While certainly a vector for exploits, like spoofing a pot hole sighting or an intent to merge, this alone would reduce accidents and increase efficiency without any change to traffic regulations. If drivers had perfect knowledge of intent amd conditions, you simply wouldn't have accidents unrelated to surprise equipment failure.
Yep.
I feel like tblox is really working from a collectivist mindset in which the road system is transformed into small-capacity mass transit and I'm not really sure how well that translates to the real world, but this bit at least is going to be great.
I wonder about the impact on society from a widespread loss of autonomy due to not driving our own vehicles.
I think that connecting "driving your own vehicle" to "autonomy" is a uniquely American-suburban mindset.
I don't feel like my autonomy is diminished at all by taking public transit or livery or walking.
Really?
Is this a thing where the stress is on how you don't feel it? Or on how it's not actually diminished?
What about all the places you cannot go without relying on another person or a dictated timetable?
What about all the places you cannot go without owning a hunk of metal that requires 300 square feet to store, may or may not have a place to park it at your destination, could get stuck in traffic, costs thousands of dollars a year, can't be safely used if you're drunk or tired or sufficiently elderly, and could break down at any time?
Unless the place you want to go is in quick walking distance, you are dependent upon somebody or something to get you there.
Your life has interdependencies with other people and/or technology. Welcome to being a member of homo sapiens. Seeing those interdependencies as intrinsically handicapping is, I think, one if the unhealthier habits of the American mindset.
If you're living in a suburban town with shitty transit and no meaningful livery service, then yeah waiting an hour for a fucking bus is pretty autonomy-destroying.
But when I've been in places with real transit options (ie, elevated or underground ＲＡＩＬ), if I want to go somewhere I walk into a tunnel and emerge at the other end. I make a decision about where I want to go and then I get there.
That's autonomy.
The american (north american really and probably some other places too) is marketed on an image of rugged independence and strength. It's powerful and can go anywhere and do anything, just like you you manly man you. The vehicle as extension of the driver's own erection.
I wonder how AVs will change that. When your car becomes a black box to get you from A to B, where's the power fantasy?
+5
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zepherinRussian warship, go fuck yourselfRegistered Userregular
While certainly a vector for exploits, like spoofing a pot hole sighting or an intent to merge, this alone would reduce accidents and increase efficiency without any change to traffic regulations. If drivers had perfect knowledge of intent amd conditions, you simply wouldn't have accidents unrelated to surprise equipment failure.
Yep.
I feel like tblox is really working from a collectivist mindset in which the road system is transformed into small-capacity mass transit and I'm not really sure how well that translates to the real world, but this bit at least is going to be great.
I wonder about the impact on society from a widespread loss of autonomy due to not driving our own vehicles.
I think that connecting "driving your own vehicle" to "autonomy" is a uniquely American-suburban mindset.
I don't feel like my autonomy is diminished at all by taking public transit or livery or walking.
Really?
Is this a thing where the stress is on how you don't feel it? Or on how it's not actually diminished?
What about all the places you cannot go without relying on another person or a dictated timetable?
What about all the places you cannot go without owning a hunk of metal that requires 300 square feet to store, may or may not have a place to park it at your destination, could get stuck in traffic, costs thousands of dollars a year, can't be safely used if you're drunk or tired or sufficiently elderly, and could break down at any time?
Unless the place you want to go is in quick walking distance, you are dependent upon somebody or something to get you there.
Your life has interdependencies with other people and/or technology. Welcome to being a member of homo sapiens. Seeing those interdependencies as intrinsically handicapping is, I think, one if the unhealthier habits of the American mindset.
If you're living in a suburban town with shitty transit and no meaningful livery service, then yeah waiting an hour for a fucking bus is pretty autonomy-destroying.
But when I've been in places with real transit options (ie, elevated or underground ＲＡＩＬ), if I want to go somewhere I walk into a tunnel and emerge at the other end. I make a decision about where I want to go and then I get there.
That's autonomy.
YEAH, so if you want true autonomy you gotta live in New York City or San Francisco. Because otherwise you need to own a car. Or Maybe DC, if you don't mind the crime and the metro breaking down all the time.
Yeah.
...So pretty much for 94% of the population cars are equated to autonomy.
Considering how strongly you've been arguing for packing more cars into less space in the name of efficiency, the AVs in this scenario will be just as fucked if a box falls off a truck into traffic. They have no room to maneuver.
No they won't, because a box falling off a truck travels at the same speed as the truck. And doubly no they wont, because my AV's are driving slower than the human vehicles would have been in they were in the fast zone of pulse flow. As such, the V^2 term of braking distance (which is dominant at high speeds and unpredictable road conditions) is suppressed even further.
As soon as that box falls off that truck, the vehicle will notice it and begin to slow down. Communicating to sufficient vehicles behind it that THEY need to slow down too. Vehicles in the lane to the right will also slow down, while maintaining the same spacing that they would have had at higher speeds. The vehicles from the lane obstructed by the box will then neatly zipper into the still open lane to the right, where the lower speeds now allow sufficient vehicle density to carry both lanes of traffic. The traffic flow algorithms will then make optimum use of the available flow path, keeping speeds nice and low and regular to allow smooth flow through the zone. and summon a 'repair' vehicle, who will move to the scene and dispose of the box.
Slowness and smoothness is best. Always. In any situation where there is any kind of traffic flow management concern at all. Because 'collision free' spacing has a V^2 term which needs to be considered more and more the less smooth the traffic is.
Sure, you can't dispose of the V^2 term entirely (what if someone drops that same box off an overpass, or a deer walks in front of you), but machines can keep far less of it, and humans don't have any of it despite driving at speeds and speed distributions where it is critical, which is why they are such bad drivers.
The AV's will also (even if by some horror pulsatile flow DOES emerge) automatically cut their speed of approach to the traffic jam tail, so that the vehicles arrive at a low enough frequency that the traffic jam disperses in minutes rather than hours (or days in some cases!) so hoorah for slow and steady AV's yet again.
A box with the same velocity as the truck is, by definition, not falling off the truck. It can only fall off the truck if it changes speed or direction.
Boxes do not propel themselves from the rear of trucks. There are two ways for a box to fall from a truck. And, in fact, they are really the same way.
1) The box is travelling at the same speed as the truck, and the truck accelerates forwards. The coefficient of friction does not suffice to accelerate the truck at the same rate and the box obtains a delta V relative to the truck. The truck moves forward at its new speed, the box retains the old truck speed. From the perspective of the truck, the box now 'falls off' the truck. However, from the perspective of everyone else (including the AV behind it) the box continued along its course, and the truck ran away from it.
2) The box is travelling at the same speed as the truck, and the truck accelerates upwards when it hits a bump. Air resistance then slightly slows the box (assuming this is an open truck) and the box obtains a delta V relative to the truck. The truck moves forward at its old speed, the box has a slightly decreased speed. From the perspective of the truck, the box now 'falls off' the truck. From the perspective of everyone else, the box did an incredibly small deceleration rate (air resistance is much less than brake resistance) and is now travelling very slightly slower than the truck.
