FSD definitely isn’t there yet. We’ve got it, and it’s fine the 95% of the time when it doesn’t succumb to it’s unquenchable hatred of organic life and actively attempt to murder us. Things like trying to make a left turn out of the traffic lane, rather than either of the left turn lanes… which was quickly patched to it pulling into the left turn pocket at the last second before the intersection. Mostly, though, the problems arrive at non-standard intersections, like where the right turn lane doesn’t have to stop. It barrels towards the intersection at full tilt, then realizes there a concrete island delineating the turn and goes full Autopia on you (for those of you who have never experienced Disney’s whiplash simulator, it’s not good).
Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion.
Do we really have any actual studies showing that widespread AV usage is going to induce a significant increase in demand?
I can see there would be some changes in patterns and certain localities might have an uptick in choosing driving vs. other options (i.e. if you can summon your car to pick you up at your door instead of walking to a more remote parking lot or sleeping overnight while your car drives 10 hours instead of taking a flight) but it kind of feels like that's more of a gut / speculative feeling and will be dwarfed by the same people going from Point A to Point B the same as they always do.
Feral’s posts a while back argue that it’s not just likely but axiomatic, almost inescapable.
NTSB institutes a regulation that each distance travelled autonomously needs to be recorded and GPS location tracked with the general distance / time uploaded to the local state or municipality.
The stare or municipality can then assess a mileage fee for distance traveled while the vehicle is unoccupied. Say unmanned travel / summon is equal to the livery fee based on distance.
That should set some parking / summon equilibrium and deter people from sending their car 20 miles back home unoccupied to waste extra trips but still be a convenience feature for people who want it.
I figure with so much infrastructure funding based on gas taxes, when EVs take off they will need to find new revenue streams somewhere. And EVs are heavy personal vehicles.
NTSB institutes a regulation that each distance travelled autonomously needs to be recorded and GPS location tracked with the general distance / time uploaded to the local state or municipality.
The stare or municipality can then assess a mileage fee for distance traveled while the vehicle is unoccupied. Say unmanned travel / summon is equal to the livery fee based on distance.
That should set some parking / summon equilibrium and deter people from sending their car 20 miles back home unoccupied to waste extra trips but still be a convenience feature for people who want it.
I figure with so much infrastructure funding based on gas taxes, when EVs take off they will need to find new revenue streams somewhere. And EVs are heavy personal vehicles.
I feel like summon/return logic is a better idea then trying to cram parking into spaces where we already don't put enough parking without this functionality. An unoccupied AV might contribute to traffic, but realistically its increasing congestion outside of peak transit hours only briefly. Given that they're all electric, this is probably also overall more energy efficient then the concrete and construction for car parks.
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MrMonroepassed outon the floor nowRegistered Userregular
To me one of the biggest possible benefits of AVs is that you don't need to own one as an individual and you don't need parking.
I still kinda hate them because it seems more likely that instead of being a publicly available system that benefits those without accessibility options most it'll just be another way to reduce the burden on the wealthy of our transit system overall being dogshit and will end up leading to more congestion and more infrastructure for cars instead of proven public transit solutions.
I'm not sure that the economics of using autonomous cars as a kind of quasi-public transport system stack up, in the sense that people will use AVs that aren't personally owned vehicles as a mainstay of personal mobility
In particular, I'm not sure that such a service would be lower cost in terms of capital investment and running costs relative to the existing business models of taxi services
People have the option right now of using taxis to go everywhere instead of owning a car, but they generally don't unless relatively wealthy and living somewhere highly urbanised
I'm not sure that the economics of using autonomous cars as a kind of quasi-public transport system stack up, in the sense that people will use AVs that aren't personally owned vehicles as a mainstay of personal mobility
In particular, I'm not sure that such a service would be lower cost in terms of capital investment and running costs relative to the existing business models of taxi services
People have the option right now of using taxis to go everywhere instead of owning a car, but they generally don't unless relatively wealthy and living somewhere highly urbanised
I think the idea is it removes the cost of having to pay a taxi driver which combined with not having to deal with the maintenance/costs of an internal combustion engine means it's far cheaper.
However even if that's true (which I kinda doubt) it's going to be a hard sell in a lot of the US because taxis are an absolutely shitty service in a lot of the US the point that I'd argue it's the primary reason Uber took off the way it did.
I'm not sure that the economics of using autonomous cars as a kind of quasi-public transport system stack up, in the sense that people will use AVs that aren't personally owned vehicles as a mainstay of personal mobility
In particular, I'm not sure that such a service would be lower cost in terms of capital investment and running costs relative to the existing business models of taxi services
People have the option right now of using taxis to go everywhere instead of owning a car, but they generally don't unless relatively wealthy and living somewhere highly urbanised
To work it would need to appeal way more than current car-sharing, it seems. That's an extremely competitive business right now and not exactly one with a huge mass appeal. And I don't think there's much proof so far that car sharing has a considerable effect in reducing personal car ownership.
I feel there is a disconnect between all the speculation about the miracle of self driving cars, and the reports of how self driving cars actually perform.
Like, aside from Musk, who is a pathological liar, what other company is claiming 100% self driving cars that you can summon or send away, and has a roadmap for delivery, not just "in the future cars will drive themselves and probably fly too!"
Yes, with a quick verbal "boom." You take a man's peko, you deny him his dab, all that is left is to rise up and tear down the walls of Jericho with a ".....not!" -TexiKen
I'm not sure that the economics of using autonomous cars as a kind of quasi-public transport system stack up, in the sense that people will use AVs that aren't personally owned vehicles as a mainstay of personal mobility
In particular, I'm not sure that such a service would be lower cost in terms of capital investment and running costs relative to the existing business models of taxi services
People have the option right now of using taxis to go everywhere instead of owning a car, but they generally don't unless relatively wealthy and living somewhere highly urbanised
I think the idea is it removes the cost of having to pay a taxi driver which combined with not having to deal with the maintenance/costs of an internal combustion engine means it's far cheaper.
However even if that's true (which I kinda doubt) it's going to be a hard sell in a lot of the US because taxis are an absolutely shitty service in a lot of the US the point that I'd argue it's the primary reason Uber took off the way it did.
No, the primary reason Uber took off the way it did was because they ran the service at a loss for years in order to strangle competition.
I'm not sure that the economics of using autonomous cars as a kind of quasi-public transport system stack up, in the sense that people will use AVs that aren't personally owned vehicles as a mainstay of personal mobility
In particular, I'm not sure that such a service would be lower cost in terms of capital investment and running costs relative to the existing business models of taxi services
People have the option right now of using taxis to go everywhere instead of owning a car, but they generally don't unless relatively wealthy and living somewhere highly urbanised
I think the idea is it removes the cost of having to pay a taxi driver which combined with not having to deal with the maintenance/costs of an internal combustion engine means it's far cheaper.
However even if that's true (which I kinda doubt) it's going to be a hard sell in a lot of the US because taxis are an absolutely shitty service in a lot of the US the point that I'd argue it's the primary reason Uber took off the way it did.
No, the primary reason Uber took off the way it did was because they ran the service at a loss for years in order to strangle competition.
And they went full Helmsley, creating systems like Greyball and Ripley to prevent municipalities from actually regulating them.
zepherinRussian warship, go fuck yourselfRegistered Userregular
I think what will likely happen as automated vehicles become the norm: The majority of people outside of NYC, Boston, DC, San Fran, and Seattle who currently own cars will continue to own cars, and those who buy new cars will have automated ones, it'll be a feature. In high density cities automated vehicles will replace cabs and Ubers.
If cars have a drive home option that is reliable. People would love that, and a lot of parking will go away in favor of automated drop off spots. There might be some congestion alleviation due to fewer accidents, and more efficient driving...eventually. But until a majority of cars on the road have it, it's not going to be much.
There's just not going to be a situation where and unless GenZ and millennials start voting in record number, there will not be a new tax to that effect.
One thing to consider is municipal revenue is going to be annihilated. For a lot of reasons, but one of the big ones is, you can set the car to follow every law, and every speed limit 100%. Minimal tickets, And most states prohibit cities from setting up tolls. So I'm not sure what's going to happen there...maybe defund the police :biggrin:
Nobody is gonna let a car drive itself around till like decades after the technology even gets to the point that it would even be possible, which is still not close.
I guess I want to ask for anyone with a semi-AV out there- do you know what your AV can and cannot recognise? How do you know what to look out for, and what to not worry about when it's autonomous?
This is the downside of neural net AI, it can be very hard to specify the limits of what it can do, and I think this is a real impediment to AV safety
I have a 2019 and a 2020 Subaru, with lane detection, adaptive cruise, and collision avoidance/mitigation.
They are very good at recognizing vehicles ahead of me and maintaining speed and distance.
There is an audio cue anytime it gains, loses, or transfers "lock" on a leading vehicle. There is also a prominent center-dash indicator; I can confirm "lock" status as easily as checking a speedometer. Thus, I have no problem knowing if it working.
They work at all speeds, from stop-crawl to full-highway, though they do disengage after coming to a complete stop for a few seconds.
They recognize towed trailers carrying boats, and those mesh trailers carrying lawn mowers and stuff.
They work morning, night, dawn, and dusk.
They work in up to moderate fog, and up to heavy (not torrential) rain.
They maintain "lock" on the leading vehicle through curves rated for 35mph or more. (yes on highways, no on roundabouts, case-by-case on cloverleaf interchange)
They will use engine braking on long downhills.
They are almost too cautious if the car ahead is making a right turn. We slow way down, and don't accelerate again for a second or two after all clear. I will often take over for those seconds to have a smoother drive.
I think they handle motorcycles well, but I honestly can't recall the last time a cycle went slow enough for me to be following it. I tend to be extra vigilant around them anyways.
I don't trust it to maintain itself in a lane or follow a curve. I can feel the haptics in the wheel, and it might be able to do so, but I'm not comfortable driving hands-off.
It does not detect red lights, stop signs, or anything of the sort.
It does not (reliably) detect bicycles or pedestrians (or animals like deer); I am extra vigilant when passing parked cars or in pedestrian-heavy areas.
I've had five or fewer activations of collision avoidance (hard braking not under my control) in appropriate situations, where a car pulled out ahead of me too close, came an unusually swift stop, that kind of thing.
I've had two or fewer activations of collision avoidance for no visible reason; in no case did my car swerve or otherwise cause me to lose steering control.
I, personally, find myself a calmer driver when using the adaptive cruise. The urge to "hurry up" is largely suppressed.
AlanF5 on
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zepherinRussian warship, go fuck yourselfRegistered Userregular
Nobody is gonna let a car drive itself around till like decades after the technology even gets to the point that it would even be possible, which is still not close.
That is how it should be.
However: I think if history has shown anything it's that rich and powerful people will allow and legislate all sorts of dangerous shit if it makes them wealthier and/or makes their lives easier and more comfortable. This would do both.
