I understand that this link is authwalled (by accounts that can be created for free), but it's telling of the medium how the actual paper itself is downvoted while the majority of the rest of the comments appear to either be tangential/unrelated to the article, or stem from misunderstandings of the actual paper; RTFA still applies after all these years.
Or perhaps it shows HN wears no clothes. No one knows what it it, yet here it is on the front page. There is zero reason to think there is any higher meaning to HN if we work it out.
Is there any reason the think HN is better on topics they know or should know?
It could well be babble. To me it feels like a obfuscation of something well studied.
The author has worked on "rejuvenation of decontaminated N95 masks" which you can see how you might want to delete the memory. Not saying the topic is bad, but still think this paper is publish or perish.
I believe there would be a single polymath who has skills in multiple fields, such as Oppenheimer who was great at science and administration who can lead a group for successful execution. For Apollo moon mission, it was the US president vision at the foremost. Even for TSMC and other companies such people exist. I don't want to say that entire credit goes to an individual but leaders with multiple skills are necessary.
Nah, this is not true. This is just the narrative because someone want to get the honors or the stacks of cash. Apple wasn't created by Steve Jobs. Not even created by Steve Jobs and the Woz. They did start something that eventually became Apple. They had a lot of sway, but without all the other people that worked there and created all the important details it would have just been a pipe dream.
Moreover, splitting the decision making is so conflict prone and unoptimised for competition. I had a look at some statistics that showed most successful startups take off when they have a single founder
I used it a recently as 2021 to practice stand-up sessions, get some confidence to show my face to strangers and be connected with the world at the absolutely worst point in my life. Even since a decade before that I frequented Omegle and saved a few conversations for eternity which I shared on Twitter long time back
To the folks particularly in US obsessed about driverless cars, why don't you instead focus on public transport, which is by default "driverless" for millions of people if you ignore a couple of metro/train drivers per 1000s of people.
The point of a driverless car, from what I understand, is having end-to-end connectivity without the need to drive which is pain.
I live in a place where public transport already has last mile connectivity and I walk the rest of the way. Never owned a car and never plan to.
For completion. You actually have real driverless public transport systems functioning for many years now with autonomous metro and rail systems across the world.
It is obviously a much easier problem to solve due to its constraints.
What is interesting to me is that we have completely altered our transport networks to fit the new paradigm of cars +100 years ago, widening roads, asphalting roads, building motorways, parking lots, etc.
But somehow anything that comes after must be backwards compatible with this 1950's US Detroit vision of the car centric world.
1. because they brought major improvements to most peoples everyday live, much more then self driving will
2. it fit's the wide landscape of the us perfectly
2. it was pushed (lobbied) by much much more money then any of the self driving car or public transportation movements today (not just Oil and Car industry but also e.g. military for Tanks)
3. it fit the American dream perfectly, everyone can go everywhere, by themself, everyone gets their own house (which in turn is often noticeable far away from city centers so a car is needed) etc.
4. it aligned with a society which moved more from compacter communities to wide spread individualism
5. the US was growing a lot, this meant a lot of potential for changes
7. it aligned with (also in EU) very wide views about what a good future would be and how to get there, e.g. EU cities which grew a ton around 1950 often have (or had) similar problems
8. people where not dependent on walking, switching to cars was viable
9. it was a powerful tool to shape society in many ways, including for suppressing successful minorities by intentionally routing highways right through the middle of them
Today the US isn't growing like that anymore nor can people at all in anyway agree anymore in which direction it should be heading wrt. urban planing. A lot of the grate ideas and shows of wealth and prosperity of the 50th have turned into liabilities. People are so dependent on being able to use cars that it has become a liability for the US where they need to make sure the huge majority of their population can at least somehow somewhat afford a car and gasoline for it, not doing so it not an option. But this leads to a chicken egg problem where for solving some problem you need to change how cars a treated but for changing that you need to first fix the problem. So the only option is to slowly do many small changes but at the same time this makes it much easier for Oil and Car lobbies to hinder the most essential changes.
The constraints on autonomous public transport systems make them viable. You create a safer system that way. Additionally, you prevent unnecessary work getting multiple vehicles to the same location roughly at the same timeframe.
I understand people want a faster solution! But mixing autonomous vehicles with human drivers isn't the way.
Moreover, these companies commit statistical fallacies discussing safety. Human drivers have driven more, as the article suggests, and in a myriad of environments. Many variables are at play, and it's disingenuous to compare this way.
The fact that someone always makes this sort of comment when driverless cars come up is really weird to me.
