Autonomous Cars Will Save Money and Lives 389
cartechboy writes "Autonomous cars are coming even if tech companies have to produce them. The biggest hurdles are the technology (very expensive and often still surprisingly rudimentary) and how vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communication happens (one car anticipates or sees an accident, it should tell nearby cars). So what are the benefits to self-driving cars? They may save us thousands of lives and not a small amount of cash. A new study from the Eno Center for Transportation (PDF) suggests that if just 10 percent of vehicles on the road were autonomous, the U.S. could see 1,000 fewer highway fatalities annually and save $38 billion in lost productivity (due to congestion and other traffic problems). Right off the bat you can imagine autonomous driving easily topping your average intoxicated drivers' ability behind the wheel. At a 90 percent adoption mark those same numbers in theory would become: 21,700 lives spared, and a whopping $447 billion saved."
Lost revenue to the cops (Score:2, Insightful)
Cops won't like it because they'll see lower revenue from DUI fines, speeding fines, and all that crap they love taking money for.
Re:Lost revenue to the cops (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do you think cops care about that money? Municipalities may care about that money, but the cops couldn't care less (they don't get a cut, after all). But cops do try to avoid hearing "how come everyone else writes more tickets than you do?" So they make a point of writing tickets. But they really don't care about revenues, per se.
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That assumes the standard street cop thinks that far ahead.
[John]
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But cops do try to avoid hearing "how come everyone else writes more tickets than you do?" So they make a point of writing tickets. But they really don't care about revenues, per se.
That's part of it. Another part is that it's their job to enforce the law, and so that's what they do. It's not their job to decide which laws to enforce (although obviously that happens to a degree). If a cop only enforces the laws they feel like enforcing, then they become the judge and jury too and our system generally tries to avoid that (federal agencies excepted of course). Sure, some cops are jerks that just want the opportunity to power trip on you, but for the most part that's a minority of cop
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Cops won't like it because they'll see lower revenue from DUI fines, speeding fines, and all that crap they love taking money for.
I'm sure the governments will figure out a way to bust people for DUI even if they are riding in an auto-auto. They already do it for sitting in cars that are not running.
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Where's that article on Oregon taxing for miles driven?
[John]
38 billion in productivity or (Score:5, Funny)
30 minutes more sleeping?
Re:38 billion in productivity or (Score:5, Insightful)
30 minutes more sleeping?
30 minutes more sleep would also make people more productive -- so either way it's a win.
So what'll we do with half a trillion dollars? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Actually, Autonomous cars are a productivity gain that quickly translates, by allowing you to nap or read in the car after you buy one.
We want to put as many people out of work as possible, that's really the whole point of technological advancement, that's how we make our lives better. There are obviously powerful people who steal our productivity gains, like Wall St. and real estate brokers, our expanding law enforcement and industrial prison system, etc. We must reclaim these productivity gains for ours
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Autonomous cars are cool though because they require no connected political reform, just put all the drivers and cabbies out of work (yey!), and save everyone an hour or so per day (double yey!).
Welcome to 1904.
The Wobs may have been too militant for their own success, but they well understood the nature of the battle. IT and business/knowlege workers today are facing the exactly the same threats to their enjoyment of life now, and will need to decide how to respond or be overwhelmed.
Where the machine is put in, some of the workers move out. One worker with a machine, or a small working force with machinery, will produce more goods than a large working force with hand tools. So that machinery displaces laborers. This is the feature of machinery that secures its installation in industry. But machinery does more than merely throw workmen out of jobs, it renders the versatile skill of the craftsman unnecessary. So the machines have won their way into every industry, and wherever they went less labor was required until eventually the aggregate of these surplus laborers grew to such proportions that there came into existence what is known as the army of unemployed.
At first the unemployed were largely of the mechanical trades, but the invention of new mechanical devices, and the improvement of machinery, which has been going on, has reduced the unemployed to a working class contingent in which the unskilled workers predominate.