In both those cases, either the change in box speed is zero (the truck changed speed) or small enough to be irrelevant (the box hit some air resistance). Boxes falling from trucks are a problem for people because people don't even drive with reaction time spacing, let alone the small amount of stopping distance spacing you need (because a box is not very aerodynamic or slippery, and might stop faster than you even with 100% brake force). So when a box falls, an aggressive driver will often see it too late, then brake as hard as they can, but its still too late and they hit the box anyway, and then often due to you braking rapidly and the driver behind you not knowing why, or what your goal speed is will brake even later, and then hit you too!
This wave of aggressive driving caused impacts will then propagate up the road until we find our hero, a responsible driver moving at a sensible (lower) speed with good spacing. Who will be able to smoothly come to a stop with gentle braking.
While certainly a vector for exploits, like spoofing a pot hole sighting or an intent to merge, this alone would reduce accidents and increase efficiency without any change to traffic regulations. If drivers had perfect knowledge of intent amd conditions, you simply wouldn't have accidents unrelated to surprise equipment failure.
Yep.
I feel like tblox is really working from a collectivist mindset in which the road system is transformed into small-capacity mass transit and I'm not really sure how well that translates to the real world, but this bit at least is going to be great.
I wonder about the impact on society from a widespread loss of autonomy due to not driving our own vehicles.
I think that connecting "driving your own vehicle" to "autonomy" is a uniquely American-suburban mindset.
I don't feel like my autonomy is diminished at all by taking public transit or livery or walking.
Really?
Is this a thing where the stress is on how you don't feel it? Or on how it's not actually diminished?
What about all the places you cannot go without relying on another person or a dictated timetable?
That's what planning is for. I lived 5 years in Los Angeles, one of the most car-centric cities in the world, without one, and I never felt all that limited. I just had to plan trips, which was useful for making me think about them.
This conflstion of the car with freedom is a problematic part of American culture, and is part of the roots of several issues, like mass transit, sprawl, etc.
It's not at all problematic. You're literally saying "well I was less free, but it was fine" anyway.
I don't consider car payments, insurance, and the regular stress of driving to be "freeing". Any time I've been fortunate enough to live somewhere with actual public transit I've found that much more freeing. It's what appeals to me the most about automated vehicles. Avoiding the worst parts of the mill stone around my neck that is owning a car.
While certainly a vector for exploits, like spoofing a pot hole sighting or an intent to merge, this alone would reduce accidents and increase efficiency without any change to traffic regulations. If drivers had perfect knowledge of intent amd conditions, you simply wouldn't have accidents unrelated to surprise equipment failure.
Yep.
I feel like tblox is really working from a collectivist mindset in which the road system is transformed into small-capacity mass transit and I'm not really sure how well that translates to the real world, but this bit at least is going to be great.
I wonder about the impact on society from a widespread loss of autonomy due to not driving our own vehicles.
I think that connecting "driving your own vehicle" to "autonomy" is a uniquely American-suburban mindset.
I don't feel like my autonomy is diminished at all by taking public transit or livery or walking.
Really?
Is this a thing where the stress is on how you don't feel it? Or on how it's not actually diminished?
What about all the places you cannot go without relying on another person or a dictated timetable?
That's what planning is for. I lived 5 years in Los Angeles, one of the most car-centric cities in the world, without one, and I never felt all that limited. I just had to plan trips, which was useful for making me think about them.
This conflstion of the car with freedom is a problematic part of American culture, and is part of the roots of several issues, like mass transit, sprawl, etc.
It's not at all problematic. You're literally saying "well I was less free, but it was fine" anyway.
Well, I guess there's a more fundamental question to be answered there.
In LA, sure you can 'get in your car' and go wherever you want whenever you want by whatever route you want. But, you cannot ARRIVE when you want. Because the decisions of others massively impacts your ability to control that. While on your way to your destination you must also follow a very strict and detailed list of rules describing what you can and cannot do.
Whereas you can get on a Train and go to a list of places, at a list of times, and arrive at any one of a list of times that you choose. While on your way to your destination you may do pretty much anything you want as long as you could do such a thing in a public place in general.
Is the car Freedom because of your freedom to choose exactly where to go, how to get there and when to leave. Or is public transit freedom because of your freedom to choose from a list of arrival times, and to do whatever you want on the way.
In autonomous vehicles you will lose the freedom to choose 'how to get there' and gain the freedom to do what you want on the way, and some freedom to choose when you arrive. Is that a plus in your eyes?
Which freedom is the important one.
"That is cool" - Abraham Lincoln
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Options
MeeqeLord of the pants most fancySomeplace amazingRegistered Userregular
This issue, like many others, illustrates the crushingly mammoth differences between rural and urban life. What works in one place is madness in another.
I don't consider car payments, insurance, and the regular stress of driving to be "freeing". Any time I've been fortunate enough to live somewhere with actual public transit I've found that much more freeing. It's what appeals to me the most about automated vehicles. Avoiding the worst parts of the mill stone around my neck that is owning a car.
The whole point of what Feral was saying is that cars are just another kind of dependence.
If you've ever tried to drive into a city and had to look for someplace to park, especially if you don't wanna pay, this becomes super obvious super quickly.
And suburban areas by design and rural areas just suffer from different kinds of dependency.
While certainly a vector for exploits, like spoofing a pot hole sighting or an intent to merge, this alone would reduce accidents and increase efficiency without any change to traffic regulations. If drivers had perfect knowledge of intent amd conditions, you simply wouldn't have accidents unrelated to surprise equipment failure.
Yep.
I feel like tblox is really working from a collectivist mindset in which the road system is transformed into small-capacity mass transit and I'm not really sure how well that translates to the real world, but this bit at least is going to be great.
I wonder about the impact on society from a widespread loss of autonomy due to not driving our own vehicles.
I think that connecting "driving your own vehicle" to "autonomy" is a uniquely American-suburban mindset.
I don't feel like my autonomy is diminished at all by taking public transit or livery or walking.
Really?
Is this a thing where the stress is on how you don't feel it? Or on how it's not actually diminished?
What about all the places you cannot go without relying on another person or a dictated timetable?
What about all the places you cannot go without owning a hunk of metal that requires 300 square feet to store, may or may not have a place to park it at your destination, could get stuck in traffic, costs thousands of dollars a year, can't be safely used if you're drunk or tired or sufficiently elderly, and could break down at any time?
Unless the place you want to go is in quick walking distance, you are dependent upon somebody or something to get you there.
Your life has interdependencies with other people and/or technology. Welcome to being a member of homo sapiens. Seeing those interdependencies as intrinsically handicapping is, I think, one if the unhealthier habits of the American mindset.
If you're living in a suburban town with shitty transit and no meaningful livery service, then yeah waiting an hour for a fucking bus is pretty autonomy-destroying.