Nobody is gonna let a car drive itself around till like decades after the technology even gets to the point that it would even be possible, which is still not close.
That is how it should be.
However: I think if history has shown anything it's that rich and powerful people will allow and legislate all sorts of dangerous shit if it makes them wealthier and/or makes their lives easier and more comfortable. This would do both.
eeehhhh
the amount of lawsuits that would come from bad driving AI would probably make their lives less comfortable. Plus they can just hire drivers.
I'm not sure that the economics of using autonomous cars as a kind of quasi-public transport system stack up, in the sense that people will use AVs that aren't personally owned vehicles as a mainstay of personal mobility
In particular, I'm not sure that such a service would be lower cost in terms of capital investment and running costs relative to the existing business models of taxi services
People have the option right now of using taxis to go everywhere instead of owning a car, but they generally don't unless relatively wealthy and living somewhere highly urbanised
I think the idea is it removes the cost of having to pay a taxi driver which combined with not having to deal with the maintenance/costs of an internal combustion engine means it's far cheaper.
However even if that's true (which I kinda doubt) it's going to be a hard sell in a lot of the US because taxis are an absolutely shitty service in a lot of the US the point that I'd argue it's the primary reason Uber took off the way it did.
No, the primary reason Uber took off the way it did was because they ran the service at a loss for years in order to strangle competition.
It is impossible to overstate how much less they sucked, and how much less they still suck, than an average taxi service in most places. NY? London? Sure, fine, maybe you're cool.
When Uber happened, the only way for me to get a cab was "call someone". Then wait on hold for a while. Then tell them where you were. Three times. Then they'd send a cab, that might show up in a couple hours. (If it didn't "get lost" and say your address didn't exist.) Every cab claimed their card reader "was broken" ("how much? how much do you think it should be?"), every cab took a few interesting route choices on the hope you wouldn't notice, every single damn cab was filthy and smelled like feet and parts didn't work. (Also, all cabs here were the same company, even if they had different signs. Yay, conglomeration!)
So now you're telling me I can use my phone, hit some buttons, and a fucking town car shows up, has a free water bottle, is CLEAN, and doesn't fuck with me? Sold. You had me at "not smelling like feet" let alone "shows up when I call them".
Talk about how they treat their employees all you like, or their business practices, and I won't argue. No contention here. But from a user POV, they were/are so much better than anything I had available to me before that people telling me to "just take a cab" actually get laughed at. This is not a case of not ordering from Amazon but the retailer, or the pizza place and not Grubhub. This is "functional useful system" vs "screaming pile of larcenous shit".
+14
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zepherinRussian warship, go fuck yourselfRegistered Userregular
Nobody is gonna let a car drive itself around till like decades after the technology even gets to the point that it would even be possible, which is still not close.
That is how it should be.
However: I think if history has shown anything it's that rich and powerful people will allow and legislate all sorts of dangerous shit if it makes them wealthier and/or makes their lives easier and more comfortable. This would do both.
eeehhhh
the amount of lawsuits that would come from bad driving AI would probably make their lives less comfortable. Plus they can just hire drivers.
Those lawsuits are coming anyways. It's their insurance companies that would pay not the company, and honestly most states will have quietly put in provisions that the driver is at fault and their insurance will pay. It'll just be a continuation of current policy honestly. Decades assumes that if we had complete driver-less tech today, that we wouldn't see just empty cars driving themselves until 2041. I would say 5 years after the technology has made it possible and reasonably safe, maybe 10 to work out injunctions and legal challenges. But once it's possible, people will start doing it.
And technology isn't the hold back right now it's cost. I'm sure you could think of a way to bring driverless cars to 90% of Americans for a large enough budget and forced cooperation. It's about doing it economically, and working around the government instead of working with the government.
I'm not sure that the economics of using autonomous cars as a kind of quasi-public transport system stack up, in the sense that people will use AVs that aren't personally owned vehicles as a mainstay of personal mobility
In particular, I'm not sure that such a service would be lower cost in terms of capital investment and running costs relative to the existing business models of taxi services
People have the option right now of using taxis to go everywhere instead of owning a car, but they generally don't unless relatively wealthy and living somewhere highly urbanised
I think the idea is it removes the cost of having to pay a taxi driver which combined with not having to deal with the maintenance/costs of an internal combustion engine means it's far cheaper.
However even if that's true (which I kinda doubt) it's going to be a hard sell in a lot of the US because taxis are an absolutely shitty service in a lot of the US the point that I'd argue it's the primary reason Uber took off the way it did.
No, the primary reason Uber took off the way it did was because they ran the service at a loss for years in order to strangle competition.
It is impossible to overstate how much less they sucked, and how much less they still suck, than an average taxi service in most places. NY? London? Sure, fine, maybe you're cool.
When Uber happened, the only way for me to get a cab was "call someone". Then wait on hold for a while. Then tell them where you were. Three times. Then they'd send a cab, that might show up in a couple hours. (If it didn't "get lost" and say your address didn't exist.) Every cab claimed their card reader "was broken" ("how much? how much do you think it should be?"), every cab took a few interesting route choices on the hope you wouldn't notice, every single damn cab was filthy and smelled like feet and parts didn't work. (Also, all cabs here were the same company, even if they had different signs. Yay, conglomeration!)
So now you're telling me I can use my phone, hit some buttons, and a fucking town car shows up, has a free water bottle, is CLEAN, and doesn't fuck with me? Sold. You had me at "not smelling like feet" let alone "shows up when I call them".
Talk about how they treat their employees all you like, or their business practices, and I won't argue. No contention here. But from a user POV, they were/are so much better than anything I had available to me before that people telling me to "just take a cab" actually get laughed at. This is not a case of not ordering from Amazon but the retailer, or the pizza place and not Grubhub. This is "functional useful system" vs "screaming pile of larcenous shit".
Correct, Uber is a larcenous company that treats its drivers like shit.
I'm not sure that the economics of using autonomous cars as a kind of quasi-public transport system stack up, in the sense that people will use AVs that aren't personally owned vehicles as a mainstay of personal mobility
In particular, I'm not sure that such a service would be lower cost in terms of capital investment and running costs relative to the existing business models of taxi services
People have the option right now of using taxis to go everywhere instead of owning a car, but they generally don't unless relatively wealthy and living somewhere highly urbanised
I think the idea is it removes the cost of having to pay a taxi driver which combined with not having to deal with the maintenance/costs of an internal combustion engine means it's far cheaper.
However even if that's true (which I kinda doubt) it's going to be a hard sell in a lot of the US because taxis are an absolutely shitty service in a lot of the US the point that I'd argue it's the primary reason Uber took off the way it did.
No, the primary reason Uber took off the way it did was because they ran the service at a loss for years in order to strangle competition.
It is impossible to overstate how much less they sucked, and how much less they still suck, than an average taxi service in most places. NY? London? Sure, fine, maybe you're cool.
When Uber happened, the only way for me to get a cab was "call someone". Then wait on hold for a while. Then tell them where you were. Three times. Then they'd send a cab, that might show up in a couple hours. (If it didn't "get lost" and say your address didn't exist.) Every cab claimed their card reader "was broken" ("how much? how much do you think it should be?"), every cab took a few interesting route choices on the hope you wouldn't notice, every single damn cab was filthy and smelled like feet and parts didn't work. (Also, all cabs here were the same company, even if they had different signs. Yay, conglomeration!)
So now you're telling me I can use my phone, hit some buttons, and a fucking town car shows up, has a free water bottle, is CLEAN, and doesn't fuck with me? Sold. You had me at "not smelling like feet" let alone "shows up when I call them".
Talk about how they treat their employees all you like, or their business practices, and I won't argue. No contention here. But from a user POV, they were/are so much better than anything I had available to me before that people telling me to "just take a cab" actually get laughed at. This is not a case of not ordering from Amazon but the retailer, or the pizza place and not Grubhub. This is "functional useful system" vs "screaming pile of larcenous shit".
A few points:
First, it's worth noting that outside of a few areas like NYC, livery was primarily used by either the wealthy (for whom driving is an actual waste of money) and the urban poor (for whom judicious use of livery can supplant car ownership.) The market for livery among the middle class was more or less nonexistent, due to extreme price sensitivity among other things - hence why for most people, they turned to livery in only a handful of situations (primarily when traveling.)
Second, Uber's "secret sauce" was low prices. You talk about how the cars were clean with water available, but the reality is that those sorts of services existed in most major cities with black car services. The thing is, they also had prices to match - and since the middle class audience they were aiming at has historically been extremely price sensitive when using livery, the goal was to offer black car service at taxicab (or even sub-taxicab) rates. Which leads to a simple question - how do you do that?
Well, from what we've seen at the major online livery services, it's a multifold answer. One big one is subsidization - Uber has been paying part of the actual cost of each ride to build market share. The problem is that this has been quixotic - unlike the airline wars of the 80s and 90s, there is little in the way of obstacles for a new entrant in the online livery space, so that, along with price sensitivity, makes it difficult at best to increase prices. So the company instead created a system where, by treating drivers as "independent contractors", they could pawn off capital costs to the drivers while retaining profit. Now as you can imagine, this is a rather shit deal for the drivers, many of whom wind up making sub-minimum wage once capital costs are accounted, and the online livery companies basically abused the independent contractor status, demanding employee level control when it benefitted them, and hands-off contractor status when that was beneficial instead. That was the point of Dynamex and AB5 - either your workers are employees or contractors, with the good and bad that entails.
Which comes back to the simple response to the "user experience" argument - there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. You don't get to turn a blind eye to the systems that provide you with that experience, and how they harm workers. Uber and other livery services built their market share by fucking over workers, and that's something that users cannot avoid.
Nobody is gonna let a car drive itself around till like decades after the technology even gets to the point that it would even be possible, which is still not close.
That is how it should be.
However: I think if history has shown anything it's that rich and powerful people will allow and legislate all sorts of dangerous shit if it makes them wealthier and/or makes their lives easier and more comfortable. This would do both.
eeehhhh
the amount of lawsuits that would come from bad driving AI would probably make their lives less comfortable. Plus they can just hire drivers.
Those lawsuits are coming anyways. It's their insurance companies that would pay not the company, and honestly most states will have quietly put in provisions that the driver is at fault and their insurance will pay. It'll just be a continuation of current policy honestly. Decades assumes that if we had complete driver-less tech today, that we wouldn't see just empty cars driving themselves until 2041. I would say 5 years after the technology has made it possible and reasonably safe, maybe 10 to work out injunctions and legal challenges. But once it's possible, people will start doing it.
And technology isn't the hold back right now it's cost. I'm sure you could think of a way to bring driverless cars to 90% of Americans for a large enough budget and forced cooperation. It's about doing it economically, and working around the government instead of working with the government.