Ask the average worker what relation machine production has to unemployment, and you will find that he is unaware of the fact that machinery will explain unemployment. Yet this fact, which is potent enough to be self-evident, is a mystery to the average unionist, let alone to the average working man and woman. The unemployed, even after many experiences, on the average only understand that "the job was shut down" by the boss. It is accepted that the employer has an unquestioned right to shut down industry, regardless of the social consequences.
http://www.iww.org/history/library/iww/isandisnt/6 [iww.org]
Autonomous cars are tangential to the conflict, but apportioning the benefits they will bring will require political reform.
Re:So what'll we do with half a trillion dollars? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think it'll necessarily put cabbies out of work, because unless i'm mistaken the primary reason people would take a taxi other than drinking, is either they lack a car (by choice, or a family with only one car, where the wife or husband needs to get somewhere while the car is out), or there is no parking at the destination. It would seem that autonomous cars wouldn't benefit people in either of these cases.
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Re:So what'll we do with half a trillion dollars? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not all economic activity benefits society. Perhaps the most well known demonstration is the parable of the broken window [wikipedia.org]:
The parable of the broken window was introduced by Frederic Bastiat in his 1850 essay Ce qu'on voit et ce qu'on ne voit pas (That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Unseen) to illustrate why destruction, and the money spent to recover from destruction, is actually not a net-benefit to society. The parable, also known as the broken window fallacy or glazier's fallacy, demonstrates how opportunity costs, as well as the law of unintended consequences, affect economic activity in ways that are "unseen" or ignored.
The productivity gains failing to make it to your level are arguably a problem of inequality of the distribution of wealth, not lack of economic activity.
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Re:So what'll we do with half a trillion dollars? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's it. There will never be computer driven cars for the masses. It will always be cheaper for them to drive their own.
Not when the insurance companies artificially jack up the rates for human driven cars. They will force the majority into this, guaranteed.
Re:So what'll we do with half a trillion dollars? (Score:5, Insightful)
If humans are the cause of more accidents there's nothing artificial about it.
More realistically, I expect most people a generation from now will find the higher vehicle cost to be easily offset by not having to get a manual driving license, freeing up driving time, lower fuel consumption and using the car even when disabled, too young or otherwise not able to drive manually for whatever reason.
Re:So what'll we do with half a trillion dollars? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is not a lifestyle I want to live. I can't imagine a future population truly being happy with this either. No matter what the soccer mom associations running western society, today say, there's much more to life than safety and convenience, especially when it comes to control over mental state and physical location/transportation.
Re:So what'll we do with half a trillion dollars? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't imagine a future population truly being happy with this either.
Really? You don't think that people would rather be playing games on a mobile device or texting, than having to pay enough attention to their surroundings to avoid harm to others and themselves?
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This is the lifestyle I want *you* to live as it decreases the changes you drive over me.
Go drive in race tracks, not in city centers.
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I can imagine being very happy that I don't have to own a car, or drive it around.
I can imagine that I will be very happy to just summon a car and tell it where I want to go, to be taken there quickly and dropped off and being able to walk away, not have to worry about parking that car, or maintaining it.
I can imagine being very happy that when I want to use my bicycle instead, I won't be cut up be
Re:So what'll we do with half a trillion dollars? (Score:5, Insightful)
Preach on, bro! You'll also never see GPS for the masses, it will always be cheaper for them to open a map. Or power windows. Or automatic transmission. Or...oh, wait.
Who will or won't have these (Score:2)
> There will never be computer driven cars for the masses.
> It will always be cheaper for them to drive their own.
And more fun !!!
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Realistically, electronically controlled vehicles will roll out in this order:
You mean "autonomous", don't you? Electronically controlled is close to what we have today for almost everything but actual steering. "Fly by wire".
6. Middle income people who can't qualifiy for a license.
If you can't qualify for a license, you aren't going to be able to take over from you car when you need to, and you won't be able to drive the last mile from your garage to the road with all the electronic navigation aids that will be required. Save lives? Turn the highway into a large parking lot when one car fails and the "driver" isn't qualified to pick his
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First of all, low-income people already have a reduced rate of car ownership compared to the other groups you list, so half of what you're predicting is "no change from the status quo".
Second, why would you want to own a car when you could rent a driverless cab (or ask the automated bus to swing by my current location)? The economics of car ownership change entirely when you take drivers out of the loop.
