[beams_of_light]

Road infrastructure is going to change, by necessity. It seems like self-driving technology is as good as it can be, given current circumstances. There's no way to get self-driving cars to airplane safety numbers without on/near road devices/reflectors/computer-readable signage/etc, edge compute, better pedestrian understanding of what the cars are seeing and are capable of reacting to, and probably much more. It's time to give it the infrastructural boost it needs to become an everyday reality. We need to put sensors in the road when they're re-paved, transmitters in signs with solar chargers when they're replaced, LIDAR reflectors on the road sides and in medians, start offering clothing/accessories with transmitters or reflectors that clearly identify people as pedestrians...

[rrdharan]

Is the reason all of this makes more sense than just building tracks and trains just the fact that there’s an evolutionary path to get there with incremental releases along the way?

Because every time I hear this kind of thing I keep finding myself asking why/whether mass transit systems aren’t just the same end state?

[chriswphoto]

I used to believe that self driving cars were a panacea for mobility. Then I moved to Boston, sold my car, bought a bike and realized that in dense urban cities, cars are the enemy, doesn’t matter if the are Electric and autonomous. They generally don’t fit in cities. Cities should be built for people not for single occupancy high speed, deadly cars.

[idavidrein]

well the ideal cheap ride-sharing AV world would have much more spread out cities, no?

[beams_of_light]

IMO, the reason mass transit isn't popular in moderately populated areas (think population per sq mi/km) is that it's too inconvenient. In these places, it's much, much quicker to hop in your car and get where you're going than to try to use the public transportation system, which is a pretty sparse set of bus routes in most places.

I'm a firm believer in Elon Musk's vision for public transit, wherein you may own an autonomous vehicle that is hired out for rides by others via something like Lyft. If you choose to own a car, it'll sit at your house when you choose, but can go out and make you money while you have nowhere to go. At this point, you can imagine that there are detractors from this idea - namely those who would profit from owning all the vehicles, those who manufacture traditional vehicles, and the fossil fuel industry, to name a few. Those people are the ones who will keep us in a state of limbo as long as possible from a legal and infrastructural standpoint. We have to decide that this future is better than the one we're in. It'll have a vast impact on pollution, anthropological contributions to climate change, and human equality and prosperity.

All we have to do is start demanding progress and stop accepting mediocrity.