But when I've been in places with real transit options (ie, elevated or underground ＲＡＩＬ), if I want to go somewhere I walk into a tunnel and emerge at the other end. I make a decision about where I want to go and then I get there.
That's autonomy.
YEAH, so if you want true autonomy you gotta live in New York City or San Francisco. Because otherwise you need to own a car. Or Maybe DC, if you don't mind the crime and the metro breaking down all the time.
Yeah.
...So pretty much for 94% of the population cars are equated to autonomy.
That's limited autonomy anyway. Feral can't go anywhere he likes... he just likes all the places he can go, which is good! But it's not autonomy, it's being satisfied with limited choice. If I wanted to head out to the hill country and visit, well, anything, I need a car. Also of course there is this which is a concern to be sure. And does the BART run after 3AM? And will it take you out to xyz national park? or up the coast for a drive or
I think you see where I'm coming from even if you don't agree. We define autonomy differently, at minimum. And I think it's worth at least talking about how AVs will change society and our views - without deciding out of the gate the question of whether or not it's good for people to feel empowered to leave their surroundings in search of some unknown better life, to hop in the car and just drive off, to move away from home because they know grandma's just a couple hours away if they really need to get back, to leave town for the big city without literally severing their ability to return for Sunday dinner absent a plan and a bus and a good long walk on the side of the road.
I don't consider car payments, insurance, and the regular stress of driving to be "freeing". Any time I've been fortunate enough to live somewhere with actual public transit I've found that much more freeing. It's what appeals to me the most about automated vehicles. Avoiding the worst parts of the mill stone around my neck that is owning a car.
The whole point of what Feral was saying is that cars are just another kind of dependence.
If you've ever tried to drive into a city and had to look for someplace to park, especially if you don't wanna pay, this becomes super obvious super quickly.
And suburban areas by design and rural areas just suffer from different kinds of dependency.
That's not really a useful definition of "dependent"
I mean yes I am dependent on a device to get me from where I am to where I wanna be, but I'm also dependent on food to not collapse and die. It's meaningless. The question here is not whether there are strings attached to travel because of course there are. You had to feed your horse after all, and kill the animal you used to get the skins to wrap your feet. It's not a meaningful designation.
The question here is whether you feel limited by your limited choice, or whether it's important to you (and more broadly to society and our beliefs about ourselves) to be more unfettered. Because there's absolutely no question that a person with no access to a vehicle has their options for travel reduced, sometimes dramatically and sometimes less so, but always reduced.
I wonder what it will mean to lose that, or whether it should be a consideration as we transition to AVs.
You're dismissing all the restrictions vehicle ownership and driving forces on to people. You have the freedom to go wherever you want, so long as registration or inspection don't need renewal. So long as it doesn't need to be cleaned. So long as there isn't any scheduled maintenance to see to. So long as there isn't any unexpected emergency maintenance to see to. So long as you have the time to go there because you don't need to work longer to pay for all of the above. And when you do drive to that hill your time is the cars. You are forced to focus on the road and other drivers instead of doing anything else.
I'm all for doing away with all of it. I'll take the unfettered freedom of being able to enjoy my leisure time over the freedom of wasting my life driving a car.
]That's limited autonomy anyway. Feral can't go anywhere he likes... he just likes all the places he can go, which is good! But it's not autonomy, it's being satisfied with limited choice. If I wanted to head out to the hill country and visit, well, anything, I need a car.
That's a silly objection and a silly way of thinking about autonomy.
You can't go anywhere you like. You can't go to the moon or the bottom of the Marianas Trench. You can't take a car across a continent or to the middle of a lake.
You just happen to like the places you can go.
Really, your post is translatable to "the places I realistically expect to go require a car to get there" which isn't surprising, because we've built America to be car dependent.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Spool32, your post isn't even a particularly good objection to AVs because there's no obvious reason you couldn't take an AV (whether one you own or one you've hired from Zipcar or Lyft) over hill over dale to grandmother's house.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Spool32, your post isn't even a particularly good objection to AVs because there's no obvious reason you couldn't take an AV (whether one you own or one you've hired from Zipcar or Lyft) over hill over dale to grandmother's house.
Which returns to the point I made. AV's will retain the freedom to let you go wherever you want, but you will trade the freedom to get there however you want (speed, route, acceleration etc) for the freedom to arrive when you want (within reason), and do what you want on the way. Is that not MORE freedom?
]That's limited autonomy anyway. Feral can't go anywhere he likes... he just likes all the places he can go, which is good! But it's not autonomy, it's being satisfied with limited choice. If I wanted to head out to the hill country and visit, well, anything, I need a car.
That's a silly objection and a silly way of thinking about autonomy.
You can't go anywhere you like. You can't go to the moon or the bottom of the Marianas Trench. You can't take a car across a continent or to the middle of a lake.
You just happen to like the places you can go.
Really, your post is translatable to "the places I realistically expect to go require a car to get there" which isn't surprising, because we've built America to be car dependent.
Well I've done the taking a car across the continent thing once already but even with your metric, the places you could reasonably expect to go are fundamentally more limited than if you had a car. It's axiomatic. When I came to Seattle to visit vowels, we went hiking in a forest and we could do that on the spur of the moment because he had the means to get there whenever he wanted and leave whenever he wanted. It's not a thing you can do unless you have a personal vehicle.
Whether AVs change that is an open question - one we answer long term by the way we design roads and infrastructure in the future. Example: I'm not interested in a system where we dramatically reduce the ability to travel in trade for buying a car with no steering wheel.
]That's limited autonomy anyway. Feral can't go anywhere he likes... he just likes all the places he can go, which is good! But it's not autonomy, it's being satisfied with limited choice. If I wanted to head out to the hill country and visit, well, anything, I need a car.
That's a silly objection and a silly way of thinking about autonomy.
You can't go anywhere you like. You can't go to the moon or the bottom of the Marianas Trench. You can't take a car across a continent or to the middle of a lake.
You just happen to like the places you can go.
Really, your post is translatable to "the places I realistically expect to go require a car to get there" which isn't surprising, because we've built America to be car dependent.
Well I've done the taking a car across the continent thing once already but even with your metric, the places you could reasonably expect to go are fundamentally more limited than if you had a car. It's axiomatic. When I came to Seattle to visit vowels, we went hiking in a forest and we could do that on the spur of the moment because he had the means to get there whenever he wanted and leave whenever he wanted. It's not a thing you can do unless you have a personal vehicle.