It's a race for ownership of the car's OS (Score:2)
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Doesn't scale very well over long distances, though.
What utter crap (Score:2, Interesting)
Hey, let's play this game with computers, after all we don't need freedom behind the keyboard either and **AA's claim piracy cost the economy countless billions of dollars every year. Let's have autonomous computers! We'll make the operating system and hardware completely closed to prevent anyone from altering their 'trusted' environment. Now in order to keep anyone from hacking into their computers and driving by themselves we'll have to make sure that we take away the ability to install software that hasn
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We'll make the operating system and hardware completely closed ... make sure that we take away the ability to install software that hasn't been approved. We'll do this through a centralized market place where every application is signed and approved. Now the signing agency ... get a cut of 30%.
Dude, you just described Apple's marketing strategy, not Microsoft RT.
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Skeptical (Score:2, Insightful)
You know . The way they're painting this , it seems like there's not going to be any unforeseen problems with it.
I can already predict crashes due to hacking/ buggy softwares and etc.
Don't get me wrong. I agree with the fact that automated cars are a step in the right direction. However, what I dislike is how it is being presented here. It is presented as if it was a holy grail of driving. The solution of all problems. That's very misleading and dangerous. That's what I can't stand. The dishonesty of it a
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Slashdot management have a serious car-boner for this tech so you'll read lots about it here. Also, page hits.
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Agreed. This dishonesty should set off alarm bells about their true intentions and priorities.
Re:Skeptical (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it's a wonderful idea - maybe because I'm older. It would allow my in laws, for example, to continue being mobile in their late 70-s and 80's, whereas now they can't drive. It would allow me more mobility too, since I can't really drive due to health reasons. I can imagine automatic-only roads, where the speed limits are increased and traffic flow is automated - no more traffic jams, traffic lights would result in faster trips and more efficient fuel use.
Of course I like driving as much as the next guy, but I wouldn't mind if it became relegated to a "hobby" as opposed to an unavoidable daily chore.
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The number of crashes from buggy software is much higher with human drivers than computers. How many computers hit the wrong pedal and slam into buildings?
And you know this how? Please don't say Google, because they just say "cool, X zillion miles without an accident, blah, blah, blah". We have no idea what the driving conditions and other factors are.
Right off the bat? (Score:2)
>Right off the bat you can imagine autonomous driving easily topping your average intoxicated drivers' ability behind the wheel.
Didn't anybody pay attention to the DARPA Grand Challenge?
Personal Time Saved (Score:5, Interesting)
Risk Perception 101: People are Idiots (Score:5, Insightful)
People are willing to endure a risk orders of magnitudes higher of crashing by human error than by machine error.
Much as they're okay with the risk of dying from flu every year by not vaccinating, but not the comparatively negligible risk of a terrorist attack.
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You can sue an individual with some chance of winning (though mandatory insurance tries to make us into mini corporations, it doesn't completely succeed.)
If the accident is blamed on a company like Google, do you think their attorneys would have let the product out the door without closing off the product liability exposure? Google et. al. will not roll a product like auto-drive out to the general public until they've successfully lobbied themselves teflon body armor.
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You could always just make the self driving part of the system deactivate itself unless it has received all scheduled checkups and maintenance, putting the liability with the mechanic.
Why do you think this means people are idiots? (Score:2)
I'd say it's more a matter of people being HUMAN. Humans have a whole range of emotions too, which often prove detrimental or at least reduce efficiency at attaining the desired outcome in a particular situation. Should we just eliminate all those pesky feelings too and become strictly logical?
I think we all realize we're going to die eventually one way or another. When it comes down to it, we're generally far more okay with it happening because we made a mistake while doing something we enjoy (or even som
Assuming no faults in the driving AI. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the problem.
Currently, they're looking at data for autonomous vehicles in a complete vacuum.
I'm quite sure that having such cars on the roads in percentile quantities will yield their own sets of unique fatalities sooner or later.
In the mean time, I'm not an quadriplegic. So I'll choose to drive my own damn car.
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Yup, GIGO. Let's assume that this tech works great under real-world conditions. Then we know that it will be a big improvement. Wow, such insight.
