as being safe to ride on – most of the time. Caution should still be taken at busier times of the day when people are driving to and from work.

Lmao. So if you actually want to like, get to work safely ... you can't do it on a bike. That's what you're expecting people to do?

No bus lanes anywhere on Streetview that I can see either, so that puts a hard ceiling on how much the city cares about public transport, and therefore how viable it is to rely on. EDIT: actually, to hell with bus lanes, where are the bus stops? I saw places with bus stop icons on Google maps, but the Streetview shows nothing at first glance. Like here for example https://goo.gl/maps/2UmQU9SumppeBmTt9 the overhead map shows two bus stops. I searched for several minutes on Streetview for the physical objects corresponding to these bus stops -- eventually I found them. They're just little metal signs attached to lamp posts that say "bus stop" on them. You call that a bus stop? Where's the shelter from sun and rain, where's the place to sit, where's the map of the routes and timetables? It's the same story even in the busier parts, like this place dares to call itself a "Main Street" https://goo.gl/maps/ovFbS37DLVCsN9t4A it's right next to a University, yet its "bus stop" is a perfunctory little disk of metal stuck on a light pole. How does anyone think this is remotely adequate?

Enormous indoor parking facility right next to it though. They didn't skimp on that ...

Actually now that I think about it, "Peoria", sounds familiar. Oh yeah, I coincidentally read about it the other day. An article about how atrocious the built environment is for non-drivers[5], and the indignities they suffer. Read that article. It's absolutely fascinating.

>On their walk, the group observed a corner of the city by East Peoria, from a downtown shopping area to a nearby neighborhood. They discovered there were no sidewalks for a significant length of the stretch, but there was a wide road, and clear, muddy pathways filled with shoe prints and bike marks showed that despite the area not being designed for people on foot, people were using it.

>“Everybody acknowledged [the neighborhood] had a pretty wide road. And very little vehicle traffic went by us during the time that we walked through there,” said Fenton.

>In one of the spaces where there was a dedicated walking area with a sidewalk, it felt uncomfortable and out of place—like people didn’t belong there.

>“We came through this area, which is bizarre, there's a sidewalk with chain link fences,” said Fenton. “People literally said ‘are we supposed to be going here?’ And the reason that that was interesting was because when we came out the backside we could see footprints and mountain bike tracks. Clearly, people from that neighborhood use this as a shortcut to cut back over to the retail area.”

It's fucking barbaric to make people live this way. You can't even get from one side of the river to the other on foot:

>After some research, Lees learned that, between 271 miles of river, there were only two bridges with a protected walking path—and they were nearly 267 miles apart, closest to the large metropolitan cities Chicago and St. Louis. It was obvious to Lees that there was an unequal opportunity for locals to travel safely about the city.

Clearly there's latent demand for sidewalks, that is going unmet. Far more people would walk if the city cared about making it safer and more pleasant.

Meanwhile, staggeringly large amounts of land in Peoria is apparently wasted on empty parking spaces[6]. Everything is pushed further apart for no reason.

>In fact, Peoria is so full of parking that the amount of land devoted to surface parking in the county actually surpasses the amount of land devoted to buildings

Just amazing. No wonder people own so many vehicles, they're pretty much forced to, just to do ordinary things. The infrastructure is biased comprehensively towards motor cars, rendering anything else impractical and/or unsafe.

So, if where you live is anywhere like Peoria, then you're pretty much like Marie Antoinette saying "let them eat cake". There are no safe, reliable viable alternatives to the car, by design, and you're trying to keep it that way on purpose, out of sheer selfishness. Maybe you should try living car-free for even a single week, so you have first hand experience of what you're choosing to make your fellow citizens endure. Do it, if you think it's so trivial. And then maybe after that week (if you survive) you'll gain some empathy and realize why they want sidewalks.

[1] https://www.governing.com/archive/car-ownership-numbers-of-v...

[2] https://www.city-data.com/county/Peoria_County-IL.html

[3] https://goo.gl/maps/qiK3QZ4WNKgFj4Cm6

[4] https://ivwheelmn.org/wordpress/?page_id=372

[5] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/4/6/peoria-reformin...

[6] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/8/16/parking-peoria...


So again we go to preferences.

You call it barbaric, but I call your "15 min walkable cities" open air prisons...

So how about we ton down the hyperbolic rhetoric.

>Clearly there's latent demand for sidewalks, that is going unmet. Far more people would walk if the city cared about making it safer and more pleasant.