If both myself and the Penny Arcade forums both still exist in 2041, I will eat my dick if there are self driving cars with no humans in them roaming the streets of major American cities
I'm not sure that the economics of using autonomous cars as a kind of quasi-public transport system stack up, in the sense that people will use AVs that aren't personally owned vehicles as a mainstay of personal mobility
In particular, I'm not sure that such a service would be lower cost in terms of capital investment and running costs relative to the existing business models of taxi services
People have the option right now of using taxis to go everywhere instead of owning a car, but they generally don't unless relatively wealthy and living somewhere highly urbanised
I think the idea is it removes the cost of having to pay a taxi driver which combined with not having to deal with the maintenance/costs of an internal combustion engine means it's far cheaper.
However even if that's true (which I kinda doubt) it's going to be a hard sell in a lot of the US because taxis are an absolutely shitty service in a lot of the US the point that I'd argue it's the primary reason Uber took off the way it did.
No, the primary reason Uber took off the way it did was because they ran the service at a loss for years in order to strangle competition.
It is impossible to overstate how much less they sucked, and how much less they still suck, than an average taxi service in most places. NY? London? Sure, fine, maybe you're cool.
When Uber happened, the only way for me to get a cab was "call someone". Then wait on hold for a while. Then tell them where you were. Three times. Then they'd send a cab, that might show up in a couple hours. (If it didn't "get lost" and say your address didn't exist.) Every cab claimed their card reader "was broken" ("how much? how much do you think it should be?"), every cab took a few interesting route choices on the hope you wouldn't notice, every single damn cab was filthy and smelled like feet and parts didn't work. (Also, all cabs here were the same company, even if they had different signs. Yay, conglomeration!)
So now you're telling me I can use my phone, hit some buttons, and a fucking town car shows up, has a free water bottle, is CLEAN, and doesn't fuck with me? Sold. You had me at "not smelling like feet" let alone "shows up when I call them".
Talk about how they treat their employees all you like, or their business practices, and I won't argue. No contention here. But from a user POV, they were/are so much better than anything I had available to me before that people telling me to "just take a cab" actually get laughed at. This is not a case of not ordering from Amazon but the retailer, or the pizza place and not Grubhub. This is "functional useful system" vs "screaming pile of larcenous shit".
A few points:
First, it's worth noting that outside of a few areas like NYC, livery was primarily used by either the wealthy (for whom driving is an actual waste of money) and the urban poor (for whom judicious use of livery can supplant car ownership.) The market for livery among the middle class was more or less nonexistent, due to extreme price sensitivity among other things - hence why for most people, they turned to livery in only a handful of situations (primarily when traveling.)
Second, Uber's "secret sauce" was low prices. You talk about how the cars were clean with water available, but the reality is that those sorts of services existed in most major cities with black car services. The thing is, they also had prices to match - and since the middle class audience they were aiming at has historically been extremely price sensitive when using livery, the goal was to offer black car service at taxicab (or even sub-taxicab) rates. Which leads to a simple question - how do you do that?
Well, from what we've seen at the major online livery services, it's a multifold answer. One big one is subsidization - Uber has been paying part of the actual cost of each ride to build market share. The problem is that this has been quixotic - unlike the airline wars of the 80s and 90s, there is little in the way of obstacles for a new entrant in the online livery space, so that, along with price sensitivity, makes it difficult at best to increase prices. So the company instead created a system where, by treating drivers as "independent contractors", they could pawn off capital costs to the drivers while retaining profit. Now as you can imagine, this is a rather shit deal for the drivers, many of whom wind up making sub-minimum wage once capital costs are accounted, and the online livery companies basically abused the independent contractor status, demanding employee level control when it benefitted them, and hands-off contractor status when that was beneficial instead. That was the point of Dynamex and AB5 - either your workers are employees or contractors, with the good and bad that entails.
Which comes back to the simple response to the "user experience" argument - there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. You don't get to turn a blind eye to the systems that provide you with that experience, and how they harm workers. Uber and other livery services built their market share by fucking over workers, and that's something that users cannot avoid.
Dude, stop telling other people that their horrible experience with taxis was imaginary; it's not helping your cause, it makes you look disconnected from reality and weaken your argument.
I'll give you a fucking hint: I did not use taxis because the experience was bad until the competition from Uber caused one of the local company to improve their service to the point where it was usable, at which point I used them.
Not because of price, which was not lowered, but because at that point, I was able to know how much it would cost, know when the taxi would pick be up, and know that I would actually be able to pay without a suspicious tax-dodging equipment failure.
Nobody is gonna let a car drive itself around till like decades after the technology even gets to the point that it would even be possible, which is still not close.
That is how it should be.
However: I think if history has shown anything it's that rich and powerful people will allow and legislate all sorts of dangerous shit if it makes them wealthier and/or makes their lives easier and more comfortable. This would do both.
eeehhhh
the amount of lawsuits that would come from bad driving AI would probably make their lives less comfortable. Plus they can just hire drivers.
Those lawsuits are coming anyways. It's their insurance companies that would pay not the company, and honestly most states will have quietly put in provisions that the driver is at fault and their insurance will pay. It'll just be a continuation of current policy honestly. Decades assumes that if we had complete driver-less tech today, that we wouldn't see just empty cars driving themselves until 2041. I would say 5 years after the technology has made it possible and reasonably safe, maybe 10 to work out injunctions and legal challenges. But once it's possible, people will start doing it.
And technology isn't the hold back right now it's cost. I'm sure you could think of a way to bring driverless cars to 90% of Americans for a large enough budget and forced cooperation. It's about doing it economically, and working around the government instead of working with the government.
If both myself and the Penny Arcade forums both still exist in 2041, I will eat my dick if there are self driving cars with no humans in them roaming the streets of major American cities
I mean, Nuro has been running driverless grocery delivery vehicles in Houston for a year now.
I'm not sure that the economics of using autonomous cars as a kind of quasi-public transport system stack up, in the sense that people will use AVs that aren't personally owned vehicles as a mainstay of personal mobility
In particular, I'm not sure that such a service would be lower cost in terms of capital investment and running costs relative to the existing business models of taxi services
People have the option right now of using taxis to go everywhere instead of owning a car, but they generally don't unless relatively wealthy and living somewhere highly urbanised
I think the idea is it removes the cost of having to pay a taxi driver which combined with not having to deal with the maintenance/costs of an internal combustion engine means it's far cheaper.
However even if that's true (which I kinda doubt) it's going to be a hard sell in a lot of the US because taxis are an absolutely shitty service in a lot of the US the point that I'd argue it's the primary reason Uber took off the way it did.
No, the primary reason Uber took off the way it did was because they ran the service at a loss for years in order to strangle competition.
It is impossible to overstate how much less they sucked, and how much less they still suck, than an average taxi service in most places. NY? London? Sure, fine, maybe you're cool.
When Uber happened, the only way for me to get a cab was "call someone". Then wait on hold for a while. Then tell them where you were. Three times. Then they'd send a cab, that might show up in a couple hours. (If it didn't "get lost" and say your address didn't exist.) Every cab claimed their card reader "was broken" ("how much? how much do you think it should be?"), every cab took a few interesting route choices on the hope you wouldn't notice, every single damn cab was filthy and smelled like feet and parts didn't work. (Also, all cabs here were the same company, even if they had different signs. Yay, conglomeration!)
So now you're telling me I can use my phone, hit some buttons, and a fucking town car shows up, has a free water bottle, is CLEAN, and doesn't fuck with me? Sold. You had me at "not smelling like feet" let alone "shows up when I call them".
Talk about how they treat their employees all you like, or their business practices, and I won't argue. No contention here. But from a user POV, they were/are so much better than anything I had available to me before that people telling me to "just take a cab" actually get laughed at. This is not a case of not ordering from Amazon but the retailer, or the pizza place and not Grubhub. This is "functional useful system" vs "screaming pile of larcenous shit".
A few points:
First, it's worth noting that outside of a few areas like NYC, livery was primarily used by either the wealthy (for whom driving is an actual waste of money) and the urban poor (for whom judicious use of livery can supplant car ownership.) The market for livery among the middle class was more or less nonexistent, due to extreme price sensitivity among other things - hence why for most people, they turned to livery in only a handful of situations (primarily when traveling.)
Second, Uber's "secret sauce" was low prices. You talk about how the cars were clean with water available, but the reality is that those sorts of services existed in most major cities with black car services. The thing is, they also had prices to match - and since the middle class audience they were aiming at has historically been extremely price sensitive when using livery, the goal was to offer black car service at taxicab (or even sub-taxicab) rates. Which leads to a simple question - how do you do that?
Well, from what we've seen at the major online livery services, it's a multifold answer. One big one is subsidization - Uber has been paying part of the actual cost of each ride to build market share. The problem is that this has been quixotic - unlike the airline wars of the 80s and 90s, there is little in the way of obstacles for a new entrant in the online livery space, so that, along with price sensitivity, makes it difficult at best to increase prices. So the company instead created a system where, by treating drivers as "independent contractors", they could pawn off capital costs to the drivers while retaining profit. Now as you can imagine, this is a rather shit deal for the drivers, many of whom wind up making sub-minimum wage once capital costs are accounted, and the online livery companies basically abused the independent contractor status, demanding employee level control when it benefitted them, and hands-off contractor status when that was beneficial instead. That was the point of Dynamex and AB5 - either your workers are employees or contractors, with the good and bad that entails.
Which comes back to the simple response to the "user experience" argument - there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. You don't get to turn a blind eye to the systems that provide you with that experience, and how they harm workers. Uber and other livery services built their market share by fucking over workers, and that's something that users cannot avoid.
Dude, stop telling other people that their horrible experience with taxis was imaginary; it's not helping your cause, it makes you look disconnected from reality and weaken your argument.
I'll give you a fucking hint: I did not use taxis because the experience was bad until the competition from Uber caused one of the local company to improve their service to the point where it was usable, at which point I used them.
Not because of price, which was not lowered, but because at that point, I was able to know how much it would cost, know when the taxi would pick be up, and know that I would actually be able to pay without a suspicious tax-dodging equipment failure.
Could you please highlight where in AngelHedgie's post he said anything of the sort?
We aren't denying you have had bad taxi experiences, or that others have had bad taxi experiences. We are saying that price undercutting and dodging regulation were the primary movers in Uber talking over marketshare.
Are there updates from that 2019 article? Because 2 human drivers per car isn't quite the same thing as 0 human drivers per car.
When a robotically driven vehicle pulls up to a home with groceries, two Nuro employees — known as vehicle operators — are always inside. (That will change when Nuro launches its fully autonomous R2 vehicle in Houston later this year.)
... all 65 of Nuro’s vehicle operators, working in teams that consist of a driver and a co-driver, are tasked with preparing Nuro’s fleet for the road. Already, the company says, drivers are making dozens of deliveries a day, many of them, somewhat surprisingly, to businesses in Houston’s bustling restaurant scene.
To be sure, I should have said "passenger cars" with no humans roaming the streets, but if that N2 exists and drives with no humans involved in the process, its further along than I thought!