I've never owned a car, use public transit very regularly, and think the state of it in the US is pretty bad and underinvested in. However, that's due to a huge set of systemic factors (political, organizational, spatial, ...) which nobody seems to have made much progress on, and not for lack of trying.
Yeah, it would be great if we all had amazing public transit instead of self-driving cars. But self-driving cars are making big advances, and transit isn't. In ten or twenty years, self-driving cars might be everywhere, and transit will probably be roughly as bad as it is today. That's why people are excited about one and not the other.
It is because one of the go-to talking points for postponing and diffusing support for better transit is the promise of self driving cars that will somehow solve everything.
It doesn’t make sense because the traffic jam problem with cars comes not from human drivers but the physics of the car itself, but it is a persistent talking point nevertheless.
I don't think this is true at all. There are at least 5 talking points that are much more common and frankly more persuasive than the promise of self driving cars.
1. Special interest group capture has made building public transit impossibly expensive. Waymo's entire $30B valuation wouldn't even fix NYC's subway and finish the 2nd ave expansion.
2. American's don't like public transit because it involves being in confined space with other people, and a variety of cultural factors make that more unpleasant than it is in other countries. There is no culture of shame here so people on public transit are commonly extremely annoying and there's no law enforcement in many large cities so you just have to deal with it.
3. Most americans live in suburbia where robust public transit just isn't possible. It can be improved but mostly that just means commuter rail which still requires using a car for everything other than commuting, and usually people drive to the commuter rail station anyway.
4. We already have all the road infrustrure needed for transportation
5. Even in the best of circumstances public transit is more of a hassle than just driving directly from point a to point b
> It can be improved but mostly that just means commuter rail which still requires using a car for everything other than commuting, and usually people drive to the commuter rail station anyway.
Fun fact / example: My hometown started as a logging town next to train tracks, but grew outwards in one direction, so the train is now off towards the edge of town and it would take most residents around an hour to walk there. Just about everyone who takes the train drives there and uses its parking lot.
Point 5 is often false. Having to park my car at B, and then again at A when I get home, can be a significant hassle. Far easier to simply arrive and have no vehicle to worry about.
Driving also takes effort and can be stressful in traffic. Not to mention gas, insurance, maintenance, etc.
I never said this was the only argument people made. But it is one of the strawmen/distractions that are commonly thrown up in at least some areas.
To answer the bullet points you made:
>1. Special interest group capture has made building public transit impossibly expensive. Waymo's entire $30B valuation wouldn't even fix NYC's subway and finish the 2nd ave expansion.
Yes, a lot of public projects are allowed to be overblown in budgeting. This has many causes and they need to be addressed, but it is not a reason for halting all infrastructure improvement. It is simply a problem orthogonal to the one being discussed.
But on the subject of cost, public transit can definitely be way cheaper than car ownership for the individual. (Yes I know fares are subsidized but so are roads and other car infrastructure, so that all needs to be balanced before claiming public transit is just the upstanding taxpayer paying for the poor and filthy).
>2. American's don't like public transit because it involves being in confined space with other people, and a variety of cultural factors make that more unpleasant than it is in other countries. There is no culture of shame here so people on public transit are commonly extremely annoying and there's no law enforcement in many large cities so you just have to deal with it.
That sounds like another problem that needs to be dealt with entirely separately, but there obviously are a lot of US cities with massively used public transport without there being more crime there than elsewhere in the city/region.
>3. Most americans live in suburbia where robust public transit just isn't possible. It can be improved but mostly that just means commuter rail which still requires using a car for everything other than commuting, and usually people drive to the commuter rail station anyway.
Even if they do, that still goes a long way towards solving the traffic jam problem, because it's the physics of the car itself that creates the jam. There just can not be enough cars on the road for everyone because there simply isn't space. Those that absolutely need or want to use it should be able to, and that is made easier when more people use transit.
>4. We already have all the road infrustrure needed for transportation
See point 3, no we don't. We can not because there isn't space for all the cars at the rush hour times.
>5. Even in the best of circumstances public transit is more of a hassle than just driving directly from point a to point b
That's perfectly fine. If I can save myself the cost of a car I am happy to walk a bit. Not all will make that cost/benefit calculation and that's fine too.
But really, the exact time when it is a complete pain to drive (rush hour) is the time where good transit beats the car anytime, and also the exact time when every single transit passenger is one less car on the road, being in the way of all the other cars.
Lastly, the micro-mobility devices of recent years really do solve the problem of this for many or most.