I guess that is a chicken vs egg statement. I dont think they actually would, and I believe the "demand" for sidewalks is a very small minority of the taxpaying base. If it was not there would be more puch for it in Local Politics which is far easier to get things like that through.

Chances are though to it would require a tax bond initiative on the ballot, which I suspect would have a VERY VERY VERY poor chance of succeeding, thus no funding to do it. People often claim they want sidewalks right up until they have to vote to increase their property, sales, or income taxes to pay for them.

Also for the record, I find "Strong Towns" to be propaganda not serious research or journalism or what ever...

>>Everything is pushed further apart for no reason.

it is not for no reason, it just reasons you disagree with.

You desire greater population density, more closely packed cities, and everything to be walkable so a person a work, live and shop in a small area.

I, and many other Americans, find population density to be a BAD thing, we do not want to live all stacked on each either. I own a 3/4 acre (about 3000 sq meters) of land where my home sits. That is the absolute minimum I would accept, and I am actively looking for a homestead that is 4+ acres (16000 sq meters)...

>So, if where you live is anywhere like Peoria,

Very similar, but more population. The city i live in is about 2x the population, but also about 2x the land area so we have about the same population density.

>> so you have first hand experience of what you're choosing to make your fellow citizens endure

This is a problem with your conceptualization you believe that I am in the minority of my citizens / neighbors, you can not comprehend that people in the US may not want to live like you live in Cardiff.

You believe that because I oppose something in my small neighborhood, of which the sidewalks on my street would have zero impact of the walkablity of my street, means I am some how keeping the poor down...

In reality all of my neighbors, agree with me..


>You call it barbaric, but I call your "15 min walkable cities" open air prisons...

What about it is a prison? Go on Streetview for Cardiff or any British city, show me what you regard as prison-like. I don't understand what you could possibly be talking about.

(Apart from the literal HMP Cardiff of course, but nobody goes there unless found guilty by a jury of twelve)

There's a reason I refer to Streetview so much: I can point to very specific concrete things (often literally made of concrete), instead of getting lost in abstractions and rhetoric (I notice you didn't even address what I said about the shitty bus stops, probably because you know they're indefensible). So show me the bars of my prison, tell me about the shadows on the cave wall.

>I guess that is a chicken vs egg statement. I dont think they actually would, and I believe the "demand" for sidewalks is a very small minority of the taxpaying base. If it was not there would be more puch for it in Local Politics which is far easier to get things like that through.

>Chances are though to it would require a tax bond initiative on the ballot, which I suspect would have a VERY VERY VERY poor chance of succeeding, thus no funding to do it. People often claim they want sidewalks right up until they have to vote to increase their property, sales, or income taxes to pay for them.

This is just another way of saying your political system is completely broken. What you're describing is not competent governance. Why do sidewalks require a referendum? And moreover, why don't roads? Why don't you need to vote for every little new road that gets built, but you do have to vote for every new sidewalk? There's your answer for why the latter doesn't get built. If you needed a referendum and tax bond initiative to build street lighting, that wouldn't get built much either. Democracy drives in darkness.

And might I remind you, given the talk of taxes: the federal gasoline tax comes nowhere close to paying for roads, the way it's theoretically supposed to. It's been fixed at the same per-gallon rate for 30 years, hasn't risen with inflation (93% since then), presumably because voters like you don't want it to go up. Road building and maintenance comes out of an increasing share of general funds each year. Non-drivers subsidize you.

>Also for the record, I find "Strong Towns" to be propaganda not serious research or journalism or what ever...

You can just look at the photographs in the articles, they speak for themselves. You can't just call something "propaganda" because you don't like its point of view.

>You desire greater population density

Greater than what?

>more closely packed cities

More closely packed than what?

I don't want to live in the Kowloon walled city, if that's what you think. I don't like tower blocks (they're usually a false economy). There's a happy middle ground in these things.

>and everything to be walkable so a person a work, live and shop in a small area.

And yeah, what's wrong with being able to work, live, and shop in a small area? You seem to have this fevered delusion that I'm somehow imprisoned in my neighbourhood, that I'm forced to shop locally, but that simply isn't the case. I can do things nearby, and I also can go further afield if I want (which I in fact do), and I have the choice to walk, bike, take a bus, taxi, train, or indeed drive. There are cars going back and forth on the road next to my house right now, they're not impeded in the slightest. The difficulties in getting around that I do have are -- you guessed it -- caused by excessive car infrastructure more than anything else. In the manner of Archimedes: give me a protected bike lane long enough, and I shall circumnavigate the Earth.