Edit2: Wikipedia strongly implies I don't have to eat my dick yet. It has nothing further listed after this April 2020 update, nearly 2 years ago.
In February 2020, Nuro announced its plans to test R2, the second generation of self-driving vehicles, in Houston, Texas.[25] In April 2020, Nuro announced that the R2 prototype was being used to transport medical supplies around medical facilities in California.[26]
I'm not sure that the economics of using autonomous cars as a kind of quasi-public transport system stack up, in the sense that people will use AVs that aren't personally owned vehicles as a mainstay of personal mobility
In particular, I'm not sure that such a service would be lower cost in terms of capital investment and running costs relative to the existing business models of taxi services
People have the option right now of using taxis to go everywhere instead of owning a car, but they generally don't unless relatively wealthy and living somewhere highly urbanised
I think the idea is it removes the cost of having to pay a taxi driver which combined with not having to deal with the maintenance/costs of an internal combustion engine means it's far cheaper.
However even if that's true (which I kinda doubt) it's going to be a hard sell in a lot of the US because taxis are an absolutely shitty service in a lot of the US the point that I'd argue it's the primary reason Uber took off the way it did.
No, the primary reason Uber took off the way it did was because they ran the service at a loss for years in order to strangle competition.
It is impossible to overstate how much less they sucked, and how much less they still suck, than an average taxi service in most places. NY? London? Sure, fine, maybe you're cool.
When Uber happened, the only way for me to get a cab was "call someone". Then wait on hold for a while. Then tell them where you were. Three times. Then they'd send a cab, that might show up in a couple hours. (If it didn't "get lost" and say your address didn't exist.) Every cab claimed their card reader "was broken" ("how much? how much do you think it should be?"), every cab took a few interesting route choices on the hope you wouldn't notice, every single damn cab was filthy and smelled like feet and parts didn't work. (Also, all cabs here were the same company, even if they had different signs. Yay, conglomeration!)
So now you're telling me I can use my phone, hit some buttons, and a fucking town car shows up, has a free water bottle, is CLEAN, and doesn't fuck with me? Sold. You had me at "not smelling like feet" let alone "shows up when I call them".
Talk about how they treat their employees all you like, or their business practices, and I won't argue. No contention here. But from a user POV, they were/are so much better than anything I had available to me before that people telling me to "just take a cab" actually get laughed at. This is not a case of not ordering from Amazon but the retailer, or the pizza place and not Grubhub. This is "functional useful system" vs "screaming pile of larcenous shit".
A few points:
First, it's worth noting that outside of a few areas like NYC, livery was primarily used by either the wealthy (for whom driving is an actual waste of money) and the urban poor (for whom judicious use of livery can supplant car ownership.) The market for livery among the middle class was more or less nonexistent, due to extreme price sensitivity among other things - hence why for most people, they turned to livery in only a handful of situations (primarily when traveling.)
Second, Uber's "secret sauce" was low prices. You talk about how the cars were clean with water available, but the reality is that those sorts of services existed in most major cities with black car services. The thing is, they also had prices to match - and since the middle class audience they were aiming at has historically been extremely price sensitive when using livery, the goal was to offer black car service at taxicab (or even sub-taxicab) rates. Which leads to a simple question - how do you do that?
Well, from what we've seen at the major online livery services, it's a multifold answer. One big one is subsidization - Uber has been paying part of the actual cost of each ride to build market share. The problem is that this has been quixotic - unlike the airline wars of the 80s and 90s, there is little in the way of obstacles for a new entrant in the online livery space, so that, along with price sensitivity, makes it difficult at best to increase prices. So the company instead created a system where, by treating drivers as "independent contractors", they could pawn off capital costs to the drivers while retaining profit. Now as you can imagine, this is a rather shit deal for the drivers, many of whom wind up making sub-minimum wage once capital costs are accounted, and the online livery companies basically abused the independent contractor status, demanding employee level control when it benefitted them, and hands-off contractor status when that was beneficial instead. That was the point of Dynamex and AB5 - either your workers are employees or contractors, with the good and bad that entails.
Which comes back to the simple response to the "user experience" argument - there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. You don't get to turn a blind eye to the systems that provide you with that experience, and how they harm workers. Uber and other livery services built their market share by fucking over workers, and that's something that users cannot avoid.
Dude, stop telling other people that their horrible experience with taxis was imaginary; it's not helping your cause, it makes you look disconnected from reality and weaken your argument.
I'll give you a fucking hint: I did not use taxis because the experience was bad until the competition from Uber caused one of the local company to improve their service to the point where it was usable, at which point I used them.
Not because of price, which was not lowered, but because at that point, I was able to know how much it would cost, know when the taxi would pick be up, and know that I would actually be able to pay without a suspicious tax-dodging equipment failure.
Could you please highlight where in AngelHedgie's post he said anything of the sort?
We aren't denying you have had bad taxi experiences, or that others have had bad taxi experiences. We are saying that price undercutting and dodging regulation were the primary movers in Uber talking over marketshare.
The part where anyone who says "taxis sucked" is immediately dismissed with "no, you are just too cheap to pay the actual price".
I'm not sure that the economics of using autonomous cars as a kind of quasi-public transport system stack up, in the sense that people will use AVs that aren't personally owned vehicles as a mainstay of personal mobility
In particular, I'm not sure that such a service would be lower cost in terms of capital investment and running costs relative to the existing business models of taxi services
People have the option right now of using taxis to go everywhere instead of owning a car, but they generally don't unless relatively wealthy and living somewhere highly urbanised
I think the idea is it removes the cost of having to pay a taxi driver which combined with not having to deal with the maintenance/costs of an internal combustion engine means it's far cheaper.
However even if that's true (which I kinda doubt) it's going to be a hard sell in a lot of the US because taxis are an absolutely shitty service in a lot of the US the point that I'd argue it's the primary reason Uber took off the way it did.
No, the primary reason Uber took off the way it did was because they ran the service at a loss for years in order to strangle competition.
It is impossible to overstate how much less they sucked, and how much less they still suck, than an average taxi service in most places. NY? London? Sure, fine, maybe you're cool.
When Uber happened, the only way for me to get a cab was "call someone". Then wait on hold for a while. Then tell them where you were. Three times. Then they'd send a cab, that might show up in a couple hours. (If it didn't "get lost" and say your address didn't exist.) Every cab claimed their card reader "was broken" ("how much? how much do you think it should be?"), every cab took a few interesting route choices on the hope you wouldn't notice, every single damn cab was filthy and smelled like feet and parts didn't work. (Also, all cabs here were the same company, even if they had different signs. Yay, conglomeration!)
So now you're telling me I can use my phone, hit some buttons, and a fucking town car shows up, has a free water bottle, is CLEAN, and doesn't fuck with me? Sold. You had me at "not smelling like feet" let alone "shows up when I call them".
Talk about how they treat their employees all you like, or their business practices, and I won't argue. No contention here. But from a user POV, they were/are so much better than anything I had available to me before that people telling me to "just take a cab" actually get laughed at. This is not a case of not ordering from Amazon but the retailer, or the pizza place and not Grubhub. This is "functional useful system" vs "screaming pile of larcenous shit".
A few points:
First, it's worth noting that outside of a few areas like NYC, livery was primarily used by either the wealthy (for whom driving is an actual waste of money) and the urban poor (for whom judicious use of livery can supplant car ownership.) The market for livery among the middle class was more or less nonexistent, due to extreme price sensitivity among other things - hence why for most people, they turned to livery in only a handful of situations (primarily when traveling.)
Second, Uber's "secret sauce" was low prices. You talk about how the cars were clean with water available, but the reality is that those sorts of services existed in most major cities with black car services. The thing is, they also had prices to match - and since the middle class audience they were aiming at has historically been extremely price sensitive when using livery, the goal was to offer black car service at taxicab (or even sub-taxicab) rates. Which leads to a simple question - how do you do that?
Well, from what we've seen at the major online livery services, it's a multifold answer. One big one is subsidization - Uber has been paying part of the actual cost of each ride to build market share. The problem is that this has been quixotic - unlike the airline wars of the 80s and 90s, there is little in the way of obstacles for a new entrant in the online livery space, so that, along with price sensitivity, makes it difficult at best to increase prices. So the company instead created a system where, by treating drivers as "independent contractors", they could pawn off capital costs to the drivers while retaining profit. Now as you can imagine, this is a rather shit deal for the drivers, many of whom wind up making sub-minimum wage once capital costs are accounted, and the online livery companies basically abused the independent contractor status, demanding employee level control when it benefitted them, and hands-off contractor status when that was beneficial instead. That was the point of Dynamex and AB5 - either your workers are employees or contractors, with the good and bad that entails.
Which comes back to the simple response to the "user experience" argument - there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. You don't get to turn a blind eye to the systems that provide you with that experience, and how they harm workers. Uber and other livery services built their market share by fucking over workers, and that's something that users cannot avoid.
"So?"
I need X. The company currently providing X (yellow/checker cab) has been shitting everywhere on everyone and in general providing a useless experience, because there has historically been zero option. (Town cars/black cars being book ahead sorts of things, not "home from the bars" kind of things.)
You can decry "unethical consumption" all you like, but it is not incumbent upon me to sacrifice myself on the altar of business in order to prop up an existing monopoly. I need X. Y provides X. Y may be shit, but I still need X. My options are "nobly sacrifice and do without X", which could be anything from "inconvenient" to "crippling", depending on whether it's being used for "groceries" or "drunk trip home from bars", or "use Y and attempt to make it less shit".
Because, again, it's not that Uber/Lyft were "just cheaper", it's that they were better; reliable, billed in an itemised manner, and in general eating the fucking lunch of the existing cab services, which you couldn't even manage to get hold of after last call in the downtown bar district.
I'm not sure that the economics of using autonomous cars as a kind of quasi-public transport system stack up, in the sense that people will use AVs that aren't personally owned vehicles as a mainstay of personal mobility
In particular, I'm not sure that such a service would be lower cost in terms of capital investment and running costs relative to the existing business models of taxi services
People have the option right now of using taxis to go everywhere instead of owning a car, but they generally don't unless relatively wealthy and living somewhere highly urbanised
I think the idea is it removes the cost of having to pay a taxi driver which combined with not having to deal with the maintenance/costs of an internal combustion engine means it's far cheaper.
However even if that's true (which I kinda doubt) it's going to be a hard sell in a lot of the US because taxis are an absolutely shitty service in a lot of the US the point that I'd argue it's the primary reason Uber took off the way it did.
No, the primary reason Uber took off the way it did was because they ran the service at a loss for years in order to strangle competition.
It is impossible to overstate how much less they sucked, and how much less they still suck, than an average taxi service in most places. NY? London? Sure, fine, maybe you're cool.
