So, they create traffic blockages as a sort of civic disobedience? How is this helping anyone? I guess they get to feel the thrill of outrage culture for a bit. And brag to their friends "I made a thousand people late for work!"
The fact that a single car can even cause this much harm is a sign of a much larger problem: car centric transportation is NOT scalable.
They are testing this crap in TX and the roads here are shit, worse after/during rain events. Have seen multiple times where a traffic light goes out or the lines are not legible and the “autonomous” vehicle just sits there with its hazard lights on.
> The fact that a single car can even cause this much harm is a sign of a much larger problem: car centric transportation is NOT scalable.
This is an interesting to me. From the perspective of an internet builder, systems vulnerable to shutdown from individual bad actors are obviously insecure and "not scalable". But too much time in this environment can make us forget that the actual world is about a zillion times less hostile than the internet.
As an educator, I worked with a computer security savvy 13 year old who knew my software background and would occasionally disclose vulnerabilities in the district's systems to me. He was incredulous that the network could be so insecure.
I asked about the security systems governing walking around in the hallway - was there any physical impediment preventing one person from punching, kicking, throwing a rock at another? Of course not - the security is socially constructed. Norms, consequences, etc, that on balance seemed to work out pretty effectively. I tried to make a case that security inside a local network of the size and scope of our school board was also ~90% social construction, but the student really struggled with it. There was a strong belief that because it was computers, you were expected to exploit it if it were vulnerable.
First paragraph is about the IT security mindset bleeding into real life, third is about the IT adversarial mindset corrupting our disposition toward technical equipment generally.
Given how immersed current generations are / have been in the adversarial landscape of the web, should we expect an uptick in the level of generalized adversarialism? Will xyst's (and my student's) assessments of these systems become true? Have they already and I'm just a knob?
We're seeing a lot of this in modern society. Social media, guns, politics . . . lots of areas where individual bad actors are overturning "social construction," norms, and trust because they can. Not realizing that a lot of those norms they're pissing all over are vital to having any kind of a society worth living in, which is why seeing them brazenly violated freaks a lot of people TF out. I don't want to live in the ultimate low-trust society because it seems it'd suck for any number of crappy reasons.
Why not have systems be as resilient and robust as possible though? For example, with the implementation of crypto, now you can massively lower trust necessary for finance to function.
That doesn't mean we purposely try to lower trust. But in the rare event it happens, I feel like it's a good safeguard. Strong foundations in many ways can often enable greater trust too I think.
Why are you talking about cryptocurrency as if it was a new technology? It's 15 years old now and it's already pretty clear that it's not very useful for ordinary people.
> Why not have systems be as resilient and robust as possible though?
Because walking around wearing medieval armors to protect from strangers randomly "punching, kicking, throwing a rock at another" would be so annoying.
> Given how immersed current generations are / have been in the adversarial landscape of the web, should we expect an uptick in the level of generalized adversarialism?
I'm really interested by this question. My initial thought is that most teens and young adults (like previous generations) aren't savvy about computer security and Student XYZ is the exception rather than the norm.
IME, the IRL adversarialism is driven by political/ religious fanaticism rather than a hacker mentality -- they're not tech savvy, they're just determined.
That said, the reality is often less important than the perception of reality, particularly _fear_. Businesses and government are reacting to fears which are outsized to the reality, like Terrorism and School Shootings. They're adopting an adversarial mindset as defenders, even in the absence of an uptick in generalized adversarialism.
To be fair, public transport often has similar issues. If a subway/train car is stuck, nothing else can get by on the same track and thousands of people could be delayed. It happens in NYC all the time. At least with the road system there are typically ways to get around stopped cars.
> The fact that a single car can even cause this much harm is a sign of a much larger problem: car centric transportation is NOT scalable.
I don't particularly love US car culture, but this is an absurd take. A single broken-down train will block all trains behind it on the same track. Unexpected damage to a runway can choke an airport.
So are we to believe that the only "scalable" form of transportation is bicycles, because it's easy and fast to move a broken or crashed bicycle out of the right of way? Yeah, right.
“When intentionally broken, this transport doesn’t work. So it is not scalable.”
There are many ways to scale car-centric transportation that have been done successfully in countries other than the US. Public transit is one example.
Autonomous buses could solve a lot of the car issues in the US. Not if we keep putting cones in front of them though.
This is a shitty take. Guess how much harm a single derailed train can cause to the New York subway? Guess how much harm a single plane crashed on a runway causes?
Every form of mass transit suffers from single outsized impacts of failures.
When the Korean airline airplane crashed into the end of the SFO runway it disrupted 10s of thousands flying into the Bay Area.
My commute on the M&E line is often (~1/month) cancelled or delayed by normal every day things (tree fall, branches, etc). All trains into New York Penn from my line get stopped.
That’s stupid. You could park a golf cart on the train tracks and it would shut down all train transport for hours. You could cut out a piece of the rail very easily (with an angle grinder) and it would cause dozens of deaths and shut down the line for weeks.
The right course of action is to make messing with automated cars like this a crime just like it is with the railways.
Railways are a little different - for the most part (except at level crossings) they are operating on dedicated rights-of-way, and someone has to go out of their way to interfere with them.
A car on a public street is mixing it up with everyone else, and the dividing line for what constitutes "messing with" them is not clear at all. What if I wear a shirt that confuses their algorithms? Shine a light that does it? Drive, bike, or walk in a pattern that does it?
> ...the dividing line for what constitutes "messing with" them is not clear at all.
Putting cones out for no other purpose beyond stopping them moving seems to me unambiguously "messing with" them (though I don't think we need additional laws to address it.)
This is not wearing a shirt though. This is people deliberately causing disruptions by putting a traffic cone, universally recognized as a traffic warning, in front of the vehicles. A lot of regular people would think twice about what to do if they came back to their parked car with traffic cones around it.
In fact, there's a "prankster" operating in Poland right now, who is sending the "stop immediately" radio signal to trains. All trains receiving it will automatically start braking. They were able to stop 20+ trains yesterday. Also, when they're not sending that signal, they're broadcasting the Russian national anthem on the emergency braking radio frequency...
>Poland's national transportation agency has stated its intention to upgrade Poland's railway systems by 2025 to use almost exclusively GSM cellular radios, which do have encryption and authentication. But until then, it will continue to use the relatively unprotected VHF 150 MHz system that allows the “radio-stop” commands to be spoofed.
It would take only a few moments to weld a metal traffic cone to a train track. Focusing on the exact timing to disturb the mode of transit is not relevant. There are always optimizations.
> Also your linked video is splitting along the length of the rail instead of cutting directly across it which would take minutes if not seconds.
Watch how long it takes to cut the top of that rail. You must not have ever used an angle grinder before if you think you’re cutting train tracks in seconds.
It took me at least a minute to cut through a single leaf spring for a truck if not longer.
What’s your point though? You’re picking an arbitrary cutoff time based on what? The intention is still disruption.
Thirty minutes is nothing. We don’t classify severity of crimes based on how long they take to accomplish. A murder is a murder whether you shot a person once or spent hours carving them up.
I have used an angle grinder and it takes me about 10 seconds to cut through rebar. I would assume a rail is like 25 pieces of rebar put together so my naive assumption would be under five minutes.
There's a big difference in both material and size between rebar and rail track, but that's just an aside.
I believe the point being made is the difference in level of intent required and the known (or hoped for) outcome from the action.
Grabbing a traffic cone from a nearby construction zone and chucking it in front of an autonomous car at a traffic light is harmless to the health of everyone involved, but is a pain in the rear for many. Meanwhile, it makes a statement, and some chunk of everyone's annoyance gets directed at the autonomous car company.
On the other hand, cutting a section of railroad takes concerted effort and a lot of premeditation if the individual hopes to get away with it. More importantly - the person cutting the track hopes/expects to cause death and destruction.
The two actions are wildly different, and should be treated as such.
Some would view disabling the cars which are interfering with emergency services as “get that taken care of”, and attempts to roll out additional cars without fixing the bug as “intentionally make things worse”.
That’s completely fair. Let’s work on that, with the required many times increase in efficiency for public transportation to work in cities made for cars, instead of blocking traffic. One approach for the increase in efficiency is automation. I would like to know what their approach is. As this, and interviews have shown, they have no approach or real goal.
Protest is a political tool. If blocking traffic raises awareness (as it has done here) then I think that counts as working on it. We're not going to get cars off the road by writing letters to our senator or donating a few hundred dollars to a political campaign (we've been trying for decades). Maybe aggravating the general public into realizing the fragility and selfishness of the tech industry's "solution" will get people to reevaluate funding for public transportation. I doubt it, because I've become deeply cynical about human nature, but I also see that the roots of progress often comes from surprising places. Like refusing to ride at the back of the bus. Or dumping tea into a harbor. Or putting a traffic cone on a robot. Keep it simple, don't hurt anyone, make your point. We can argue about the efficacy of their tactics but at the end of the day they're trying something.
> protest against the city being used as a testing ground for this emerging technology.
What awareness are they raising, exactly? Are you/they suggesting that people in the Bay Area don't know that these driverless cars exist? Or is it that they're fragile/not complete yet? This is a genuine question, because I, obviously, don't understand.
I see this similar to someone laying in the road, blocking human drivers, and saying they're raising awareness of the fact that drivers can be blocking if someone put effort into blocking them. I don't get it. Help me.