On the other hand you can't do things nearby, and you must go far afield, and you must drive to get there. You have objectively fewer options, which makes you less free.

And you must always carry official travel documents, and produce them on demand to armed officers of the state, with severe penalties for refusal. Whereas I go about as I please, breathing free English air, carrying no identification, and never hearing the snarl of "papers, please"; a continental despotism which here thankfully has never taken root. In a country dependent on the car, driving licenses are tantamount to internal passports. How's that for an open-air prison?

>I, and many other Americans, find population density to be a BAD thing, we do not want to live all stacked on each either. I own a 3/4 acre (about 3000 sq meters) of land where my home sits. That is the absolute minimum I would accept, and I am actively looking for a homestead that is 4+ acres (16000 sq meters)...

That's great! I really don't have a problem with you living out in the middle of nowhere with a big house. There's a lot to be said for that way of living.

But I will say this: there's density, and then there's density. One of the good things about low density, I'm sure you'll agree, is that, per person, you have lots of beautiful nature and open places around you, that you can enjoy. But quality is important too, not just quantity. Look at Peoria: there certainly is a lot of area per person, but it's low quality: it's "space", but it's not "place". Most of it is surface parking, or sad little disconnected patches of grass on which no child will ever play a ball game, with no actual nature or biodiversity, or similar ugly and unpleasant non-places that no human being can enjoy. The actual nice public places seem pretty sparse, and have to be shared by a lot of people, as if it were high density anyway. So it seems to be the worst of both worlds: all the downsides of low density (increased distances, worse walkability), but not much upside.

As for private acreage, again: it's possible to have that, without the miles and miles of surface parking. I really have no problem at all with big houses in outlying districts, my problem is with extravagantly wasteful land-use patterns in productive urban cores. That, and unsafe-by-design roads.

>This is a problem with your conceptualization you believe that I am in the minority of my citizens / neighbors, you can not comprehend that people in the US may not want to live like you live in Cardiff.

I get that not everyone wants to live in an extremely dense city (and Cardiff is not such a city). But I don't think most Americans are quite as explicitly hellbent as you about low-density living. I think most people just want a pleasant and affordable place to live, where "pleasant" might amount to many possible things. People can enjoy low density and high density at the same time, without any contradiction; they will weigh the benefits and drawbacks against one another. And I suspect many literally don't even realize what a good walkable city can be, because they haven't lived in one and don't know what they're missing. For example, I've spoken to someone who literally thought I made an enormous measurement error when I said I could walk to buy groceries because there are so many shops within 10 minute walk. He asked me to double check that it really was 10 minutes and really was half a mile and there really were so many in that radius. The idea was foreign, it had never occurred to him that this might be possible and easy and normal, in a place that isn't like Manhattan or something (and I found Manhattan fairly unpleasant when I visited fwiw, it's not the kind of urbanism I like). Low density suburbia was all he knew.

(That's part of why that "Not Just Bikes" channel got so popular -- what it depicts is so mundane, yet so foreign to so many people's experiences. And East Berliners didn't know they liked bananas, until the Wall fell and they tasted them.)

So maybe this "lack of comprehension" runs both ways.


>>What about it is a prison? Go on Streetview for Cardiff or any British city, show me what you regard as prison-like.

nothing today, it is slipply slope that is enables. Which I am sure you reject.. (I am also a pro-gun rights person for many of the same reasons. something i am sure you will also reject.)

I have no trust, faith, or desire for government control. 15min cities enable government control

>>This is just another way of saying your political system is completely broken. What you're describing is not competent governance.

We go back again to you jumping to the conclusion that your method is the correct way, and no other ways are valid. This is the biggest thing I am trying to get through here. People have have different views than you, and that is ok. It is broken, evil, or wrong for us to have a different from of governance,

One where government is limited, extremely so.

>Why don't you need to vote for every little new road that gets built, but you do have to vote for every new sidewalk?

Many locations you would, any project that would require the local city to take on long term debt would need to be voted on by the public assuming that debt. This is why it is a bond initiative. Most Local governments in my area are required by law to have balanced budgets. In my area the city government must submit a Budget to the state at year before, from that local tax rates are set to give the city the money they requested. For a large capital projects that require the city to take out debt (i.e issue bonds) they must go to the tax payers for approval for that.

