[lx3459683]

Self driving cars are not going to happen in established cities for a very, very long time.

The only thing that could make it happen is a giant like Google/Alphabet investing enough cash to lobby governments to repurpose existing transportation infra to only belong to self-driving cars. But that's also the doorway to a dystopian future where megacorps run entire countries.

[emodendroket]

By the time you're building self-driving car-exclusive tunnels and the like, you really are getting very little benefit over a train system to justify doing it, especially when you take emissions into account.

[gdulli]

I agree. Anything with low-occupancy vehicles feels like a dead end to me. Of all things, car ownership is the thing we're aggressively enabling/optimizing in 2018? Really?

I'm usually not a person who's sympathetic to complaints about advances in technology eliminating jobs. Not for a real overall long term gain to society. But autonomous cars putting swaths of people out of work while at the same time taking us in the wrong direction on traffic, emissions, etc. doesn't feel great. Those drivers losing work slowly over time as cities evolve truly better and more sustainable transportation options feels more right.

Aside from the opportunity cost of not furthering public transportation, autonomous cars will drive around aimlessly anytime the cost of fuel is less than the cost of parking. We already have Uber creating waste by idling/driving around between passengers.

[icebraining]

car ownership is the thing we're aggressively enabling/optimizing in 2018? Really?

On the contrary: making taxis cheaper (which self-driving can do, by eliminating the biggest cost - the driver) makes it much easier to live without owning a car.

If there was no Uber and such, I'd probably have to own a car for the exceptions not covered by public transport. And after paying for the fixed costs anyway, the marginal cost per trip is low, making me more likely to use it over PT.

autonomous cars will drive around aimlessly anytime the cost of fuel is less than the cost of parking

Per the above, cheaper taxis → fewer owned cars → more free parking spaces.

[gdulli]

Who happens to own the car, the driver or a service provider, is inconsequential in assessing the big picture consequences of more cars on the road vs. more sustainable options.

[icebraining]

But it's not more cars, that's my point.

Say public transport covers 95% of my needs. If I have cheap taxis, I'll use public transport most of the time, and cars only 5%.

If I have to buy a car because I can't afford those taxi rides, I might use it for 30% or 40% or more of the trips, since it just costs me a bit of gas (or electricity) - the fixed costs are sunk.

[emodendroket]

I mean, the incentives are also kind of backwards -- it's usually free to drive and you have to pay to ride the train. If we're really looking at climate cataclysm it might be worth thinking about changing that dynamic.

[maym86]

Right. We already have a great solution to many of the autonomous vehicle problems. Trains and busses.

[morsma]

As a European living in the states. Trains and buses are not a substitute for a car, not even in Europe.

[mrec]

In general, no, but generalizing can miss important local markets. I live in London and trains and busses do me fine. I honestly can't remember the last time I got into a car here; certainly years rather than months.

Big-city issues like parking and congestion charging can tip the scales quite a bit, with much better public transport than the rest of the country to compensate.

[emodendroket]

Trains also do not have to completely supplant cars to make a difference. If people take the train to work and use their cars to run errands around town it's still an improvement over driving everywhere.

[emodendroket]

How many Americans drive to and from an office in a city center at the same predictable hours every single day? We're certainly underutilizing trains.

[maym86]

Even shared bus services can made into something desirable with the right marketing and investment. The large tech companies provide luxuary coach services with WiFi to their workers and the people riding them are seemingly very happy with the services.

[emodendroket]

I mean, let's be honest here: a lot of people don't want to ride the bus because they associate it with poor people and don't want to share a vehicle with them. There's a lot of legacies of America's social problems getting tangled up with this question.

[icebraining]

That's only helpful if they mostly share the same route; if it's a star topology, trains won't help.

[emodendroket]

That's why usually there are multiple lines that converge on a central station.

[maym86]

I lived in Europe for a long time too. Trains are not a complete solution but they do solve a lot of the problems and are underused in the US.

[yalph]

Long distance train rides are incredibly expensive in the US.