From where I sit, there's a general perception that driverless cars ("tech") will reduce traffic accidents and fatalities and be an overall significant positive improvement in transportation (source: partner is lifer at city DOT and is pro-driverless cars). There's a corresponding trust that companies/process/regulations wouldn't allow the deployment of driverless vehicles unless they're a safe and mature technology. And a similar lack of understanding of how mature the technology actually is (given mainstream hype from Musk etc). So a demonstration that extreme anti-social behavior will currently result, not from edge-case conditions that would be dangerous even for a human to be driving in, but from a simple hack that literally any miscreant could pull off in seconds and successfully run away from without any risk to themselves, might be sufficient to raise awareness that we can't trust creators of these vehicles or the larger system to do adequate testing before deployment, and that in fact the vehicles are already deployed widely enough to inflict transportation blockages with a minimum of miscreants and effort by same.
> but from a simple hack that literally any miscreant could pull off in seconds and successfully run away from without any risk to themselves
Without any risk to themselves, or anyone else.
I don't think anyone will see this point of "not enough testing", when a car should not continue with a stop sign, road cone, or human on the hood, under any condition. I think most everyone will see this as expected and desired behavior, with a clear demonstration of safe handling of a dumb situation caused by some angry idiots.
Here's a question for anyone with this perspective: What should a fully tested, fully qualified, car do in this situation?
I see the "correct" answer as: immediately disable automation, and prompt a human for remote control.
What's your "correct" answer?
This is all opinion that could only be settled be a poll of those who became aware of this situation. I'm having trouble finding any, but this one from NY [1].
> Here's a question for anyone with this perspective: What should a fully tested, fully qualified, car do in this situation?
Okay, fine: it should deploy an embedded all-purpose maintenance drone to exit the vehicle and move the cone to a safe and out-of-the-way location.
It's a good thought experiment, and I think goes to show that we can't really have Level 5 Autonomous Vehicles without an embedded all-purpose maintenance drone. I mean the dream is for humanless robotaxis to drive themselves to their next fare, right? They shouldn't need a human to come out in order to remove a harmless 5-pound object. I mean how about any number of other things that might happen onto its hood? A plastic bag, or a half-eaten happy meal? These are routine urban annoyances that require 15 seconds of attention and an eyeroll at most.
They are very different grades of steel. Track is over twice the yield strength of rebar from your home center and through-hardened. Rebar is mild steel and can't be hardened (maybe case-hardened). It's the difference between cutting water and ice :-).
> And brag to their friends "I made a thousand people late for work!"
Seems like the protestors are not required for this to happen:
> The city’s transportation agencies documented several incidents where driverless cars disrupted Muni service. During the night of Sept. 23, five Cruise cars blocked traffic lanes on Mission Street in Bernal Heights, stalling a Muni bus for 45 minutes. On at least three different occasions, Cruise cars stopped on Muni light-rail tracks, halting service.
Meanwhile, these additional things are happening:
> San Francisco firefighters were battling a two-alarm apartment blaze on the corner of Hayes and Divisadero streets during a recent Sunday morning when a driverless Cruise car entered the active firefighting scene and nearly ran over fire hoses on the street.
> Firefighters at the scene stood in front of the car to try to get it to stop, but the autonomous vehicle came to a halt only after one of them smashed the Cruise car’s front window amid the chaotic effort to put out a fire that displaced 25 people, according to city transportation officials.
> A Cruise vehicle came to a stop after nearly colliding with a Muni N-Judah train at the intersection of Carl and Cole streets. The Cruise car blocked light-rail tracks in both directions for close to seven minutes.
> A passenger in a driverless Cruise vehicle suffered injuries on Thursday after the vehicle was struck by a San Francisco fire truck that was responding to an emergency call.
> Now, the California Department of Motor Vehicles has requested the autonomous vehicle company cut its San Francisco fleet in half, following this latest incident. Cruise told KTVU the company will comply with that request.
There have been three human-driven car crashes on my busy street within a 10 second walk from my front door just in the last year. A multi car collision woke me up last night at 4 am. All three crashes completely closed the road for several hours. I've even seen a human driver trying to outrun the police, ignoring their instructions to stop.
Clearly, the rollout of human drivers isn't working and we should start blocking roads until the government bans them.
Let me know how that works out over the next 5-10 days, after the food runs out, and you realize you can’t get food, or even hope to flee your urban anarcho-hellscape after the train system fails for lack of maintenance workers or parts.
There are a whole lot more human driven vehicles on the streets than autonomous.
For how small these autonomous fleets are we shouldn't be hearing about any such events if they were actually superior to human drivers. This tech clearly isn't ready, and the cities they're operating in are being used as training grounds while putting everyone there at risk.
Unless the public and media is biased and swayed by hysteria. But of course it can’t be exaggerated, just like terrorism, child kidnapping and the threat of white techies getting murdered by street people.
Cruise has been in my hood for years. I’ll take them anyday over humans.
It used to be fairly common that some idiot would drive their car into a Muni tunnel and put that part of the system out of service for hours. For some reason I haven't heard of something like that in quite a few years, though.
I have my issues with this "live testing" that Cruise et al. are doing, but let's not pretend that these sorts of things are any worse than what human drivers have done, and continue to do.
Being inconvenienced by a protest is your responsibility as a citizen of a democratic republic. If you don’t engage with democracy, democracy engages with you.
I won't be held hostage by asocial freaks who piss and moan when they don't get their way. Let's democratic republic these people into the prison they so yearn for, you may join them if you want.
What is the point of peaceful assembly if not to protest something?
If you're counting peaceful assembly as a tool of democracy, you might as well be saying peaceful protest, of which merely blocking traffic is included, since inconveniencing people is not violent.
There are many cases of people dying from blocked emergency vehicles, with these sort of obstructions.
I’m certain if you were in an ambulance, dying if a heart attack, you would look out your window to see the non violent protest, give a thumbs up, easily make peace with leaving you family behind, and breathe your last breath with a smile, knowing you were part of “democracy”.
My point was that it was peaceful/non-violent. Again, obstructing traffic is not violent. If people die because emergency vehicles couldn't pass, that still isn't violent.
Cool scenario, they have trolleys and switches in SF too. Do you feel the same about people driving to work who cause ordinary traffic that happens to cause an ambulance to arrive too late? Breathe your last breath with a smile, knowing you were part of “capitalism.”
> Protests are not democracy. Voting, freedom of speech, and peaceful assembly, sure, in the US at least.
If not "peaceful assembly", how are you defining "protests"?
Stopping a lawful vehicle with a traffic cone isn't protest. Harassment is not protest. Vandalism is not protest. Halting traffic for 60 seconds might be protest; halting traffic for 60 minutes definitely isn't.
Even civil disobedience, where someone deliberately violates the law, is predicated on being _peaceful_. (And IMO also on the willingness, if not the desire, to accept the legal consequences.)
IMO, media outlets have pushed this idea that violence is protest, but that's pretty new (and of course limited to issues where they agree).
The point of the protests is to bring attention to the fact corps are running dangerous automated vehicles into the middle of active fire scenes and stuff. Were you aware of that without the protests? Maybe they work.
One could argue it's utilizing a set of free people to create a Chaos Monkey-esque environment to train cars.
This increases resilience and speeds up the timeline for driverless cars. Which of course decreases alcohol-related fatalities.
It's that last part that is tough to argue against.
Of course, there is the stress of creating an identity politics cultural clash in a city of millions. These are people who we now face on an incredible divide. It takes work, and it costs stress, to bridge that.
Over two decades ago, after the first dot-com crash, I remember one of the last statements from a SF resident before I left. That it was my fault, or the people like me, that the city ended up the way it did. That stung. A lot.
But, you cant argue we're not saving lives from drunk drivers. That's something that will help on both coasts and the middle.
I think this particular protest is counterproductive. AVs will make public transit work a lot better and reduce traffic, make pedestrians safer, etc. But protest isn't meant to be convenient.
> AVs will make public transit work a lot better and reduce traffic, make pedestrians safer, etc
Highly doubt it.
1. if you have a regular car you get from point A to B, park, do sth, go from B to A. If you use AV it has to go from point X to A, take you to B, go do sth else at Y, you do your thing, it has to go back from Z to B and take you to A. Instead of using the road from A to B and back you're using the road from X to A, from A to B and back and from Z to B (going from B to Y counts for the other customer so I don't add it). It uses road LONGER per passanger - so traffic will be WORSE and it will use MORE fuel. It will save some parking space tho.
Basicaly AVs (and taxis/ubers etc.) trade parking space for road space and fuel. You can't reduce traffic by driving more :)
2. it will only make pedestrians safer if it drives conservatively, but from what I've seen by AV advocacy is people want AV cars to interface with each other and use that to cut the safety margin for efficiency. That's an inherently American idea that assumes people don't walk so you can just change cars and everything will be fine :)
It would make pedestrians inherently less safe (because AVs become a train basically - you cannot suddenly stop 1 AV because other are behind it and they assume it won't suddenly stop).
If you want a city in which every street is effectively a rail track and every pedestrian crossing is a train crossing with all the disruption to pedestrians and others - do this. Otherwise just use public transport and bikes, please - all the benefits and more, for fraction of cost, and it's healthier. Moving individual people in huge cars just doesn't scale, no matter who drives them.
As someone who lives far enough out of the nearest major city that I don't really pop in casually for a meal or drink. (It's very doable but I end up being on the road for a good two hours total around whatever activity I'm doing.)
An AV wouldn't be free to travel that distance but I would absolutely do that and other activities requiring 1+ hour drives each way more frequently if I didn't need to do the driving myself.
I lived in a small village 40 minutes from a big city half my life. There are buses going every 30 minutes each way between around 06:00 and 20:00. They cost under 1 USD per trip. Lots of people use them - kids going to schools, people commuting for work, grandmas who don't have driving licence. I probably used them over 1000 times through my life.
That city isn't even that big - 350 000 people. And the buses are profitable. Why can't cities over million people afford public transport is beyond me.
BTW notice how old people who can't drive still might want to go to a cinema/theater/doctor/whatever without asking their family or paying for a taxi. It's a huge benefit to everybody that these buses are available. I doubt you can get AV profitable transporting 1 person where buses transport 10-20 people.
