urbanSTL

They’re also rapidly ramping up in Chicago. It’s the real deal folks. A future free of car dependency via shared inventory is upon us!

^They're cars. Using them cannot reduce dependency on them. They will drive about twice as many miles for every passenger mile as driving yourself. They not only increase car dependency, they roughly cut the inefficiency of an already enormously wasteful system in half. They will cut into transit because the tech bros will price dump just like they did with Uber and Lyft. And all the delviery services. People think this is some kind of magical pill that solves traffic when it is precisely the opposite. It creates more traffic. More pollution. More waste. More noise. More money leaving the area. This is not a good thing. This is a thing that needs to be rooted out completely.

Yea I believe these cars are gonna be as seismic as the Vegas Loop. Lots of promises that never come to fruition.

What I would be interested in is looking into automated bus technology since buses run the same route on repeat and do very little "intelligent" maneuvers like a taxi may have to do. Could save a lot of money on the cost of labor for buses some day.

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maybe St. Louis could get one of Musk's side businesses
https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-signals-expansion-tesla-unique-side-business/ 

I want to know how they work on the narrow two way streets in S. City where there is parking on both sides and you have to either go super slow or take turns half pulling over where there is a gap between parked cars.  Specifically, Ivanhoe near Epiphany on a Fish Friday.

StlAlex wrote: ↑

6:54 AM - 14 days ago

Yea I believe these cars are gonna be as seismic as the Vegas Loop. Lots of promises that never come to fruition.

What I would be interested in is looking into automated bus technology since buses run the same route on repeat and do very little "intelligent" maneuvers like a taxi may have to do. Could save a lot of money on the cost of labor for buses some day.

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That would be a terrible outcome. That is people's livelihood. Well-paying, union driver jobs. There is no benefit to society if technology takes away people's ability to support themselves. The continued automation of things is going to be the ruin of lives. It only benefits the bottom line of the companies. At the expense of those who need the income.

SRQ2STL wrote:

StlAlex wrote: ↑

6:54 AM - 14 days ago

Yea I believe these cars are gonna be as seismic as the Vegas Loop. Lots of promises that never come to fruition.

What I would be interested in is looking into automated bus technology since buses run the same route on repeat and do very little "intelligent" maneuvers like a taxi may have to do. Could save a lot of money on the cost of labor for buses some day.

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That would be a terrible outcome. That is people's livelihood. Well-paying, union driver jobs. There is no benefit to society if technology takes away people's ability to support themselves. The continued automation of things is going to be the ruin of lives. It only benefits the bottom line of the companies. At the expense of those who need the income.

Less cost to operate buses = more potential bus lines

Helping the bottom line of a tax-payer funded entity that does a fundamental good, such as provide public transportation, is good. There's a difference between cutting jobs to marginally increase the profit margin of a for-profit publicly traded company and cutting the costs of a public transportation agency.

Also, if they were "good" jobs, there wouldn't be a bus driver shortage. Reality is that the market's demand for bus driver pay is higher tban what most transit agencies are offering, but they can't offer more because they are already operating on tight budgets as is and would have to cut service to raise pay. So the result is mediocre jobs that are not particularly attractive.

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This is going to sound capitalist max but hear me out. I’m not paying taxes to support livelihoods. I pay taxes to receive services that support all of us. If the government can deliver more services at a lower cost, it should. For example, just the automation of MetroLink (will happen) would allow a substantial increase in bus service hours without raising new taxes.

So should a person experiencing poverty who relies on public transportation accept that every commute is worse because the government has a responsibility to employee people?

Ownership isn’t going anywhere because it’s instant. Getting a message that the car will arrive in 8-12 minutes for you to take you to something that’s a 5 minute drive isn’t instant

Ownership wont go away but the rate will decrease. Two car households will be more likely to make one work, and I ( a one-car household) would not own a car in Chicago. Even 15 minutes of grace is nothing compared to the wait I give to accommodate the bus, walking to a Divvy station, or waiting for Lyft/Uber.

Ideally autonomous cars offer me another mobility service that can let me ditch the few remaining car trips I take each week.

You aren't ditching the cartrips though, you're essentially just Ubering instead. There's nothing stopping you from doing that right now.

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gone corporate wrote: ↑

10:15 PM - 13 days ago

Imagine no longer needing to pay for car loans, or car insurance, or maintenance, or gasoline, or for that matter having gas stations all over the place. 

The thing is none of those costs will actually go away, you'll just be paying them differently. The cars will still need to be bought, so you'll still pay for them in fees. Same for the insurance, maintenance, and energy. It might put it "out of sight" and thus "out of mind," but it will still be there. Cars won't get cheaper with all this tech. It won't magically eliminate liability. The rate of accidents might decrease somewhat, but it will still be there. (And there will still be malicious actors and mischance destroying cars. Tree branches will always fall and someone will find a way to steal the things, whether there's a steering wheel or not. There will have to be a port on it somewhere to upload new data, and that will always be a vulnerability. As will the fact that they'll need to be on a network of some kind.)

They could reduce demand for parking somewhat, since fewer cars could serve the same number of people. But at the expense of needing to drive more lane miles and use more energy requiring more fueling infrastructure, albeit in different places, so that's probably about a wash at best. (And personally I'd call it worse than a wash, since more automotive traffic is worse than more parking spaces in my opinion.)

I won't say there aren't advantages to electrification over internal combustion. There are. It's not clean, but at least it's less dirty. It's not quiet, particularly at highways speeds, but at least it's less noisy. There are some wins. But they're pretty marginal when at the end of the day it's still a car. Mind you, I drive a car. I like my car. I'm not launching a crusade to ban them just yet. But transit is clearly the better way to go. And pedestrian and cycling infrastructure. And at the end of the day, what we need is better zoning, and that's hard to do when everyone is sold on cars.

I want a car optional world, and self driving cars keep us further from that by reducing the apparent frictions of car; the insurance costs and parking and need to drive the things. Truth be told I don't want to ban self driving cars, but I do want to regulate them. I want to tax them heavily to support transit. I want zoning that prioritizes walkability and transit access, so that all cars, even the self driving ones, are undesirable ways to make short trips inside cities.

Cars can be great, but we've sunk so much public money into the infrastructure that supports them that it's deeply frustrating to see the highway gang at it again, making yet another pass at the public trough to siphen more money and more life away from the rest of us. 

And just to put the cherry on top, the only thing uglier than a Waymo is a bleeping cyber truck. They are just . . . holy cow are the horrible looking.

I would prefer cashless cars. Something like Waymo but I’m putting in the path data real time via the steering wheel. Just as Google Maps catches up when I choose to spontaneously turn down a street not on the plan line, the Waymo would be in the background letting me pretend to drive just there to prevent crashes. Like the old timy car ride at Six Flags.


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Infographics take on autonomous cars (Waymo)

Expecting driverless taxis to respect bike lanes “too high a bar” – because customers want to be dropped off in them, autonomous vehicle firm Waymo tells cyclists
https://road.cc/news/driverless-taxis-veering-into-cycle-lanes-normal-practice-says-waymo