When Uber happened, the only way for me to get a cab was "call someone". Then wait on hold for a while. Then tell them where you were. Three times. Then they'd send a cab, that might show up in a couple hours. (If it didn't "get lost" and say your address didn't exist.) Every cab claimed their card reader "was broken" ("how much? how much do you think it should be?"), every cab took a few interesting route choices on the hope you wouldn't notice, every single damn cab was filthy and smelled like feet and parts didn't work. (Also, all cabs here were the same company, even if they had different signs. Yay, conglomeration!)
So now you're telling me I can use my phone, hit some buttons, and a fucking town car shows up, has a free water bottle, is CLEAN, and doesn't fuck with me? Sold. You had me at "not smelling like feet" let alone "shows up when I call them".
Talk about how they treat their employees all you like, or their business practices, and I won't argue. No contention here. But from a user POV, they were/are so much better than anything I had available to me before that people telling me to "just take a cab" actually get laughed at. This is not a case of not ordering from Amazon but the retailer, or the pizza place and not Grubhub. This is "functional useful system" vs "screaming pile of larcenous shit".
A few points:
First, it's worth noting that outside of a few areas like NYC, livery was primarily used by either the wealthy (for whom driving is an actual waste of money) and the urban poor (for whom judicious use of livery can supplant car ownership.) The market for livery among the middle class was more or less nonexistent, due to extreme price sensitivity among other things - hence why for most people, they turned to livery in only a handful of situations (primarily when traveling.)
Second, Uber's "secret sauce" was low prices. You talk about how the cars were clean with water available, but the reality is that those sorts of services existed in most major cities with black car services. The thing is, they also had prices to match - and since the middle class audience they were aiming at has historically been extremely price sensitive when using livery, the goal was to offer black car service at taxicab (or even sub-taxicab) rates. Which leads to a simple question - how do you do that?
Well, from what we've seen at the major online livery services, it's a multifold answer. One big one is subsidization - Uber has been paying part of the actual cost of each ride to build market share. The problem is that this has been quixotic - unlike the airline wars of the 80s and 90s, there is little in the way of obstacles for a new entrant in the online livery space, so that, along with price sensitivity, makes it difficult at best to increase prices. So the company instead created a system where, by treating drivers as "independent contractors", they could pawn off capital costs to the drivers while retaining profit. Now as you can imagine, this is a rather shit deal for the drivers, many of whom wind up making sub-minimum wage once capital costs are accounted, and the online livery companies basically abused the independent contractor status, demanding employee level control when it benefitted them, and hands-off contractor status when that was beneficial instead. That was the point of Dynamex and AB5 - either your workers are employees or contractors, with the good and bad that entails.
Which comes back to the simple response to the "user experience" argument - there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. You don't get to turn a blind eye to the systems that provide you with that experience, and how they harm workers. Uber and other livery services built their market share by fucking over workers, and that's something that users cannot avoid.
Dude, stop telling other people that their horrible experience with taxis was imaginary; it's not helping your cause, it makes you look disconnected from reality and weaken your argument.
I'll give you a fucking hint: I did not use taxis because the experience was bad until the competition from Uber caused one of the local company to improve their service to the point where it was usable, at which point I used them.
Not because of price, which was not lowered, but because at that point, I was able to know how much it would cost, know when the taxi would pick be up, and know that I would actually be able to pay without a suspicious tax-dodging equipment failure.
I'm not saying that they didn't exist - I'm pointing out that the facts show that "user experience" didn't drive the adoption of online livery among the middle class - it was addressing the problem of extreme price sensitivity. Because as I pointed out, there were companies providing the sort of service that these users wanted - it was just at a cost they were unwilling to pay. Uber's "secret sauce" was in abusing every loophole they could find to "drop" the price down to where it was palatable to the audience they were targeting (and given their continuing subsidies, they haven't solved the problem.)
And frankly, I find the constant response of "well, I had a bad experience in a cab" to people pointing out the cesspool of horrors that is the current state of online livery to undermine your side on a moral level, because if your response to how these companies are fucking over drivers while taking the position of "laws are for the little people" is to go "but the user experience" - well, at that point you're now a cheerleader for Omelas, caring only about how systems impact you without regard for the people delivering them. Which is exactly what Uber et al. are hoping for.
I'm not sure that the economics of using autonomous cars as a kind of quasi-public transport system stack up, in the sense that people will use AVs that aren't personally owned vehicles as a mainstay of personal mobility
In particular, I'm not sure that such a service would be lower cost in terms of capital investment and running costs relative to the existing business models of taxi services
People have the option right now of using taxis to go everywhere instead of owning a car, but they generally don't unless relatively wealthy and living somewhere highly urbanised
I think the idea is it removes the cost of having to pay a taxi driver which combined with not having to deal with the maintenance/costs of an internal combustion engine means it's far cheaper.
However even if that's true (which I kinda doubt) it's going to be a hard sell in a lot of the US because taxis are an absolutely shitty service in a lot of the US the point that I'd argue it's the primary reason Uber took off the way it did.
No, the primary reason Uber took off the way it did was because they ran the service at a loss for years in order to strangle competition.
It is impossible to overstate how much less they sucked, and how much less they still suck, than an average taxi service in most places. NY? London? Sure, fine, maybe you're cool.
When Uber happened, the only way for me to get a cab was "call someone". Then wait on hold for a while. Then tell them where you were. Three times. Then they'd send a cab, that might show up in a couple hours. (If it didn't "get lost" and say your address didn't exist.) Every cab claimed their card reader "was broken" ("how much? how much do you think it should be?"), every cab took a few interesting route choices on the hope you wouldn't notice, every single damn cab was filthy and smelled like feet and parts didn't work. (Also, all cabs here were the same company, even if they had different signs. Yay, conglomeration!)
So now you're telling me I can use my phone, hit some buttons, and a fucking town car shows up, has a free water bottle, is CLEAN, and doesn't fuck with me? Sold. You had me at "not smelling like feet" let alone "shows up when I call them".
Talk about how they treat their employees all you like, or their business practices, and I won't argue. No contention here. But from a user POV, they were/are so much better than anything I had available to me before that people telling me to "just take a cab" actually get laughed at. This is not a case of not ordering from Amazon but the retailer, or the pizza place and not Grubhub. This is "functional useful system" vs "screaming pile of larcenous shit".
A few points:
First, it's worth noting that outside of a few areas like NYC, livery was primarily used by either the wealthy (for whom driving is an actual waste of money) and the urban poor (for whom judicious use of livery can supplant car ownership.) The market for livery among the middle class was more or less nonexistent, due to extreme price sensitivity among other things - hence why for most people, they turned to livery in only a handful of situations (primarily when traveling.)
Second, Uber's "secret sauce" was low prices. You talk about how the cars were clean with water available, but the reality is that those sorts of services existed in most major cities with black car services. The thing is, they also had prices to match - and since the middle class audience they were aiming at has historically been extremely price sensitive when using livery, the goal was to offer black car service at taxicab (or even sub-taxicab) rates. Which leads to a simple question - how do you do that?
Well, from what we've seen at the major online livery services, it's a multifold answer. One big one is subsidization - Uber has been paying part of the actual cost of each ride to build market share. The problem is that this has been quixotic - unlike the airline wars of the 80s and 90s, there is little in the way of obstacles for a new entrant in the online livery space, so that, along with price sensitivity, makes it difficult at best to increase prices. So the company instead created a system where, by treating drivers as "independent contractors", they could pawn off capital costs to the drivers while retaining profit. Now as you can imagine, this is a rather shit deal for the drivers, many of whom wind up making sub-minimum wage once capital costs are accounted, and the online livery companies basically abused the independent contractor status, demanding employee level control when it benefitted them, and hands-off contractor status when that was beneficial instead. That was the point of Dynamex and AB5 - either your workers are employees or contractors, with the good and bad that entails.
Which comes back to the simple response to the "user experience" argument - there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. You don't get to turn a blind eye to the systems that provide you with that experience, and how they harm workers. Uber and other livery services built their market share by fucking over workers, and that's something that users cannot avoid.
Dude, stop telling other people that their horrible experience with taxis was imaginary; it's not helping your cause, it makes you look disconnected from reality and weaken your argument.
I'll give you a fucking hint: I did not use taxis because the experience was bad until the competition from Uber caused one of the local company to improve their service to the point where it was usable, at which point I used them.
Not because of price, which was not lowered, but because at that point, I was able to know how much it would cost, know when the taxi would pick be up, and know that I would actually be able to pay without a suspicious tax-dodging equipment failure.
I'm not saying that they didn't exist - I'm pointing out that the facts show that "user experience" didn't drive the adoption of online livery among the middle class - it was addressing the problem of extreme price sensitivity. Because as I pointed out, there were companies providing the sort of service that these users wanted - it was just at a cost they were unwilling to pay. Uber's "secret sauce" was in abusing every loophole they could find to "drop" the price down to where it was palatable to the audience they were targeting (and given their continuing subsidies, they haven't solved the problem.)
And frankly, I find the constant response of "well, I had a bad experience in a cab" to people pointing out the cesspool of horrors that is the current state of online livery to undermine your side on a moral level, because if your response to how these companies are fucking over drivers while taking the position of "laws are for the little people" is to go "but the user experience" - well, at that point you're now a cheerleader for Omelas, caring only about how systems impact you without regard for the people delivering them. Which is exactly what Uber et al. are hoping for.
Anecdotally, living in a big city, calling a cab just wasn't a thing anyone did. We'd take a cab back from the bars sometimes since they had a bunch of them waiting their in a lineup, but the idea of calling one to take you to the bars just didn't happen because it wasn't worth the hassle and you didn't trust them to actually show up on time / at all.
Uber and Lyfts pricing definitely had me taking cabs more than I would have before, but their user experience is why I tried it in the first place and made it obvious how bad the existing system was.
Nobody is gonna let a car drive itself around till like decades after the technology even gets to the point that it would even be possible, which is still not close.
That is how it should be.
However: I think if history has shown anything it's that rich and powerful people will allow and legislate all sorts of dangerous shit if it makes them wealthier and/or makes their lives easier and more comfortable. This would do both.
eeehhhh
the amount of lawsuits that would come from bad driving AI would probably make their lives less comfortable. Plus they can just hire drivers.
Those lawsuits are coming anyways. It's their insurance companies that would pay not the company, and honestly most states will have quietly put in provisions that the driver is at fault and their insurance will pay. It'll just be a continuation of current policy honestly. Decades assumes that if we had complete driver-less tech today, that we wouldn't see just empty cars driving themselves until 2041. I would say 5 years after the technology has made it possible and reasonably safe, maybe 10 to work out injunctions and legal challenges. But once it's possible, people will start doing it.
And technology isn't the hold back right now it's cost. I'm sure you could think of a way to bring driverless cars to 90% of Americans for a large enough budget and forced cooperation. It's about doing it economically, and working around the government instead of working with the government.
If both myself and the Penny Arcade forums both still exist in 2041, I will eat my dick if there are self driving cars with no humans in them roaming the streets of major American cities
I mean, Nuro has been running driverless grocery delivery vehicles in Houston for a year now.