It takes me very little time and is quite enjoyable, to rent a scooter in the morning to get to the best bus stop to get to work. When there I can walk to work or if I need to go further I rent another scooter.
All this to say, good and robust public transit is a win-win for every person in the town/city. Except perhaps the car dealership owner.
Edit: Oh, and I can't believe I forgot to mention, given this thread. The ultimate solution to the last-mile travel for longer distances is indeed self driving cars!
> the micro-mobility devices of recent years really do solve the problem of this for many or most
I really just think you either don't know or aren't thinking about how most people live with this statement. Micro mobility is great in urban areas, but for the vast majority of americans it is a complete non starter. No one wants to use a scooter on a 4 lane road where everyone is going 50, and that's the reality for almost every american. I live in an urban area, never owned a car. I would love to see more public transit, but it's just so obvious that it can't work in non urban areas and even many urban areas built post car unless you tear everything down and start from scratch. And as much as we may want that it's never going to happen.
Scooters also blow in the winter in all the cities where people would consider using them since the warm cities are all concrete hellscapes where scootering is legitimately dangerous.
Similar things hold for regional transit, trains are better than cars (for reducing traffic jams and road wear) and then depending on the particular circumstances one would pick the best option for last mile.
And like I added, this is where self driving taxis could really shine.
Re scooters and snow: build bike paths and service them in the winter. Easy enough and done in many places.
It is all about adding more options for people so they are more free to organise their lives as they want and lighten the traffic load on the roads.
There are people who will only want a car and there are places where mostly only cars (and possibly bikes) make sense and that’s just fine.
I wonder if fully automated traffic could be optimised to remove most congestion problems, if a system was able to coordinate the movements of the driverless vehicles. Theoretical maximum throughout may be much higher than typically realised.
There’s progress because there’s investment. If dozens of billions were poured into public transport, it would improve dramatically.
How can I be so so sure? Because that’s what a lot of countries have done, China first among many, and their public transport network has dramatically improved.
The main issue is how much the private car industry avoids having to pay for the astounding externalities they generate: pollution, noise, road violence, global warming, microplastic, urban disruption… It’s orders of magnitude more expensive for people around drivers than for drivers.
Dozens of billions are being poured in. That’s we got the California high speed rail connecting nowhere to nothing and BART just barely making it to San Jose.
None of that still fixes the last mile problem of suburbia, and buses aren’t a solution. They are slow, too infrequent, and generally uncomfortable.
Have you been to Switzerland? Their public transport system is a mix of busses/short trams and long trip trains. They aren't precisely a high density urban country. They have suburban sectors. The difference here is that they don't make walking a punishment. You can count that everywhere you want to go there's a walking path, even when going off-road. Yes, it's not 100%, but it doesn't need to be. If you can reach 70% of all the places you will ever want to go using public transport, that is enough.
I've been to Switzerland and it was _great_. Only had to grab an Uber a handful of times. However, Switzerland is like the size of the Houston metroplex. Getting to the corners of Switzerland seems like a problem on a different scale from the US.
Switzerland only has a bit more population than the Houston metroplex and is about the same size - why can't the Houston metroplex be great like Switzerland? I wouldn't be moving away from Houston if they could accomplish that.
Switzerland is significantly smaller than the US, even ignoring all of the other countless differences. Why can't a startup do the same thing as Google infrastructure and be successful?
> They are slow, too infrequent, and generally uncomfortable.
Uh, make them more frequent, more comfortable and faster?
I spend the last 15 minutes of my commute on a bus. Driving vs. bus + train = 3 minutes. I can drive, probably get stuck in traffic, get pissed at angry drivers ... or just chill on a bus and train for 45 minutes.
The only time it is worth driving is when I need to-the-minute exactness of when to arrive, which is rarely ever. IOW, I show up 10 minutes early to work (and also leave 10 minutes early) to be on the public transportation schedule.
Trains come every 10 minutes, busses every 15. I've never had any issues. Sure, I walk a whole 300 meters (1000ft) from the bus to my house, and again from the bus to work. But that is probably good for me since I don't get enough exercise as it is.
Chairs in our bus stops are designed to be uncomfy to make sure people don't sleep in them, especially not when laying down.
There were too many drunk people sleeping in them, making things messy. The bus company gave up and decided low-comfort chairs were better than puke-filled chairs.
The bus stops around here don't even have seats usually. However, they run every 15 minutes on weekdays, and every 30 minutes on weekends. So, you usually just walk or bike there a few minutes before the bus shows up. You maybe wait 3 minutes for the bus. Google Maps is awesome for knowing exactly when the bus will show up too.