Public transit has been run at barebone levels in the US for so long that hardly anyone even thinks of it as something that should, or even can, function well. For a route in my city, a 14 minute drive in a car is 83 minutes on public transit. The three buses come every 30 minutes, 40 minutes, and 60 minutes respectively. There are no bus lanes, because drivers are a powerful and greedy constituency. There's no political will to convert one lane on each road to bus-only, to add traffic signal prioritization, or to buy enough buses and hire enough drivers to have 10-15 minute headways.
Even if we did, we're fighting uphill against 70 years of suburbanization and the general pattern of very sparse and sprawling development. The level of taxation necessary to make transit work well in many areas would be far more than is politically feasible. Plus there's the perception of public transit being dangerous, for criminals and drug addicts, etc.
The only public transit option for me is commuter rail which would require me to drive to and park at the (relatively) nearby station. (I'm well outside the city's local bus and subway transit system.) It takes 60-90 minutes to go the 50 miles depending upon whether I need to connect to the subway at my destination or not. It runs no more frequently than hourly and the last couple of trains at night are more like 90+ minutes apart. It's utterly impractical to take in for an evening event.
(And it's about $30 round-trip with parking; I do take it in the rare times when I'm going in for the day to work because driving in and back at rush hour is awful.)
The commuter rail is "fine" but its schedule doesn't really work outside of commuting hours--and even that is significantly worse than pre-COVID.
Yeah for me it was like 500 meter walk to the bus stop :) And bus stops were every 2 km or so :)
I'm wondering why there are no such buses where you live? It it a matter of population density, different road network architecture (here most villages are build along the roads so you can put bus stops every 1-2 km and you'll get enoguh passangers to get by), or just a chicken-and-egg problem of customers not being used to it so it's not profitable if you create it?
There is a small regional transit system that covers the grocery store, Walmart, train station, and I'm not sure what else. My sense from seeing it at the grocery store is that it's mostly for seniors and others who can't drive. It covers the nearby ~40K population pair of cities.
The surrounding towns--one of which I live in--are pretty rural, or at least exurban, with a very limited commercial tax base and generally don't even have sidewalks outside of the town centers. We'd have neither the density/demand or the budget to have a public transit system.
Comparing your experience of the service for ~40k people vs an urban setting intended to serve ~400k people or more seems at least irrelevant and at most intentionally misleading.
That sounds pretty accurate for most of the country which isn't in an ultra high COL area.[0] One doesn't "just" take public transit to a city center from most of America.
[0] Which can be fairly accurately described as regions within an acceptable commute of the aforementioned centers. (Or non city job centers a la silicon valley).
Do they? Or is it the only game in town because of decisions made sixty years ago and housing pressures and cost structures mean that if you want to live at an affordable level in that area a car is functionally required?
I live where I live specifically because I dont want density or a bunch of public transport options. Financially I could afford to move 25 miles and be in areas that are more walkable with public transportation but the downsides (crime, homeless, traffic, crowds, smaller living spaces, privacy concerns) outweigh the benefits for me and my family.
Those decision made 60 years ago was buying cars and moving out of the dense cities into car-oriented housing. Then they continued to move more and more into car oriented housing and voting for more car oriented housing. It's not like suburbs just appeared one day against everyone's wishes.
I'm not suggesting it's the only choice, or it being a good choice, or anything like that. I'm just pushing back against the narrative that people didn't freely choose this. Popularly elected leaders chose the city planning. Local elections and people leaving the cities by choice created the suburbs. If most the people in the cities wanted the change it would happen.
And hey look, you're doing it too. "Zoning laws" just magically happened with zero input and somehow radically changed the world without anyone noticing. How did the zoning laws get there? Popularly elected people chosen by the people who live there who made it happen year over year over year. If people didn't like the zoning, they'd vote to change it. That's how it happened in the Netherlands, people elected people who wanted the change.
It was a mess of utopian central planning, good intentions, private capture, bad science, corruption, bad incentives, and never looking back and fixing it. At very few points did people had a say in how this turned out.
> At very few points did people had a say in how this turned out.
This is an incorrect take from this though. Those parking minimums coud be changed tomorrow. They could have been changed any time these last 60 years. It doesn't take a federal constitutional amendment. It doesn't take 60 votes in the US senate. Those parking minimums and car centric developments continue to be policy because people continue choosing it. Local elections don't take that many votes to swing! Lots of positions run unopposed every year! They didn't change because the people there didn't care to change it.
Acting like zoning laws are something people can't change and that people don't want is to ignore reality. Zoning laws exist because people choose to have them!
I'm all for cities removing parking minimums. They're often really bad policy. I agree with a lot of things pushed by NotJustBikes and StrongTowns and what not. But acting like nobody wants these policies just isn't reality. Go see the town halls full of people complaing against density, complaining against bike lanes, complaining against transit, complaining against traffic soothing and then tell me nobody wants zoning laws.
> Those parking minimums and car centric developments continue to be policy because people continue choosing it
This is unambiguously true, but at the same time it's not an answer. There's a deeper problem here that I don't think you can dismiss with "well, people vote for it". Yeah. And people voted for redlining, and people voted for school segregation.
It is very hard not to see (growing up in such places and visiting occasionally still) a deep-seated kind of racism driving a whole lot of that separation, much more than "I want cars". You see elsewhere in the thread the predictable dog-whistles of "crime"--but rural crime is prevalent, too! It's just crime perpetuated by...well...people who look like those worried about crime. You see right-wing influencers on YouTube getting strapped to go to cities or even to Subway restaurants and it's not because of actual incidents--one's more likely to commit suicide with a firearm than to have to "defend oneself". It's just saying the quiet part loud.
At some point we're going to need a societal unfucking, and this is symptomatic (but not causative) of why we need it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to be dismissive as a "well, people vote for it" kind of way. I'm just trying to point out its not just that these things appeared or happened without the majority's consent which is what people seem to continue to suggest over and over. These policies exist because they're popular at least with those who actually get out and vote in local elections, that's all I'm trying to say. And we won't successfully get rid of these policies in a lot of the country until we change the culture, which is challenging.
I definitely agree that there's strong overlaps with those demanding far flung remote suburbs, car-centric infrastructure, gun culture, and right-wing ideology. These people want their castles and their tanks to drive around. I do agree this is probably an overall unhealthy culture for our society and do vote against it. In those town halls people argue against densification because "the wrong people" will come into their town, that adding busses will only lead to increased crime rates, etc. I continue to proselytize to those around me about better transit, traffic soothing, right-sizing vehicle choices with realistic needs, pushing for sensible densification, better mixing of zoning, etc. and continue voting for policies to move the needle.
They are strictly private enterprises and aren't subsidized. There was a national transport company that was subsidized, but it was slowly losing customers after communism fell in 1989 because it was inflexible and used big 40-person buses instead of small 20-person vans on every route. Now the national one was privatized and only runs very few long-distance routes in some parts of the country, most routes are handled by small companies that have a few vans each.
The city buses going inside the big cities are centralized and often subsidized tho.
> School Busses, not public transport,
School buses are a form of public transport, we have them too, but kids go to various schools - some to the nearest one, some to a bigger city further away (I commuted to a primary school 5 km away and then high school 40 minutes away - and mostly used regular buses) - it wouldn't make sense to restrict these buses to kids only and then have separate buses for other people. Why drive 10 people when you have 20 seats and enough potential customers to fill them?
> Nope, never. I prefer not to spat on, robbed, or other ways harassed.
Why is this accepted? If people spit at others in a mall or a cinema would you just accept that it's a thing, or would the society do sth to stop it? It's not rocket science - the driver just has to call police and drive to meet them at nearest stop. In 90s we had huge problems with crime (20% unemployment at one point so you can imagine) yet public transport wasn't any less safe than a mall or cinema - what was unsafe was walking in the wrong hood after dark ;)
>>They are strictly private enterprises and aren't subsidized.
I guess this is a deviation of definition, "public transport" in the US is government run, regulated, and subsidized by government. There are no private "public transport" in the form of local buses, trains, etc. They are either quasi government run (amtrak) or directly government run "Transportation Authority" often run by city or state governments.
Airlines are private though at this point HEAVILY subsidized as most airports are government run, and they get bailouts all the time...
I can not think of a single mass transportation system in the US that is not either directly owned by the government or HEAVILY subsidized by government
>There are no private "public transport" in the form of local buses, trains, etc.
That isn't strictly true. A number of (predominantly ethnic minority) communities are served by entirely privately-operated bus services, created mainly to fill gaps in publicly-subsidised services.
None of the universities with in a 100 mi of me have their own shuttle busses, they all utilize the local City Owned public buses they do not have their own bus network. they might rent some during a sporting event but it not "public transport" it would be ticketed event holders... Further almost if not all of the universities are "public" and should be consider quasi government as they have their own police dept's, and are heavily subsidized by the government
>>shuttles to industrial parks, megachurch parking shuttles, theme park transit.
none of these are public transportation, they may be "mass transportation" but they are not generally open to the general public, they are for the use of people going to or in those private properties, further most do not even travel on the public road system or pickup from "public" places, they are moving people from parking lots to entrances.
The state university I grew up near in NYS was serviced by a private bus system for more than a decade. I don't remember much about it other than the busses being painted blue and being full of college students.
AV cars could be programmed to never stop in bike lanes or bus lanes or do anything else to disrupt transit. They could automatically get out of the way of buses. AV buses and AV cars could coordinate to move people around faster making the public transit more efficient. And all the emotional stress and conflict between buses and cars could be eliminated.