I'm not sure that the economics of using autonomous cars as a kind of quasi-public transport system stack up, in the sense that people will use AVs that aren't personally owned vehicles as a mainstay of personal mobility
In particular, I'm not sure that such a service would be lower cost in terms of capital investment and running costs relative to the existing business models of taxi services
People have the option right now of using taxis to go everywhere instead of owning a car, but they generally don't unless relatively wealthy and living somewhere highly urbanised
I think the idea is it removes the cost of having to pay a taxi driver which combined with not having to deal with the maintenance/costs of an internal combustion engine means it's far cheaper.
However even if that's true (which I kinda doubt) it's going to be a hard sell in a lot of the US because taxis are an absolutely shitty service in a lot of the US the point that I'd argue it's the primary reason Uber took off the way it did.
No, the primary reason Uber took off the way it did was because they ran the service at a loss for years in order to strangle competition.
It is impossible to overstate how much less they sucked, and how much less they still suck, than an average taxi service in most places. NY? London? Sure, fine, maybe you're cool.
When Uber happened, the only way for me to get a cab was "call someone". Then wait on hold for a while. Then tell them where you were. Three times. Then they'd send a cab, that might show up in a couple hours. (If it didn't "get lost" and say your address didn't exist.) Every cab claimed their card reader "was broken" ("how much? how much do you think it should be?"), every cab took a few interesting route choices on the hope you wouldn't notice, every single damn cab was filthy and smelled like feet and parts didn't work. (Also, all cabs here were the same company, even if they had different signs. Yay, conglomeration!)
So now you're telling me I can use my phone, hit some buttons, and a fucking town car shows up, has a free water bottle, is CLEAN, and doesn't fuck with me? Sold. You had me at "not smelling like feet" let alone "shows up when I call them".
Talk about how they treat their employees all you like, or their business practices, and I won't argue. No contention here. But from a user POV, they were/are so much better than anything I had available to me before that people telling me to "just take a cab" actually get laughed at. This is not a case of not ordering from Amazon but the retailer, or the pizza place and not Grubhub. This is "functional useful system" vs "screaming pile of larcenous shit".
A few points:
First, it's worth noting that outside of a few areas like NYC, livery was primarily used by either the wealthy (for whom driving is an actual waste of money) and the urban poor (for whom judicious use of livery can supplant car ownership.) The market for livery among the middle class was more or less nonexistent, due to extreme price sensitivity among other things - hence why for most people, they turned to livery in only a handful of situations (primarily when traveling.)
Second, Uber's "secret sauce" was low prices. You talk about how the cars were clean with water available, but the reality is that those sorts of services existed in most major cities with black car services. The thing is, they also had prices to match - and since the middle class audience they were aiming at has historically been extremely price sensitive when using livery, the goal was to offer black car service at taxicab (or even sub-taxicab) rates. Which leads to a simple question - how do you do that?
Well, from what we've seen at the major online livery services, it's a multifold answer. One big one is subsidization - Uber has been paying part of the actual cost of each ride to build market share. The problem is that this has been quixotic - unlike the airline wars of the 80s and 90s, there is little in the way of obstacles for a new entrant in the online livery space, so that, along with price sensitivity, makes it difficult at best to increase prices. So the company instead created a system where, by treating drivers as "independent contractors", they could pawn off capital costs to the drivers while retaining profit. Now as you can imagine, this is a rather shit deal for the drivers, many of whom wind up making sub-minimum wage once capital costs are accounted, and the online livery companies basically abused the independent contractor status, demanding employee level control when it benefitted them, and hands-off contractor status when that was beneficial instead. That was the point of Dynamex and AB5 - either your workers are employees or contractors, with the good and bad that entails.
Which comes back to the simple response to the "user experience" argument - there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. You don't get to turn a blind eye to the systems that provide you with that experience, and how they harm workers. Uber and other livery services built their market share by fucking over workers, and that's something that users cannot avoid.
Dude, stop telling other people that their horrible experience with taxis was imaginary; it's not helping your cause, it makes you look disconnected from reality and weaken your argument.
I'll give you a fucking hint: I did not use taxis because the experience was bad until the competition from Uber caused one of the local company to improve their service to the point where it was usable, at which point I used them.
Not because of price, which was not lowered, but because at that point, I was able to know how much it would cost, know when the taxi would pick be up, and know that I would actually be able to pay without a suspicious tax-dodging equipment failure.
I'm not saying that they didn't exist - I'm pointing out that the facts show that "user experience" didn't drive the adoption of online livery among the middle class - it was addressing the problem of extreme price sensitivity. Because as I pointed out, there were companies providing the sort of service that these users wanted - it was just at a cost they were unwilling to pay. Uber's "secret sauce" was in abusing every loophole they could find to "drop" the price down to where it was palatable to the audience they were targeting (and given their continuing subsidies, they haven't solved the problem.)
And frankly, I find the constant response of "well, I had a bad experience in a cab" to people pointing out the cesspool of horrors that is the current state of online livery to undermine your side on a moral level, because if your response to how these companies are fucking over drivers while taking the position of "laws are for the little people" is to go "but the user experience" - well, at that point you're now a cheerleader for Omelas, caring only about how systems impact you without regard for the people delivering them. Which is exactly what Uber et al. are hoping for.
No, there weren't.
Black car service is not the same as taxi service.
I'm not sure that the economics of using autonomous cars as a kind of quasi-public transport system stack up, in the sense that people will use AVs that aren't personally owned vehicles as a mainstay of personal mobility
In particular, I'm not sure that such a service would be lower cost in terms of capital investment and running costs relative to the existing business models of taxi services
People have the option right now of using taxis to go everywhere instead of owning a car, but they generally don't unless relatively wealthy and living somewhere highly urbanised
I think the idea is it removes the cost of having to pay a taxi driver which combined with not having to deal with the maintenance/costs of an internal combustion engine means it's far cheaper.
However even if that's true (which I kinda doubt) it's going to be a hard sell in a lot of the US because taxis are an absolutely shitty service in a lot of the US the point that I'd argue it's the primary reason Uber took off the way it did.
No, the primary reason Uber took off the way it did was because they ran the service at a loss for years in order to strangle competition.
It is impossible to overstate how much less they sucked, and how much less they still suck, than an average taxi service in most places. NY? London? Sure, fine, maybe you're cool.
When Uber happened, the only way for me to get a cab was "call someone". Then wait on hold for a while. Then tell them where you were. Three times. Then they'd send a cab, that might show up in a couple hours. (If it didn't "get lost" and say your address didn't exist.) Every cab claimed their card reader "was broken" ("how much? how much do you think it should be?"), every cab took a few interesting route choices on the hope you wouldn't notice, every single damn cab was filthy and smelled like feet and parts didn't work. (Also, all cabs here were the same company, even if they had different signs. Yay, conglomeration!)
So now you're telling me I can use my phone, hit some buttons, and a fucking town car shows up, has a free water bottle, is CLEAN, and doesn't fuck with me? Sold. You had me at "not smelling like feet" let alone "shows up when I call them".
Talk about how they treat their employees all you like, or their business practices, and I won't argue. No contention here. But from a user POV, they were/are so much better than anything I had available to me before that people telling me to "just take a cab" actually get laughed at. This is not a case of not ordering from Amazon but the retailer, or the pizza place and not Grubhub. This is "functional useful system" vs "screaming pile of larcenous shit".
A few points:
First, it's worth noting that outside of a few areas like NYC, livery was primarily used by either the wealthy (for whom driving is an actual waste of money) and the urban poor (for whom judicious use of livery can supplant car ownership.) The market for livery among the middle class was more or less nonexistent, due to extreme price sensitivity among other things - hence why for most people, they turned to livery in only a handful of situations (primarily when traveling.)
Second, Uber's "secret sauce" was low prices. You talk about how the cars were clean with water available, but the reality is that those sorts of services existed in most major cities with black car services. The thing is, they also had prices to match - and since the middle class audience they were aiming at has historically been extremely price sensitive when using livery, the goal was to offer black car service at taxicab (or even sub-taxicab) rates. Which leads to a simple question - how do you do that?
Well, from what we've seen at the major online livery services, it's a multifold answer. One big one is subsidization - Uber has been paying part of the actual cost of each ride to build market share. The problem is that this has been quixotic - unlike the airline wars of the 80s and 90s, there is little in the way of obstacles for a new entrant in the online livery space, so that, along with price sensitivity, makes it difficult at best to increase prices. So the company instead created a system where, by treating drivers as "independent contractors", they could pawn off capital costs to the drivers while retaining profit. Now as you can imagine, this is a rather shit deal for the drivers, many of whom wind up making sub-minimum wage once capital costs are accounted, and the online livery companies basically abused the independent contractor status, demanding employee level control when it benefitted them, and hands-off contractor status when that was beneficial instead. That was the point of Dynamex and AB5 - either your workers are employees or contractors, with the good and bad that entails.
Which comes back to the simple response to the "user experience" argument - there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. You don't get to turn a blind eye to the systems that provide you with that experience, and how they harm workers. Uber and other livery services built their market share by fucking over workers, and that's something that users cannot avoid.
Dude, stop telling other people that their horrible experience with taxis was imaginary; it's not helping your cause, it makes you look disconnected from reality and weaken your argument.
I'll give you a fucking hint: I did not use taxis because the experience was bad until the competition from Uber caused one of the local company to improve their service to the point where it was usable, at which point I used them.
Not because of price, which was not lowered, but because at that point, I was able to know how much it would cost, know when the taxi would pick be up, and know that I would actually be able to pay without a suspicious tax-dodging equipment failure.
I'm not saying that they didn't exist - I'm pointing out that the facts show that "user experience" didn't drive the adoption of online livery among the middle class - it was addressing the problem of extreme price sensitivity. Because as I pointed out, there were companies providing the sort of service that these users wanted - it was just at a cost they were unwilling to pay. Uber's "secret sauce" was in abusing every loophole they could find to "drop" the price down to where it was palatable to the audience they were targeting (and given their continuing subsidies, they haven't solved the problem.)
And frankly, I find the constant response of "well, I had a bad experience in a cab" to people pointing out the cesspool of horrors that is the current state of online livery to undermine your side on a moral level, because if your response to how these companies are fucking over drivers while taking the position of "laws are for the little people" is to go "but the user experience" - well, at that point you're now a cheerleader for Omelas, caring only about how systems impact you without regard for the people delivering them. Which is exactly what Uber et al. are hoping for.
I have never used Uber in my life, and have used Lift 2 or 3 times, during business trips where nether public transportation nor taxis were actually available, and I did not have the time to walk a few hours.
I'm also aware of the actual working condition in livery companies which is the other reason I don't use taxis if I can avoid it. The only times I did so was when that one local company started specifically to address the problems with Uber and the other livery companies by providing a decent user experience and actually paying drivers hourly, rather than by the trip.
Focusing on "Uber bad", while true, is completely ignoring all the problems with livery companies, which were also bad.