[emodendroket]

I mean even moderate-distance train rides aren't cheap. Look at the price of a single ticket from the outer zones of the commuter rail systems into the city

[ams6110]

Trains and buses don't run on demand from point to point.

[maym86]

They do a pretty good job of getting you very close in London and NYC. Longer distance trains get you between cities much faster than in a car. They don't solve everything but they are definitely underutilized as a solution in the US.

We could put effort into making them better but it's not as sexy.

[tialaramex]

Metro service is the key. When frequencies get high enough the timetable exists only for the benefit of the operations personnel, customers don't care about it because their experience is like with an elevator. You don't ask for a timetable for the elevator, you just go to the place where elevators arrive, and wait, and very shortly there will be an elevator.

Very high densities are both the problem and the solution. They're the problem because under very high density private car ownership is infeasible, and the solution because public transport becomes fast and affordable. If you let it.

[maym86]

Exactly. A lot of the issues with public transportation are because we underfund the systems and they end up seeming worse than they could be. The complaints that users have are not with the concept of trains or busses but with the failures, which can be minimized with adequate investment.

[emodendroket]

Frankly I think commuter rail for suburban riders is great and I think there should be more of it too. Who the hell likes driving to work during rush hour?

[findjashua]

Trains and buses don't solve the last mile problem

[majormajor]

Cars displaced those for a reason. Especially busses.

[emodendroket]

I have commuted to work by car and by train and I'd much rather do the latter. If it were so self-evident that mass transit were worse you'd expect to see people everywhere drive just as much as Americans

[Piskvorrr]

I can imagine a part of the Interstate mesh getting repurposed as SDV-only. In a city...not so fast.

[thanatropism]

Long range trucking is really the killer app. Fleets of N trucks can take an entire lane of road in sequence (almost like train wagons) and talk to each other and have M<N supervisors.

[emodendroket]

But long-range trucking seems just as amenable to replacement by freight trains if we're building dedicated infrastructure.

[Piskvorrr]

1. Building railroads is an order of magnitude harder than building roads (gradients, turn radii, clearance, yards).

2. Not even building, just repurposing. "This road/lane/whatever now SDV only."

3. Trains only run on rails. Trucks that could be run as SDVs on dedicated infrastructure and as human-driven on shared infrastructure tackle the last-mile problem far more efficiently.

4. Trains are built on the "smart infrastructure" paradigm (go straight at the speed which the signals tell you, until the signals tell you to stop); trucks on the opposite "smart vehicles" paradigm (road exists, everything else is your responsibility). This makes a truck rollout far more scalable (as in "just add this road to whitelist").

[ams6110]

Trains don't run on demand from point to point. All your Amazon next day deliveries depend on trucks and airplanes.

Trains work for some freight delivery patterns, but not nearly all. Stuff that can go by train for the most part already does.

[Zarel]

I don't know why people are still casting aspersions on self-driving cars when Waymo is this close to market.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-31/inside-th...

They're already testing with customers! Customers who love the service! They're planning for a roll-out later this year!

https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/08/waymo-snow-navigation/

They can handle rain and snow!

[randomdata]

Waymo uses remote drivers for their service. It is neat that technology has progressed to allow drivers to sit an office rather than the vehicle, but that's not exactly what people imagine when they hear driverless.

[datguacdoh]

They use remote assistance for tricky emergency situations. That's a pretty big distinction. The remote assistance can be called in to help the car if it gets into a completely unknown state, but otherwise the cars are self driving.

https://www.wired.com/story/phantom-teleops/

[dmode]

Waymo also runs on well mapped, predictable, grid like city patterns. Most of the world is not like Phoenix suburbs or Mountain View.

[Zarel]

The second article I linked to also mentioned work on unmapped roads:

https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/07/mit-maplite-self-driving...

Waymo has solved problem after problem you think they haven't solved yet, for some reason. They've intentionally gone after unpredictable situations and dealt with them.