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Um, what? (Score:3)
Right off the bat you can imagine autonomous driving easily topping your average intoxicated drivers' ability behind the wheel.
Um, what? Self-driving cars will drive better than drunks? That's an endorsement?
10% of 25,580 is 2558 (Score:2)
Just sayin'.
And I don't think that 10% computer driven cars would do much to change congestion.
No they won't.... (Score:2)
Don't be first! (Score:3)
Because you know that as soon as your car is recognized as autonomous, some asshole kid is going to say "Let's make it crash!"
Re:Don't be first! (Score:4, Interesting)
Does it matter that the autonomous car will be continuously recording everything around it, and will retain plenty of that recording to put that kid in jail for attempted murder? Not too many people will dare to even approach such a car with bad intent. I'd build such a car to record everything around it all the time, even when parked :-)
Insurance (Score:5, Insightful)
This topic has been discussed here several times now, but one thing I haven't seen brought up is insurance. If my vehicle is driving itself and causes an accident, then what driver is to blame? The person sitting behind the wheel? Why would my insurance company want to pay for an accident caused by a piece of software when they can go after the company that produced the software? Or what if they will only insure Ford cars and not Chrysler because statistics show that one auto-driving system performs better than the other? If my car's autonomous system just flat out runs over a little girl playing in the street and kills her, could I be charged with manslaughter because I was behind the wheel reading the newspaper?
Think back a few years to the Toyota "auto acceleration" issue, and the lawsuits and government testing, etc, etc that was going on over that one issue. And that was possible hiccup in a single system that merely relayed user input to the engine. It wasn't even remotely as complex as a vehicle actually driving itself.
There's going to be a whole lot to figure out in the legal, insurance and liability areas that makes the technical challenge and development look like child's play.
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Self driving cars do not cause accidents, therefore insurance isn't necessary
That's ridiculous. Things will happen to autonomous vehicles that will result in deaths and destruction of property, even if 100% of vehicles are autonomous. Insurance will not go away because the stakes are too high both with liability and the cost of the hardware involved.
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If only there were some other highly-automated transportation system in place we could use as a model. Maybe set up some sort of mandatory validation methodology for the control systems and a post-accident review system to assess problems found in the field. If we nationalized those services they might be called the Federal Automated Automobile Administration and the National Automative Transportation Safety Board. But that's just silly I know -- these problems are totally new and we are completely unable t
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Quite a few of the crash tests are done by the I Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurance_Institute_for_Highway_Safety [wikipedia.org]
The insurance companies pay for it so they better understand the costs involved in insurance different cars. I don't see why they wouldn't do the same thing for software.
If cars were like computers... (Score:2, Funny)
If cars were like computers [york.ac.uk]
If General Motors had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:
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You left out the part where the car goes a million miles per hour, runs on electricity from a rechargeable battery, and costs $100. Unfortunately, it fits in the palm of your hand.
and 1 bad accident / death will lead to a lot of c (Score:2)
and 1 bad accident / death will lead to a lot of time and money in the courts??
and will they be able to have some outsourced coders be forced to come to court / how much will the courts like to have to deal with a big list of contracts / Sub contracts to get to who did what piece of the over all system.
airplanes autopilot still don't cover all stuff (Score:3)
airplanes autopilot still don't cover all stuff and they have less to deal with then a car does.
Reality vs Ignorance and inertia (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically the last manually driven cars will be seen to be a homicidal menace and high cost nightmare.
Re:Reality vs Ignorance and inertia (Score:4, Interesting)
Plus there will be a huge number of special interest groups who will desperately try to keep drivers in cars: Taxi unions, truck driver unions, bus driver unions, classic car associations, the police (if the drivers are perfect then no more tickets), and even groups like MADD might find themselves without a mandate if there are no "Drivers". But then you get more subtle groups who will lose their minds: many small municipalities coffers will become empty if they can't be handing out fines. Even larger governments might discover serious drops in revenue without any ticket revenue coming in.
And even groups like the police will be ticked that they can't pull "suspicious" people over by just waiting for them to make a traffic mistake.