Outside of that new roads are often created by developers wanting to develop land, the city requires developers to "improve" the roads near the new development as part of approving their zoning and permits, Sidewalks can be included in that requirement which would not need tax payer approval

I find this system to be very functional and the correct way to ensure governments to overspend the public money and go in massive debt like our Federal government has.

>And might I remind you, given the talk of taxes: the federal gasoline tax comes nowhere close to paying for roads, the way it's theoretically supposed to. It's been fixed at the same per-gallon rate for 30 years, hasn't risen with inflation (93% since then), presumably because voters like you don't want it to go up. Road building and maintenance comes out of an increasing share of general funds each year. Non-drivers subsidize you.

That is the federal gas tax, which only pays for federal roads which is like 10% of the paved surface in the US none of which have any sidewalks at all, and all prohibit non-motorized travel of any kind. Seem odd to bring up in a conversation about sidewalks.

Further the federal gas tax is not the only tax that is (or suppose to be) ear marked for Road Maintenance, other taxes and fees include Wheel Taxes, Sales Taxes on Cars, Tolls, Excise Taxes on Vehicles. I can assure all of these taxes have gone up.

Per Gallon gas based taxation is very out dated and not the only revenue source for roads. In the light of the push for EV's needs to be replaced completely

>> I said I could walk to buy groceries because there are so many shops within 10 minute walk

This sounds like you go to multiple places to buy these things, all with in 10misn of each other. People I know that live in walkable cities live a very different life style that is of no interest to me, which includes shopping for "fresh" food daily or multiple times per week, going to small specialize shops (for example a baker, butcher, etc) instead of a supermarket.

I like, and prefer being able to go into one store where I can buy my Milk, Meat, Potatos, a Tent, a new Appliance, a Rug, a new TV, ammo, and anything else I may need for a 2 for 4 week interval where I make that trip no more than once per week.

More recently I like not even having to go into those places, I order online pull out outside in my car they load it up for me and I drive away, shopping for 1-2 weeks of supplies takes 10mins to pickup...


>nothing today, it is slipply slope that is enables. Which I am sure you reject.. (I am also a pro-gun rights person for many of the same reasons. something i am sure you will also reject.)

I thought you might say something like that. You can't actually point to anything real, so you retreat to vague paranoid insinuations. Well, monsters tend to live in shadows, because when you turn on the light you see they're not real. And it may surprise and please you to know that I'm pro-gun too; I wish we had 2A here. Once upon a time, England had gun laws that would make Texas look effeminate. And as a practical matter, I think fewer drivers would make dangerous close passes if I had a loaded rifle strapped to my back.

>15min cities enable government control

You have to carry government-issued ID to go anywhere in your car, which for you means anywhere at all. Armed officers of the state can arbitrarily intercept you and demand to see your papers. Tell me more about "government control".

>I find this system to be very functional and the correct way to ensure governments to overspend the public money and go in massive debt like our Federal government has.

Then why do so many cities have so many unfunded road maintenance liabilities? The potholes you complain about.

How can you call the system "functional", when it produces roads that are 10x deadlier than a normal country?

Besides, you're ignoring most of the story[1]. Most highway and road spending comes from federal and state funds, not local. A lot of that is interstate highway spending, but also a lot of it isn't.

And if you're so concerned about government overreach, you must surely be against mandatory parking minimums, where local governments compel private businesses to over-provide free parking. Or are you okay with it, because it makes your life more convenient?

>That is the federal gas tax, which only pays for federal roads which is like 10% of the paved surface in the US none of which have any sidewalks at all, and all prohibit non-motorized travel of any kind. Seem odd to bring up in a conversation about sidewalks.

I brought it up because the tax isn't enough to cover the cost of those paved surfaces. By your stated preference for fiscal responsibility, the gas tax should be at least 93% higher (and probably higher still, because there are more highways now than there were in 1993).

Again, you seem to demand everything pay for itself, except the things you personally benefit from. Everyone's a socialist about what he loves best.

>Further the federal gas tax is not the only tax that is (or suppose to be) ear marked for Road Maintenance, other taxes and fees include Wheel Taxes, Sales Taxes on Cars, Tolls, Excise Taxes on Vehicles. I can assure all of these taxes have gone up.

They still don't cover the cost, and at any rate they're unlike the gasoline tax in that they are taxes on one-time purchases, not ongoing use (aside from tolls, which are so rare they hardly bear mention, and at any rate tend to demonstrate by revealed preferences that people place a very low dollar value on driving). The gasoline tax is the closest thing to a Pigouvian tax on the externalities of motor traffic: road wear, pollution, noise, congestion. However, I agree it needs reform with the advent of EVs.