Whether AVs change that is an open question - one we answer long term by the way we design roads and infrastructure in the future. Example: I'm not interested in a system where we dramatically reduce the ability to travel in trade for buying a car with no steering wheel.
what makes you think AVs are likely to dramatically reduce the ability to travel?
like the whole reason they've taken so long is because they're being designed to work with pre-existing roads with human-readable signs and signals for the infrastructre
like, if we wanted to build an AV system on custom AV infrastructure (like, guide wires in the road and barcoded signs n shit) we had the technology for that decades ago, but it'd be expensive to add in that infrastructure and you would be limited in where you could travel
but the travel limits on current AVs are like... roads that are in google maps and you can get a GPS signal
the talk of doing stuff where AVs cross-talk and share info and get managed by central systems are all stretch goals, like if you're on the highway and if there are mostly other AVs then they can work together, but the fallback base functionality is that they're able to operate independently in the way a car today can
they're not gonna work for legit off-roading but neither do most cars available today (well unless you want to break your car)
the biggest things I can think of off the top of my head is like, there will probably need to be a way to set up custom routes on your own property for driveways that aren't in the maps, or things like "you can park on the lawn", maybe you put up special reflectors for that.
But these things aren't going out the door if they can't follow a path generated by google maps.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
It seems likely that fully automated vehicles that completely lack manual controls are going to be very niche for a long time, if they even exist at all. A lot of futurists speculation I have seen seems enamored with that idea, but in practice the "last meters" of a trip are much more complicated than the rest of the trip with b parking, driveways, etc. Also sometimes you need to drive on a dirt road or a gravel lot with no parking lines or whatever.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
I don't consider car payments, insurance, and the regular stress of driving to be "freeing". Any time I've been fortunate enough to live somewhere with actual public transit I've found that much more freeing. It's what appeals to me the most about automated vehicles. Avoiding the worst parts of the mill stone around my neck that is owning a car.
The whole point of what Feral was saying is that cars are just another kind of dependence.
If you've ever tried to drive into a city and had to look for someplace to park, especially if you don't wanna pay, this becomes super obvious super quickly.
And suburban areas by design and rural areas just suffer from different kinds of dependency.
That's not really a useful definition of "dependent"
I mean yes I am dependent on a device to get me from where I am to where I wanna be, but I'm also dependent on food to not collapse and die. It's meaningless. The question here is not whether there are strings attached to travel because of course there are. You had to feed your horse after all, and kill the animal you used to get the skins to wrap your feet. It's not a meaningful designation.
The question here is whether you feel limited by your limited choice, or whether it's important to you (and more broadly to society and our beliefs about ourselves) to be more unfettered. Because there's absolutely no question that a person with no access to a vehicle has their options for travel reduced, sometimes dramatically and sometimes less so, but always reduced.
I wonder what it will mean to lose that, or whether it should be a consideration as we transition to AVs.
Dude, there are only 3 sentences in my post and one of them is literally giving you an example of the constraints depending on a car to get around places upon you. Parking is a big deal. It's why the zombie car problem rears it's head. This is a real way in which cars are restricting.
One of the biggest reasons people take transit into the urban core, even if they have a car, is because it's just much easier to get around because you don't need to try and find and/or pay for parking.
The other biggest reason is so you can get nice and buzzed while out and not have to worry. And that only doesn't show up in other places because without good transit, there are no other options so people just drive home drunk instead.
I don't consider car payments, insurance, and the regular stress of driving to be "freeing". Any time I've been fortunate enough to live somewhere with actual public transit I've found that much more freeing. It's what appeals to me the most about automated vehicles. Avoiding the worst parts of the mill stone around my neck that is owning a car.
The whole point of what Feral was saying is that cars are just another kind of dependence.
If you've ever tried to drive into a city and had to look for someplace to park, especially if you don't wanna pay, this becomes super obvious super quickly.
And suburban areas by design and rural areas just suffer from different kinds of dependency.
That's not really a useful definition of "dependent"
I mean yes I am dependent on a device to get me from where I am to where I wanna be, but I'm also dependent on food to not collapse and die. It's meaningless. The question here is not whether there are strings attached to travel because of course there are. You had to feed your horse after all, and kill the animal you used to get the skins to wrap your feet. It's not a meaningful designation.
The question here is whether you feel limited by your limited choice, or whether it's important to you (and more broadly to society and our beliefs about ourselves) to be more unfettered. Because there's absolutely no question that a person with no access to a vehicle has their options for travel reduced, sometimes dramatically and sometimes less so, but always reduced.
I wonder what it will mean to lose that, or whether it should be a consideration as we transition to AVs.
Dude, there are only 3 sentences in my post and one of them is literally giving you an example of the constraints depending on a car to get around places upon you. Parking is a big deal. It's why the zombie car problem rears it's head. This is a real way in which cars are restricting.
One of the biggest reasons people take transit into the urban core, even if they have a car, is because it's just much easier to get around because you don't need to try and find and/or pay for parking.
The other biggest reason is so you can get nice and buzzed while out and not have to worry. And that only doesn't show up in other places because without good transit, there are no other options so people just drive home drunk instead.
If you have a car, you can choose to use public transit if you want to. If you don't have a car you have no choice.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
Back on that collision, it turns out that there was a lidar on the vehicle and the maker (Velodyne) days it should have picked up the pedestrian: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43523286
But I don't mind, as long as there's a bed beneath the stars that shine,
I'll be fine, just give me a minute, a man's got a limit, I can't get a life if my heart's not in it.
I don't consider car payments, insurance, and the regular stress of driving to be "freeing". Any time I've been fortunate enough to live somewhere with actual public transit I've found that much more freeing. It's what appeals to me the most about automated vehicles. Avoiding the worst parts of the mill stone around my neck that is owning a car.
The whole point of what Feral was saying is that cars are just another kind of dependence.
If you've ever tried to drive into a city and had to look for someplace to park, especially if you don't wanna pay, this becomes super obvious super quickly.
And suburban areas by design and rural areas just suffer from different kinds of dependency.
That's not really a useful definition of "dependent"
I mean yes I am dependent on a device to get me from where I am to where I wanna be, but I'm also dependent on food to not collapse and die. It's meaningless. The question here is not whether there are strings attached to travel because of course there are. You had to feed your horse after all, and kill the animal you used to get the skins to wrap your feet. It's not a meaningful designation.
The question here is whether you feel limited by your limited choice, or whether it's important to you (and more broadly to society and our beliefs about ourselves) to be more unfettered. Because there's absolutely no question that a person with no access to a vehicle has their options for travel reduced, sometimes dramatically and sometimes less so, but always reduced.
I wonder what it will mean to lose that, or whether it should be a consideration as we transition to AVs.
Dude, there are only 3 sentences in my post and one of them is literally giving you an example of the constraints depending on a car to get around places upon you. Parking is a big deal. It's why the zombie car problem rears it's head. This is a real way in which cars are restricting.
One of the biggest reasons people take transit into the urban core, even if they have a car, is because it's just much easier to get around because you don't need to try and find and/or pay for parking.
The other biggest reason is so you can get nice and buzzed while out and not have to worry. And that only doesn't show up in other places because without good transit, there are no other options so people just drive home drunk instead.
If you have a car, you can choose to use public transit if you want to. If you don't have a car you have no choice.
Car rentals exist and are a perfectly valid option for that random weekend trip to the mountains or whatever.