Then you get stores and other commercial areas that have made based their financial model on easy parking, but if you are using either your own robot car or more specifically a cheap robot taxi then you can get dropped off in the most dense parts of downtown and go to your specialty stores and when done get picked up at the push of a smartphone button. So if these groups realize the threat to their business models then they too will squeal.
But on a side note one of the biggest threats to life and limb posed by robot cars will be the potential for a drastic reduction in the average distance walked. I can see some people integrating a robot car so much into their movements that they step out their front door into a waiting car, it drops them off at the front door of destination one, picks them up at the front door when they are done, and this would continue until they are eventually dropped off at the front door of their house. Whereas right now they might have to walk from their parking, walk among a cluster of destinations, and then walk back to their car.
This whole lack of walking could turn out to be more deadly than the lives saved through car accidents. At least with no-walking deaths it will be people doing it to themselves vs car accidents often killing other innocent people.
As much as I love tech. This is bad (Score:2, Interesting)
1 - If the car hits someone. Who is responsible
2 - If the car hits another autonomous car who is at fault.
3 - Imagine the much more complex and costly process to sort out damage claims.
4 - Strict standards and regulations will be required. This of course means less freedom.
5 - Government will want to switch off your car when you don't comply. For safety of course.
6 - The NSA and FBI will get their hands on those switches and do with you as they please (Movie: Fifth Element)
7 - The perceived benefits are so
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We can regulate automated cars and deal with accidents the same way we already deal with automated planes (and trains and other such things) -- with regulation on the systems qualified to control the vehicle (FAA) and investigations into accidents (NTSB). We'll need some new rules, but the general problem space is well understood and already regulated.
Beyond that it's not clear to me why the government would be in any better position to disable your self-driving car than your human-driving care -- if they'r
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I like my horse, cars? no thank you.
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false equivalence fallacy? no thank you.
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You're right!
Self-driving horse? No thank you.
Re:I like my A4 2T 6 speed (Score:4)
Re:I like my A4 2T 6 speed (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, but your boss can't expect you to work on your commute. This is really about adding 10 hours a week to your workweek.
Re: I like my A4 2T 6 speed (Score:3, Insightful)
If you work 2 h during commute, then you work 6 h in the office. That is all.
Re:I like my A4 2T 6 speed (Score:4, Funny)
And when you plow into a pedestrian in your Audi A4 while checking a Facebook message, better call Saul!
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Or you could put the effin' smart phone away until you get to your destination.
I was wondering how far down I'd need to scroll to find a comment about how this would benefit people who can't leave their phones alone while they're behind the wheel of a car. As it turned out... not very far at all.
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It isn't about benefiting people that can't put their phones down. it is about benefiting the people they run into.
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Or you could put the effin' smart phone away until you get to your destination.
I was wondering how far down I'd need to scroll to find a comment about how this would benefit people who can't leave their phones alone while they're behind the wheel of a car. As it turned out... not very far at all.
Seems a much cheaper solution to distracted drivers (at least by cell phones) would be a $10 chip that simply blocks cell phone reception. If it is illegal to talk and text while driving a vehicle, then block the signal. If you want/need to talk or text, pull over. Or, instead of putting a chip in each vehicle, it could be built into the phone. It seems smart phones are pretty good at telling where you are, what direction you are going and even your speed. If your speed appears to be over 5 or 10mph, it au
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I like my standard too, but I hate it when I have to drive 2000 miles in it. Can I just put it on auto and be there by morning, please?
Driving 2,000 or even just 500 in my manual shift Jeep is fine, but it is the 5 mile trips that are annoying. Still, not annoying enough to trade it for an autonomous car. Do I want to ban these new-fangled cars? No, of course not. However, I sure as hell don't want it to be the only choice in automotive transport either.
Re:I like my A4 2T 6 speed (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to drive recreationally, on a closed course, I expect you'll be able to do that indefinitely in more or less whatever format you prefer. But there's no reason you need to endanger others with your manual driving just to scratch your recreational itch or satisfy some nostalgic idea of "freedom" (via dependence on the auto industry, the oil industry, and public roads).
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He's a socialist for pointing out that cars require huge, mostly capitalist, social support to exist and function?!? Exactly what would he have to do to demonstrate his commitment to capitalism?