>This sounds like you go to multiple places to buy these things, all with in 10misn of each other.

I don't. Most of the time I go to one, sometimes two (they're practically next door to each other). Sometimes I go to a different one, if it's on the way back from an unrelated journey.

> People I know that live in walkable cities live a very different life style that is of no interest to me, which includes shopping for "fresh" food daily or multiple times per week,

Why the scare-quotes on "fresh"? It is fresh, I can tell it's fresh, I know what fresh food tastes like. I'll tell you what's not fresh: whatever's been sitting in your fridge for 2 weeks.

What's wrong with going multiple times a week? I mean I get that you personally don't like that, and that's perfectly alright, but what is objectively wrong with it? It's not a hassle to do that when it's close by, and you don't need to buy much. I go once or twice a week. Does that offend you somehow?

Other people can, and do, shop less frequently, taking their car and stocking up on large amounts, just as you do. My parents buy food for 1-2 weeks. I could do it if I wanted to, but I simply don't.

What are you trying to imply by all this?

It's becoming a little exasperating talking to you, that I need to spell out these quite mundane matters of existence, and reassure you that there aren't sinister forces at work. Like .. there aren't secret police who disappear you because you didn't pick up your mandatory rations three times a week. You can buy food the way you like. Frequently or not frequently. By car, or bike, or public transport. You can go in person or get it delivered. Do you get it?

>I like, and prefer being able to go into one store where I can buy my Milk, Meat, Potatos, a Tent, a new Appliance, a Rug, a new TV, ammo, and anything else I may need for a 2 for 4 week interval where I make that trip no more than once per week.

You can do that here!!! My goodness. Well it's usually not one giant store but it would be like 2-4 reasonably large stores literally right next to each other in a retail park. But I'm sure you could manage ... you'd walk about the same distance indoors. We have malls (shopping centres) too, except you can also bike or take public transport, if you want. And ours are doing okay, the "dead mall" phenomenon mostly isn't a thing here.

>More recently I like not even having to go into those places, I order online pull out outside in my car they load it up for me and I drive away, shopping for 1-2 weeks of supplies takes 10mins to pickup...

Yeah same here. You can do all that. Easily. The 15 minute city Stasi have not yet extinguished this ancient rite.

[1] https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...


>> You can't actually point to anything real, so you retreat to vague paranoid insinuations.

TIL history is not real, and learning from history is paranoia... nice...

>>And it may surprise and please you to know that I'm pro-gun too; I wish we had 2A here. Once upon a time, England had gun laws that would make Texas look effeminate. And as a practical matter, I think fewer drivers would make dangerous close passes if I had a loaded rifle strapped to my back.

That does surprise me, and Texas is effeminate, contrary to the public persona of Texas being "Ultra conservative" they are not, The red states of the MidWest are far far more "red" than Texas.

>>you must surely be against mandatory parking minimums, where local governments compel private businesses to over-provide free parking. Or are you okay with it, because it makes your life more convenient?

In general I am against all government regulations that do not protect the personal or property rights of individuals against harm, theft or fraud. So not I do not support compelling private businesses to provide free parking.

>Most highway and road spending comes from federal and state funds, not local.

Highway funding sure, Highways are owned by the Federal and State governments.

Highways do not have sidewalks so I am not sure why that is relevant. Roads with sidewalks are 100% funded by local tax revenues.

>>They still don't cover the cost,

They would if they were 100% used for roads only... they not though

>>Again, you seem to demand everything pay for itself, except the things you personally benefit from. Everyone's a socialist about what he loves best.

>> and at any rate they're unlike the gasoline tax in that they are taxes on one-time purchases, not ongoing use

100% false, of the taxes I listed only one of them are on one-time purchases (sales), I pay excise and property taxes annually on my vehicle(s), I pay things like wheel taxes, and other related taxes annually. Further excluding sales taxes on Automobile for road maintenance seems to be odd to me. Why would those taxes not count?

I never said I disagreed with raising the user taxes, I said I believe they already collect enough to cover the roads and instead they appropriated the money in correctly to other programs. If however there an actual need for more money they I would support that provided they are actually using the money for the roads and not just adding it to the general fund where by they use it for pet projects and continue to ignore the road.

