And, following recent events, now every parked Tesla is also a potential surveillance device for the surrounding area, with direct connection to the US government, possibly through famous 3 letter agencies.
Why even bother with one of those crusty old 3-letter agencies, when you can go straight to the top via your very own 4-letter (1 better!) agency: D.O.G.E.
Nobody should be suprised by this. This applies to all proprietary blackboxes with unrestricted network access. Maybe now that people are comically angry at musk they at least act like they care.
Except the "comically" part (what does even mean? I'd call it "sad" if anything) I agree with you. You had (1) strong marketing and (2) lack of choice on one side, and a few tech folks that were expressing their concerns on this for years, except that the public at large didn't care - or didn't have much choice (e.g. when you buy a vacuum cleaner).
I hope this whole row will make people just a bit more aware. But it's hard to say how much it will help. An average person is powerless when seeing "Connect to Wi-Fi to complete setup" on their screen - whether it's their new TV set or a new laptop.
It will go in the wrong direction. The people who are tricked by the marketing are persuaded by fear and greed, but also are incredibly lazy, negligent, and uninformed. In other words, they hate who the Ministry of Truth (Social) tells them to.
I would like to understand your position. Why do you think people being really mad is funny? To me, this reaction seems to be why Trump and Musk are able to troll and bully. It's because people think it's funny, but why? Are you a child? I mean literally.
It's funny (and sad, too!) that people are so surprised, because lots of activists and NGOs have been warning against proprietary software for decades, starting with Richard Stallman [0] and https://fsf.org and continuing with Cory Doctorow [1] and https://eff.org. If your hardware obeys somebody else, it will betray you sooner or later, one way or another to extract more money for the benefit of the actual owner.
OP suggests it's funny that people are mad at Elon Musk. This implies they find the actions of Elon funny, or they're laughing at the people who are harmed. I'm trying to understand why people act like this.
It's comical. People are mad at Musk. But they themselves have bought the proprietary car from him despite the decades of warnings, as I explained above.
I understand what you're saying now and agree with that sentiment. People are insane to buy car trackers with subscription services. Those things are horribly anticonsumer.
Most cars are "proprietary". The only cars that come close to being open is older vehicles that are no-longer manufacturer with a good after market parts market.
e.g. I bought a Land Rover Defender because it is the closest thing to an "open source" vehicle. However you are giving up many modern conveniences and you will be doing a lot of work yourself.
Because their trolls are very light hearted and everyone overexaggerates the pain they feel from it because they are on the other side of politics (for now). Like answering an e-mail that asked what you did this week turned into many folks doing hours long interviews about how they were wasting time answering the e-mail. comical, they could have spent 5 minutes replying and spend hours complaining instead.
I did not call them a child. I asked a question. I recall when I was in school, children were very cruel and would bully one another. It's why I asked.
> Maybe now that people are comically angry at musk they at least act like they care.
Doesn’t just imply, but within its context directly states that people are mad at Elon for reasons unrelated to Tesla software (hence the “now”).
The rule is “strongest possible interpretation” not “invent a much less plausible but much more generous interpretation”. If you interpret that rule the way you’re suggesting it could be rewritten as “Trolls and bad faith posters only exist in your head, not on the internet”
I think the strongest plausible interpretation is that OP is cruel and likes when others suffer. I can't think of an alternative. Why do people laugh at misfortune?
and my interpretation is that people who ridicule other as being childish for disagreeing with them but act like angsty teenager when they encounter disagreements online should look in the mirror once in a while.
I asked questions and was not trying to provoke hostility. I explained my thought process. I would like to understand those who find Trump and Musk comical.
and I answered by pointing at a mirror while you continue to clutch your pearls.
To write it out for you. It is comically because even a vague statement (like mine) which could be interpreted positively brought on a vicious reaction (like yours). At this point somebody could compliment musks (or trumps which wasn't even part of the discussion) lawn and someone would jump out of the woodworks that they are small brained, childish and also supports supposed bullying.
Okay. Then, I was correct in my initial assertion. There's something that compels you to enjoy cruelty or suffering of others and I'd like to understand what that is. The best explanation I can deduce is that the person who enjoys suffering or finds it comical is typically miserable.
I didn't react in any sort of mean or cruel way. I'm asking questions and trying to understand context. I'm out of the loop here because I try to avoid bullies IRL.
Great deflection after calling me small brained and cruel for disagreeing with you online. It truly must be a cruel world if that's how you see simple disagreements. I hope you mature further to better handle other opinions instead of this thinly veiled posturing.
I appreciate you trying to help me understand. Thanks. I didn't mean to insult you. I only wanted to ask if you were young, because in my experience children are the most cruel.
I never called you small brained. Just trying to understand what compels people to enjoy the misery of others. That's all.
People laugh at misfortune, when the victims brought it on themselves despite all the warnings. Also this is not laughing here but a statement about its comical nature.
You're misinterpreting OP. Here's their explanation:
"somebody could compliment musks (or trumps which wasn't even part of the discussion) lawn and someone would jump out of the woodworks that they are small brained, childish and also supports supposed bullying"
Musk has been actively trying to destroy America, so I understand why people have knee jerk reactions to him and Trump.
I would consider myself as apolitical as can be. I just have never cared about either side. I haven't voted since 1996. I think it is all a total fraud.
It seems obvious that people are basically being brainwashed by technology.
The story is the massive corruption and waste in the government. But this brainwashing turns the thought into ELON == BAD so government waste == good.
I feel like everyone I interact with at this point is borderline retarded.
> The story is the massive corruption and waste in the government.
This is not the story. The story is that the massive waste in the government is being used as an excuse to destroy whole agencies regardless of whether they are useful or wasteful. While at the same time handing over access to ALL of the most sensitive data to unelected third party who most certainly acting in his own, and the country's, best interest. This is the 'massive corruption' that you should be worried about.