Look at any video where they explain how it works, and you'll notice how many situations they can manage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSX3qdy0dFg

And even if Waymo only works on well-mapped cities? That's still far from "can only work if they repurpose existing transportation infrastructure to only belong to self-driving cars" which is the comment I was replying to.

[alkonaut]

I think the ambition will be adjusted and it will happen. The realization that will come is that solving the last percent (or five, or ten) of driving is so expensive that it's just not pursued. So we'll have these 99% autonomous cars that will be confused and handed off to a human driver, inside the car or remote. This will give most of the benefit at a tiny fraction of the cost. The race won't be to reach fully autonomous driving, but to reach 99.9% when the competition is 99.8%, because that is half the workforce needed to drive all those confused cars.

If we take "self driving cars" to mean "cars handling every siytuation", I completely agree that reaching 100% without either restricting the area or modifying the driving environment won't be possible within several decades. But my guess is we never get there because no one will make that investment for such little gain. Completely autonomous driving (handling the things that happen only once in a drivers lifetime) will require so much of human intelligence that if you have that kind of AI there are probably better things to do with it than drive cars around.

[emodendroket]

Cars that drive themselves 99% of the time but 1% of the time give up and hand off to human drivers are going to kill the drivers or somebody else about 1% of the time.

[dragonwriter]

That's a faulty assumption; if the 1% isn't “give up because otherwise we are certain to kill people” but instead “give up because this is a circumstance we aren't confident that the system will handle better than a human”, for instance.

[lx3459683]

It's a very reasonable assumption. When self driving cars give up, they give you a second or less to assess the situation around you and avert disaster. This is now well understood to be less safe than just 100% manual driving since your attention is then on the road at all times instead of inevitably wandering when the car is doing just fine 99% of the time. Don't forget that Wayomo killed off their SAE-2 test program after finding drivers were falling asleep at the wheel of these 99.0% autonomous cars.

And to build a self driving system that can give you a reasonable time to actually assess the situation and respond to it? That's the same system that's 99.9999% reliable.

This is the crux of why self driving cars will simply not work in the foreseeable future unless sequestered to their own tightly controlled road networks.

[alkonaut]

> When self driving cars give up, they give you a second or less to assess the situation around you and avert disaster.

I don't think the problem will be any situation with short reaction times at all. Nothing at freeway speeds, or situations like the Uber accident. That I think is where autonomous cars will shine, because sensors never get tired and reaction times are great.

The weird things that will happen which I count to the "not going to solve any time soon" category will be when the car comes to a completely snowed over roadworks, in the middle of the night, with the diversion signs completely hidden in snow. Construction workers barely visible in the snowstorm. Are those guys roadworkers or pedestrians? Are they working? Can I pass here? Will I get oncoming traffic because they narrowed it to one lane?

When things this weird happens at highway speeds or anywhere else where reaction is important - humans probably fail too. And at that point it's not really a question of technology but one of trust. Can we allow autonomous car to kill tons of people every year, with the sole excuse that humans would have killed all those people too, and then some? I'm not convinced of that either - I'm only arguing that from a technological standpoint, it should be possible to reach the 99% cars within a rather short timeframe. Those cars may be left on the scrapheap of history because of legal or ethical reasons, however.

[tigershark]

The scenario that you described seems to me less intractable than the “woman in an electric wheelchair chasing a duck with a broom” that Waymo handled correctly.

[emodendroket]

One problem with this theory is that the Uber car sensors misidentified the woman who was killed and they were so erratic that they felt like turning them off made sense.

[TangoTrotFox]

You're not considering why the AI turns it over the human. It's rarely about some crazy imminent emergency where if the human doesn't respond instantly and with super-human reflexes, it's all over.

In reality it's mostly just the AI expected one thing, and observed another - so something's not working right and it seeks a disengagement. California requires companies to quantify disengagements and most go a step further and specify the reason for the disengagement. I think the reason for this is precisely because of your intuition -- thinking that disengagement means imminent danger. Even for companies with relatively large numbers of disengagements, there were generally 0 that involved any danger whatsoever.