Ars has a little piece pointing out that the super dark dash cam footage from the fatal crash doesn't actually represent the road conditions or visibility at the time, but rather a poorly-optimized camera unconfigured for low-light operation. You can clearly see multiple street lamps appearing to throw no illumination on the ground. The car likely had much more than 2 seconds to react, and the driver spent at least 5 seconds looking at his damn phone before seeing the pedestrian.
edit: how the hell do these cars have night vision cameras to watch the drivers and not have night vision dash cams??
DivideByZero on
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKERS
Night vision dash cams might have the opposite problem. But yeah the cameras should be optimized to give an accurate account of what the driver would have seen (for human-driven cars, or safety drivers). Also the tech definitely exists to show a visualization of what the car AI was aware of.
Like, the driver absolutely fucked up in that very special YOU HAD ONE JOB kind of way, and should totally eat a vehicular manslaughter charge for distracted driving. But there's no way Uber's sensors should have missed a slow moving, man sized object on an intercept course in clear weather. Mostly I'm saucy because the chief of police took one look at that pitch black dash cam video and blamed the pedestrian.
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKERS
Like, the driver absolutely fucked up in that very special YOU HAD ONE JOB kind of way, and should totally eat a vehicular manslaughter charge for distracted driving. But there's no way Uber's sensors should have missed a slow moving, man sized object on an intercept course in clear weather. Mostly I'm saucy because the chief of police took one look at that pitch black dash cam video and blamed the pedestrian.
I suspect that may be the issue, in that it wasn't man sized.
It was as tall as human, but much longer, and it seemed to have some kind of mechanical prosthesis extending from its torso. It was like centaur with wheels... some kind of mancycle. The AV clearly realized there were no such things as mancycles, assumed it was having an acid flashback, and tried to play it cool about the mechanical chimera, now bearing down on it at an alarming speed, so that the safety driver wouldn't think it was crazy.
Like, the driver absolutely fucked up in that very special YOU HAD ONE JOB kind of way, and should totally eat a vehicular manslaughter charge for distracted driving. But there's no way Uber's sensors should have missed a slow moving, man sized object on an intercept course in clear weather. Mostly I'm saucy because the chief of police took one look at that pitch black dash cam video and blamed the pedestrian.
I suspect that may be the issue, in that it wasn't man sized.
It was as tall as human, but much longer, and it seemed to have some kind of mechanical prosthesis extending from its torso. It was like centaur with wheels... some kind of mancycle. The AV clearly realized there were no such things as mancycles, assumed it was having an acid flashback, and tried to play it cool about the mechanical chimera, now bearing down on it at an alarming speed, so that the safety driver wouldn't think it was crazy.
I've watched enough Deep Dreams renders to know that AIs are having acid flashbacks all the time.
Like, the driver absolutely fucked up in that very special YOU HAD ONE JOB kind of way, and should totally eat a vehicular manslaughter charge for distracted driving. But there's no way Uber's sensors should have missed a slow moving, man sized object on an intercept course in clear weather. Mostly I'm saucy because the chief of police took one look at that pitch black dash cam video and blamed the pedestrian.
Eh. It's literally very difficult for human beings to pay continuous, close attention to something boring. Our brains just aren't wired that way. It's hard for me to blame the safety driver.
Like, the driver absolutely fucked up in that very special YOU HAD ONE JOB kind of way, and should totally eat a vehicular manslaughter charge for distracted driving. But there's no way Uber's sensors should have missed a slow moving, man sized object on an intercept course in clear weather. Mostly I'm saucy because the chief of police took one look at that pitch black dash cam video and blamed the pedestrian.
Eh. It's literally very difficult for human beings to pay continuous, close attention to something boring. Our brains just aren't wired that way. It's hard for me to blame the safety driver.
"I was bored and not paying attention. Humans amirite?" is not a defense that will or should hold up in court.
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKERS
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AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
edited March 2018
Dash cameras that do basic auto f-stop adjustments are certainly possible, the way your iPhone camera can adjust grossly when you tap on different areas of the image. Dash cams that recreate exactly what the driver was seeing are a long ways off, unless you want to give every car a RED and a cinematographer in the back seat working post on a laptop. There’s a little room for improvement but let’s not go crazy here.
While certainly a vector for exploits, like spoofing a pot hole sighting or an intent to merge, this alone would reduce accidents and increase efficiency without any change to traffic regulations. If drivers had perfect knowledge of intent amd conditions, you simply wouldn't have accidents unrelated to surprise equipment failure.
What about spoofing a vehicle traveling 80 mph in the wrong direction on a crowded highway?
If that was really happening, then someone is almost certainly going to get hurt or killed, and the job of an AI would be to arrange the crashes in such a way to minimize casualties. Staying in lane at full speed almost certainly wouldn't be the best choice. That's all well and good if there's actually a car to avoid, but if the car is an illusion, the AI might possibly jump into a different high-speed crash for no benefit.
When they have AVs I can "hire" to take me, my boat and trailer camping I'll ditch my car and truck. That's the only use case I still have for a personal vehicle. It will be Fucking awesome to hire an AV, hook up the boat and then chill out on the way. Once there I unhook everything and send it on its way to the next guy. When I am done my recreating I will signal for another.
Same thing with EVs for me. Give me the capabilities and "autonomy" to do what I do now and I'm down. Not paying insurance each month would give me plenty of cash for a Halibut setup
Like, the driver absolutely fucked up in that very special YOU HAD ONE JOB kind of way, and should totally eat a vehicular manslaughter charge for distracted driving. But there's no way Uber's sensors should have missed a slow moving, man sized object on an intercept course in clear weather. Mostly I'm saucy because the chief of police took one look at that pitch black dash cam video and blamed the pedestrian.
Eh. It's literally very difficult for human beings to pay continuous, close attention to something boring. Our brains just aren't wired that way. It's hard for me to blame the safety driver.
"I was bored and not paying attention. Humans amirite?" is not a defense that will or should hold up in court.
"I'm tasked with a basically impossible job that only exists to prop up the thin veneer that testing AI controlled vehicles on public roads is safe"
There really is no ability for humans to intervene in most emergencies, which is why Tesla's Level 3 automation autopilot is so dangerous. You either have to expect 100% human concentration or 0. So much so that Ford isn't even making level 3 capable vehicles because it's honestly quite unsafe.
It's not a traffic jam. It is continually improving the flow of more and more traffic as time goes on. Every second more vehicles are travelling at an appropriate and constant speed, and the amount of fast vehicles causing braking events is decreasing. Every vehicle in that smooth flow zone is improving the average performance of the highway.
This statement is only NOT true, if traffic density is so low that no pulsatile traffic jam would ever have formed. And then yes, what the students have demonstrated is that the speed limit is too low
It has already been shown that it is a traffic jam by mathematical necessity.
It is impossible to create a negative density space when a higher flow rate is behind a slower flow rate.
It is impossible to create good traffic by this method because the flow rate is limited by any lower flow rate in front of it.