Public transport infrastructure at a national scale is not a dozens of billions project, it's a hundreds to thousands of billions project. The current investment in Waymo is less than the investment in the (still underfunded) NYC metro alone
Didn't they do that to themselves? IIRC, it's like that because (A), they were the first to do underground rail so lots of things were done "wrong" (with what we know today), thus requiring lots of money to fix it. And, (B), any changes they make (even small ones) require redoing significant infrastructure because of (A).
Pour out gazillions of money into American public transit and it won’t get you far.
The reason why China and other Asian nations have amazing public transit isn’t financial or technical. It’s cultural and social. And by that, I don’t mean anything to do with cars - I’m referring to just a public willingness (or enforcement) to enshre nice public things stay nice, which is often lacking in the US.
It is strange that you chose China! Have you seen how many kilometers of urban freeways they built in the last 30 years? It is crazy. Look at the Beijing ring roads -- a traffic clogged hell space.
China has built out both while the US has let both crumble.
The Netherlands also has both amazing public transit and amazing highways.
The US would rather argue over slashing the already meager social safety net and buy some more fighter jets, nuclear aircraft carriers, and modernize the obsolete ICBM force than invest in infrastructure these days.
Where I live in Northern England, buses are (amongst other reasons) mostly hampered in their reliability by delays and cancellations caused by sharing roads congested with cars.
Here there's an almost palpable attitude of disgust towards using the bus. Almost a me versus the plebs attitude. The car represents the people's private island.
It would be slightly improved if people moved from tank-like SUVs to smaller cars, even better improved by embracing 1/2 seat cars (which will never happen because the design isn't conformist, see the Smart Car), and most improved by people putting their ego aside and taking the bus.
For a country hitting 2/3 of adults being overweight and obese, it may be a perk that public transport doesn't provide A-to-B delivery and instead people get a 5 minute walk somewhere in their day.
Instead it looks like self-driving cars will win out due to people's behaviour.
In London, which is a much denser city that any in Northern England, that attitude to buses and public transport is not shared. We have had a lot more sustained investment into reliable and affordable public transport.
The lack of comparable investment in northern cities is of course not really the fault of the cities in question (London centric institutions, political culture, and voting base power).
In London I personally always try and cycle beucase I know that any bus I get is likely going to be slower because they are continually stuck in car traffic. Especially during rush hours.
Annoyingly, the time when I would like to get public transport most is when it rains. And this is also when the public transport becomes slowest and least reliable.
Your remark on buses being hampered by sharing the road with cars is on point.
I've lived in Porto, and Malmö. Both have done considerable efforts in making certain roads or lanes exclusive to public transportation.
In Porto, for example, these lanes are exclusive to a very interesting set of vehicles: buses, taxis, and motorcycles. It makes a lot of sense, this way you make riding a motorcycle safer (less vehicles), while preventing bus lanes from blocking all other manners of transport.
> For a country hitting 2/3 of adults being overweight and obese, it may be a perk that public transport doesn't provide A-to-B delivery and instead people get a 5 minute walk somewhere in their day.
5 minute? It’s 4 miles to the nearest Caltrain stop from where I live.
The state of bus services in York is pretty terrible. Traffic (journey times) is one reason, but frequency is the main problem. We’ve got these huge vehicles turning up at most very 45 minutes (even in rush hour) because, I’m guessing, the cost of the driver prohibits more frequent services.
I can’t park my car near my office in town, it’s just too expensive. I mostly cycle the 8km trip, except when the weather is awful.
I’m hoping what we actually get are self driving, smaller, more frequent busses !
Of course, because in your personal car you have your own A/C, music, comfort, privacy, and agency. A bus really needs its own lane instead of being stuck in traffic with all the other schmucks who refuse to take it, but few US cities have the balls to do it.
In my car I have a comfy seat and can control my environment (noise, temperature etc.) and whom I share the space with. On the bus I'm often standing and crammed in between dozens of other people. Also the really big problem isn't being stuck in traffic on the bus, but being stuck standing in the cold at the bus stop waiting for the bus that is stuck in traffic or cancelled.
The solution I see working (I live it) is separate bus lanes and regular commuter trains. Because I can work just fine (laptop and phone) sitting in that seat, what I cannot do in my car regardless of the noise/temperature/mates. But yes, I know people who drive to work because they enjoy driving. I instead enjoy my time gains (working while commuting is a significant time gain).