[grogenaut]

The problem is, as air flight has found, you're removing training hours from the humans so theyll be more and more dangerous also. And how do you safely hand off to a driver who is 99% of the time not doing anything. That's the thing humans are worst at, stayomg attent to long boring periods

[majewsky]

The safety driver will be sitting in a call-center-like office and taking remote control when the car requests it.

[emodendroket]

That sounds like a terrible job with a lot of potential for things to go wrong.

[emodendroket]

It is a bit of an exaggeration, but the fact remains that handing off to a bored driver who likely isn't paying any attention and expecting them to take over a car at speed is not reasonable or safe.

[tialaramex]

You're imagining something akin to the autoland disconnect scenario for a jet liner, and you're correct that, in the absence of expert operators who are prepared to take over immediately this is often fatal. Which is why the jet liner has not one but two people specifically standing by to take over and try to land safely without the autoland. [ This is still scary because usually the autoland is trying to put the plane down in very poor visibility, and it is disconnecting because you're below decision height but something so bad went wrong that it's no longer able to land the plane - a human pilot may not be able to make whatever that bad thing was survivable either ]

The auto-land disconnect scenario isn't applicable to cars. It happens because jet liners are _flying_ and suddenly ceasing to fly in a jet liner is both very bad and perhaps unavoidable in the absence of enough information to operate the plane within parameters.

In contrast when a car becomes uncertain about what to do it's not flying so _stopping_ is almost always a good choice. It's not ideal, it may block traffic and be a nuisance, it might even cause a small accident of some sort - but it's very likely to end with everybody walking away, not with a burning wreck and dozens of dead.

[notatoad]

talking about cars that drive themselves only 99% of the time is a straw man. Waymo's disengagement rate in the year leading up to nov 2017 was once per 5,596 miles [1]. i'm not sure how to translate that to a percentage of time, but let's say a disengagement is a tenth of a mile - that means waymo's cars are self-driving 99.99998% of the time. they're the closest to market, but that was almost two years ago now, and in the 65 reported disengagements they didn't kill anybody.

[emodendroket]

Waymo measures their disengagements differently than the competition.

https://blog.piekniewski.info/2017/05/11/a-car-safety-myths-...

> Now it is important to note that the definition of a "disengagement event" may vary between companies. Most companies report every case in which a human grabs the wheel for any reason. Waymo (*) only reports the events, in which if not for the human intervention the car would actually cause a dangerous situation [read more here]. The way they do it, is for every physical disengagement they gather all the sensor data and next simulate multiple scenarios. If these scenarios lead to a dangerous situation, such event is being reported. According to Waymo in 2016 nine events would have lead to the car hitting an obstacle or another road user, approximately 1/10 of all disengagements they've reported (124). Hence there is such a gap between Waymo and the rest of the pack.

I also think it's hard to generalize from Waymo employees being attentive and general road users achieving the same thing.

[TangoTrotFox]

I don't think the goal should be seen as perfect driving, and that is likely impossible in any case. You can take the most extreme scenario that AI or human can possibly successfully overcome, and then make it just slightly more challenging to induce failure. You'll always be able to 'break' a driver's ability to correctly respond whether they're human or AI. So the goal, to start, should simply be to overcome humans on average. If a human will end up in a fatal crash every x 'average' miles, then an AI is a success if gets into fatal crashes at an average rate less than x.

[maxxxxx]

I really hope that the future won't be even more car centric but that's how things may go.

[sidibe]

You have to ignore Waymo to still have this opinion. I doubt they'd buy 80k cars if they didn't think they could use them soon.

[epmatsw]

Or you’d have to not have walked around downtown SF lately. It’s a rare day where I don’t see multiple self-driving cars.

[madengr]

Delta City (aka New Detroit) would be the ideal for testing.

[paganel]

When I think of self-driving cars I always think of this taxi scene (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWgrvNHjKkY) from Total Recall. Paul Verhoeven is a genius.

[madengr]

Isn’t that the one with the body scanners (at the airport)?