California just opened the floodgates for self-driving cars

holo_nexus@kbin.social to Technology@lemmy.world – 110 points –
washingtonpost.com

In a pivotal moment for the autonomous transportation industry, California chose to expand one of the biggest test cases for the technology.

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Yeah...Great...

How about building public transport and not such stupid things?

Self driving cars could actually be kind of a good stepping stone to better public transit while making more efficient use of existing roadways. You hit a button to request a car, it drives you to wherever, you need to go, and then gets tasked to pick up the next person. Where you used to need 10 cars for 10 people, you now need one.

Thats still only a few people.. compared to a bus?

Why not just have a bus??

I take the bus to work every day. It's a set route for my set work schedule and it's great.

But everything else I do in my life? Not on a bus route, schedules are slow on the weekend or stop completely after a certain time.

When you come up with a bus that goes wherever I want to go when I want, I'm in. Until then, a car that doesn't require a driver and is easily shared between many people to take them the last mile is an actual solution.

Buses suck because they're like cars only worse.

Cars suck because of the amount of infrastructure you have to build for them all to avoid proper design of anything.

In a well designed area, you'd be able to get wherever you needed without having to take either of these things.

Sure you might have a lower number of cars total, but you'll also have way more cars on the road, making the traffic problem even worse (because you can now have more cars than people). I'm guessing we'll be seeing legislation that disallows empty cars driving around in big cities.

I don't think it would necessarily mean more cars. It means that your car takes you to work but instead of sitting in the parking lot whole day it drives other people around making you money and then at the end of the day it takes you back home and perhaps then goes back to being a taxi for the night.

You won't own the cars. The cost alone would be prohibitive, but operation and maintenance is far better done by an organization rather than an individual.

And there's almost no way a modern (feudalistic) car company will allow you to use your car this way to earn money.

The corporate masters are already not so keen on paying you when you are actually driving the thing. Do you really think they'll let you in on the racket?

Are these things in conflict somehow?

Yes, if there's any chance in hell of self-driving becoming feasible at scale it will involve pre-defined routes, possibly with other sorts of monitoring systems, and new infrastructure/mandatory equipment for safe pedestrian crossing zones after the first handful of school kids inevitably get plowed down thanks to the obviously-not-quite-there-yet image recognition systems.

Likely we'd see some rollback to a more achievable goal of a city-funded fleet of robo-taxis running pre-defined routes with standardized equipment and maybe some years into it, when we realize traffic jams still suck, start thinking "hmmm.... maybe we should've just improved our bus/rail systems..."

Cities are just as easily duped by guys like Elon Musk as any of these poor fuckers who died actually entrusting their lives to their shitty "autopilot" system. Especially when cities/officials stand to profit from kickbacks of various sorts. Don't assume something like this won't come at the cost of not investing in the obvious competing tech: public transport.

Indeed, we've had autonomous trains for 3 decades now, and without 'AI' to make things murky. Automation in airplanes and industry is also very advanced. The key to success is not in the software, but rather in overall system design.

They're already in conflict everywhere. Infrastructure for cars robs public transit infrastructure blind in lots of government budgets. The only public transit category potentially benefiting from car infrastructure is buses, which are arguably the worst form of public transit to begin with, and still also require additional dedicated infrastructure to get any better (e.g. dedicated bus lanes).

"Self-driving" cars obviously require car infrastructure which already steals from public transit budgets both federally and locally, but if we add government emphasis on this technology and start to develop specific infrastructure for "self-driving" cars (walled off routes, communications appliances, etc.) then they'll start taking even more of the budget.

And all of this for something that's arguably much more braindead and useless and consuming of R&D dollars than the obviously more efficient, already technically possible forms of transit that could be built or expanded upon today.

Because one of them costs taxpayer money and the other one is just signing legislation? The two concepts aren't even related other than that they are two different ways of getting to places.

Yeah because roads definitely don't cost taxpayers a single dime. 🙄

Public transport has been around for many decades. The US infrastructure and now lifestyle / culture is not built for it and there's not a great reason to think it's suddenly going to catch on. Self driving cars have real potential in the US to have an environmental impact as well save many thousands of lives each year. I wish you were more excited about this.

Well, we're not. There's a reason you don't see New York City jumping to adopt this tech, and it's because they bothered to invest in a public transit system that makes cars obsolete for a lot of people. If we got decent public transit in more cities combined with an actually functional high speed rail system in this country, you'd see cars become obsolete for a whole lot more people.

This "lifestyle/culture" developed out of sheer necessity given the geographic size of this country and the complete failure to invest in mass transit. It can and must be changed, if we want our future to be viable at all.

Your argument has been around for decades. This already could have been and "should" have been done. There's no cultural or tech change Now that's going to spur it all the sudden. This is like complaining about gun control. Of course it makes sense and would be better for US - that's blatantly obvious, but to kid yourself into thinking that therenis momentum for such a change is foolish. Self driving cars offer a real chance for change. Embrace.

While it is exciting, I can see both sides of the argument here. The infrastructure here in the US is built around cars so it would be much less effort to automate the existing infrastructure. On the other hand, things could be so much more efficient if we focused on trains and other public transport that excels at transporting a large amount of people. But that would take so much more effort and money to update the infrastructure.