Because I can work just fine (laptop and phone) sitting in that seat
I've been commuting to school or work by public transport since I was 16 and in 4 different European cities. Getting any seat is uncommon, let alone one where pulling out a laptop and getting work done was even an option. The only public transport option where I can conceivably see getting work done are the intercity trains, and then only if you get on at one of the very early stops before the train fills up.
Personally, 'can I get to the office by foot or bike' is one of the most important questions I ask myself when looking for a new job (or house). Commuting by car and public transport are both suboptimal.
A bus is already slower than my car because of the need to stop to let others on. Plus a bus is much less likely to take a direct route to where I want to be thus requiring me to go someplace I don't want to go just to transfer to a different bus to get there. Finally when I drive i often am on faster roads that a bus wouldn't be on because there is nobody else to pick up (unless I transferred to an express bus)
Most people, throughout history have had a fixed time budget to get to work. They move if the trip takes more than half an hour. They will not take jobs (or will move) if it is farther away. We see this across civilizations, from hunter gathers following herds to modern people. There are exceptions but they are exceptions.
It's not people's behaviour. It's the state of public transport. Lots of delays, dirty seats, crowded spaces, weird smells, hard noises, jerky movements etc etc etc.
I'd be okay if the state would ban cars, and put all that money into extremely well thought out public transport. But that won't happen.
I suspect driverless cars get more perceived attention because switching cars over will actually make a lot more money then building up a public transport system. Its a bit like with washing machines or TV sets. Selling to each and every individual household or even citizen is going to be more lucrative then maintaining shared infrastructure.
As a European, this seems like an impossible feat at this point. It has been tried, but the cities have evolved in a way where this is just unfeasible.
EU cities have mostly been built to be dense around train & bus stations. US cities (besides NY) are extremely large, flat, and spread out. Even if you had public transportation, it would be practically impossible to get from A to B because there are no hotspots besides the downtown/city center.
The concept of a "car city" is real. It's a vicious cycle that the US entered at some point, and besides rebuilding the cities entirely there's not much hope for public transport.
>>Aren't there examples of European cities that "converted?"
Loads and loads and loads - at least here in the UK, nearly every city centre is converting to be pedestrian only, with cars being pushed further and further out, with councils emphasising that you should really park your car at one of the massive park&ride car parks outside of the city centre then just take a metro or bus in. That's a good thing in my opinion. It's really shocking to look at pictures taken from the city centre just 30 years ago and see that cars basically were prioritized everywhere, the main shopping street in Newcastle for instance used to be a normal road with cars parked on either side - it hasn't been like that for a long time and the city manages just fine.
Not really. If the city is older than cars it didn’t really convert from a car centric city. It tried to convert to one for a while, but that’s not the same as being built with cars in existence.
Atlanta has interstate interchanges that can fit the entire Vatican in them. Every major city in the west is packed with boulevards 6 lanes across. The US didn’t just accommodate cars, it optimized for them as it was building out. Making that walkable again isn’t a matter of converting a 6 lane road into a pedestrian walkway…
Well yes, the question was if there are any European cities that have done it - and as you said, that's been traditionally possible here because cities were never designed to be car-centric in the first place. In US, it's the opposite - cities were built with cars in mind, so just building parks over highways isn't going to solve anything.
Amsterdam was 2-4 storey apartments with narrow streets, but the streets were taken over by cars. Once enough traffic was removed/space reserved for busses, trams and bikes, the public transport was able to effectively serve users.
The US has huge areas where each lot must be single family, at least 50% yard, etc. As well as huge parking lots around businesses. Therefore putting the residents much further from the places they need to be. Meaning busses and bikes would need to travel further. They still need to stop at an interval of say, 10 minutes walk, and therefore they're slower. Even if you gave them a dedicated lane this would not help.
As well, in London I can take a bus and usually access dozens of services at my destination, like food, entertainment, shopping, etc. In the US, a destination might just have one service, and just a few random businesses in walking distance. Again increasing the number of miles travelled.
According to the article, Amsterdam was still built with bicycles in mind:
> At the start of the 20th century, bikes far outnumbered cars in Dutch cities and the bicycle was considered a respectable mode of transport for men and women. But when the Dutch economy began to boom in the post-war era, more and more people were able to afford cars
Amsterdam also has 50% higher population density than Los Angeles, despite housing much fewer people.
Well fair enough, but I really don't think Americans should throw their hands up in the air and say "we just can't do it." This is the country that landed a man on the moon after all, it should be a solvable problem. Maybe the Europeans can't help with their own experience, but the American solution of "just add another lane" is self-evidently unsustainable. Something new is needed.