It's always been a turd sandwich or shit burrito, I agree. The difference now is one side is literally tearing the country apart, creating a disinformation echochamber, bigoted, stealing public land, public infrastructure, all public services, the list is endless.
Maybe Trump will break it beyond repair and we'll have a revolution or something. Seems extremely unlikely. People are literal thought and wage slaves, so there's no potential for that unless the Ministry of Truth demands it.
No one is talking about solutions. Elon and Trump are bad because they lie about everything and act only for personal gain. Elon and Trump are bad and government waste is bad. Medicaid is horrible and gutting medicaid to finance tax cuts for millionaires is beyond retarded, but here we are.
Ok, my old model Y has a camera inside to monitor me. 1€ AliExpress camera cover gave my privacy back. The new model y has a radar. So it will monitor not only my presence, but also my vital parameters as well as vital parameters of all passengers. No radar cover invented for that yet… it’s a bit too much. And since it’s already there it will be abused. That’s the path with all the technology.
Probably not. Proper grounding and good shielding is needed. Eventually you can use conductive glue and attach the foil to the pcb (my guess is that Tesla uses low cost printed circuit board antenna, haven’t seen it yet) antenna directly messing its geometry and transmission characteristics.
you don't need to ground it i don't think. it will just create a "hole" in the radar's vision. Imagine holding a dental mirror in front of your eyeball.
you need a faraday cage to prevent any signal from getting in or out; but that's not the goal here.
this is more like sticking a piece of tape on your laptop camera.
I wonder if this is an argument for more public transport.
Electric buses make rides pretty cheap and comfortable. And shifting traffic from personal cars to buses would make mobility much more efficient. Because in a bus, 30 people can cross a crossing so much faster than in a line of 30 individual cars.
Would privacy also be better? Because the government is more trustworthy regarding the collection of movement data than private companies?
In your car you have an expectation of privacy. Public transport is by definition a public space and thus has no expectation of privacy. Whole different ruleset applies. Anyone can monitor you on a bus. Without your consent too.
A couple days after that United Health CEO was assasinated they has video of the suspect from a deluge of sources and none of them were from busses or cars.
Nearly every business has cameras. More and more residential homes have porch cameras pointed at the street. Even if your vehicle isn't monitoring you, it has a license plate hanging off the back so it can be easily identified. We're all being tracked by our phones, and everybody else's phone will be used against you should you be caught acting weird in pubic. There are records of me in more databases than what's even knowable, the plot is so lost. We're back to being naked all the time, except now without the privilege of knowing who is looking at you.
I felt like people rallying against surveillance and tracking were beating a dead horse 20 years ago and I feel even more that way today.
in practice, in a car your motions are tracked and stored forever (you, today, already inplemented) by both automated license plate readers, the car’s phone home gps, and typically the phone in your pocket. In a bus, if you pay with a card its tracked where you got on, and they can run facial recognition after the fact, but its at least not greppable
Possibly the point is that an individual can not be as easily tracked by first identifying the bus, however most cars are registered to their owners. Nowadays most buses and public transport are full of CCTV though so same problem really.
We had electric busses in our city. They were awesome. The were far less noisy and didn't stink. But they were scrapped again. Reason: Diesel busses had a maintenance time of 2%, electric busses of 5%, meaning they spend 5% of their running time in maintenance. That was all, so we now have loud and stinky busses again.
That said, I don't think you can ever replace individual traffic. It is only possible in the most dense cities. Otherwise bus travel is too slow and unreliable for people working 40h+.
I would expect travel to speed up when we move from cars to buses. Look at what cars do most of the time. Waiting at crossings, slowing down for crossings, accelerating after passing a crossing. I have not measured it yet, but I would expect buses that carry 20 passengers each to accelerate that by a factor of 10 or so.
and unreliable
You mean when the bus is stuck in traffic? Don't you have the same problem with a car?
people working 40h+
I would think people who work 40h would be happy if they could do their work in a nice electric bus with a table instead of spending that time handling a steering wheel.
> but I would expect buses that carry 20 passengers each
FWIW, that's a _tiny_ bus. Typical city buses take 80-100 people, articulated buses about 150. At peak time on important routes they'll generally be mostly full.
The major capacity limit on buses is stopping. On busy systems at peak times, you'll tend to get clumping at stops, as similar routes line up one after another.
city buses take 80-100 people, articulated buses about 150
Yes, but then they are not offering a ride that is better than a ride in a private car.
I have took an extensive look at this over the last weeks. A typical articulated bus can only carry about 20 to 30 passengers who are seated as comfortably as in a private car.
Partly that is because of the design of the buses. If the buses were redesigned to comfortably seat people, they could probably carry an additional 10 or 20 passengers who are comfortably seated.
> Yes, but then they are not offering a ride that is better than a ride in a private car.
Oh, I missed that point. I mean, personally I'd say that any bus offers a better ride than driving a car, in that you do not have to _drive_ the thing, but tastes differ, of course.
Ideally most urban bus routes would be short enough that healthy people can comfortably use them without sitting.
Realistically, the costs of operating a bus are pretty fixed, and bus networks have hard space-based caps on capacity (as I mention elsewhere stops in particular are a problem), so the priority will always be on getting as many people in the space as possible. It's hard to see why any public transport authority would do seating-only urban buses; it would degrade the system as a whole, and the ticket price would be unreasonably high.
Most people, also, will care more about "can I actually get on the bus for my 20 minute journey" than "if I get on, will I have a comfy seat", which tends to indicate a mostly-standing design with seating available for elderly and disabled people.
As an example, take my local system. Dublin's main bus system has about 1,300 buses in operation; almost all of these are double-deckers with a capacity of 90-100 people. The system is pretty much limited by availability of drivers. Fares are 2 euro for a 90 minute journey (or where the last leg of the journey is started within 90 minutes of the first one). Adopting your system, we'd need five times as many buses, so for a start we'd need 6,500 buses, along with maybe 15,000 drivers and another 5,000 or so support staff. It's hard to see how that could happen without dramatically increasing the cost. But also, at peak times, major bus corridors are full of buses, and major bus stops have buses queueing up. It would simply not be reasonable to 5x this.
why any public transport authority would do seating-only urban buses
To get people to use the bus instead of a car.