Why not do both? They aren't mutually exclusive. I feel strongly for reasons I've outlined that one has much more potential than another, but I'm not anti public transport. I think we need to invest heavily though where the most potential lies.

Most SDCs in use currently are for public transport.

well, LA is building out a lot of light rail as of late at least

Self driving cars are stupid. Invest in public transit instead.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

Exactly, don't divert investment in public transportation because you want your own personal AI chauffeur.

You think public taxes and fees are being delivered to autonomous vehicle development?

That's the original premise of this thread.

But also, yes, ultimately I think that's the direction this would end up going:

https://lemmy.world/comment/2298894

The premise is that you're just making shit up?

If you want to backtrack on your comment "perfect is the enemy of good" then you need to go up a couple levels in the thread and actually refute the original claim. I'm just replying your statement.

You'll deliberately misinterpret my words no matter where I comment.

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regulators are grappling with how to control this rapidly developing industry.

Read: how to collect all these little black briefcases

As cool as the idea of self driving cars are, I don't trust it not to become a future where script kiddies and novice hackers take control of vehicles and crash them for fun if AI gets involved.

Don't even get me started on if a country had AI self driving cars and an enemy nation hacks the AI and sends directions that cause the car to end up damaging itself without you knowing. Or just uses it to cause all the vehicles in an area to crash and not be able to deploy airbags.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

California often serves as a “canary in the coal mine for the country and the developed world,” said David Zipper, Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Taubman Center for State and Local Government.

The California Public Utilities Commission approved the permits for Waymo and Cruise on Thursday despite pushback from local leaders and many residents in San Francisco, who argue that the autonomous vehicles have caused chaos around the city — from traffic jams to disrupted emergency scenes.

But critics say this data is unreliable and incomplete because the companies are not required to report a range of other incidents that affect the public — such as when a car veers into a bike or bus lane or stops short and disrupts traffic.

Philip Koopman, a Carnegie Mellon University professor who has conducted research on autonomous-vehicle safety for decades, said the self-driving car companies are under intense pressure to turn a profit and — in some cases — prove the business’s viability to shareholders.

In Los Angeles, Jarvis Murray, the county’s transportation administrator, said it is “untenable” to allow a new mobility service to expand without requiring companies to report more data and also give the cities more say over what is happening on their public roadways.

In an attempt to halt Thursday’s vote, they wrote letters and spoke at hearings to bring attention to a string of incidents in recent months: A car stopping near the scene of a mass shooting, another getting tangled in caution tape and downed wires after a major storm and another blocking a firetruck from exiting a station for several minutes.

I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Isn't a self driving car just a train? We should build trans and trollies instead. The tech is already there and they carry more people.

Isn’t a self driving car just a train?

no, it is not... here is handy image to familiarize you with some basic differences

Could you like label them or something?

EVs are a crutch for the failed auto industry. Personal vehicles made life worse over time. This is an extension of that mistake. The people defending it are myopic and lazy.

"The people defending it are myopic and lazy." I don't think that's a fair statement. If I could walk/bike everywhere I would but as it turns out my area isn't walk-able at all. I didn't choose the infrastructure I have.

Personal vehicles made life worse over time.

When you guys are walking everywhere you'll be regretting this insanity. Don't bother responding, I'm not interested in your delusions and Lemmy.world has proven that real discussions are not possible here.

Lol this is such a weird sentiment to me. You realize many of us do walk everywhere, right?

Good. I’m sick of the fearmonger. “OH NO, THIS ONE CAR GOT IN A CRASH!!!!!!”

Yeah, but humans crash too?

It hits different when you're the one being crashed into, but if it crashes less than monkeys behind the wheel and liabilities are all accounted for and punished accordingly, bring it!

What's with the obsession with punishment?

Because corporations can't be allowed to get away with what would land any of us in jail if we did it. We know they will cut corners if allowed, so make sure FSD is safer and that citizens are not defrauded when dealing with economic behemoths.

In other words, it's good that they have less accidents, but the ones they have should be treated the same way we treat human drivers or harsher, so that playing with chances is not just an economic factor to optimize and cut corners on. E.g. aviation safety rules: even low cost airlines need to follow these rules, not the legal farwest they created with social media.

With FSD the example is: LIDAR is more expensive, but it is an evolving technology that is essentially safe, but Elon wants to use just cameras...because it's cheaper...and...much less safe...it's not a solved problem on the cheap. That's why you need to penalize them for making such choices or outright forbid them from making them. They are going to be setting standards here and there is a risk that a shittier technology wins a few bucks for elon at the cost of lives into the future: and we can't half-ass this forever just because Elon wants his cars to be half the price it takes to do right.

When I worked on Google's Waymo project, we only had a small handful of our cars involved in any collision on public roads. And every single one of them was from a human driver running into the SDC. I dunno if that's changed since I left, but even in the early stages, SDCs are remarkably safe compared to human drivers.

Cruise has hit an oncoming car, smashed into the back of a Muni bus, and is constantly stopping in emergency zones making first responders lives harder.

7 hours of debate of the community making it clear how much they don’t want this, how much the city’s leaders don’t want this, but the state doesn’t give a shit.

They may be “safe” because they avoid difficult maneuvers and only drive like 25-30mph, but that doesn’t mean they’re practical or should be welcome in our cities.

And every single one of them was from a human driver running into the SDC

Yea, me too. I'm such a good driver, others are crashing into me every day...