I agree, but self-driving cars (in the success case) are something new. More safety, less traffic, no more parking. I could see them make the way to Europe too (I'd love to have Waymos in my rural village, where cars are still common).
These two goals are incompatible. If the idea is that self driving cars don't need to park, they can just drive around in circles until needed(which is an absolutely insane idea for a whole number of reasons, but let's stick with it for a second), then that will only increase not decrease traffic.
>>I could see them make the way to Europe too
I've love to see a Waymo navigate some narrow British roads where there is no road signage and there is no defined priority.
Like, this is a real situation encountered on a road here by myself just few months ago, skip to 1:30 to see the interesting bit - I'd love to hear proponents of self driving cars explain to me exactly what the car would do in this case. Hand over to a remote operator? There is no signal there, sorry.
I don't see any indication(other than some people on HN saying this) that people would not want to own a personal vehicle anymore just because self driving cars are a thing. Whether the car drives itself or not, people want to have their own personal space. Not to mention the (very common) need for things like child seats which don't really work with shared cars.
Well, that is Waymo's plan, which is explicitly a robotaxi, that this article is about. If we were talking about Teslas, the self-driving vision for instance would be different.
Well yes, let me rephrase that - I don't see any indication that people would switch to robotaxis over owning a personal vehicle. I see that now already - it would be cheaper for me to take a taxi(you know, normal human operated kind) to work every day and back than to own my own car. Once you add up the finance payments, insurance, maintanance and fuel, I could easily just Uber every day to work and back and it would actually save me money. I don't want to do that though, as I like the flexibility of owning my own car - and that feeling doesn't change even with robotaxis. Maybe I'm an outlier?
I know, I'm in Europe. And yes, public transport is an option but a lot of people still own and drive cars(just on my street every single house has at least 2 cars each, even though our public transport options are excellent).
If 60% of people want to travel at 8:30am and they don't want to share a vehicle, then there needs to be that many cars and space for them to park.
You can park them further away from their destination, this increases traffic massively driving to the parking.
As well, if the ride is comfortable then people will be willing to plan longer commutes. An induced demand which increases the number of miles driven and hence traffic. Watching TV in the car is a major appeal of self driving.
If at peak time only 60% of people are driving that means we saved 40% of parking space at no traffic cost, even if we just park the cars normally! That is significant.
I'm also convinced that the peak share of vehicles in use is less than 60% at any time of the day and year, but happy to be proven wrong.
Wild idea: maybe they could try to make a pilot project of that in - ironically - the decaying Motor City maybe.
Also: the big car mania spilling over from the US to Europe makes driving in European cities/roads more and more difficult, as formerly bidirectional parts are now choke points where only a single oversized SUV can fit through at a time.
I suspect that if a metro would be built in a large car centric city over time the city would adapt to the metro and become less car centric. But making the economical argument for building the metro in the first place would be very hard. It would pay back over a time scale that capitalist economies hardly consider.
No, capitalist economies tax effort and spend it on longer-term things. It's democracies where things can be rolled back by the next leader that are the main cause of short-termism.
(I don't have a better alternative to democracy; just stating that's where the flaw is. Well, that and zero incentive to do things well/efficiently outside of political kudos).
Things used to work pretty well in capitalist democracies when the capitalists were well regulated and taxed and the demagogues didn’t have unrestricted personal access to the voter base.
I think the point of the comment was: is this even a problem that needs to be solved because we already have a perfectly good solution, it's just that nobody (for REASONS) wants to implement the solution. So, some company has to solve a "hard problem."
A perfect "this is why we can't have nice things."
Not everyone agrees that public transport and rebuilding cities around them is a good idea. That’s what you people who are obsessed with trains and busses don’t get. Self driving cars are still cars, and cars come with a freedom public transportation can’t match. It’s more likely that self driving cars become public transportation than we enact the fantasy that the US changes it’s entire cultural mindset to hate individual choice.
I for one don’t want to ride a bus, every time I’ve been on one there’s been some drugged out maniac sketching everyone out. They’re also usually gross like public bathrooms and building more, forcing everyone to use them, isn’t going away to change that.
> every time I’ve been on one there’s been some drugged out maniac sketching everyone out.
I'd never been on a bus until I moved out of the US, and I've never run into that problem.
> you people who are obsessed with trains and busses
I'm not obsessed, I grew up in the US. I drove a car every day since I was 16.5 years old, well into my 30s. I also drove fuel trucks, tractors, boats, and so much more during my life in the US. It wasn't until I moved out of the US that I saw a different way of living. Does it have issues? Yep. Does it mean I can live without a car payment, insurance, and maintenance costs? Hell yeah, and that is a lot of money.