The average car costs €300/month. Plus about the same amount of opportunity costs, missed by having to control the steering wheel for about an hour per day.
A public transport flatrate in Germany is only €59.
Seems like there is a huge gap in the middle for a better bus experience.
It would not degrade the system but wastly improve it. Because the buses would be additional buses. Each bus taking over 100 cars of the road. A bus can carry over 20 passengers and drive over 10 hours per day. While the average car ride carries 1.1 passengers or so and the car is only used 1 hour per day or so.
Okay, so you're talking about an additional premium/first class bus service, rather than a change to the existing service? I suspect that that is doomed, because class-segregated intraurban transport _used to be a thing_ (albeit largely on metro and commuter train services, not buses), and it's died out virtually everywhere in the world; when offered the choice of paying X or 3X for the same journey with better seating, people just don't want to do that for short journeys.
For instance the Paris Metro system used to have a first class carriage, until I think the late 80s.
And this would actually be worse, because you'd be talking about separate, likely less frequent buses. Most people will just get on the first thing that comes along, unless it's more expensive.
In general, on transport, people will pay a premium for speed; _express_ bus routes can charge a premium. For instance going to the airport I can take the city bus system for 2 euro and take over an hour (I'm on the wrong side of the city) or an express service that takes 20 minutes but costs 8 euro. I take the express one, and so do enough other people that it stays in business. And they'll pay for better seating for _long_ journeys. But 'long' appears to mean "at least an hour" and possibly "at least two hours".
(Semi-anecdotal evidence of this; in Ireland, a small country where most rail journeys not involving a transfer are <2 hours, first class _used_ to be a thing on trains, but it has been withdrawn from all services except Dublin-Belfast (2 hours) and Dublin-Cork (2.5 hours) because people simply weren't using it. You also see this with air travel; non-budget airlines have been cutting non-economy seating on short routes for years because it's hard to sell.)
It is an interesting mix of a private and public service. Mostly it is used by people who prefer a better ride experience than on a public bus. And are fine with paying a much higher price per ride. They pay out of their own pocket to the service provider, Volkswagen. But for people with disabilities, using the Moia buses is free and paid by the city.
> If we double the number of buses, we can increase the number of seats per bus and still have a higher overall passenger capacity in the city.
As mentioned, in a large bus system, the logistical challenges of doubling the number of buses would be formidable, and would likely lead to overall service degradation.
Are people paying for the _seats_, here, though, or for the more direct route? (AIUI it's a hybrid bus-taxi sort of thing where it only stops where people have indicated they want to be dropped off/picked up on an app). Like, if it was all-seats but operated on a normal bus route, I doubt people would pay for it.
I'd also question how sustainable it is; as far as I can see it's basically an experiment by VW, and likely a subsidised one. It feels like one of these things being prepped in case self-driving vehicles ever work properly. And in any case the scale is _tiny_; apparently a ridership of 11 million ever.
I think that there's a practical upper limit for most cities (it'll vary somewhat depending on population, road layout, openness to measures like making significant parts of the road network bus only, etc), and that most cities do tend towards more or less hitting it, yeah. Adding bus capacity is a cheap option up to a point, but there are _limits_, and as you hit those limits you generally explore expensive higher capacity options for busy routes (in rough order of expensiveness and capacity these tend to go BRT -> tram -> commuter rail -> metro).
This is a simplification, and there's definitely wiggle room within those categories (for instance, there exist tram lines which are higher capacity than many metro lines, mostly through the use of extremely long tramsets) but _basically_ how it works; buses can only take you so far, capacity-wise.
> Most people, also, will care more about "can I actually get on the bus for my 20 minute journey" than "if I get on, will I have a comfy seat", which tends to indicate a mostly-standing design with seating available for elderly and disabled people.
For me, knowing that the bus/tram is probably going to be packed and I won't be able to find a seat is a very good reason to try and find a different route/mode of transport, especially if I'm carrying something. I know that some people don't mind, but I really do, even though I'm young and reasonably fit. I'd rather sit down for 35 minutes than stand up for 20.
Given a bunch of us live in the US a US mindset shouldn't be shocking. Whereas in other places other ground truths apply, in the US exactly zero major metropolitan areas are built around mass transit making it wildly impractical for the bulk of human traffic.
> Half of the metro areas in the US used to have comprehensive public transit!
Sure, when said metro areas were a 10th of their current size with a couple orders of magnitude fewer residents street cars were kind of a thing. You cannot credibly expect a similar system to service the suburban sprawl around Atlanta for example. So unless the plan is to dragline the suburbs and mulch 80% of the urban population this is a complete non-starter. The sheer number of routes and volume of equipment required to service them would be financially prohibitive.
Buses are fantastic for the use case "we need to transport 100 people from suburbs to the office every day at 8AM", but they completely suck at use case "this one guy wants to come back home from a concert at 2AM". This means you need some personal vehicle anyway. And if you already have a car, why not use it for work commute.
Living in a bike-oriented city, I think e-bikes are the future. Almost as versatile as cars, with none of the downsides.
In Oslo (and I am sure other European places), the answer is simply "because I want to spend 30 minutes on my commute instead of 90 minutes". (At least for train/metro)
Assuming urban areas: Roads are always congested. Building more roads/more lanes only relieves it a few years then car traffic increases until you are as congested as before. (You can find proper scientific studies of this effect -- "induced traffic")
But public transport, if enough people take it, take so ridiculously many more passengers per area of road that it cuts through this effect and actually helps congestion. (Establishing a bus route may also induce more traffic, but you can add another bus much more cheaply than another road lane, and actually keep up.)
This requires buses to be prioritized in traffic though (dedicated lanes), otherwise there is as you point out no reason for individuals to take public transport.