They did not run into a low flow rate in front of them ergo there was no pulsate traffic in front of the obstruction!
4 cars driving in a line cannot violate the laws of physics
Nah.
The flow rate could well be the same.
Just you have turbulent mixed traffic/bubbles at the average flow rate followed by a large bubble of zero flow and then a well packed packet of high flow rate, falling back to the average fall rate after.
As long as the overall flow of break in traffic + packed traffic column doesn't exceed the previous flow rate, it shouldn't catch up to the rest of the traffic.
And all you're looking to do is increase the instantaneous flow rate anyway, to prove that the well-packed slower traffic could admit a higher volume of traffic if everyone followed the speed limit and enabled laminar flow.
It's not like the flow changing will increase the volume of cars entering the system immediately.
It's not a traffic jam. It is continually improving the flow of more and more traffic as time goes on. Every second more vehicles are travelling at an appropriate and constant speed, and the amount of fast vehicles causing braking events is decreasing. Every vehicle in that smooth flow zone is improving the average performance of the highway.
This statement is only NOT true, if traffic density is so low that no pulsatile traffic jam would ever have formed. And then yes, what the students have demonstrated is that the speed limit is too low
It has already been shown that it is a traffic jam by mathematical necessity.
It is impossible to create a negative density space when a higher flow rate is behind a slower flow rate.
It is impossible to create good traffic by this method because the flow rate is limited by any lower flow rate in front of it.
They did not run into a low flow rate in front of them ergo there was no pulsate traffic in front of the obstruction!
4 cars driving in a line cannot violate the laws of physics
Nah.
The flow rate could well be the same.
Just you have turbulent mixed traffic/bubbles at the average flow rate followed by a large bubble of zero flow and then a well packed packet of high flow rate, falling back to the average fall rate after.
As long as the overall flow of break in traffic + packed traffic column doesn't exceed the previous flow rate, it shouldn't catch up to the rest of the traffic.
And all you're looking to do is increase the instantaneous flow rate anyway, to prove that the well-packed slower traffic could admit a higher volume of traffic if everyone followed the speed limit and enabled laminar flow.
It's not like the flow changing will increase the volume of cars entering the system immediately.
Flow rate cannot be the same because the obstruction created a negative density/flow zone ahead of it. This can only occur when there is a change from low flow to high flow along the path. Flow rate behind the cars must have been lower. The only way it could have been higher is if these four cars caused the highway to violate the physical laws of the universe and math itself.
Well packed traffic could theoretically increase flow rate if it’s over the entire range of traffic. But it cannot increase the flow rate unless it is done from the front rather than the rear. This is because of the aforementioned physical laws of the universe.
IE. The problem of traffic jams is road and speed limit is to design to get people to align optimally naturally. Not to create obstructions and run them along the path. It cannot work.
It's not a traffic jam. It is continually improving the flow of more and more traffic as time goes on. Every second more vehicles are travelling at an appropriate and constant speed, and the amount of fast vehicles causing braking events is decreasing. Every vehicle in that smooth flow zone is improving the average performance of the highway.
This statement is only NOT true, if traffic density is so low that no pulsatile traffic jam would ever have formed. And then yes, what the students have demonstrated is that the speed limit is too low
It has already been shown that it is a traffic jam by mathematical necessity.
It is impossible to create a negative density space when a higher flow rate is behind a slower flow rate.
It is impossible to create good traffic by this method because the flow rate is limited by any lower flow rate in front of it.
They did not run into a low flow rate in front of them ergo there was no pulsate traffic in front of the obstruction!
4 cars driving in a line cannot violate the laws of physics
Nah.
The flow rate could well be the same.
Just you have turbulent mixed traffic/bubbles at the average flow rate followed by a large bubble of zero flow and then a well packed packet of high flow rate, falling back to the average fall rate after.
As long as the overall flow of break in traffic + packed traffic column doesn't exceed the previous flow rate, it shouldn't catch up to the rest of the traffic.
And all you're looking to do is increase the instantaneous flow rate anyway, to prove that the well-packed slower traffic could admit a higher volume of traffic if everyone followed the speed limit and enabled laminar flow.
It's not like the flow changing will increase the volume of cars entering the system immediately.
Flow rate cannot be the same because the obstruction created a negative density/flow zone ahead of it. This can only occur when there is a change from low flow to high flow along the path. Flow rate behind the cars must have been lower. The only way it could have been higher is if these four cars caused the highway to violate the physical laws of the universe and math itself.
Well packed traffic could theoretically increase flow rate if it’s over the entire range of traffic. But it cannot increase the flow rate unless it is done from the front rather than the rear. This is because of the aforementioned physical laws of the universe.
IE. The problem of traffic jams is road and speed limit is to design to get people to align optimally naturally. Not to create obstructions and run them along the path. It cannot work.
The flow rate of the road is bounded by the flow rate of the inputs/outputs.
The traffic ahead of the break is likely flowing at the same rate as the average flow in the break (zero) and the cars behind the obstruction.
This would mean the cars behind the obstruction are flowing faster than those ahead of them.
Because math.
Like you could think about it as partial pressures of two gasses and think about what happens to the effective flow rate of one if you go from mixed gasses to gas one then gas two.
The overall flow rate may have decreased due to the obstruction as a second option, which would create a traffic jam, and that would be different in that the tail behind the obstruction would not have passed under the bridge the students were standing on.
But I don't believe we saw that.
Like, the driver absolutely fucked up in that very special YOU HAD ONE JOB kind of way, and should totally eat a vehicular manslaughter charge for distracted driving. But there's no way Uber's sensors should have missed a slow moving, man sized object on an intercept course in clear weather. Mostly I'm saucy because the chief of police took one look at that pitch black dash cam video and blamed the pedestrian.
Eh. It's literally very difficult for human beings to pay continuous, close attention to something boring. Our brains just aren't wired that way. It's hard for me to blame the safety driver.
"I was bored and not paying attention. Humans amirite?" is not a defense that will or should hold up in court.
"I'm tasked with a basically impossible job that only exists to prop up the thin veneer that testing AI controlled vehicles on public roads is safe"
There really is no ability for humans to intervene in most emergencies, which is why Tesla's Level 3 automation autopilot is so dangerous. You either have to expect 100% human concentration or 0. So much so that Ford isn't even making level 3 capable vehicles because it's honestly quite unsafe.
My point is that if the whole purpose of the safety driver is to make sure the robot car doesn't accidentally kill anyone, we should damn well expect 100% human concentration. If this driver hadn't been looking at their phone for five seconds out of every seven, the pedestrian would have been seen. Contrary to Uber's dash cam video, she was likely visible in the headlights for close to four seconds. That is more than enough time for a human to notice the car wasn't slowing down and apply the brake, swerve, or at least tap the horn. Then this incident would have been an exercise in debugging the sensors instead of a fatal accident.