And, to bring it back to AVs, removing drivers is also ignoring all the problem caused by relying on individual vehicles, which are the reason taxis had the legal monopoly and restrictions that allowed them to have such a bad user experience in the first place.
I'm not sure that the economics of using autonomous cars as a kind of quasi-public transport system stack up, in the sense that people will use AVs that aren't personally owned vehicles as a mainstay of personal mobility
In particular, I'm not sure that such a service would be lower cost in terms of capital investment and running costs relative to the existing business models of taxi services
People have the option right now of using taxis to go everywhere instead of owning a car, but they generally don't unless relatively wealthy and living somewhere highly urbanised
I think the idea is it removes the cost of having to pay a taxi driver which combined with not having to deal with the maintenance/costs of an internal combustion engine means it's far cheaper.
However even if that's true (which I kinda doubt) it's going to be a hard sell in a lot of the US because taxis are an absolutely shitty service in a lot of the US the point that I'd argue it's the primary reason Uber took off the way it did.
No, the primary reason Uber took off the way it did was because they ran the service at a loss for years in order to strangle competition.
It is impossible to overstate how much less they sucked, and how much less they still suck, than an average taxi service in most places. NY? London? Sure, fine, maybe you're cool.
When Uber happened, the only way for me to get a cab was "call someone". Then wait on hold for a while. Then tell them where you were. Three times. Then they'd send a cab, that might show up in a couple hours. (If it didn't "get lost" and say your address didn't exist.) Every cab claimed their card reader "was broken" ("how much? how much do you think it should be?"), every cab took a few interesting route choices on the hope you wouldn't notice, every single damn cab was filthy and smelled like feet and parts didn't work. (Also, all cabs here were the same company, even if they had different signs. Yay, conglomeration!)
So now you're telling me I can use my phone, hit some buttons, and a fucking town car shows up, has a free water bottle, is CLEAN, and doesn't fuck with me? Sold. You had me at "not smelling like feet" let alone "shows up when I call them".
Talk about how they treat their employees all you like, or their business practices, and I won't argue. No contention here. But from a user POV, they were/are so much better than anything I had available to me before that people telling me to "just take a cab" actually get laughed at. This is not a case of not ordering from Amazon but the retailer, or the pizza place and not Grubhub. This is "functional useful system" vs "screaming pile of larcenous shit".
A few points:
First, it's worth noting that outside of a few areas like NYC, livery was primarily used by either the wealthy (for whom driving is an actual waste of money) and the urban poor (for whom judicious use of livery can supplant car ownership.) The market for livery among the middle class was more or less nonexistent, due to extreme price sensitivity among other things - hence why for most people, they turned to livery in only a handful of situations (primarily when traveling.)
Second, Uber's "secret sauce" was low prices. You talk about how the cars were clean with water available, but the reality is that those sorts of services existed in most major cities with black car services. The thing is, they also had prices to match - and since the middle class audience they were aiming at has historically been extremely price sensitive when using livery, the goal was to offer black car service at taxicab (or even sub-taxicab) rates. Which leads to a simple question - how do you do that?
Well, from what we've seen at the major online livery services, it's a multifold answer. One big one is subsidization - Uber has been paying part of the actual cost of each ride to build market share. The problem is that this has been quixotic - unlike the airline wars of the 80s and 90s, there is little in the way of obstacles for a new entrant in the online livery space, so that, along with price sensitivity, makes it difficult at best to increase prices. So the company instead created a system where, by treating drivers as "independent contractors", they could pawn off capital costs to the drivers while retaining profit. Now as you can imagine, this is a rather shit deal for the drivers, many of whom wind up making sub-minimum wage once capital costs are accounted, and the online livery companies basically abused the independent contractor status, demanding employee level control when it benefitted them, and hands-off contractor status when that was beneficial instead. That was the point of Dynamex and AB5 - either your workers are employees or contractors, with the good and bad that entails.
Which comes back to the simple response to the "user experience" argument - there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. You don't get to turn a blind eye to the systems that provide you with that experience, and how they harm workers. Uber and other livery services built their market share by fucking over workers, and that's something that users cannot avoid.
Dude, stop telling other people that their horrible experience with taxis was imaginary; it's not helping your cause, it makes you look disconnected from reality and weaken your argument.
I'll give you a fucking hint: I did not use taxis because the experience was bad until the competition from Uber caused one of the local company to improve their service to the point where it was usable, at which point I used them.
Not because of price, which was not lowered, but because at that point, I was able to know how much it would cost, know when the taxi would pick be up, and know that I would actually be able to pay without a suspicious tax-dodging equipment failure.
I'm not saying that they didn't exist - I'm pointing out that the facts show that "user experience" didn't drive the adoption of online livery among the middle class - it was addressing the problem of extreme price sensitivity. Because as I pointed out, there were companies providing the sort of service that these users wanted - it was just at a cost they were unwilling to pay. Uber's "secret sauce" was in abusing every loophole they could find to "drop" the price down to where it was palatable to the audience they were targeting (and given their continuing subsidies, they haven't solved the problem.)
And frankly, I find the constant response of "well, I had a bad experience in a cab" to people pointing out the cesspool of horrors that is the current state of online livery to undermine your side on a moral level, because if your response to how these companies are fucking over drivers while taking the position of "laws are for the little people" is to go "but the user experience" - well, at that point you're now a cheerleader for Omelas, caring only about how systems impact you without regard for the people delivering them. Which is exactly what Uber et al. are hoping for.
No, there weren't.
Black car service is not the same as taxi service.
The only real difference is that black cars don't have the right to accept hails, instead needing to be dispatched. Given the nature of how online apps work, the distinction between dispatch and hail using them is murky at best. So from a functional level given online apps, they are the same (and have always been very close - hence why they both fall under livery, and why the body that regulates both in NYC is the Taxicab and Limousine Commission.)
Now, from a user experience perspective, they are very different, and that is because of the bifurcation of traditional livery consumers - they typically are either wealthy or poor, for very understandable reasons. Black cars have been the provence of the former, and have provided a commensurate experience traditionally. Taxicabs have traditionally been the province of the urban poor (save for a few specific urban areas like NYC which does have some spillover) and as such there's a focus on price over all (and thus why traditional taxi services made the compromises they did.)
So yes, part of Uber's "success" was in delivering an experience closer to the black car model at rates equal to or less than that of taxicabs, and hoping that users wouldn't think too long about how that would work.
Arriving for pickup at a predetermined time and giving you a stated price for the ride before you book don't seem like luxury hurdles only available to black car services.
The amenities are not even close to my highest priority, I just don't want to get conned or feel like I'm being conned while using your business/service.
Middle class people weren't failing to use black car service because of the cost, they were not using it because of the lack of convenience.
Places that have shit taxi service tend to not have a black car service that consists of "I'm at X, come pick me up in 15 minutes." It tends to be more along the lines of "I have a flight tomorrow morning so I'll call today and schedule a car to bring me the airport in the morning". And that's if they have black car service it at all.
If you had just said "part of Uber's "success" was due to pricing" I don't think anyone would have argued but black car service fills a different niche than taxi service.
Knowing the price before you get in, the driver being guaranteed to actually drive you to your destination (the fucking number of black cabs that just said nah don't want to go there after hailing Jesus), and not having to pay in cash were the reasons I used Uber. The price was not a concern.
By the way black cabs here are required to have a working card reader, basically none do.
In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony god’s blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my intelligence.
Posts
Three Mile Island didn't kill anyone, though.
A largely harmless and entirely irrelevant issue outside the US?
- John Stuart Mill
Feral’s posts a while back argue that it’s not just likely but axiomatic, almost inescapable.
The stare or municipality can then assess a mileage fee for distance traveled while the vehicle is unoccupied. Say unmanned travel / summon is equal to the livery fee based on distance.
That should set some parking / summon equilibrium and deter people from sending their car 20 miles back home unoccupied to waste extra trips but still be a convenience feature for people who want it.
I figure with so much infrastructure funding based on gas taxes, when EVs take off they will need to find new revenue streams somewhere. And EVs are heavy personal vehicles.
I feel like summon/return logic is a better idea then trying to cram parking into spaces where we already don't put enough parking without this functionality. An unoccupied AV might contribute to traffic, but realistically its increasing congestion outside of peak transit hours only briefly. Given that they're all electric, this is probably also overall more energy efficient then the concrete and construction for car parks.
I still kinda hate them because it seems more likely that instead of being a publicly available system that benefits those without accessibility options most it'll just be another way to reduce the burden on the wealthy of our transit system overall being dogshit and will end up leading to more congestion and more infrastructure for cars instead of proven public transit solutions.
In particular, I'm not sure that such a service would be lower cost in terms of capital investment and running costs relative to the existing business models of taxi services
People have the option right now of using taxis to go everywhere instead of owning a car, but they generally don't unless relatively wealthy and living somewhere highly urbanised
I think the idea is it removes the cost of having to pay a taxi driver which combined with not having to deal with the maintenance/costs of an internal combustion engine means it's far cheaper.
However even if that's true (which I kinda doubt) it's going to be a hard sell in a lot of the US because taxis are an absolutely shitty service in a lot of the US the point that I'd argue it's the primary reason Uber took off the way it did.
To work it would need to appeal way more than current car-sharing, it seems. That's an extremely competitive business right now and not exactly one with a huge mass appeal. And I don't think there's much proof so far that car sharing has a considerable effect in reducing personal car ownership.
Which it utterly and completely failed to be because, at least in the US, it seems like car sharing has never actually worked because no one wants it
Like, aside from Musk, who is a pathological liar, what other company is claiming 100% self driving cars that you can summon or send away, and has a roadmap for delivery, not just "in the future cars will drive themselves and probably fly too!"
No, the primary reason Uber took off the way it did was because they ran the service at a loss for years in order to strangle competition.
And they went full Helmsley, creating systems like Greyball and Ripley to prevent municipalities from actually regulating them.
If cars have a drive home option that is reliable. People would love that, and a lot of parking will go away in favor of automated drop off spots. There might be some congestion alleviation due to fewer accidents, and more efficient driving...eventually. But until a majority of cars on the road have it, it's not going to be much.
There's just not going to be a situation where and unless GenZ and millennials start voting in record number, there will not be a new tax to that effect.
One thing to consider is municipal revenue is going to be annihilated. For a lot of reasons, but one of the big ones is, you can set the car to follow every law, and every speed limit 100%. Minimal tickets, And most states prohibit cities from setting up tolls. So I'm not sure what's going to happen there...maybe defund the police :biggrin:
I have a 2019 and a 2020 Subaru, with lane detection, adaptive cruise, and collision avoidance/mitigation.
They are very good at recognizing vehicles ahead of me and maintaining speed and distance.
There is an audio cue anytime it gains, loses, or transfers "lock" on a leading vehicle. There is also a prominent center-dash indicator; I can confirm "lock" status as easily as checking a speedometer. Thus, I have no problem knowing if it working.