Re:I like my A4 2T 6 speed (Score:5, Interesting)
When considering whether someone thinks they are better than average in driving skill you should look at this study [sciencedirect.com]
Svenson (1981) surveyed 161 students in Sweden and the United States, asking them to compare their driving safety and skill to the other people in the experiment. For driving skill, 93% of the US sample and 69% of the Swedish sample put themselves in the top 50% (above the median). For safety, 88% of the US group and 77% of the Swedish sample put themselves in the top 50%.
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It's quite enough that he's required to pass a competency exam and forbidden from driving while impaired.
Either you've never driven on public roads with other drivers around you, or you have very unusual definitions of "competency" and "forbidden".
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Only if either A. you have access to a park-and-ride facility that is closer to your house than your workplace is, or B. the bus stops very close to both your home and your workplace. I've usually found that unless your commute is at least half an hour by car, you'll spend more time walking to and from the bus than you would spend driving, and even if you don't count the
Re:It already exists! (Score:5, Insightful)
Public Transportation: A great way to get from someplace you don't live to someplace you don't work.
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It really depends. Where I work, parking is awful and I have to walk 5 blocks from a parking garage to my building, because all the parking garages near my building are full and have a long waiting list (apparently the waiting list is 20 years long for the better parking). Meanwhile, the bus only takes 5 more minutes than driving, and it drops me half a block from my building. So in some cases, busses can be literally faster. To be fair, it also helps that I'm only half a block from a main road, and tha
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Anybody care to guess how long it'll take cities like New York to pass a law making it illegal for driverless empty cars to follow any route besides one leading directly to a parking space somewhere, to avoid having 40,000 driverless cars doing laps around lower Manhattan for hours at a time since it's cheaper to run the car for 2 hours than to actually pay to park for two hours?
I can definitely see driverless cars causing massive collapse in downtown parking rates across America. In a city like Miami, the
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What wold you do with a $2,000 per year raise?
Buy a car and quit taking the bus?
(Sorry, I couldn't resist.)
Not a bus; a taxi (Score:2)
Buses don't provide door-to-door, non-stop service. Taxis do - but of course now you have to cover the whole cost of the driver by yourself.
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Buses don't provide door-to-door, non-stop service. Taxis do - but of course now you have to cover the whole cost of the driver by yourself.
Self-driving vehicles will change that trade-off...
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And some of them might be xenophobes!
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It seems like there's always some not-drunk (but not necessarily sober) jackass who is willing to cheat these dashboard breathalyzer tests for inebriated drivers who are forced to install such devices due to DUI/DWI infractions. The device may well be more simple to design and implement than a self-driving car, but their efficacy is likewise simple to undermine.
I'm holding out hope for the Johnny Cab: "The door opened. You got in". Now *that's* what I call simple!
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...by which I mean an autonomous, self-driving taxicab service staffed by a gentle robotic companion voiced by one Robert Picardo, of course. [youtube.com]
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I'm not familiar with the dynamics of this situation but it seems to me that if there is a not drunk person who could pass the test that they would logically be the one to drive the car. I do, however, understand that "logic" doesn't always apply in these situations.
Re:A breathalizer in the dashboard will do the sam (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that a johnny cab done today would report your travel plans to the local police dept, insurance company, and any other institution that has a vested interest in judging your behavior. No thanks. I'd rather walk.
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Yup. There are plenty of apologizers keeping that worry to themselves just to avoid the 'conspiracy nut' label, and/or who don't care about anything besides convenience (until someone else's form of it intrudes on their own lives, of course). These people project their own whims onto everyone else and become surprised/fearful/offended when the rest of us don't step it up. If there's a root dynamic to today's societal ills, this is it.
It's one thing to automate repetitive tasks and another to automate liv
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Where do you drive that they've worked out all the flaws in human-controlled cars? Or are you just ignoring the status quo to complain about the scary new system?
Also, what part of your argument couldn't be equally applied to the transition from human-and-animal-powered transit to steam-and-oil powered-transit? We've made these changes before. Most people are happy with them. I suspect you're happy with them. Why is this set of changes different and objectionable?
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Assuming nobody checks the cars between rents the mess in the cars will be a problem. They'll be smelly from all the trash on the ground.