Basically a reserved bus/metro lane gives you "infinite road capacity" (with the obvious caveats)
> this one guy wants to come back home from a concert at 2AM
Night buses are a thing. A city / urban area large enough to have concerts at 2AM should be able to support a set of them running one or two per hour with a 15 minutes’ walk to the closest stop. (There’s a tradeoff between convenience and empty buses, and night buses are there more to make sure nobody gets stuck.)
> A city / urban area large enough to have concerts at 2AM should be able to support a set of them running one or two per hour with a 15 minutes’ walk to the closest stop
I mean... every city I've been in in the last few years has either 24 hour routes or night routes or both. (I do think it used to be less common, but at least in Western Europe it is now standard for largish cities.)
bicycles don't work when the user is sufficiently drunk, as one might be, when leaving a concert at 2am or later. it's not a competition, the beauty of living in a city full of people is having a half dozen ways to get where you are going, instead of being limited to one or two.
> but they completely suck at use case "this one guy wants to come back home from a concert at 2AM".
Hmm, last week I was out til about 4am on Friday night, then got a 24 hour bus home. That's what I generally do when I'm out late.
> This means you need some personal vehicle anyway
Unless you're not drinking at this 2am concert, you're probably not using a personal car.
Buses are actually quite _good_ for this use case, in that they're much cheaper to run 24/7 than trams and heavy rail (whose higher capacity is largely useless late at night, and, particularly in the case of heavy rail, really _need_ maintenance downtime).
Does the maintenance time include regular servicing or is it only the time spent out of service in a day, for example charging?
I think electric vehicles are such a clear win for pollution (air and sound pollution) in cities that rolling back to ICEs should be clearly justified.
Here in the Netherlands the bus companies are required to buy by tender which has led to the purchase of lots of cheap Byd busses.
While they are fast enough and silent they are not that great: there are software problems, heaters don't work, doors won't close and the seats are so bad the (already scarce) drivers are getting back problems.
As a general rule, in transport fleets, unless the old thing is actually basically at the point where it needs to be scrapped right now, the new thing always has more downtime than the old thing, because the old thing has had its kinks ironed out, and the maintainers are used to maintaining it.
Of course, the trouble is, sometimes the new thing is just bad. A commuter/metro train system in my city operates mostly on 40 year old rolling stock. In 2000, some new trainsets were introduced, from two different manufacturers. One model never really worked properly, and was scrapped in 2008; the other survived. The whole thing is now due to be replaced with shiny new trains, starting this year... hopefully these ones work.
Yup (the scrapped Alstom DARTs). But it happens everywhere; for a start we weren't the only users of that problematic Alstom model. You see a lot of old train rolling stock around, but there's a hell of a survivorship bias; a really alarming number of train models last less than a decade in service in any given operator.
You'd _think_ this wouldn't happen, because reliability is absolutely the number one thing that operators care about, and they're usually willing to pay a premium to get it (the alternative being to pay to keep their reliable 40 year old units in service). But the industry's surprisingly bad at delivering it.
I don't expect bikes to take market share from cars.
Bikes have been around for a long time and are expected to technically stay the same in the foreseeable future.
Electric buses are so much better than gasoline buses. Fewer vibrations, less noise. Makes it much more suitable to relax or do some work on your phone. Plus, the cost (manufacturing+maintenance+fuel) of electric buses is 25% lower than the cost of gasoline buses. At the moment, only 10% or so of buses are electric. So the effect of these two improvements are mostly still to hit the market.
And in a few years, buses will start to become autonomous. Which reduces the costs of a bus operation by 70%.
Imagine we get autonomous electric buses with nice seats and tables. Then you can do your work in a bus while getting from A to B super cheap. Mobility would be so different.
> Bikes have been around for a long time and are expected to technically stay the same in the foreseeable future.
You might have missed the electric bike revolution that started a few years ago? Probably half the bikes I see here (in Flanders) are electric. It has enabled many people who would never have considered it before to start biking.
And bikes are absolutely taking market share from cars here. Honestly I don't even understand why enough people still use their cars through my city instead of biking. It easily takes 2x or 3x the time to get anywhere.
Agree with all of the above. Electric bikes are a game changer. It takes away most of the strain and effort from cycling, making it as convenient as walking. You still have to deal with weather, traffic, theft and so on, but it is still an excellent option for many transport needs.
> Honestly I don't even understand why enough people still use their cars through my city instead of biking.
I am an ex-avid cyclist. Bikes are easily stolen, You can get soaked if the weather is poor, If it is bitterly cold it can literally take you hours to warm up (especially if you are older). If you have to ride in traffic it can be very frightening especially if you haven't done it before. Other people find cycling simply uncomfortable, I've been told it more uncomfortable for women.
Well we're in different places so I guess it's different. I used to bike in France and I got about three or four bikes stolen there, one every other year or so. At around 30-50€ per bike it's not that expensive even though it's certainly inconvenient.
Now my bikes don't get stolen anymore in Flanders (even though I use a much cheaper and more convenient frame lock).
About the weather, I just wear warm clothes. I'm about ten minutes away from my children's school, not 2 hours. It rarely gets lower than -5°C though (23°F).
It also works because we have decent cycling infrastructure so cars don't kill too many cyclists.
I'm not an avid cyclist or an avid automobilist but I sometimes have to drive the same route by car and I have never wished I was in a car rather than in a bike including under rain, while the other way around is almost every time.
> At around 30-50€ per bike it's not that expensive even though it's certainly inconvenient.
The bikes I had stolen would be about €2000 today. I ride a second hand mountain bike that is old and isn't a target for thieves.
> About the weather, I just wear warm clothes. I'm about ten minutes away from my children's school, not 2 hours. It rarely gets lower than -5°C though (23°F).
I am in North of England. The temperature itself frequently isn't the problem. It is the wind chill factor. You can literally feel it chill your bones. I have fenders on all my bikes and tbh that reduces how wet you get by about 30-50% but affects the bikes handling a lot IME.