> AVs will make public transit work a lot better and reduce traffic
Or will reduce use of public transit & make traffic worse because the negative effects of traffic will be less felt & the cost of private transit via an AV will be lower
No, AVs will increase traffic. The only thing that holds traffic back from yet another explosion is that it requires a licensed driver to operate a vehicle. If that requirement goes away there will be much more traffic than there is today. Kids, packages, empty cars sent from one spouse to another...
> AVs will make public transit work a lot better and reduce traffic
AV adoption will probably be comparable to the effect of Uber. It'll create more traffic on the roads at the expense of gutting the public transit infrastructure and probably create significantly problems than it solves.
Once cars can drive themselves, parking lots no longer need to surround businesses since everyone will have a free valet that can drop you off and park your car in a distant lot. The parking lot surrounding the business can be redeveloped into more commercial or residential space. Ironically, self-driving cars may make commercial areas denser and more walkable.
The parking lots for self-driving vehicles can also be significantly more dense than lots for normal vehicles. Current parking lots must reserve half the overall lot for aisles, since every car must be able to leave without any other vehicle moving. A parking lot for autonomous vehicles won't be limited by that restriction and can achieve a higher utilization of the space by filling the aisles with more vehicles.
However, some people will probably decide to commute much longer distances when they no longer need to drive themselves and residential areas will probably end up sprawling even more than they do already.
Car ownership in the US today is really high (recently was over 90% [1])
Why would 90% of people forego paying approximately $1~$5 to travel a dozen miles in their already payed for car vs paying a taxi-cab like fare for an AV? I'm not sure how much it costs to go 10 miles in an AV taxi, but I'm guessing it's $20-$30.
The effect of AVs with respect to strip malls and commercial spaces seems like it'll be a pretty low traffic flow.
Asked another way, how many people take conventional taxis (being Uber/Lyft, or a legit taxi) today to go such places? It seems like the prices are similar, why then would the lack of a human driver make an AV taxi that much more attractive (like, to the point where the 90% of car owners decided to stop driving their own car, which is far cheaper - and then this pattern plays out for long enough that the parking lot situation changes!
Nothing I described requires giving up ownership of the vehicle. All that is needed is for it to be able to navigate to and from the parking lot by itself, and to move spots when requested by the parking lot's computer.
There are sharp limits on the development you're describing. Cars still need to be parked nearby because nobody wants to have to wait for 40 minutes, or 15 minutes, for their car to come get them after they've decided they're done shopping.
If everyone keeps their private vehicle, and that is still at over 90%, why would any part of society change due to AI cars? The parent post described a situation where strip malls would be redone in the image of AI cars. I'm not sure how that happens when the future continues to be like the present with overwhelming majorities owning a personal car.
The US car fleet is also unusually old. If transit worked better, using AVs or not, it's a pretty good hypothesis that people keeping old cars on the road would find using better transit saves them money.
The goal of AVs is to undermine high-density public transportation in favor of privately owned low-density transportation. The approach is to beta-test murder-capable robots amid unwilling living humans. That will neither reduce traffic nor make pedestrians safer.
Counterpoint: pedestrians may be made safer by blockading the roads with unwitting AVs.
AVs, like Uber, will give the affluent class in cities an alternative to public transit (and inconvenient personal car ownership), thereby reducing the pressure from this politically influential segment of society to keep mass transit clean and safe, and with good schedules and routes. Mass transit quality drops to the detriment of the majority, further reinforcing the affluent class's reliance on cars, creating a vicious cycle of destruction.
? The size of the pipe does not change, the substance in it does not get much more denser or faster.. I just don't see it. Maybe in combination with a turn towards public transport as ride & drive..
Sure and so is speeding, double parking, not stopping at stop signs and failing to signal, but the cars still have to deal with that.
I'm not condoning the protestors but failure to deal with this (and other similar things... Minor mechanical trouble, birds shitting on sensors, brushing snow off windshield) is a real problem for autonomous cars.
One of the four commissioners (John Reynolds) of the California Public Utilities Commission who voted to approve the expansion previously worked at Cruise [1]. I'm not sure about the others' backgrounds, but that's already 25% of the vote with a conflict of interest.
Usually it goes the other way: being on the board and then being given a position at Cruise. Having worked for a company in the past doesn't mean you like the company or will be soft on them. In fact, many people hate their former employers. So without anything further than "they used to work at a big company in San Francisco", it doesn't seem like a conflict of interest to me.
Does anyone have good numbers for, say, deaths per mile driven in urban environments, and for the number of miles driven by driverless cars?
The article says:
"Both Cruise and Waymo say their vehicles are far safer than human drivers and compared to humans they've had relatively few incidents. They say they've driven millions of driverless miles without any human fatalities or life-threatening injuries."
which is about all the detail I've seen since Tesla's sketchy press release a few years back.
Here's the deal: California has 1.4 deaths per 100,000,000 vehicle miles traveled; "millions of miles" is a drop in the statistical bucket. But on the other hand, that's California overall while the autonomous vehicles are largely in urban areas, right?
The article claims, between Cruise and Waymo, there are roughly 300 AVs. If they average 30mph, that's 9000 miles per hour or 80M miles per year. That would be about 1 expected death per year, assuming the California statistics.
I suspect if they wanted, Cruise and Waymo could easily have their fleet shuttle back and forth from SF to LA to just rack up miles, but exactly nobody would be impressed. A huge percentage of accidents occur around intersections, and intersections are rare on the longest stretches of road.
I wish it was possible to measure safety as incidents per stops. That is, the number of accidents that occur per number of times the vehicle comes to a full stop. It's not perfect but it gives another good signal.
Egads that would be something - cars slamming on their brakes going 25 in the city and then blocking traffic is one thing.
now imagine it happens at 70 mph on i5 because a tumble weed blows by, of which I’ve seen plenty, and it takes the company 3 hours for the driver to get out there. Or similar for the usual construction temp lane closer.
There’s a reason they don’t test on I-5 with their current tech.
I don't think there's enough public data to make a good comparison on safety. Only the companies and presumably the NTSB have that data.
As you mentioned, an apples-to-apples comparison is hard. The type of driving (urban vs freeway), the location, the weather conditions, even the times of day they drive could all bias accident rates.
In sf you rarely hit 30mph unless all you do is the highway and the bridges. Otherwise speed limit is often 25 and these cruise and way nos drive on the safe side, so their average is probably in the tens of mph
30mph across the entire fleet, 24x7? I don't live in a city with them but that sounds optimistic. 30mph seems like a decent average in a big city when you're on the move. Add stops to recharge, pick and drop fares, maintenance, and down time between fares, I'd not be surprised if it was half that or less.
(Note: news orgs don't want to send you outside their site, so no links for you on NPR, etc.)
I think it would be fair to say this is a climate emergency response group, to protest getting personal transit off the roads, and start re-wilding millions of square kilometers of asphalt.
> I think it would be fair to say this is a climate emergency response group, to protest getting personal transit off the roads, and start re-wilding millions of square kilometers of asphalt.
I think it would be fair to say these are self aggrandizing idiots with delusions of grandeur.
They seem like a bunch of zealots, in particular, I find this amusing "We're proud to stand with the San Francisco Taxi Workers Alliance" I'm confused, are you pro cars or anti cars?
In a culture of overweight lonely youth lacking good public transportation and beautiful safe walkable cities, the future is at-cost privately owned driverless soulless cars and even more car focused ugly cities. I can understand why they protest. It will likely happen one way or another and could be good for some use cases but I'd rather find more community based methods that are better for the person and the environment. Soon you'll never need to see anyone for anything if not already. It will be easier to avoid the ugly.
....
Good for the young folks to push back. I remember San Francisco as a scary place, the streets of the poor and homeless had long stretches of dark zombie like people waiting. Just waiting around. At night they would make mini markets casting out ratty clothes hoping someone might pay them or perhaps trade for a shirt or pair of pants found from who knows where, just piles and piles of clothes of no value but to I suppose those who could find it. People who took shelter in whatever was left of a decayed community. Even in my area, a safe uppity hotel while I visited this area for work, I saw them sleep in strange phone booths, barely realizing someone was there but for the light not getting through the door crack. The hidden people locked away. I wonder how many more I never noticed. And at night many floors up you could still hear sometimes someone cry for help echoing out. I'm not really a fan of the city, but there were a few cozy areas well lit with strings of lights and rich expensive meals with street sitting made to take up space. They wanted the streets for themselves. Plants added a cozy factor and so many more trees were found there and the feeling of peace with the people dining and drinking under the cloudy night quietly enjoying the evening. What a strange contrast.
I had to get an uber driver for the bad areas and everyone was scared for me when I went walking by myself at night to go home on one of my trips. I still often would walk though, as perhaps a stupid act of defiance but I really wasn't all that far from my hotel. I remember forgetting a toothbrush once and finding them locked up at Walgreens and had to get help to purchase it. Prized item it was. One day we may even fear walking in the day. We don't know who lives by us, these unknown leftover Americans.
I don't think this will be very effective in the long run as a way to stop driverless cars, which promise to help all kinds of people currently unable or unwilling to drive to get around.
Likely Scenario:
The driver behind notices the driverless car is immobilized by the traffic cone.
They get out, remove the traffic cone, get back in their car and then they and the driverless car go on their way.
Sounds alot easier than helping push a broken down human driven car out of the way.
From recent headlines, it sounds like people are protesting the fact their city is being used as an alpha testing site and causing a nuisance.
I don't think its necessarily in protest of the technology in general, but the irresponsible way these things are let loose on the road without a person there to get it out of the way when it gridlocks.
Its an issue that can be solved by spending relatively little money on a test driver's salary that they're purposefully avoiding to save money and avoid responsibility.
As much as I endure the spirit of these cars helping people, San Francisco is not the place to test this.
I realize Cruise started in SF and they want that SF startup vibe for hiring, but SF was not designed for this.
Test the cars elsewhere in suburbia and leave densely populated, narrow streets for later conquests.