>>It's becoming a little exasperating talking to you, that I need to spell out these quite mundane matters of existence, and reassure you that there aren't sinister forces at work

you have confused the order of conversation here. You are the one wanting to use governmental force to impose your preferred life on to others via government regulated and owned roads, sidewalks, etc

I want to leave that up to individual property owner to choose for themselves if that is what they want.

IF you want to create, and with other create a walkable city, through voluntary cooperation more power to you, however it seems you do not want anyone to be able to have a non-walkable city, you believe that is "barbaric" or something close to that, and those types of communities should be abolished.

I think both can and should exist, that is the point I have been trying to get across and in all of your comments you have done nothing but attempt to justify the use of government to impose your preference, while in an odd and convoluted way twisting my comments to where me not wanting government to do something is some how forcing others to live my way. They are free to use non-governmental resources and voluntary exchange on their property to put in sidewalks, they are free to advocate other do the same, but they should not be free to force me do follow them via government.


The dream of a "car that just drives itself" works for everyone. It serves both goals of letting people such as yourself take your car (optionally paying attention), while also making sure that car doesn't run over pedestrians, cyclists, and the like.

Your geographic region doesn't really matter.


You're talking to someone who thinks PHP is the best.


I'm pretty sure the garbage truck in a single weekly trip does more damage on my street than all the bikes and cars combined for that same period of time.

Time and weight consume road and sidewalk infrastructure.


The huge amount of cars makes it seem attractive to widen roads and such. Which, more road surface leads to more maintenance. Along with that, widening also induces more demand and such.


There is a great YouTuber [1] that talks about city planning. They have a lot of content, but a theme is tax revenue per square foot, and the mathematical reality of a sustainable city being unattainable because collective expectations regarding road infrastructure are so expensive.

[1] - Not Just Bikes


If that's what you've taken away from it, you need to rewatch it; the financial theme is not "sustainable cities are impossible" the theme is "American sprawling car dependent suburbia is insolvent because it doesn't generate enough tax revenue to pay for the sprawling roads/water/sewage/garbage disposal/other services that it uses", and it's like a Ponzi scheme where the construction and sale of a new chunk of suburbs pays for the maintenance work on the previous one.

Denser inner-city areas generate much more tax revenue with less cost of services because they have to cover a smaller area, and this can be solvent and subsidises the suburbs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI "Suburbs are subsidized: Here's the Math"

NB. the last time I linked this on HN someone dismissed it as "Strong towns propaganda" claiming that if suburbs didn't exist, everyone would starve. They completely failed to respond to followup questions about cities which are not sprawling suburbs and are not starving. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35238666


There is a vast majority of suburban towns around Boston which are both quite old and quite solvent, contrary to the Strong Towns predictions.

I’ve written about them before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34599508

For convenience, they include: Arlington (1635), Belmont (1849), Waltham (1884), Watertown (1630), Lincoln (1754), Wellesley (1881), Newton (1688 town, 1874 city) among others.


Arlington, Mass.[1] has 46k people in 5.5 square miles, population density of 9.1k people per square mile, 9.1k taxpayers paying for a square mile of services.

Lafayette, Louisiana[2] (the city from the video I linked) has 121k people in an area of 56 square miles for a density of 2.1k people per square mile, but a metro area population of 478k people over a metro area of 3,400 square miles with a density of 140 people per square mile of services.

Arlington has a median family income of $131k, Lafayette has a median family income of $54k (both from the same Wikipedia pages). Just the urban parts - roads covering 5.5 square miles in Arlington vs 56 square miles in Lafayette, but they've got a quarter of the population density who are less than half as wealthy paying taxes to maintain them. I don't know how it's funded for roads in the 3,400 square miles of suburban area.

Watertown has 35k people in 4 square miles, Lincoln has 7k people over 15 square miles with a median family income of $202,704 - these hardly seem to fit "sprawling car dependent suburbia"? I haven't looked very hard because internet argument, but I'd be surprised if the 7k people in Lincoln have their own dedicated fire service, hospital, ambulances, sewage works, dump, salt gritters, dual carriageway highways for moving cities worth of vehicles, and so on public services that a big city with 20x the population would need, which Lincoln likely shares with other places or just doesn't have.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arlington,_Massachusetts

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafayette,_Louisiana


I checked the "walk score" for several of my friends' addresses in Lincoln. They were in the range of 3 to 7; Lincoln is absolutely a car-dependent suburb, as is Wellesley, Newton and the rest of that list (with the exception of the center of Arlington and select parts of Watertown).