I use a decent U lock. Always lock the frame to something metal and solid. Additionally I have a ~100USD insurance to cover my several thousand dollars bikes. Never got stolen any.
Yeah you need to adapt to weather.
But a good pair of biking pants, rain cover for the shoes, thick leather gloves and different pairs of coats (which you anyway need) usually do the job.
If your bike is super uncomfortable there is tons of different sattles and options. Even bike fitting to fit your bike perfectly to your body.
Not to be rude. You think I am not aware of all of this? I was an avid cyclist. I have repaired and built my own bikes for the last 25 years, I still look after my bikes even though I don't ride them as often as I used to.
> I use a decent U lock. Always lock the frame to something metal and solid. Additionally I have a ~100USD insurance to cover my several thousand dollars bikes. Never got stolen any.
You are lucky. I've had two bikes stolen. I ride a very old and battered looking mountain bike (Marin Hawk Hill 97). My anti-theft measure is that it isn't worth stealing.
> If your bike is super uncomfortable there is tons of different sattles and options. Even bike fitting to fit your bike perfectly to your body.
If you haven't cycled in years it is just painful on backside and your nether regions. I hadn't cycled in over a year and I was saddle sore for about two days afterwards. I was expecting it btw. The bikes I have fit me perfectly, I use a good saddle (roll).
Generally people buy the cheapest POS bike from a store, the fitting probably isn't right or they just get their friends bike that they no longer want and put up with it until they can afford a car. They aren't going to a proper bike shop to get fitted up.
Bikes have already taken market shares from cars in large European cities such as Amsterdam [0] or Paris [1]. They may be a superior technology for most urban commutes: faster, requiring less space on roads and for parking, and more enjoyable [2].
Buses are subsidized. In cities with subways, they are used primarily to accommodate people with limited mobility or to cover rare routes. Between cities, they remain the cheapest option. Therefore, I'm not sure that cost is an important factor.
It is not about the bikes themselves, but building the city to promote one transport mode against another.
If your city has nice green public spaces linked by bike lanes, and has a good “human” level of density where most of the stuff you actually want to go to are reachable in less than an hour of cycling, people will naturally gravitate towards that, since biking in green spaces is usually enjoyable in and of itself.
Paradoxically this makes driving nicer as well, since it frees up traffic for car enthusiasts.
When I was living in Sofia (Bulgaria) I used to bike a lot, just because it is nice.
And I did own a car and used it frequently. But my commute / grocery run / recreation was usually done by cycle.
Berlin could be a perfect example of this, all the factors are there to make it a perfect bikable city. Yet our politicians continue to favor road building and expansion for cars, and neglect bike lanes. There is some cultural calcification regarding cars too of course, colleagues who take 45 minutes by car compared to my 20 minutes by bike to get to work, at a comparable distance, still seem to find it more enjoyable for some reason I still haven’t understood.
The biggest issue with cycling (I used to cycle everyday, no longer):
* Theft. I have to carry a lock and cable (for the front wheel). These are heavy and get dirty.
* Storage. I have to haul my mountain bike up and down the stairs in my apartment. Additionally I can't put the bike on my right shoulder and I cannot carry things on my left as it "feels wrong". So the whole process is a PITA.
* Being run over and accidents. I've been hit by cars hard enough twice to send me in and out of hospital for months. I had other less minor collisions with cars. I do not like cycle lanes either because there is even more chances of collision (read below).
* I am also normally dodging people's dogs and/or children while on a cycle even on the "cycle" lanes. This makes any cycle frustrating.
* Cycling has intertwined itself with the insufferable green crowd. I used to enjoy cycling for the act itself, I am not naive enough to think I am saving the planet.
I don't want to associate (or seen to associate even though I don't) with the green crowd. Guilt by association is a thing. However due to them now infecting what is essentially a hobby, I no longer enjoy it, so I moved on. I still cycle from time to time, but I am no longer and avid cyclist.
I actually prefer working on and driving my 97 LandRover Defender these days and Making Youtube Videos.
I disagree, a lot. First of all, while biking may be a hobby to you, it’s the primary mode of transportation for at least a billion people. To claim that all these people are “infected” by the green crowd, whatever that means, is just silly.
Would you be happy to be associated with aristocracy, now that you drive a land rover, because many "old money" people drive those?
While in your first comment you gave lots of reason why you dont ride a bike, now youre saying you stopped mostly due to perception of others..thats to me just as silly as all the tesla drivers who are now oh so afraid to be associated to musk and going so far to putting stickers on their car claiming they didnt know musk is unhinged.
> I disagree, a lot. First of all, while biking may be a hobby to you, it’s the primary mode of transportation for at least a billion people. To claim that all these people are “infected” by the green crowd, whatever that means, is just silly
BTW it was a form of transport to me. I used to cycle everyday to work and I used to cycle after work and at the weekends.
When I say it was infected by the green crowd, I am not including people that simply use it as a means of transport. I would have thought that would be obvious.
I am talking generally about cycling as a whole. I got into it because I thought mountain biking was cool when I was 12. Now almost every discussion about it is about building whole cities around it, carbon emissions etc. That is pushed by people primarily by people in the green crowd. I used to personally know these people. I probably still have their email and phone numbers hanging about.
There are a lot of extremists in the cycling the movement that want to totally ban cars, think pet ownership is akin to slavery and they are very vocal and some are involved in planning transport infrastructure. I know this for a fact, because I used to know these people personally.
You only think this is all silly because you haven't encountered these people.
> Would you be happy to be associated with aristocracy, now that you drive a land rover, because many "old money" people drive those?
Most Defenders are driven by Farmers I would wager. You are confusing a Defender with a Range Rover. Defenders are very bare bones, mine doesn't even have a Radio. I also have no issue with the aristocracy. They don't interfere with my hobbies or my life in any meaningful way. In fact many of them that I have met are very nice.