We don't excuse a train conductor or air traffic controller who zones out and causes fatalities, I see no reason why we should do so for these drivers. If it's so damn hard for them to concentrate on the road, shorten their shifts and add eye-tracking rigs with alarms to keep them on task. Until this technology is mature, human drivers are the only failsafe available. Quit making excuses for somebody who was looking at their phone instead of the road.
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKERS
I do find it hard to fault someone who loses concentration on a task that they normally have no input in whatsoever.
Even if they're the test drivers, and are expected to be attentive 100% of the time for just this scenario.
I do not think the vast majority of people would be able to hold their attention in that circumstance, and I do not trust that Uber would have selected an appropriate individual for the task.
Reading up on this some more, the only thing that would exonerate the driver would be if it turned out she wasn't looking at her phone, but Uber was requiring her to monitor the car's systems on a laptop display, a function that used to be the job of a second person in the passenger seat until Uber decided to eliminate that position so they could get twice the amount of cars on the road without hiring/training more drivers.
Mostly I take issue with the claim that no human could react in time to prevent an accident anyway, which decades of history with driving instructors' redundant control systems would seem to disprove.
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKERS
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The american (north american really and probably some other places too) is marketed on an image of rugged independence and strength. It's powerful and can go anywhere and do anything, just like you you manly man you. The vehicle as extension of the driver's own erection.
I wonder how AVs will change that. When your car becomes a black box to get you from A to B, where's the power fantasy?
Yeah.
...So pretty much for 94% of the population cars are equated to autonomy.
Boxes do not propel themselves from the rear of trucks. There are two ways for a box to fall from a truck. And, in fact, they are really the same way.
1) The box is travelling at the same speed as the truck, and the truck accelerates forwards. The coefficient of friction does not suffice to accelerate the truck at the same rate and the box obtains a delta V relative to the truck. The truck moves forward at its new speed, the box retains the old truck speed. From the perspective of the truck, the box now 'falls off' the truck. However, from the perspective of everyone else (including the AV behind it) the box continued along its course, and the truck ran away from it.
2) The box is travelling at the same speed as the truck, and the truck accelerates upwards when it hits a bump. Air resistance then slightly slows the box (assuming this is an open truck) and the box obtains a delta V relative to the truck. The truck moves forward at its old speed, the box has a slightly decreased speed. From the perspective of the truck, the box now 'falls off' the truck. From the perspective of everyone else, the box did an incredibly small deceleration rate (air resistance is much less than brake resistance) and is now travelling very slightly slower than the truck.
In both those cases, either the change in box speed is zero (the truck changed speed) or small enough to be irrelevant (the box hit some air resistance). Boxes falling from trucks are a problem for people because people don't even drive with reaction time spacing, let alone the small amount of stopping distance spacing you need (because a box is not very aerodynamic or slippery, and might stop faster than you even with 100% brake force). So when a box falls, an aggressive driver will often see it too late, then brake as hard as they can, but its still too late and they hit the box anyway, and then often due to you braking rapidly and the driver behind you not knowing why, or what your goal speed is will brake even later, and then hit you too!
This wave of aggressive driving caused impacts will then propagate up the road until we find our hero, a responsible driver moving at a sensible (lower) speed with good spacing. Who will be able to smoothly come to a stop with gentle braking.
It's not at all problematic. You're literally saying "well I was less free, but it was fine" anyway.
Well, I guess there's a more fundamental question to be answered there.
In LA, sure you can 'get in your car' and go wherever you want whenever you want by whatever route you want. But, you cannot ARRIVE when you want. Because the decisions of others massively impacts your ability to control that. While on your way to your destination you must also follow a very strict and detailed list of rules describing what you can and cannot do.
Whereas you can get on a Train and go to a list of places, at a list of times, and arrive at any one of a list of times that you choose. While on your way to your destination you may do pretty much anything you want as long as you could do such a thing in a public place in general.
Is the car Freedom because of your freedom to choose exactly where to go, how to get there and when to leave. Or is public transit freedom because of your freedom to choose from a list of arrival times, and to do whatever you want on the way.
In autonomous vehicles you will lose the freedom to choose 'how to get there' and gain the freedom to do what you want on the way, and some freedom to choose when you arrive. Is that a plus in your eyes?
Which freedom is the important one.
The whole point of what Feral was saying is that cars are just another kind of dependence.
If you've ever tried to drive into a city and had to look for someplace to park, especially if you don't wanna pay, this becomes super obvious super quickly.
And suburban areas by design and rural areas just suffer from different kinds of dependency.
That's limited autonomy anyway. Feral can't go anywhere he likes... he just likes all the places he can go, which is good! But it's not autonomy, it's being satisfied with limited choice. If I wanted to head out to the hill country and visit, well, anything, I need a car. Also of course there is this which is a concern to be sure. And does the BART run after 3AM? And will it take you out to xyz national park? or up the coast for a drive or
I think you see where I'm coming from even if you don't agree. We define autonomy differently, at minimum. And I think it's worth at least talking about how AVs will change society and our views - without deciding out of the gate the question of whether or not it's good for people to feel empowered to leave their surroundings in search of some unknown better life, to hop in the car and just drive off, to move away from home because they know grandma's just a couple hours away if they really need to get back, to leave town for the big city without literally severing their ability to return for Sunday dinner absent a plan and a bus and a good long walk on the side of the road.
That's not really a useful definition of "dependent"
I mean yes I am dependent on a device to get me from where I am to where I wanna be, but I'm also dependent on food to not collapse and die. It's meaningless. The question here is not whether there are strings attached to travel because of course there are. You had to feed your horse after all, and kill the animal you used to get the skins to wrap your feet. It's not a meaningful designation.
The question here is whether you feel limited by your limited choice, or whether it's important to you (and more broadly to society and our beliefs about ourselves) to be more unfettered. Because there's absolutely no question that a person with no access to a vehicle has their options for travel reduced, sometimes dramatically and sometimes less so, but always reduced.
I wonder what it will mean to lose that, or whether it should be a consideration as we transition to AVs.
I'm all for doing away with all of it. I'll take the unfettered freedom of being able to enjoy my leisure time over the freedom of wasting my life driving a car.
That's a silly objection and a silly way of thinking about autonomy.
You can't go anywhere you like. You can't go to the moon or the bottom of the Marianas Trench. You can't take a car across a continent or to the middle of a lake.
You just happen to like the places you can go.
Really, your post is translatable to "the places I realistically expect to go require a car to get there" which isn't surprising, because we've built America to be car dependent.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Which returns to the point I made. AV's will retain the freedom to let you go wherever you want, but you will trade the freedom to get there however you want (speed, route, acceleration etc) for the freedom to arrive when you want (within reason), and do what you want on the way. Is that not MORE freedom?
Well I've done the taking a car across the continent thing once already but even with your metric, the places you could reasonably expect to go are fundamentally more limited than if you had a car. It's axiomatic. When I came to Seattle to visit vowels, we went hiking in a forest and we could do that on the spur of the moment because he had the means to get there whenever he wanted and leave whenever he wanted. It's not a thing you can do unless you have a personal vehicle.