Larger cities with wider roads are better suited. Once the reputation of the cars being successful, it’ll work it’s way into denser areas like SF and NYC.
SF has a hair on fire need for this sort of solution because practically no apartments come with parking spots, there’s nowhere to park even if you had a car, car break-ins are ubiquitous and public transportation is horrific unless you happen to live along a few convenient lines. Ergo Uber and now Cruise.
You don’t need Cruise in the suburbs, everybody has a car and parking is convenient.
On other hand if the Cruise is located in SF it is entirely just not to externalise testing. If people don't like them they are free to go front of their office and protest.
> "We thought that putting cones on these [driverless cars] was a funny image that could captivate people," says one organizer. "One of these self-driving cars with billions of dollars of venture capital investment money and R&D, just being disabled by a common traffic cone."
So basically they're just idiots. Yes, deliberate sabotage does have a way of messing things up, no matter how much money something is worth / has been spent. If you stab a billionaire they bleed, just like the common folk!
When asked what their act of protest was against, they said "cars in general." They're very anti-car and, although they acknowledge that self-driving cars will be much safer in the long term and could transform a world full of wasteful single-car ownership, they are adamant that cars shouldn't exist.
Yes, they're in their 20s and enjoy riding their bikes in San Francisco.
They argue for "public transit, walking and bikes" according to their website. Bikes are mainly how they choose to protest, but they want accessible public transit. Your last sentence is phrased like a "gotcha" but seems like a disingenuous way to say that young members of the community are organizing over this cause.
Or maybe would be disingenuous to think that public transport would cover for all places a car today can go. The world is not only made of urban sprawl.
Self driving cars will lower the costs of having a roaming fleet out looking for fares down to near zero. It will be disastrous for cities in terms of congestion and emissions.
Why would they have to roam?
In a country like Switzerland where public transportation is ubiquitous in a lot of cases buses cannot be the answer because density or usage (for instance during the night) is too low. On demand bus are costly and rather ineffective, so there is no question that on demand car will meet an important need.
Just rode SF public transit from airport and there was human urine on the floor. It’s anecdotal, but still … ew. Public transit only works when done right.
Because they’re asking for more access to public transit, reconsidering the US car culture, and improving quality of life in the city in general? Less cars means less pollution, less noise, less traffic, better health, more livable districts… How is that idiotic?
And driverless cars, if they are allowed to be developed, will eventually be public transit that takes you from door-to-door running 24/7, way, way better than any train or bus.
Being autonomous does not change the fact that a car weighs 1000kg and occupies about 10sqm, just to move a single 70kg person. Or even no one at all, since they are autonomous.
It's a gigantic waste of space and energy.
In this regard, it is in no way comparable to trains, buses etc.
Except there’s an obvious failure of the market when the true cost of something is not borne by the producer or the consumer. Negative externalities lead to an overproduction and overconsumption of goods or services because the market price does not reflect the true social costs. Which can have detrimental effects on society and the environment. Not to mention the misallocation of resources that one day we may well bitterly regret.
The cost is not bourne entirely by the driver though, that is why it riles people up I think. Taxes subsidize all the infrastructure for cars, even if the taxee doesn't drive, yet it isn't a service for everyone. It also vastly degrades the usage of the space for everyone else. The fact thst the city stinks, is loud, hard to get around and real estate is more expensive can all be linked to impact of cars.
I think people would hate on cars less if there was a fair focus on other infrastructure as well. We could have the best of both worlds.
I love the freedom to drive but I would rather we all have freedom of movement with mass transit and cleaner, quieter cities.
> Taxes subsidize all the infrastructure for cars, even if the taxee doesn't drive, yet it isn't a service for everyone.
Gasoline taxes pay for a lot of road infrastructure; except for people buying gasoline for their lawn mowers and leaf blowers (not applicable in California), the taxes are being paid by folks using the infrastructure.
If no one in the household drives, they likely use taxis and delivery services, both of which depend upon road infrastructure.
I've never heard of a government bus service which paid for the general (not segregated) road infrastructure they use; if some do, I'd love to be corrected.
And bicyclists also use general road infrastructure.
Roads are broadly used by the people. Why shouldn't the people broadly pay for it?
You missed my point I think, which was mostly the below.
> I think people would hate on cars less if there was a fair focus on other infrastructure as well. We could have the best of both worlds.
It's fine that we all pay for it, it would just be nice if that's not all we paid for. It would also be nice to slide the balance toward pedestrian focus once you get into CBDs and once you get to residential areas. You still need roads, absolutely, but we should do better at matching the roads to their spaces.
> And bicyclists also use general road infrastructure
This is more of an aside to be honest, but cyclists don't want to be on the road as much as drivers don't want them to be. Added bike lanes are a compromise, no one wants them, they get people mad, they get people killed. Separated bikelines is one of those "other infrastructure" pieces, which can be built next to mass transit lines for cost efficiency, everyone would prefer that.
Just for a comparison of efficiency: The M10 Tram in Berlin runs every 5 minutes during daytime, each car with a capacity of around 300 passengers. That’s equivalent to roughly a kilometer of cars, parked end to end with no space in between.
It’s usually pretty full in the M10. I don’t get the comparison with the total length of the track - you could compare with the length of a tram, which would be 50 meters.
More like 1700kg, trending heavier each year. Bigger is safer until everyone is the same size, pedestrians are literally losing that battle. Death tolls are up in city centres, some cities are considering taxing SUVs/high GMV commuters that enter the city.
I can almost guarantee it was raised by someone back then. That’s a strange claim to make. Even just dealing with the poo was a logistical nightmare for a city!
> Just because all roads lead to Rome doesn’t mean you can get in — at least not on wheels. During Julius Caesar’s reign, daytime access to the Eternal City was restricted, with travelers required to hitch their carriages outside the city gates.
According to the International Energy Agency, cars emit between 57 and 322 gCO2-eq/pkm—compared to buses at just 22-92 gCO2-eq/pkm, and trains at 6-118 gCO2-eq/pkm. That metric meaning “grams of carbon dioxide-equivalent per passenger-kilometer”. They are also just massively safer to ride.
So driverless busses would probably be a better outcome than driverless taxis. Does a driverless electric bus fall under "any bus"? This group targets individual transport systems like robotaxis, and similar developments in the field of public transit would probably not be targeted by this group as such.
And there will be hundreds of them on the road at any one time, empty vehicles idling behind one another because the company decided that was the "safest speed" to maximise their profits, taking up the roadways to hinder much more efficient public transit, and slowing everything right down. The companies will then likely pay off the city to let them use mass transit lanes, or to allow them some priority over other drivers. If you think this is hyperbole, consider Netflix's great win in the Net Neutrality fight.
They also point out that these automated cars, if they end up actually working right, make zero effort to be handicap accessible, unlike existing and currently working public transit (which also happens to be delayed and hampered by these same semi functional, automated cars)
You'd have a fleet of driverless cars driving around the city and summon one with an app. With no drivers they would only need to stop to recharge/refuel and for maintenance.
If you can automate a car, you can automate a handicap accessible van. Just because they haven't yet doesn't mean they wouldn't.
Public transit is great, but it means you have to go to a specific stop and wait there, and then go from wherever you get dropped off to your final destination, which is probably not the bus stop / train station. That's not very handicap-accessible, since it often means navigating escalators / elevators that end up being broken half the time.
These cars would be privately owned and follow the whims of shareholders. We all know how well that goes.
These issues with public transit are correctable. Stops could be added in between, infrastructure made more accessible… Handicap accessibility is a mandate for public transit. For a private car fleet, it’s an afterthought and token gesture.
Also, the public transit network is already there and works. Why not invest in that instead while also encouraging active Mobility by walking or cycling instead of more cars?
I still fail to see how what they’re demanding is idiotic. You might not agree with it, or it might make you uncomfortable about your transportation choices, but it’s the opposite of idiotic.
> These cars would be privately owned and follow the whims of shareholders. We all know how well that goes.
The state can easily legislate that fleets of self-driving cars needs to have x% of their cars be wheelchair-accessible, just as it has legislated that the newly built buildings (public or private) need to be wheelchair accessible.
If it were simply "add more stops" or "add more trains/busses", then it would have been done a long time ago. The calculus there is much more complex and you are hand-waving away those issues.
What is stopping the city from buying and operating driverless cars? Their money is just as good and I'm sure the companies selling the cars would be happy to sell to them. Oh, the only thing stopping them are "activists" who demand inferior solutions to transit.
The public transit network is "there" in some places, and kind of works. If you happen to live near a stop and your schedule allows you enough time to wait for a bus / train to arrive, then sure. If you don't live in one of those places then you're SOL. Good luck waiting for the city to add a new train line. It took NYC over 100 years to build the second avenue line...
Meanwhile the infrastructure for cars is there, and actually does work and goes from point-to-point from almost every single residence / place of business in the entire country.
> What's stopping the city from buying and operating driverless cars?
Cost and inefficiency? The city should invest in and expand access to efficient public transit, not spend money on expensive multi-ton vehicles that can move one fare at a time. The solution to "some people live far from bus stops" should first be "local government adds more bus stops", not "local government spends billions on small cars."
There is no way that a city could have enough bus stops and routes to service most sprawling American cities. This is especially true when you consider that a sizable portion of the population wouldn’t be caught dead on a bus. Building more routes and stops might work in dense cities but is not a one size fits all solution.
> a sizable portion of the population wouldn’t be caught dead on a bus.
Yep that’s another part of the problem. Easy answer is for official to through their hands up and make way for more individual cars rather than addressing the root problem and do the hard work of making public transit attractive.
I’m in Switzerland at the moment for example, a large chunk of people don’t own cars, you can go by train and bus everywhere (literally, I can go across the country on one ticket, go to ski by train, or to the top of mountains by train and mountain trains), and the bus isn’t the social stigma it is in the US.