> While in your first comment you gave lots of reason why you dont ride a bike, now youre saying you stopped mostly due to perception of others..thats to me just as silly as all the tesla drivers who are now oh so afraid to be associated to musk and going so far to putting stickers on their car claiming they didnt know musk is unhinged.
To clarify, it was a combination of all the reason I listed. You are focusing in on this particular issue because you took exception to it.
The primary reason is one I didn't list (as it was only relevant to myself). I am in my early 40s now. My left ankle has issues, my right knee has issues. My right shoulder is slightly deformed from breaking my collar bone 3 times. When I was run over (the second time), I broke all my fingers on my right hand, some of the fingers didn't set correctly. I don't want to go through that in my 40s again and the roads are less safe than they were 15 years ago.
As for the Musk stuff. I believe it is largely astro-turf'd on the net. If people wish to sell their Tesla or adorn it with Anti-Musk slogans because of his current involvement with the Trump Administration, they are free to do so. I see nothing unhinged about it at all.
If they were to engage in acts of vandalism or violence because of anti-Tesla sentiment that would be unhinged IMO.
> Cycling has intertwined itself with the insufferable green crowd.
> When I say it was infected by the green crowd, I am not including people that simply use it as a means of transport. I would have thought that would be obvious.
Sorry but nothing in your comment made that obvious. It seems you are the one who is conflating cyclists with the "insufferable green crowd" (why caring about the environment is insufferable is a question for another time). People ride the bike for all kinds of reasons, they are quicker, they help them excercise, they help them save money, they simply enjoy it.
> You only think this is all silly because you haven't encountered these people.
I live in berlin, I know this kind of extremism very well, and still would never dream to judge cyclists as a whole - because i know it's just a means of transport that both "good" and "shitty" people use.
> the roads are less safe than they were 15 years ago.
Maybe that's because there are many many more cars on the road than in the past, population is rising everywhere. For everyone to have a car is simply not sustainable, especially in cities.
> Bikes have been around for a long time and are expected to technically stay the same in the foreseeable future.
Probably half the urban bikes I see now are (mostly cheap) electric ones. There's also a question of infrastructure; many cities have made great improvements in bike lanes over the last few decades.
> Electric buses are so much better than gasoline buses. Fewer vibrations, less noise.
Also faster takeoff, which is quite important (urban bus routes are typically very stop-start-y).
> And in a few years, buses will start to become autonomous.
I have doubts.
(Buses are very big and heavy, and other road users tend to behave badly around them; they're a near-worst-case for automation. You might get away with it on a mostly-segregated BRT line, but not a conventional bus route.)
> I don't expect bikes to take market share from cars.
Not in a society that is car-centric. But in countries that optimize for different types of transport, it is quite busy with bikes. Every commuter bike would have been a car otherwise - so also taking much more space.
I have an ebike and a trailer, and it absolutely removed my need for a car. My neighbors are a family of 6, and an electric cargo bike allows them to live without a second car.
Living in Europe this is much less of an issue.
Yeah car drivers tend to oversee you but after a while you can anticipate their movements very often.
I bike every day to work and the only semi-serious crash was 90% my fault because I was speeding lol
Europe is a big continent. Even within one city you can have neighborhoods with more aggro drivers than others. If there is a protected bike path I don't have problems taking it.
It's really a strange realization. If your health is fine.. and you don't live in smog.. biking is immensely beneficial. There's often multiple path to the same destination, shorter than main arteries, no traffic jam, no stress. I take my car twice a month and everytime I'm surprised by the effect of having to deal with all interruption and safety because we all drive 500-1000kg metallic buckets. It's quickly annoying.. that's a feeling you never have on bike. And no gas cost, near no insurance.. cheap repairs.
So true, weather is an issue (but in a way it's fun to now look at the sky to see where the clouds are going), clothing too a bit. My only problem is that weak health quickly cut your ability to move far.
Only argument I have is the no stress part. I find myself stressed out more often than should be when riding a bike in the city due to careless car drivers.
My bad, I should have explained that I take detours on smaller / calmer roads, whenever possible, to avoid traffic as much as possible. Depending on your country, there might be a lot of alternate paths. For normal roads you can have shorter trip, but often I choose longer travel if it's on a bike lane near a river or a forest, so I enjoy even more calm. Otherwise you're right.
It's quite amazing how every thread related to "public transport" systematically ends up being "the rest of the world" trying to explain to Americans that they may want to get slightly informed about the rest of the world before they say "public transports cannot work anywhere, because in the US they don't work".
Sure, US cities have mostly (1) been designed as far away from anything that is not the individual car as possible, and now it's very difficult to come back. But at least Americans could pretend they are aware of the fact that cities can be built in such a way that public transports actually work.
(1) Because there are cities, like NYC, where it actually works!
IF the default handling of any recordings is total erasure after some specified (and not unreasonable) period, then it's not an unleavened evil is it ?
Not entirely helpful, if the video has already been scanned, face rec employed, groupings of people recorded (eg, who you hang out with), and perhaps phone identifiers.
The recordings may be gone, but is all metadata? And when they answer yes, does that also mean "partners" too?
Anyhow, public transport will always be less private than a car, just due to fewer people traveling with you. That's not the point though.
The point is, car companies spying on you. And they all do it too. Ford does it. It needs to be stopped.
Yes, absolutely. All these other potential invasions of privacy.
But I'd like to think the items on your list become more visible - and easier to combat - if recordings are time-limited. Can activists conceivably use FOIA requests to identify ALL dataflows out of surveillance systems in use in public commons ?
The default. Nothing to hide, nothing to fear, right? Ironically even in my old car that doesn't even have parking sensors, I can still expect to have the police surveil me from roadside and drone cameras.