They work at all speeds, from stop-crawl to full-highway, though they do disengage after coming to a complete stop for a few seconds.
They recognize towed trailers carrying boats, and those mesh trailers carrying lawn mowers and stuff.
They work morning, night, dawn, and dusk.
They work in up to moderate fog, and up to heavy (not torrential) rain.
They maintain "lock" on the leading vehicle through curves rated for 35mph or more. (yes on highways, no on roundabouts, case-by-case on cloverleaf interchange)
They will use engine braking on long downhills.
They are almost too cautious if the car ahead is making a right turn. We slow way down, and don't accelerate again for a second or two after all clear. I will often take over for those seconds to have a smoother drive.
I think they handle motorcycles well, but I honestly can't recall the last time a cycle went slow enough for me to be following it. I tend to be extra vigilant around them anyways.
I don't trust it to maintain itself in a lane or follow a curve. I can feel the haptics in the wheel, and it might be able to do so, but I'm not comfortable driving hands-off.
It does not detect red lights, stop signs, or anything of the sort.
It does not (reliably) detect bicycles or pedestrians (or animals like deer); I am extra vigilant when passing parked cars or in pedestrian-heavy areas.
I've had five or fewer activations of collision avoidance (hard braking not under my control) in appropriate situations, where a car pulled out ahead of me too close, came an unusually swift stop, that kind of thing.
I've had two or fewer activations of collision avoidance for no visible reason; in no case did my car swerve or otherwise cause me to lose steering control.
I, personally, find myself a calmer driver when using the adaptive cruise. The urge to "hurry up" is largely suppressed.
However: I think if history has shown anything it's that rich and powerful people will allow and legislate all sorts of dangerous shit if it makes them wealthier and/or makes their lives easier and more comfortable. This would do both.
eeehhhh
the amount of lawsuits that would come from bad driving AI would probably make their lives less comfortable. Plus they can just hire drivers.
It is impossible to overstate how much less they sucked, and how much less they still suck, than an average taxi service in most places. NY? London? Sure, fine, maybe you're cool.
When Uber happened, the only way for me to get a cab was "call someone". Then wait on hold for a while. Then tell them where you were. Three times. Then they'd send a cab, that might show up in a couple hours. (If it didn't "get lost" and say your address didn't exist.) Every cab claimed their card reader "was broken" ("how much? how much do you think it should be?"), every cab took a few interesting route choices on the hope you wouldn't notice, every single damn cab was filthy and smelled like feet and parts didn't work. (Also, all cabs here were the same company, even if they had different signs. Yay, conglomeration!)
So now you're telling me I can use my phone, hit some buttons, and a fucking town car shows up, has a free water bottle, is CLEAN, and doesn't fuck with me? Sold. You had me at "not smelling like feet" let alone "shows up when I call them".
Talk about how they treat their employees all you like, or their business practices, and I won't argue. No contention here. But from a user POV, they were/are so much better than anything I had available to me before that people telling me to "just take a cab" actually get laughed at. This is not a case of not ordering from Amazon but the retailer, or the pizza place and not Grubhub. This is "functional useful system" vs "screaming pile of larcenous shit".
And technology isn't the hold back right now it's cost. I'm sure you could think of a way to bring driverless cars to 90% of Americans for a large enough budget and forced cooperation. It's about doing it economically, and working around the government instead of working with the government.
Correct, Uber is a larcenous company that treats its drivers like shit.
A few points:
First, it's worth noting that outside of a few areas like NYC, livery was primarily used by either the wealthy (for whom driving is an actual waste of money) and the urban poor (for whom judicious use of livery can supplant car ownership.) The market for livery among the middle class was more or less nonexistent, due to extreme price sensitivity among other things - hence why for most people, they turned to livery in only a handful of situations (primarily when traveling.)
Second, Uber's "secret sauce" was low prices. You talk about how the cars were clean with water available, but the reality is that those sorts of services existed in most major cities with black car services. The thing is, they also had prices to match - and since the middle class audience they were aiming at has historically been extremely price sensitive when using livery, the goal was to offer black car service at taxicab (or even sub-taxicab) rates. Which leads to a simple question - how do you do that?
Well, from what we've seen at the major online livery services, it's a multifold answer. One big one is subsidization - Uber has been paying part of the actual cost of each ride to build market share. The problem is that this has been quixotic - unlike the airline wars of the 80s and 90s, there is little in the way of obstacles for a new entrant in the online livery space, so that, along with price sensitivity, makes it difficult at best to increase prices. So the company instead created a system where, by treating drivers as "independent contractors", they could pawn off capital costs to the drivers while retaining profit. Now as you can imagine, this is a rather shit deal for the drivers, many of whom wind up making sub-minimum wage once capital costs are accounted, and the online livery companies basically abused the independent contractor status, demanding employee level control when it benefitted them, and hands-off contractor status when that was beneficial instead. That was the point of Dynamex and AB5 - either your workers are employees or contractors, with the good and bad that entails.
Which comes back to the simple response to the "user experience" argument - there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. You don't get to turn a blind eye to the systems that provide you with that experience, and how they harm workers. Uber and other livery services built their market share by fucking over workers, and that's something that users cannot avoid.
If both myself and the Penny Arcade forums both still exist in 2041, I will eat my dick if there are self driving cars with no humans in them roaming the streets of major American cities
Dude, stop telling other people that their horrible experience with taxis was imaginary; it's not helping your cause, it makes you look disconnected from reality and weaken your argument.
I'll give you a fucking hint: I did not use taxis because the experience was bad until the competition from Uber caused one of the local company to improve their service to the point where it was usable, at which point I used them.
Not because of price, which was not lowered, but because at that point, I was able to know how much it would cost, know when the taxi would pick be up, and know that I would actually be able to pay without a suspicious tax-dodging equipment failure.
I mean, Nuro has been running driverless grocery delivery vehicles in Houston for a year now.
You can't give someone a pirate ship in one game, and then take it back in the next game. It's rude.
Could you please highlight where in AngelHedgie's post he said anything of the sort?
We aren't denying you have had bad taxi experiences, or that others have had bad taxi experiences. We are saying that price undercutting and dodging regulation were the primary movers in Uber talking over marketshare.
To be sure, I should have said "passenger cars" with no humans roaming the streets, but if that N2 exists and drives with no humans involved in the process, its further along than I thought!
Edit2: Wikipedia strongly implies I don't have to eat my dick yet. It has nothing further listed after this April 2020 update, nearly 2 years ago.
The part where anyone who says "taxis sucked" is immediately dismissed with "no, you are just too cheap to pay the actual price".
"So?"
I need X. The company currently providing X (yellow/checker cab) has been shitting everywhere on everyone and in general providing a useless experience, because there has historically been zero option. (Town cars/black cars being book ahead sorts of things, not "home from the bars" kind of things.)
You can decry "unethical consumption" all you like, but it is not incumbent upon me to sacrifice myself on the altar of business in order to prop up an existing monopoly. I need X. Y provides X. Y may be shit, but I still need X. My options are "nobly sacrifice and do without X", which could be anything from "inconvenient" to "crippling", depending on whether it's being used for "groceries" or "drunk trip home from bars", or "use Y and attempt to make it less shit".
Because, again, it's not that Uber/Lyft were "just cheaper", it's that they were better; reliable, billed in an itemised manner, and in general eating the fucking lunch of the existing cab services, which you couldn't even manage to get hold of after last call in the downtown bar district.
I'm not saying that they didn't exist - I'm pointing out that the facts show that "user experience" didn't drive the adoption of online livery among the middle class - it was addressing the problem of extreme price sensitivity. Because as I pointed out, there were companies providing the sort of service that these users wanted - it was just at a cost they were unwilling to pay. Uber's "secret sauce" was in abusing every loophole they could find to "drop" the price down to where it was palatable to the audience they were targeting (and given their continuing subsidies, they haven't solved the problem.)
And frankly, I find the constant response of "well, I had a bad experience in a cab" to people pointing out the cesspool of horrors that is the current state of online livery to undermine your side on a moral level, because if your response to how these companies are fucking over drivers while taking the position of "laws are for the little people" is to go "but the user experience" - well, at that point you're now a cheerleader for Omelas, caring only about how systems impact you without regard for the people delivering them. Which is exactly what Uber et al. are hoping for.
Anecdotally, living in a big city, calling a cab just wasn't a thing anyone did. We'd take a cab back from the bars sometimes since they had a bunch of them waiting their in a lineup, but the idea of calling one to take you to the bars just didn't happen because it wasn't worth the hassle and you didn't trust them to actually show up on time / at all.
Uber and Lyfts pricing definitely had me taking cabs more than I would have before, but their user experience is why I tried it in the first place and made it obvious how bad the existing system was.
As has Waymo in Phoenix
No, there weren't.
Black car service is not the same as taxi service.
I have never used Uber in my life, and have used Lift 2 or 3 times, during business trips where nether public transportation nor taxis were actually available, and I did not have the time to walk a few hours.
I'm also aware of the actual working condition in livery companies which is the other reason I don't use taxis if I can avoid it. The only times I did so was when that one local company started specifically to address the problems with Uber and the other livery companies by providing a decent user experience and actually paying drivers hourly, rather than by the trip.
Focusing on "Uber bad", while true, is completely ignoring all the problems with livery companies, which were also bad.
And, to bring it back to AVs, removing drivers is also ignoring all the problem caused by relying on individual vehicles, which are the reason taxis had the legal monopoly and restrictions that allowed them to have such a bad user experience in the first place.
The only real difference is that black cars don't have the right to accept hails, instead needing to be dispatched. Given the nature of how online apps work, the distinction between dispatch and hail using them is murky at best. So from a functional level given online apps, they are the same (and have always been very close - hence why they both fall under livery, and why the body that regulates both in NYC is the Taxicab and Limousine Commission.)
Now, from a user experience perspective, they are very different, and that is because of the bifurcation of traditional livery consumers - they typically are either wealthy or poor, for very understandable reasons. Black cars have been the provence of the former, and have provided a commensurate experience traditionally. Taxicabs have traditionally been the province of the urban poor (save for a few specific urban areas like NYC which does have some spillover) and as such there's a focus on price over all (and thus why traditional taxi services made the compromises they did.)
So yes, part of Uber's "success" was in delivering an experience closer to the black car model at rates equal to or less than that of taxicabs, and hoping that users wouldn't think too long about how that would work.
The amenities are not even close to my highest priority, I just don't want to get conned or feel like I'm being conned while using your business/service.
Places that have shit taxi service tend to not have a black car service that consists of "I'm at X, come pick me up in 15 minutes." It tends to be more along the lines of "I have a flight tomorrow morning so I'll call today and schedule a car to bring me the airport in the morning". And that's if they have black car service it at all.
If you had just said "part of Uber's "success" was due to pricing" I don't think anyone would have argued but black car service fills a different niche than taxi service.
By the way black cabs here are required to have a working card reader, basically none do.