I 100% agree with you and that was my takeaway as well from watching the series, I clearly was not very good at communicating my point.


> about city planning. They have a lot of content, but a theme is tax revenue per square foot

Sounds more like SimCity metric than what a real life city should care about.


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I don't necessarily agree with it, but it's not inane. It was the government that paid for roads and highways, after all, not Ford or GM.


I feel like I've stumbled into bizarro world. Self driving cars would be a massive boon to quality of life in every American city with perhaps a few exceptions. I couldn't care less if my city spent a billion dollars a year making them work. Way better than that billion going to the current public transit system that sucks out loud.


Many people think that money could be better spent on improving transit so that it no longer sucks.


We tried that about 7 years ago. Zero projects from that tax increase have been delivered and the one actually under construction is mostly pointless.


I am sympathetic that pressing issues need solutions sooner rather than later, and that a lot of public good will was indeed spent on projects that have vanished into thin air with zero accountability. Is it not worth perhaps investing time and energy into fixing the stagnant, shitty processes that have lead to what I will agree (for the sake of good faith argument) are ineffective-at-best shitty decisions and policies? My $0.02: looking to simply abandon civic involvement and completely privatize the solutions?


I was right, started with up votes, then the west coast time zone came alive and went -3. No surprise there.


You’re not going to be downvoted if that’s also the conclusion the article has.


My dream long-term would be completely separated infra for cars+buses and for bikes+scooters. Human-driven cars will be pointless except on backwoods trails or racetracks in any case.


We better start on another baby boom then. Mass transit of any sort requires a certain population density to be viable. Unless you define any given suburb as "backwoods".


In the techno-utopian view which has become the default for self-driving vehicles' integration into society, suburbs are also served by self-driving cars. What is your point exactly?


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It's anecdotal, but as an upper middle class, gun-owning, formerly (pre-Trump) Republican-voting American white guy raised in a largely white upper middle class suburb, I've ridden my adopted city's bus many times and it's fine. I'd happily take it to work and save on gas if it went straight there, as it stands taking the bus turns a 30 minute commute into an hour+ commute. Also my kid's doctor and dentist are completely inaccessible by bus, never mind other activities.

Whatever the original motivations for suburbs, I've yet to meet anyone who moved to a suburb to get away from <insert ethnicity>, and I've had enough unasked for conversations with racists to know I don't immediately alienate them for whatever reason. Commute, crime, space and schools are usually at the top of the list of reasons for moving to a suburb. Sure you can argue institutionalized racism and such is somewhat integrated into those things, but very few people (with the possible exception of the less educated regions of the South/Midwest) are consciously turning down properties solely because a black family lives next door.

At any rate, those people are bitter losers and idiots who's opinion grows less relevant each passing year. There are plenty of more rational people who could be convinced if mass transit was made practical


"American white guy raised in a largely white upper middle class suburb, I've ridden my adopted city's bus many times and it's fine."

Yeah, that will be the majority of people's experiences riding the bus. Other than sexual harassment. Or watching the driver have to refuse someone on the bus because they wanted to call the driver a derogatory slur.

Regardless I digress. People absolutely move out of the City to the Suburbs "for the schools".

They won't say it outright but no, white people don't want to live near black people in America. Otherwise, since rent is still pretty affordable in predominantly black neighborhoods you would think they (white people) would choose to live there instead of moving outside of the city and having longer commutes and bigger mortgages.


I don't disagree with the sentiment, but --

> Otherwise, since rent is still pretty affordable in predominantly black neighborhoods you would think they (white people) would choose to live there

This is almost the definition of gentrification, which is pretty common where I live (Boston area).


Gentrification is pushing people out of their environment due to high rent prices which happens because white people 'feel' comfortable to live there now.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentrification

I'm saying that our neighborhoods should reflect more or less the ratio of diversity in the population but it doesn't does it?

Presumably there's more poor white people than poor black people in America, right? So if price of rent was the main determining factor for where someone lives presumably lower income communities ought to be pretty mixed then, right?

That is white people ought to feel comfortable enough to have black neighbors and lower rent and mortgages before the gentrification happens.


> "Otherwise, since rent is still pretty affordable in predominantly black neighborhoods you would think they (white people) would choose to live there instead of moving outside of the city and having longer commutes and bigger mortgages."

This is one of the most blatant cases of selective omission I've ever seen. Pray tell why is rent in Detroit or Chicago so cheap? I mean I spent two years doing humanitarian work across north Ohio in some of the cities that have incredibly "low rent" there's a reason for that, and anyone who can chooses to leave when they can for very obvious reasons if you go and visit those areas.