>And shifting traffic from personal cars to buses would make mobility much more efficient. Because in a bus, 30 people can cross a crossing so much faster than in a line of 30 individual cars. [...] I would expect travel to speed up when we move from cars to buses. Look at what cars do most of the time. Waiting at crossings, slowing down for crossings, accelerating after passing a crossing. I have not measured it yet, but I would expect buses that carry 20 passengers each to accelerate that by a factor of 10 or so.
Your math is leaving out a lot of other waiting periods which makes it seem like buses save time over cars. Your focus on crossing intersections is distorting the calculations.
Yes, 1 bus can move 30 passengers through a traffic light is faster than 30 individual cars but you have to offset that savings with extra wait times in other places:
+ add additional time to travel to the bus stop
+ add additional time to wait at the bus stop because buses don't come on demand but at spaced intervals. Maybe once an hour or half hour.
+ add additional time for bus to stop at other bus stops that are not relevant to the passenger, or changing buses,
+ add additional time to account for the bus taking a longer convoluted route that deviates from the shortest path between points A and B because they have to accommodate for the bus stops and also optimize the # of buses in the fleet vs passenger counts.
+ add time to travel from the final bus stop dropoff point to travel to the final destination without the bus. Each mile of walking takes about ~20 minutes. If the bus stop is too far away from the destination office or house, then I guess the passenger can take an Uber ride? Not only does that add more time, it negates a lot of benefits of using the bus. People could use the Uber for the entire trip -- or just use their personal car.
There are scenarios where the bus is undeniably faster. Inside dense cities where they have special lanes that can bypass some gridlock. The tour buses with stops that have frequent pickup intervals that do continuous loops around cities for tourists is another example that's faster than cars.
My perspective is from living in a big city. Hamburg in Germany. Here it is like this:
add additional time to travel to the bus stop
That is more than offset by the time and stress to find a parking place when you use a private car.
add additional time to wait at the bus stop
I would guess the average wait time here is about 3 minutes.
additional time for bus to stop at other bus stops
True, but decreases the more buses there are. The more buses, the less stops every bus has to do. And also decreases the better the planning via internet becomes. We have buses here in Hamburg, called "Moia" by Volkswagen, where you announce your starting and destination positions in advance, and the bus only stops where it has to.
additional time to account for the bus taking a route
that deviates from shortest path
True, but decreases the more buses there are. And the better we plan the routes via the internet with people announcing their route upfront.
> add additional time to wait at the bus stop because buses don't come on demand but at spaced intervals. Maybe once an hour or half hour.
I mean, this is enormously dependent on how busy the route or routes is. A once an hour route is _very_ infrequent. Every 10 minutes isn't unusual at peak times and of course multiple routes may work for you. I sometimes go for a drink with friends on the other side of the city after work; at rush hour, there's an almost continuous stream of suitable buses.
>I mean, this is enormously dependent on how busy the route or routes is. A once an hour route is _very_ infrequent.
Yes, it depends on the city. In Atlanta GA, the MARTA bus stops have 40-minute wait intervals outside of peak times. In Missoula Montana, the bus stop interval is 1 hour on Saturdays and Sundays. https://mountainline.com/your-trip/maps-schedules/
In the USA away from dense downtowns, using a public bus can be 4x the total commute time of a personal car when adding in all the extra wait times and the extra non-bus travel times to get to-and-from the bus stops. A 30-minute commute by car that takes 2 hours by public bus isn't appealing to most Americans.
The layout & logistics of American lifestyles favors the car. At any Costco parking lot, you can see soccer moms loading up the SUV with a ton of groceries and toilet paper. Trying to haul all that on a public bus would not be convenient. (The other passengers would also be annoyed by that extra baggage taking up space.) And drivers also like listening to music in their private cars.
In the USA, the more realistic consumer preference change would be replacing private personal cars with public robot driverless cars. Americans could then keep most of their lifestyle without drastic changes while the fleet of driverless cars reduces the space for parking and the pollution.
> In Atlanta GA, the MARTA bus stops have 40-minute wait intervals outside of peak times. In Missoula Montana, the bus stop interval is 1 hour on Saturdays and Sundays.
Yeah, okay, wow, that's really bad. Only place in the US I've ever used the bus was San Francisco (and its immediate surroundings), which is, I suppose, a bit of a special case, as American cities go (it was worse than the buses I'm used to in terms of frequency, but not _dramatically_ worse).
> The layout & logistics of American lifestyles favors the car.
This is true to some extent, but I would wonder how much of it is chicken-and-egg; people avoid the public transport because, as you've mentioned, it is _unusably bad_ (I wouldn't consider 1/hour acceptable except for late-night or rural services). As I understand it, in NYC, for instance, which has acceptable public transport, people _do_ use it.
> At any Costco parking lot, you can see soccer moms loading up the SUV with a ton of groceries and toilet paper. Trying to haul all that on a public bus would not be convenient.
Grocery delivery is a thing (actually, my impression is that it's less common as a first-party thing in the US; I'm not entirely sure why). And of course even in less car-dependent countries people often do use cars for _that_ sort of thing.
> And drivers also like listening to music in their private cars.
I mean, this would have made sense as a justification at one time (I think way back in the day this was actually used as a selling point by car companies), but come on, now, the walkman came out in 1979 (even before that, the transistor radio with earphone was a thing). I'm 40 and have been listening to music on public transport all my life.
Plenty of places, including my current city, have time-based tickets only. So even for the shortest ones you have to validate only once, while you can have a much longer trip.
Daily/weekend/weekly are even better, and monthly/quarterly even while they tied to your name, don't have to be validated in any particular place at all. You can do it far from any vehicles.
In the interest of minimalism and collective human efficiency, buses are best. Car or SUV makes sense only when a family or friends of 3-4 folks are travelling.
I started playing a game when I’m waiting at traffic lights, that is to count how many cars have a single driver and no passengers in it. A good portion of those cars are SUVs that have no business being in a city. The results are far from surprising and completely maddening.
In Sweden the municipality finances 40-50% of public transport, and owns recorded CCTV and gathered traffic data (from ticket scans etc). But operations are by private companies (regular procurement stuff).