Do I miss having a car? Yes! I actually do. However, when I need one, I can usually rent an electric BMW one for a few hours for ~50 USD an hour, or ~100 for a day. But realistically, on average, I only need a car for a day, every few months.
I mean... have you seen how much space is taken up by parking lots in the US? Often, the parking lot is bigger than the building it serves. That's a lot of space for homes ... shops ... instead of places for cars that do nothing.
I use Waymos in SF. For every Waymo trip I do maybe 8 e-bike trips and 20 walking commutes. I’ve taken Waymos to BART stations. Waymo has just replaced Uber for trips in SF for me.
It would be nice if the city added more BART coverage but it seems unlikely
one will ever be added within 10min walk of my house. There is already one 10min e-bike ride, but I’m not comfortable locking my e-bike there.
To bus to the BART station is 10min walk + 3min wait avg then 10min on bus.
Uber/Lyft/Waymo will always be part of my commuting solution for where I live. I just happen to find Waymo the more pleasant experience.
>why don't you instead focus on public transport, which is by default "driverless" for millions of people if you ignore a couple of metro/train drivers per 1000s of people.
That doesn't create enough value for shareholders.
I am currently sitting in a European train that was a replacement for another train that had, at point of replacement, a delay of 30 minutes on a 55 minute trip.
Since, well, everything could be much better and it's still fairly unclear who makes substantial progress on one of these problems, I am fairly happy to let various playbooks play out and see where progress can be made.
Germany? I don't think Germany is a good example of a working public transport infrastructure. Trains being actually on time is a cause worthy of celebration over there.
The last time I took a train there, my train was so late that the next train on the same route (scheduled for 1 hour after) arrived first. Normally since it was not my train I wasn't allowed to board according to the announcement on PA. I played the confused foreigner card and boarded...
As you point out there are solutions to the problem publicly promoted.
I have always understood this double think in two ways:
1. The problem needs to make sense to the people who are working on the tech and people who might buy the tech, but it only needs to be and is preferable to be only adjacent to the real value proposition of the tech. This provides opportunities to incrementally capitalize (“businesses don’t make products they make money”) without providing too much value for “too little” money.
2. The “I want x” vs “I need x” is a chasm easily bridged by “this is entertaining to me”. Life is small experiences summed together, providing a blank canvas on which people can extrapolate is engaging but mostly wasted time except for a small number of people who can actually change the direction of the tech. It’s fun for people to dream.
Most public transit isn't driverless, and that's actually one of it's key negatives. Perhaps think about it this way: driverless cars are effectively driverless buses sized for the flexibility and efficiencies that come with not needing a driver.
but if you live in an area with a nicely sustainable population density and there are no subventions (e.g. for cars/roads) involved this seems quite impossible to ever be the case
Which means it's probably will be the case for the US as most of the us is either has a less sustainable, too low (e.g. "typical" US metro area, and well the endless rural areas(1)) or too high (e.g. city center) density.
(1): Through very rural areas might not be substainable for any self driving car service either, so people there will most most likely still have their own car. And for reasons of serviceability much more likely a non self driving car.
Due to automobile lobbying last century, the American city is very car dependent. At this point, creating good public transport in places with giant urban sprawl seems pretty much impossible without redesigning full cities.. Also Insane amount of money interested keeping it car-focused, which driverless cars fit in to.
This does not explain why there is no good trains in highly populated corridors like Quebec City–Windsor Corridor tho.
Not trying to be devil's advocate, but to solve public transportation you need regulations and organisations that would consolidate and refactor the existing system(s). Driverless cars can kinda evolve independently, with much less regulations introduced.
At this point you can sit back and wait for driverless cars to improve without doing anything extra (public and private companies will continue doing all the work). You cannot sit back and expect public transport to fix itself - investments are needed, political push is required, risks need to be taken.
Another big thing is demand for properly functioning public transportation - is it really there for US? No demand usually means no political effort or even attention invested into changing things.
Because it doesn’t work unless you burn down 75% of the homes and layout the cities all over again to be packed in like Europe/Asia in a public transit friendly manner.