Idk, I grew up in a white middle class neighborhood but the cost of housing is pretty considerably lower in the neighborhoods to the other side of the freeway/railroad tracks that happens to also be predominantly black. (This is Ohio btw)

Note those neighborhoods were built in similar times with similar sizes of lots and quality of houses.

The only noticable differences between the two locations is racial makeup of the community.

So if two areas are equally nice to live in but one is cheaper to live in than the other then why are people electing to live in a more expensive area over the cheaper one? Assuming everything else is equal.


> The only noticable differences between the two locations is racial makeup of the community.

> So if two areas are equally nice to live in but one is cheaper to live in than the other then why are people electing to live in a more expensive area over the cheaper one? Assuming everything else is equal.

I strongly doubt that "housing is considerably lower" while having no "noticable differences" besides race. Name the communities, so one can research the actual differences, otherwise this is imaginary. I hope you can't mean Cleveland.


No I mean Columbus. It's easy: Clintonville vs Linden. Communities that literally share the same street names that are cut by railroad tracks and a freeway.

I've lived in both, both are equally nice and equally nice property and neighbors. Linden is incredibly cheaper. At a glance I'm seeing around 100k price difference with similar sized homes.


Yes, it is easy. Home buyers look at schools, crime, and proximity to work and amenities.

Clintonville is right next to OSU (100k! students and staff), High St. amenities, and all the parks along the Olentangy River, of which Linden has nothing comparable to those. A crime map of the area clearly demarcates those areas https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/oh/columbus/crime

And schools are definitely better in Clintonville https://www.greatschools.org/ohio/columbus/schools/?gradeLev... https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/oh/columbus/schools

This is what makes people buy homes; hardly a gut feel on "nice neighbors." Most people reading this would easily rather buy in Clintonville if prices were the same, based on just the things I mentioned.


Parts of Linden are just as close if not closer to OSU than Clintonville.

Linden also has parks and stores just like Clintonville.

And with crime I suggest looking at where the crime happens, it's typically particular to a few main streets/corners.

The neighborhoods themselves are comparable.

You're almost making it sound like if you lived in a home in Linden that you'd expect drive by shootings on the regular or some such shit. That's not the case though shootings and street theft have been happening quite a bit in Clintonville and Short North on High St. Over last few years.

People still move out of Clintonville to smaller school districts because city schools are perceived as bad. Of course a lot of white flight occurred during inner city bussing but whatever.

If better schools, less crime, and allegedly work proximity are the reasons you need to convince yourself why suburbs became popular the first place and not that it is because white people don't want to have black neighbors, suit yourself.


> those people are bitter losers and idiots who's opinion grows less relevant each passing year

Their racist opinions have grown relevant enough in the past several years to drive you, a presumably non-racist Republican, away from voting for your own political party. Racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, white supremacy, and bigotry in general are all on a sharp rise, thanks to Trump's normalization and weaponization of bigotry, and to everyone who supports him, and especially to people who privately dislike him but publicly support him (most of the Republican party).

Thanks for not voting for him yourself, but don't blind yourself to the problem with America and your Republican party, which owns Trump now and forever.


> Jaime Viloria of Equity on Public Transit, a grassroots group of riders in the Tenderloin neighborhood, says companies operating autonomous vehicles should be fined for causing delays.

Insufficient. They'll only count it as part of the cost of doing business.

I think every person director or above at these companies should be eligible to be delayed at random for a time equal to the total human-minutes of delay caused to transit riders and people in private vehicles. If a driverless vehicle blocks a train with 60 riders for 15 minutes, those directors and executives should in aggregate spend 15 hours not able to go wherever they want to go, and in a way which they are unable to schedule in advance.


They already have a system for this, it’s called “driving on the 101 during rush hour”


The whole point of this article is that driverless vehicles are causing delays which are qualitatively different and longer than what human drivers would do. Pointing out that bad traffic already exists elsewhere (presumably caused by human drivers) does not decrease the problems that these companies are creating for the public, and certainly doesn't create accountability.


We don't have consequences if a normal person blocks a train for 15 minutes why would we add them for automated cars first?


If you stand in front of a muni train for 15 minutes, and refuse to speak to or respond to anyone, I think there's a decent chance you'll experience a negative consequence.


Replace 'refuse to speak' with 'scream incoherently' and that sounds like a normal occurrence in SF to me.




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