There is no reason why the Us can’t get their act together and do the same thing other than lack of will to do so. Instead, you have multilevel 12 lanes freeway monstrosities and insane traffic.
Spoken like someone that lives in a high-density area. Switzerland is 223 per Km2 while the US is 37 per Km2. In the EU, only Finland, Sweden, Latvia, and Estonia have a lower population density. There average across the EU is 109.56 per Km2. GB is 280 per Km2.
Solutions to transportation in the US need to factor in the density and account for the low-density areas as well. Politically, those low-density regions are, IME, the ones most likely to fight against changes that would move towards mass-transit because they feel like they are being ignored.
Beyond that, SDVs and Mass-transit aren't at opposition. Busses can and should be SDVs as well. As mentioned by another poster, small handicap-accessible SDVs that do point-to-point transport are _better_ than mass-transit. If vehicular mass is a concern, with ubiquitous SDV integration into an urban transit system you can and should design purpose-built transporters with lower mass. With central EV charging and remote power generation you are already moving the pollution point to a smaller number of locations that are easier to optimize and monitor.
Really, these people seem to be saying "We don't like this, so you shouldn't be allowed to do it" and then they use flimsy excuses as justification. That makes them just like all the other people that want to force their world-view on me. Maybe instead of doing that they could spend all of that energy on moving the needle on the core issues that are possible in the short term and will make a difference, like moving to green renewables for power generation.
Sorry if this seems overly cranky, but it's frustrating to see people that think interfering with SDV operation is a 'good thing' in any way, shape, or form.
It could be done well. It would require some people with a better plan than "let's put cones on driverless cars hurr durr durr".
That doesn't seem forthcoming, though.
There's also no reason you can't have both. Private companies testing driverless cars are not preventing the city from building other public transit.
These are not serious people. Sure, when they’re contacted by a reporter they can say some nice-sounding things like “we want better public transit“, but they aren’t actually doing anything that could reasonably be expected to result in that happening. All they’re doing is juvenile petty vandalism.
They’re getting a discussion around these issues started at the very least, like in this thread. Aside from their methods and whether a particular individual agrees with them or not, it doesn’t do nothing at all. Awareness and discussion is a necessary step.
> Also, the public transit network is already there and works. Why not invest in that instead while also encouraging active Mobility by walking or cycling instead of more cars?
I have no idea where the nearest bus stop to my house is but I’m guessing it is over a half mile away. According to my Apple Watch it is supposed to be 110 degrees outside today. Does that help clarify why people might want door to door service if they were getting a ride whether public transportation or taxi?
It’s hard to overlook the irony. It is so warm partly because we’ve been pushing polluting convenience over a little extra effort with less pollution. You should be agitating your government to make public transit an attractive alternative (because walking half a mile to the public bus stop in 43C weather is absolutely unreasonable). As long as public transit in the US is so crappy and unattractive, it’s a slam dunk for building more car infrastructure and exacerbate the problems further.
The privately owned car owners that offer a public good without following ADA will get sued. It should even be relatively easy to find the owner through the license plate.
> You'd have a fleet of driverless cars driving around the city and summon one with an app. With no drivers they would only need to stop to recharge/refuel and for maintenance.
We shouldn't have nice things because some sub-10% portion of the population might not be able to use them is the dumbest argument. You can have public transit and driverless cars.
(They mention that the WAV trips in SF had been manual, it's unclear to me if that was the case also in Phoenix)
Anyhow, while I think that "zero effort" is hyperbole, the risk that they are not going to invest enough is a very real risk...
And also, if the argument is that 100% of their fleet should be (wheelchair?) accessible, that's a valid concern, since it seems that all players are currently failing at it
> And driverless cars, if they are allowed to be developed, will eventually be public transit that takes you from door-to-door running 24/7, way, way better than any train or bus.
Driverless cars still take space both to move and to stand still.
Mass taxis would still be an improvement over individual cars, which are idle 90% of the day and require parking space in the most valuable parts of the city.
> Mass taxis would still be an improvement over individual cars
No, they'd actually be substantially worse. Personal cars are poorly utilized, but they at least spend all of their time carrying at least one person (the driver), and stay off the roads when they aren't in use. A taxi will, necessarily, spend less than 100% of its time carrying a passenger; if it's being used primarily by commuters, it's likely to spend at least 50% of its time with no passengers at all (because it's deadheading back into a city to take workers home, or vice versa).
Having everyone drive cars everywhere isn't sustainable, but making those cars into taxis isn't the solution either.
Good point. I was already thinking that taxis have an issue with peak demand, but I was only thinking of the capacity, I didn't consider the return trip.
One option is to mix public transport with driverless taxis - consolidate public transportation into fewer, bigger routes (knocking down costs), then use driverless taxis for short trips to the station. A little inconvenient to add 1-2 extra transfers to your trip, though.
There's also the opportunity to automate carpooling, but that's not quite the same - it's just moving a little further on the flexibility <-> efficiency scale of transportation (where individual vehicles are furthest left and trains are furthest right). Even if you're just sharing a taxi with 2-3 other commuters, you're still sacrificing the convenience of leaving at the time of your choice and having privacy during the trip - though of course for a big price discount.
While this is true, the typical taxi’s vehicle doesn’t cost a quarter million dollars (radar, LiDAR, high performance compute system, special calibration).
I am curious how much cheaper the robotaxis will actually be for the user (right now they’re all at a loss)
The median annual income for cab drivers is about $35k. Assuming a car is shared across three shifts a day, 7 days a week, then you're looking at about $105k/yr in savings.
To barely scratch the surface here, mass transit helps solve congestion issues, something almost all car-centric cities suffer from. Forget the word public, I know that scares some people. We are talking about space and efficiency now. How would putting everyone back in cars help? Autonomous or not, tightly following or not, super syncronous (good luck with company interop and human drivers on that one) it's a lot of energy and space for 1-4 people, and we already know most city's road infra can't support everyone.
You'll just be stuck in traffic autonomously instead of on a train moving more people more effectively.
Well, it sounds strangely like a "15-minute city" agenda, where you have less pollution, less noise, less traffic, and are stuck living in your block :D
This "15-minute city" meme is the latest example of how conservative propaganda and misinformation make it around the world before the truth has even put on its shoes.
Actually, no. What is the cone made of? LDPE most likely. Soft, easily melted, easily shredded, easily burned.
So a gas turbine most likely won't even notice a cone.
Besides in a modern high-bypass turbofan about 80% of it would just get shredded by the fan and fly around the delicate parts, which aren't that much delicate.
What the cone is made out of is irrelevant. Any sort of FOD ingestion will lead to downtime and inspection/rebuild depending on severity of the damage found.
right, it is almost always cheaper to destroy something than it is to build it. there is some beauty to this principle, in a cosmic sense, but this particular stunt doesn't impress me either.
This is so often true. I can think of one notable exception, rocket counter measures[0]. Perhaps there is some inversion, since this is destroy(destroy()).
Im so sick of these bike nazis. Im sorry but not every town and city is designed so everyone can ride a bike 5 minutes from their house. Some of us live many miles from where we work or where the nearest store is, some of us are crippled or elderly so doing so would not be feasble anyway.
As usual the modern day extremist protestor is all emotion and no logic.
I assume that gluing your crotch to the Mona Lisa stopped being funny after a while, by the unexpected blisters and the skin loss
Welcome to the puppetocene, the age of remote controlled puppets that will be tricked to boycott its own industry for the price of a few dopamine rushes and 15 seconds of fame
They probably think that taxes are paid by mythical creatures like the fairy of taxes or the plentyrich yeti so is not their own money what is being burnt in each sabotage party. The reality will hit them like a ton of bricks.
If it harms nobody and gets people talking, that’s fine. They’re not blocking ambulances from getting to hospitals. They’re not interfering with existing rides. I’m all for this.
You can impede manned vehicles with traffic cones in exactly the same way. Randomly put them on roads, and people will stop, causing traffic jams. Throw them under the wheels of moving cars, and people will crash and likely die.
Allowing people to drive 2-tonne death traps around dense urban areas seems like a bigger mistake.
No, you cannot impede manned vehicles in the same way. If you put a traffic cone on the hood of a manned vehicle at a stop light, the driver will simply get out (when safe), remove the cone, and continue. It takes all of a minute to recover. Whereas the unmanned vehicle requires the responsible person to be notified and to arrive from who knows how far away to resolve the situation.
The fact that this prank can be done quickly, cheaply, safely, and without property damage means the car software needs to be prepared to deal with it without becoming a public nuisance. If the software is not prepared, the car is not fit for widespread deployment on public roads.
The equal possibility, which you raise, of dangerous impediments on both manned and unmanned vehicles is not relevant here, because the argument has not been made that the cars inadequately deal with dangerous impediments.
Finally, our society is largely comfortable with the current level of risk that manned vehicles entail, together with the ongoing progress of safety improvements. Not many would agree that the concept is a big mistake.
I think the point is that if the vehicle's software can't figure out how to cope with something as simple as a cone on its hood, it's woefully unprepared for real driving conditions and a liability to everyone
I had largely the opposite takeaway, the cars are built to prioritize safety in unexpected situations, and are doing this here.
It might seem trivial, but it's not too hard to imagine a traffic cone on the windshield actually being a fairly dangerous situation if the car simply drove off, for instance if could roll over the top of the car and impact another vehicle behind it.
And that's even assuming that the traffic cone can be identified as 100% being a normal traffic cone, and not something else (say, a heavy object suspended in some meansm, in which case driving into it would damage the car) or a person or animal that happens to look like a traffic cone.
So by demonstrating that the cars stop under unexpected situations they are showing that the cars successfully identify a potentially dangerous situation and prioritize safety over navigation.