> Would privacy also be better? Because the government is more trustworthy regarding the collection of movement data than private companies?
On this topic, I think public/private ownership, and public/private usage, makes no difference either way.
Public transport can be privately owned. Back in the UK, the majority of busses I saw were Stagecoach[0].
But even when government owned, that doesn't remove the argument in favour of CCTV: here in Berlin we have BVG[1], which is government owned, and I'm fairly sure the blobs I see on the ceiling are CCTV cameras[2].
I think what does make a difference is rules like GDPR — but cookie popups have shown that it's an uphill struggle to force businesses to actually follow that law rather than demand "consent" before doing business, or to actually minimise their usage of tracking to the level where "legitimate interest" actually applies and therefore they don't need to ask (as opposed to the IMO wishful thinking "legitimate interest" used by some cookie popups).
When I was a kid, buses didn't have cameras (or at least most buses didn't; it started coming in in the early 90s) but even then they had these mirror periscope things so that the driver could see the upper deck and the area behind the stairs on the lower deck.
Many cars monitor the driver now, often with facial recognition enabled cameras. Mazda, infinity, Hyundai/genesis, others. It feels a bit like every brand will end up with invasive tech, ads, and subscriptions.
> It feels a bit like every brand will end up with invasive tech, ads, and subscriptions.
It's bad enough as it is, and consumers should try and fight against that by not buying those cars.
Especially now that we see that the CEO can turn fascist and feel entitled to do whatever he pleases with the data. How long before federal employees get fired because their Tesla showed that they arrived late to work?
At the very least, don't buy Teslas. At this point that's probably one of the riskiest choices.
Unless someone is 60, you don't know a time when companies haven't been spying on you.
People were worried about Google in the early 2000s, after they bought doubleclick. There's nothing new here, except a continuous walk along the same path.
Data collection was a big trend of the 80s. Credit bureaus and points cards were the big start.
If you go into a forum about cars, you can see people asking about 5 or 6 years ago, to turn off telemetry in their cars. They are mocked relentlessly.
Then the insurance issue came to light, where car companies were caught selling data without consent. Suddenly, everyone cared.
Point is, the average person hasn't the time, or the inclination to understand, or even care... until it hurts them.
Of course, by the time the hurting happens, it's too late...
So give them pennies (point cards) and they'll be happy to be tracked.
From what I've noticed in my life, many people are incapable of being aware of dangers, without perspective. Thus, to survive mentally, they must dismiss dangers they cannot control. They deride concerns, to protect themselves menrally.
I'd say at least 50% of the population is like this.
Americans liked to laugh at Europe's data regulations, but they sure are effective at preventing this specific problem of "CEO can turn fascist and feel entitled to do whatever he pleases with the data."
Which surely has some connection to why Musk (like many other Silicon Valley billionaires) hates the EU so much.
Given a long enough timeline you can count on anyone to do the right thing. It's the balance of right to wrong which is more interesting. By this measure I don't think Americans are particularly exceptional.
Also, whether people choose to do the right thing is less interesting if they have no choice.
The quote means let americans fail because they'll get there eventually. After they've stubbornly tried everything else.
American's believe we're exceptional and dont have to learn from others. We'll do it OUR WAY and it'll work. We'll force it if we have to. This isn't something most people are consciously aware of, but it's something you can notice if you start to look for.
The thing I don't get is that the fascists running the state still have the support of the people. It's amazing to see a country that loves seeing themselves as "kings of democracy" so much, while at the same time proving over and over again that they don't really understand democracy.
> Americans liked to laugh at Europe's data regulations
They aren't laughing.
On the contrary, the surveillance capitalists (many of which frequent this site) are vocal because they are spreading FUD. After all, sensible data protection laws affect their business models.
Driver attention monitoring is very normal and required for any car with significant Assisted Driving technology, which is likely to be all new cars soon. I expect safety scoring schemes like Euro NCAP continue to give AD systems higher and higher weights in their scores over time.
A deadly piece of equipment monitoring a safety critical part of the control system (ie the driver) is totally normal and expected. That same piece of equipment surreptitiously phoning home to the manufacturer with the data is the part that isn't acceptable.
I want my car to monitor both me and the surroundings. I also want to be able to do things like speak in natural language to my phone, use my phone camera to OCR and translate documents from a foreign language, and all sorts of other 90s sci-fi stuff.
Unfortunately the future we were graced with is a dystopian reality where all of this is built on proprietary black boxes that spy on you 24/7. And somehow the government takes no issue with this state of affairs, instead constructing their own data feeds.
Even if it would be one percent, eg. every hundreth car that can store IDs and car color of cars passing by then you'r movement could be tracked easily just by being spotted by teslas. Musk has shown he's not a man to be trusted.
That is quite the assumption to make, how do you know why they think Musk is not to be trusted? There are many of us who have been saying this for years. And you have to admit, even for him his actions in the last year have been egregious. Also, just because you do not see people complaining about the other 1M CEOs doesn't mean they don't exist.
Musk isn't untrustworthy just for being vocal. He has too much power and has shown he'll break rules or even the law when it suits him. Someone who is inherently political and wields this much influence without accountability should never be trusted.
Being vocal is one thing but constantly attacking someone on x while spreading misinformation or straight up lies doesn't add to ones credibility either.
Given this is about new technologies or more accurately the potential misuse of new technology, I think we can infer we are talking newer models of cars rather than cars already on the road.
Sure, but it has the same energy as saying it's worth having a camera in your living room recording 24/7(to the cloud) because any potential recording of burglars entering your house is worth having.
It's one thing if it's only recorded and stored locally on your machine and another if it's some private company with dubious history that records everything.
A ridiculous amount of tech wizardry goes into building software that watches over users. Most software engineers won’t blink twice before jumping on such a project—especially if the paycheck is juicy. But rest assured, they’ll still rush to HN to roll their eyes when someone else does it.