Because we prefer the freedom of cars. I don't like to have to spend 3x as much time on a bus I would hopping in a car and getting to my destination while also dealing with weather concerns as well. It's fine if you like public transportation, please continue to vote and advocate for that, but don't expect the rest of us to have the same position as you.
because due to multiple decades of bad lobbying seriously messing up regulations related to cars and trains in such a manifold multi layered an sometimes well hidden ways that it's basically impossible to build proper public transportation in many (not all) areas of the US
this lead to a situation where a lot of well meant public transport projects had very underwhelming results
worse if how in many areas trains just don't integrate well with the surrounding in the US. For public transportation to be usable it needs to be reachable. This means reliable and save walkways and/or bicycle ways to the next bus/train station (and having the schedule of trains and busses synced up even if they are from different providers). It also means you shouldn't have a massive parking lot directly in the front of the train station (don't mean there can't be a parking lot, just not in front) and similar
Another problem is the approach to housing the US has, for public transportation to work well (especially wrt. cost) you need to have reasonable compact housing. For example in many EU citices where public transportation is the main transport factors the main used housing unit is a apartment block often something like 2-4 apartments per floor and 3-5 floors where even in the more rural close by city areas houses often have 2 or 3 apartments or if not are in general much smaller then housing in the US (but in many rural areas in the EU cars are the main transport mean, often followed by bicycles for "short trips to "close by" neighbors, restaurants etc.).
If you combine that with the fact or how convenient privileged cars are in the US it really strongly favors self driving cars in many places (except some of the quite compact city centers, where cars of any form are a curse and self driving cars won't fix that).
I love public transport, however what driverless enable is very different: point-to-point personal transportation is something buses cannot achieve yet.
You do realize that Europe has 3X the population density (and subsequent urbanization) as the US right? That alone explains literally every difference between Europe and America, in everything from public transportation down to socialist political leaning.
Yes, as an engineer, it is absolutely more “efficient” if everyone lived in small government subsidized boxes, in centrally planned cities, taking centrally planned transport to only the places you’ve decided they should go.
However, central planning and praying at the god of efficiency has its downsides. Namely a total lack of innovation or people having children. It turns out having 2 crying babies in your tiny 2 bedroom apartment and taking 2 trains and a bus to the pediatrician kind of sucks.
And then huge space between the two extremes that is not easily serviced. It's this space (sprawl/suburbs/low density housing/commercial) that many people live and need to commute from.
I agree that driverless cars are very stupid technology compared to an investment in public transport. All the money wasted on this ridiculous idea is staggering.
They could have plopped more tubes on rails that require nowhere close to this level of software and hardware difficulty and decongested roads at the same time.
The invention of the personal automobile was largely a mistake and this just continues to double down.
We should be moving away from cities designed for cars, not further toward it.
Maker of driverless cars (Waymo) obviously would promote their product. What is surprising to you about this?
If you are talking about US users of HN who upvote such news I would venture I guess that they know that any new public transportation that could be built in California would have following deal-breakers for them:
1. It will (maybe) start operation in 10-20 years, long after they have sold they RSUs and moved to another state.
2. Will be huge money sink, potentially leading to tax increases.
3. Even if they live in alternative fairy tale timeline where is is built on time and on budget (and connects actual places where SDEs live, not Bakersfield!) they still won't use it because it would be full of homeless people and thieves snatching their latest iPhones and running away. Saying that last part out loud in Cali would just get you attacked as privileged rich SDE who is antihomeless Trump-supporting Rand-reading nazi or something.
PS I also live in a place with good public transport and have never owned a car.
By the looks of it, to me this is just the once in 5 years rumor cycle. The authors have been working on it for a long time and have been rejected by Nature. Other co-authors have said they weren't consulted before uploading the paper. The author who uploaded had to give a talk, and for whatever reason uploaded it on Arxiv before uploading, and didn't expect it would blow up like it has.
For official confirmation of room temp superconductor, I would rather go with a big publishing journal group organising a press conference before paying any attention.
As a phone 1 user I'm offended . The backlights are a significant trick to invoke minimalism in smartphone use. Screens are more addictive than led lights. So it is actually useful.
You don't need to look at phone screen and then get distracted away.
There are much more important things in the world right now to get "offended" over, than the majority of people not fitting into the niche you found yourself in.
Given the "LED lights" can tell you things like if there's something on the screen to look at, it arguably just leads to the same thing in the first place -- and it's not screens that are addictive, it's content.
If you get so distracted by an on-screen notification that you need to get a phone with a rear-facing notification LED, you've got much more serious problems.
I mean, the lights look cool, but they are too low information and I don’t want the immediate notification anyway. I’m happy to have an always on screen I can quickly check to determine if a notification is actionable and have no problem flipping it back over.