The cone is placed close to the windshield and sensors, I seriously doubt a cone would wind up in that spot pretty frequently in normal driving conditions.
Also, I doubt it's a software problem: the cone is blocking a pretty substantial field of view. No amount of software can fix an occluded sensor. They might as well be spray painting over the cameras.
I'm not sure if the cars are the problem. Many things can be disabled with malicious vandalism. We can ban automated elevators because people can put a stick in them and break them
You could literally put a traffic cone between the doors, and it would prevent the elevator being able to go up and down until someone moved the cone—exactly the same as the car.
Why stop at robotic arms? Perhaps a flipper on the bonnet to eject cones? A water-jet to discourage anything remaining in front? A spike or rotary saw for the more challenging obstacles?
Armed with a powerful media platform with extensive reach, media executives are building the blocks of hatred and division in the ongoing and escalating war between the people who will benefit from automation and the people who will suffer. If you're reading this, you're probably on the side of those benefiting from automation, at least in the short term.
On a lighter note, I would love to see this technique used in a future Terminator or Robocop movie.
This is another reason it’s probably a bad idea to do this type of technology company and testing in a place like San Francisco. It’s not surprising companies like this end up in Texas, etc.
Instead they would be peppered with bullet holes; I doubt these cars would be warmly welcomed in TX either, at least until the experimentation phase is over
Once enough of a city's inhabitants become adversarial towards robotaxis, the technology is donefor. Their only means of long-term success is if the people cooperatively tolerate their existence on the roads.
If you need a security guard in every vehicle to defend it, you have a driver.
Driverless cars will eventually be safer and more efficient than human drivers. They'll respond faster in emergencies. They won't be drunk or stoned. They won't exceed speed limits. They won't rev or honk angrily.
But to reach that point, we've got to accept a learning/development process that will involve some risks and some annoyance.
Because going the speed limit is unsafe in certain scenarios, because other human drivers are expecting people to exceed the limit like they do.
It's the same with Tesla wanting to allow rolling stops at stop signs – not the letter of the law, but it's what humans expect. In many instances you are more likely to cause a minor accident (being rear-ended) by coming to a complete stop at a stop sign than the risk of causing and accident by rolling through an intersection that clearly has nobody else in it.
Won't be a problem once most cars on the road are driverless.
No we don't have to accept that. Experimentation belongs in a laboratory, and all these companies can afford to build private, controlled environments, they just don't want to spend the money.
The time to find out your car does not stop for emergency vehicles, is not during an emergency. Yet here we are
How about all those new drivers hitting the road for the very first time? Are you suggesting we should banish them from public roads until they've got a few hundred hours under their belt?
Driverless cars will eventually be safer and more efficient than human drivers
That'll happen only when we have solved the general intelligence problem. Driving on roads is a cooperative process, it requires a theory of mind, and many people are sick of making allowances for experimental technology that is inherently incapable of performing as intended. It's the equivalence of goldmaking alchemists.
Meanwhile there's us motorcyclists - I trust robotaxis to even estimate distances as much as I trust drunk drivers or teenagers on their second driving lessons.
Don't get me wrong, this is an impressive feat—that sometimes crashes into firetrucks.
Until they stop crashing into firetrucks, which are rather large, bright red, and pretty hard to crash into, the idea that they are going to be better than most drivers is speculation.
However it is very likely that self driving is in some sense AGI complete - in other words to get to the goal may require something just as generally intelligent as humans, not least as driving in a city is a social interaction problem as much as a routing problem.
I don't understand why this part isn't talked about more. Seems like an elephant in the room to me.
Have most people just not encountered confusing road conditions?
A couple weeks ago, I was in West Virginia bobbing up and down hills around hairpin turns on loose gravel. The whole time, I was thinking to myself "The first autonomous vehicle that attempts this route is going straight into the ravine."
One time evacuating from a hurricane, the route I found required me to drive through an open field. How well does LIDAR cope with tall grass?
Another time, I'm headed north on I-95 and there's a several car pileup. Police divert all traffic off the nearest exit and close the highway with a few road flares. I'd wager anything an AV would blow right past the flares and wreak havoc on the scene of the accident.
Until AI can cope with completely novel scenarios it was never trained for, it's going to be prone to catastrophic failure.
Personally, I don't expect to see it in our lifetimes.
This is a huge regulatory failure and not just a technology problem. These cars can be networked and a human can monitor and override when exceptional situations arise. Amazing to see how billions of dollar of VC money, tech bros, government bureaucrats all get this so spectacularly wrong after working on the problem for decades.
Exactly. I don’t mind AVs, but we don’t need them clogging up the core of our cities. Cars have their place. But let’s build real transit in our cities.
I also worry about a future in which we can’t own cars, but public transit has been mostly done away with in favor of privately owned AV companies.
In the present, here in Austin Cruise is regularly blocking streets at night. The tech works great…until it doesn’t. I wish they’d stop alpha testing at our expense.
People prefer invidual vehicles because they are much more convenient and comfortable.
People use mass transit because it's cheaper or because the circumstances make individual vehicles very inconvenient (e.g. not parking space and terrible traffic), not because they prefer it.
Not sure. I would prefer not to spend $30K on an individual vehicle that requires gas, insurance, registration ... but no reasonable public transportation exists instead (west Omaha, Nebraska, FWIW).
Now if I lived in Tokyo I would be so hot to ditch the car!
I suspect individual vehicles is inherently inconvenient. The parking lot for Disneyland is an example, the traffic jams of any city with over 50k people in it are examples. Individual vehicles do not scale very well, and through extreme expense the US has built infrastructure to make individual vehicles as convenient as can be.
> not because they prefer it.
I would like to see data behind this. Driving for a commute is generally not enjoyable, it's time a person will not get back and meanwhile they have done very little productive other than perhaps listen to a podcast. OTOH when on a bus, someone else is worrying about the roads and plenty of people get significant work done, reading done, generally relax. I suspect most would prefer mass transit if it were more time efficient. Driving yourself is still a pretty killer option in most of the US as it's an extreme reduction in commute time due to lack of density and frequency in the mass transit network.
*To clarify, the typical bus experience in the US can vary quite a bit. I commuted into Seattle for several years on the bus system. That is my experience, those trips were 99.9% fine experiences, it was quiet and essentially everyone was just messing around on their smart phones. The only really unpleasant part of the bus experience was there were not enough of them running such that the bus could be crowded and was a long wait between buses. That is a different experience for sure from the buses that run within downtown and riding those buses around 2pm when there are no commuters on them.
My claim is that a well funded bus system is intrinsically more enjoyable for the same reason an AV is - because you can do something other than 'driving' while traveling.
in my short 4 month internship in Seattle I have had two bad experiences (among others)
1. Some woman starts yelling at me saying I am a foreigner (I am, but I am more Canadian than anything else). She gets louder and louder and tells me that I am probably a visa student and that I’ll be deported when my studies are done. She went around the entire bus making derogatory comments about them (I.e. what are you doing with that white bitch to an interracial couple)
2. A woman accuses me of being a North Korean spy on the bus (she says I have the nose of a North Korean). I exit the bus because she is increasingly hostile. I get off the bus. She follows me 4 blocks to my apartment, trying to get the red blooded Americans to catch the North Korean spy.
> Can you see how some folks would prefer to drive?
Very much so, yes. I agree with the reply comment that you should not have been subjected to that experience. As a 215lbs white male - I don't have those experiences.
I was making fundamentally two points: (1) single occupancy vehicles are a non-scalable transportation solution and (2) I would suspect most people intrinsically would prefer to spend their time while traveling doing something other than driving. It's one of the major selling points for AI cars, that you can do something else while travelling.
As someone who falls in the anti car camp, I'm really sorry you had those experiences. Seattle definitely has problems with insane people, it can be encountered on the streets or on public transit.
I can imagine that most people who take public transit daily (I hope) probably never experience the things that I have experienced.
Maybe because I am visibly Asian (therefore easier to be perceived as non-American), some folks are more daring in picking on me? Unfortunately I cannot a/b test it because I can't look any less Asian than I do now.
> A car feels much better and is more convenient as well.
That is unsurprising. Though, when you are stuck in gridlock, do you think to yourself, "this is exactly where I want to be?"
The car commutes I had in Seattle were 90% gridlock, very common to spend about 30 minutes to travel 7 miles. I went into office one night and it took 14 minutes total. One evening trying to get home during rush hour it took 45 minutes just to get down the on-ramp onto the actual highway! In total that was a two hour commute to travel 12 miles. The 2 hours was atypical, but spending 60-90 minutes to get home was typical.
> So you never have to wait for a vehicle and all of your routes are direct with no stops? I doubt that.
If I am riding the metro at peak hours then I wait a minute or two.
If off-peak then I leave the house at the appropriate time so as not to have to wait.
There are stops, but they are predictable and short. Nothing at all like the experience of being in a car.
> You been on US public transit?
Yes, and in my experience, my insurance company does not raise my rates if someone damages a metro car.
> You pay for public transit while you're not using it.
In the same way that I pay for car infrastructure when I'm not using it, except that I pay a lot more for car infrastructure I don't use than people who don't ride the metro pay for that.
> And we need to de-personal-vehicle-ize. It's already killing us.
That's never going to happen. We've had personal transport ever since we tamed horses. And we can't really go back to horses.
We just need to prioritise small personal vehicles powered by pedals and/or batteries, particularly in urban environments. We need to make more roads safer for them, and solve the storage/theft problems.
The US is too lo-density for human driven buses to be better for the environment. AVs will enable a transit fleet of right-sized vehicles that respond to demand and can surge without a big labor force working split shifts.
There are plenty of area that could support mass transit, especially in cities.
Even suburbia can be made more walkable.