Whether AVs change that is an open question - one we answer long term by the way we design roads and infrastructure in the future. Example: I'm not interested in a system where we dramatically reduce the ability to travel in trade for buying a car with no steering wheel.
what makes you think AVs are likely to dramatically reduce the ability to travel?
like the whole reason they've taken so long is because they're being designed to work with pre-existing roads with human-readable signs and signals for the infrastructre
like, if we wanted to build an AV system on custom AV infrastructure (like, guide wires in the road and barcoded signs n shit) we had the technology for that decades ago, but it'd be expensive to add in that infrastructure and you would be limited in where you could travel
but the travel limits on current AVs are like... roads that are in google maps and you can get a GPS signal
the talk of doing stuff where AVs cross-talk and share info and get managed by central systems are all stretch goals, like if you're on the highway and if there are mostly other AVs then they can work together, but the fallback base functionality is that they're able to operate independently in the way a car today can
they're not gonna work for legit off-roading but neither do most cars available today (well unless you want to break your car)
the biggest things I can think of off the top of my head is like, there will probably need to be a way to set up custom routes on your own property for driveways that aren't in the maps, or things like "you can park on the lawn", maybe you put up special reflectors for that.
But these things aren't going out the door if they can't follow a path generated by google maps.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Dude, there are only 3 sentences in my post and one of them is literally giving you an example of the constraints depending on a car to get around places upon you. Parking is a big deal. It's why the zombie car problem rears it's head. This is a real way in which cars are restricting.
One of the biggest reasons people take transit into the urban core, even if they have a car, is because it's just much easier to get around because you don't need to try and find and/or pay for parking.
The other biggest reason is so you can get nice and buzzed while out and not have to worry. And that only doesn't show up in other places because without good transit, there are no other options so people just drive home drunk instead.
If you have a car, you can choose to use public transit if you want to. If you don't have a car you have no choice.
I'll be fine, just give me a minute, a man's got a limit, I can't get a life if my heart's not in it.
Car rentals exist and are a perfectly valid option for that random weekend trip to the mountains or whatever.
edit: how the hell do these cars have night vision cameras to watch the drivers and not have night vision dash cams??
It was as tall as human, but much longer, and it seemed to have some kind of mechanical prosthesis extending from its torso. It was like centaur with wheels... some kind of mancycle. The AV clearly realized there were no such things as mancycles, assumed it was having an acid flashback, and tried to play it cool about the mechanical chimera, now bearing down on it at an alarming speed, so that the safety driver wouldn't think it was crazy.
I've watched enough Deep Dreams renders to know that AIs are having acid flashbacks all the time.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Eh. It's literally very difficult for human beings to pay continuous, close attention to something boring. Our brains just aren't wired that way. It's hard for me to blame the safety driver.
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"I was bored and not paying attention. Humans amirite?" is not a defense that will or should hold up in court.
What about spoofing a vehicle traveling 80 mph in the wrong direction on a crowded highway?
If that was really happening, then someone is almost certainly going to get hurt or killed, and the job of an AI would be to arrange the crashes in such a way to minimize casualties. Staying in lane at full speed almost certainly wouldn't be the best choice. That's all well and good if there's actually a car to avoid, but if the car is an illusion, the AI might possibly jump into a different high-speed crash for no benefit.
Same thing with EVs for me. Give me the capabilities and "autonomy" to do what I do now and I'm down. Not paying insurance each month would give me plenty of cash for a Halibut setup
"I'm tasked with a basically impossible job that only exists to prop up the thin veneer that testing AI controlled vehicles on public roads is safe"
There really is no ability for humans to intervene in most emergencies, which is why Tesla's Level 3 automation autopilot is so dangerous. You either have to expect 100% human concentration or 0. So much so that Ford isn't even making level 3 capable vehicles because it's honestly quite unsafe.
Nah.
The flow rate could well be the same.
Just you have turbulent mixed traffic/bubbles at the average flow rate followed by a large bubble of zero flow and then a well packed packet of high flow rate, falling back to the average fall rate after.
As long as the overall flow of break in traffic + packed traffic column doesn't exceed the previous flow rate, it shouldn't catch up to the rest of the traffic.
And all you're looking to do is increase the instantaneous flow rate anyway, to prove that the well-packed slower traffic could admit a higher volume of traffic if everyone followed the speed limit and enabled laminar flow.
It's not like the flow changing will increase the volume of cars entering the system immediately.
Flow rate cannot be the same because the obstruction created a negative density/flow zone ahead of it. This can only occur when there is a change from low flow to high flow along the path. Flow rate behind the cars must have been lower. The only way it could have been higher is if these four cars caused the highway to violate the physical laws of the universe and math itself.
Well packed traffic could theoretically increase flow rate if it’s over the entire range of traffic. But it cannot increase the flow rate unless it is done from the front rather than the rear. This is because of the aforementioned physical laws of the universe.
IE. The problem of traffic jams is road and speed limit is to design to get people to align optimally naturally. Not to create obstructions and run them along the path. It cannot work.
The flow rate of the road is bounded by the flow rate of the inputs/outputs.
The traffic ahead of the break is likely flowing at the same rate as the average flow in the break (zero) and the cars behind the obstruction.
This would mean the cars behind the obstruction are flowing faster than those ahead of them.
Because math.
Like you could think about it as partial pressures of two gasses and think about what happens to the effective flow rate of one if you go from mixed gasses to gas one then gas two.
The overall flow rate may have decreased due to the obstruction as a second option, which would create a traffic jam, and that would be different in that the tail behind the obstruction would not have passed under the bridge the students were standing on.
But I don't believe we saw that.
My point is that if the whole purpose of the safety driver is to make sure the robot car doesn't accidentally kill anyone, we should damn well expect 100% human concentration. If this driver hadn't been looking at their phone for five seconds out of every seven, the pedestrian would have been seen. Contrary to Uber's dash cam video, she was likely visible in the headlights for close to four seconds. That is more than enough time for a human to notice the car wasn't slowing down and apply the brake, swerve, or at least tap the horn. Then this incident would have been an exercise in debugging the sensors instead of a fatal accident.
We don't excuse a train conductor or air traffic controller who zones out and causes fatalities, I see no reason why we should do so for these drivers. If it's so damn hard for them to concentrate on the road, shorten their shifts and add eye-tracking rigs with alarms to keep them on task. Until this technology is mature, human drivers are the only failsafe available. Quit making excuses for somebody who was looking at their phone instead of the road.
I do find it hard to fault someone who loses concentration on a task that they normally have no input in whatsoever.
Even if they're the test drivers, and are expected to be attentive 100% of the time for just this scenario.
I do not think the vast majority of people would be able to hold their attention in that circumstance, and I do not trust that Uber would have selected an appropriate individual for the task.
Mostly I take issue with the claim that no human could react in time to prevent an accident anyway, which decades of history with driving instructors' redundant control systems would seem to disprove.