For example, walking to my local gas station isn't really that practical due to a lack of continuous sidewalks. It isn't that far but the path to the gas station can get pretty muddy at time.
I once tried to get food at a fast food joint by walking, the lack of sidewalks is even more acute. Crossing several lanes of road felt pretty unsafe even when the traffic light is red.
That's one ideal, sure. I don't see it though -- who's going to keep all these individual driving pods clean? How is access going to be gated to them? SF is a dense city, only New York has higher population density. Its BART and muni and bus service isn't bad, either -- and partly because it's such a pain to drive downtown, it gets used, and being used keeps it safe.
This is a story about San Francisco. SF has plenty of density for human driven buses to be better for the environment.
AVs are not currently competing with human drivers in the use-case you say they'd be best at, they're clogging already dense cities with even more cars.
I have ridden commuter rail, aubways, and busses in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Amsterdam, London, Vienna and other places.
While you have a point that "lo-density" is an oversimplification, only New York has the kind of density and frequency of service that make public transit really usable. Boston commuter rail sucks pretty bad, with a too-sparse schedule. BART from SFO to the city is OK but around town there are too few lines and stops. This all could be fixed, but the fact is they suck compared to cities like Amsterdam where cycling has the infrastructure and the critical mass to be safe (unlike London, for example).
Inhabitants are going to become increasingly pro driverless car though, not anti.
Consumers like good products.
And driverless cars are a good product, as evidenced by the literally free taxi service that is just being given out to many people in SF right now (but will still be cheaper than regular taxis when it goes mainstream).
> as evidenced by the literally free taxi service that is just being given out to many people in SF right now.
You realize that it's only free while they test and it's not going to be free forever, right? In fact, the protests are in response to a decision which allowed the companies to start charging for driver-less rides, so that is already changing.
Hard to say which way people will go overall. I personally am no longer a fan of driver-less cars. I used to be but now I see it as a doubling down of car-dependence. I could see a nasty rebound effect [1] through increased convenience and a lot of other negative consequences if cities adapt their infrastructure to cater to those vehicles. History repeating itself for "automobile progress." A possible second coming of demolishing our cities and neighborhoods to make way for cars. Yeah I know most if not all of the arguments for how the technology will just fix all the problems and make everything about cars better, I used to make those arguments myself. I don't believe them anymore.
> You realize that it's only free while they test and it's not going to be free forever, right
You realize that the whole point of self driving taxis is that they are cheaper to run than regular taxis, and that's how they will compete right?
> I used to be but now I see it as a doubling down of car-dependence
Ok, so you just don't like taxis in general then.
That's fine, but it changes nothing about the idea that self driving taxis are strictly better than regular taxis.
> I could see a nasty rebound effect [1] through increased convenience
Oh the irony of this statement.
At the very beginning of you post, you talk about how the benefits of self driving cars are temporary, and yet now you admit that the problem is that they are too good.
I am glad that I have convinced you that self driving cars are such a benefit, such a popular consumer product that everyone will love, so much so that it will cause problems because of just how useful they are!
You're putting a lot of words in the parents mouth.
>> I used to be but now I see it as a doubling down of car-dependence
> Ok, so you just don't like taxis in general then.
That was not the point. One of the general arguments for AVs is that it will reduce car-dependence, that we're all going to be able to live car-free and AVs will shuttle us around in hyper efficient transport systems.
If the way we get there is by having a taxi service that is 70% cheaper, I don't see how that follows. I agree with the parent, the claim that AVs are a ticket out of car dependence seems like a bill of goods.
> You realize that the whole point of self driving taxis is that they are cheaper to run than regular taxis, and that's how they will compete right?
Longterm that will be true if there is substantial competition between driverless car providers (since it requires very significant that won’t necessarily be the case).
Otherwise these companies will just keep their margins high and charge only slightly below what a car driven by a person costs.
> Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
That's the process of "Enshittification" by Cory Doctorow. And it's blatantly obvious by your comment that we're in stage 1, "good to their users".... except people LOVE free shit. But no techbro gives shit away for free. This is 'buy-in' and training data.
It ONLY gets worse from here.
And 100 cars on the road is still 100 cars on the road, even if only carrying 100 people. It's a waste of energy, waste of resources, and climate-destroying by fact of all that asphalt and resources to make said cars... all so you don't have to ride in icky 'public transit', cause that's what the "poors" take.
It's 100 fewer cars having to park, idle and unused, for hours a day. Also, it could lead to thousands of fewer cars in existence if that single AV is even moderately used. I think that might make the tech a net win.
We were told that Uber would mean fewer cars on the road, and in fact it's led to exactly the opposite - an explosion of additional VMTs, with all the accompanying pollution, resource waste, congestion, and crash deaths.
If AV taxis are cheap then people are going to use them for all sorts of things they previously could not afford to use a taxi for.
And if they're expensive then they will cannibalize public transport for the benefit of the upper economic classes and the significant detriment of people of lesser means.
> except people LOVE free shit. But no techbro gives shit away for free.
Self driving cars are cheaper than regular taxis to run.
The incentives are aligned.
The whole point is that self driving cars will be cheaper than regular taxis.
This isn't some crazy complicated social media business plan. Instead the business plan is simply.
Costs of running taxis go down, therefore complete with regular taxis with lower prices.
So yes, this is all good for consumers.
And not everything can be refuted by referring to a pitty viral article that doesn't apply to the right industry.
> all so you don't have to ride in icky 'public transit
Cars aren't going away. There will be lots and lots of places that still use cars, for a very long time, regardless of how much additional public transit funding a couple cities add.
And yes, this means that cars self driving are a benefit.
I don't know the details. I assume that's the driverless taxi service. Is it going to stay free forever or are they giving the service for free to make people get familiar with it and then they'll set a price?
The number of passenger miles/hours driven by AVs are such that no fatalities would have been expected with a human driver. A lot of automobile deaths happen but it's not because cars are dangerous it's because we drive a mind numbingly large amount.
A few years ago I wrote a short story on how people would force cars to stop in order to extort money from the passengers. I thought such a thing would first happen in Rio.
It's inevitable, whatever the reason: if the car won't run over people or things, whoever wants to stop them will do so.
You speak as if criminals don’t already exist; as if it isn’t currently possible to rob a house, or someone on the street, or a car stopped at traffic lights.
If someone wants to commit a robbery there are already plenty of ways they can do it. I fail to see how autonomous vehicles would increase the rate of crime.
This happened in NYC in the 1980s, people would stand at stoplights with a squeegee and offer to clean your windshield for money. If you refused, they'd wipe your windshield with an oily rag.
It's far fetched but not impossible. Rio is already extremely dangerous compared to SF, with gangs committing mass robbery, home invasions, shootings, and kidnappings. More likely a much more benign gamification will ensue in the US: homeless people will learn they can extort money from passengers of self driving vehicles in exchange for not delaying them with cones, physically blocking them, or whatever. I'd look at it as karma or recompense from a society that doesn't meet the basic needs of all people.
The ordeal reminds me of Rome, which I visited as a teenager. I discovered if you didn't take a risk / put your life on the line, cars wouldn't stop at a zebra(crossing).
The biggest problem here is that they needed permission in the first place.
We have completely inverted how society is suppose to work. Government should have to provide a clear, articulable justification to make something illegal
People should not have to petition the government for permission to do something, if everything is defacto illegal with out government approval you no longer live in a free society
> Government should have to provide a clear, articulable justification to make something illegal
The roads are owned and paid for by the public, ergo the government can set rules for safety and maintenance. That seems clear and articulate enough to me.
So then I take you oppose the protesters. because you can not have ti both ways, you can not claim to outsource your thinking to the government for your safety, who have approved this technology while at the same time opposing this technology.
Not really relevant to my argument, but sure. I never asked to have it both ways - I don’t like the technology, but they are allowed to be operating. Civil disobedience is also an American tradition, so I don’t oppose it, nor would I oppose the police for enforcing the law.
So do you think anything should be legal on the roads by default? I think there is a clear and obvious justification for why we don't let anyone drive anything on the roads: safety. Letting people test whatever they want on our roads is a risk to all other road users.
>>So do you think anything should be legal on the roads by default?
yes
>>I think there is a clear and obvious justification for why we don't let anyone drive anything on the roads: safety.
Safety, the drum beat of the authoritarians for all of human history. Safety is often used to limit freedom, rarely is safety the actual reason for laws and regulations, even rarer does safety increase as a result of the rules
In this case there is no safety issue even being claimed, people are annoyed by them, they believe they take away from other public transit aka they are politically opposed to them, or a wide range of other non-safety issues.
If there is a safety issue that actually endangers others we have many mechanisms to check that including legal liability.
Further with safety you get in the "if it saves one life" debate as well. In short if safety was the only goal we would have no freedom at all, life is about risk management, not ensuring absolute safety. I have no desire to live in a "safe" society where safety first is the goal
To misquote Mike Rowe.. "Safety Third... lots of things come before safety"
I definitely agree with your point, but outdoor public spaces in the US are now primarily roads subject to extensive regulation. Despite what an ad for a new truck may try to sell you, driving is not part of free society.
How is freedom to travel with out government oppression not part of a free society
Keep in mind public roads, in the US, pre-date Automobiles, pre-date even the founding of this nation. and I think the idea that free travel upon public roads was not a core freedom would be a shock to the Founders
This is the old "Rule of Law" vs "Rule of Men" question.
In a Rule of Men system, you have to ask some gatekeeper for permission to do things. The gatekeeper will always ask for something in return for saying yes, one way or another.
It’s because corporations show time and time again to cut corners and do harmful things.
Everything should be de facto illegal and companies should have to prove that it should be made legal through research and data.
Things will move much slower but at this point I’d rather that than another Uber airbnb who “disrupts” the market but actually causes many negative externalities.
