- cross-posted to:
- technology@hexbear.net
- becomeme@sh.itjust.works
- news@kbin.social
- cross-posted to:
- technology@hexbear.net
- becomeme@sh.itjust.works
- news@kbin.social
A crowd destroyed a driverless Waymo car in San Francisco::A Waymo car was destroyed in San Francisco as a crowd began vandalizing it and ultimately set the car on fire. Nobody was in the vehicle at the time.
Elsewhere in the thread someone who knows the city well better than me (or probably you) said that it’s an area known for mobile home encampments. Yes, that’s homelessness, even if it’s upper class homeless.
So your electricians etc. which I already said have their commercial vehicles which don’t fall under individual transport. They’re also lugging means of production around.
I invite you again to imagine city roads without commuters. That single change, and nothing else. It’s like 98% of traffic in car-dependent cities.
Merging the threads because I’m getting tired of it:
No. Use autonomous technology if you want. Just don’t hail it as the silver bullet it isn’t when there’s much more deep as well as tried and true solutions to the issues we have. You’re taking attention away from the actual solutions in favour of gadgetry unaffordable for most which need to drive in places like the US. Pedestrians won’t be safe no matter how good the tech becomes, as long your average burger flipper still needs a car to get to work and can’t afford that fancy stuff there’s going to be distracted commuters out there. You could get all of them off the street, pretty much instantly, by having proper public transit.
Millions of road deaths which don’t need autonomous technology to severely curtail. Have a look at statistics US vs. Netherlands.
Not many pedestrians out there getting run over either, though, are there? Yes of course if you live 100km away from the next power pole you’ll need some form of individual transportation, but you’re also statistically insignificant.
So how do you push a car out of the way with your fire truck if you aren’t driving?
It was in Chinatown during a Chinese New Year’s celebration. I’m done with this conversation. You seem to want to believe that the rest of the world will magically densify into Europe faster than we’ll develop self driving cars that are safer than human drivers.
Good luck! I mean that earnestly, because it would be a better future, but I also don’t mean it remotely earnestly because that’s not how the world works and that’s not going to happen. That’s a problem that is solved on a generational timescale. Self driving cars is a couple decade timescale.
LA urban area is a bit more dense (2888pop/km2) than Hamburg (2506) your objection is completely nonsensical: Having more space between cities doesn’t mean that your cities must suck. The difference is that one is a couple of high rises and then endless car-dependent single-home sprawl, while the other is almost entirely stuff that’s illegal to build in the US. Changing building codes to allow such uses wouldn’t just solve their housing crisis, it would also densen up suburbia to allow for rail-based public transport. Plop down stations, zone a radius around them as medium density, also make sure have a grocery store, doctor’s practice, daycare, cafe and restaurant there, crucially no car parking – but make space for cargo bikes so that suburbanites within the catchment area but outside of walking distance can use all that infrastructure. You won’t recognise the city in 10 years, it’d totally transform, very much for the better.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
stuff that’s illegal to build in the US
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Bruh, it takes ~10 years to plan and build a single major infrastructure project in America. Again, the timelines you’re talking about are nonsensical. Yes, building out transit and reorienting communities like that is the ultimate solution, but the idea that that will happen so much and so extensively that we’ll have no need for autonomous cars in even 20 years is absolutely absurd and detached from reality.
That kind of stuff is already happening and often on much shorter time-frames.
Salt Lake city went from rough political discussions in the early 90s, starting at literally zero, with practically no prior art in the US, and finished its first tram line in 1999, a year ahead of schedule of two-year construction, it’s since been expanded a lot. If you bring on experts who know their stuff (probably from abroad because you can’t really study public transit in the US, universities haven’t caught up yet) you can get the first wheels on the track in 2-3 years, thereabouts. In those 20 years you’re talking about Salt Lake City built a network spanning most of the valley.
One crucial mistake they didn’t do is trying to re-invent the wheel: They invited European experts, ultimately had Stadler build the trams which they’re doing in Salt Lake City (some parts still come from Switzerland) and now they’ve got a new industry in town, building e.g. FLIRTs for TexRail.
That’s probably all news to you, presumably because the techbro scene isn’t interested in things actually moving forward, what you’re interested in is jerking off to gadgetry, not public transport. It’s not “I’m interested in public transport, therefore I like autonomous cars”, it’s “Autonomous cars are cool, let’s find ways to shoehorn them into everything”.
So, gain: Please tell me how you’re going to make it so that burger flippers can afford those autonomous cars within 20 years. Tech won’t solve that issue. Public transport circumvents it completely.
No, I have youtube as well, it doesn’t make you a genius.
Lol. I’m interested in reducing our millions of road deaths in whatever way possible. You’re interested in jerking yourself off in the fuck cars subreddit cause it sounds simple and edgy and you’re frustrated.
It’s “let’s not be dumbasses and trash autonomous cars on the off chance your public transit paradise doesn’t materialize”.
They literally can through a taxi service that splits the costs amongst users, called Waymo. Car shares also already exist. The cost of sensors and computers will also come down both through mass manufacturing and technological improvements (like solid state lidar).
Honestly, let’s make a bet and check back in 20 years, does your public transit paradise exist or maybe just maybe, the actual political and infrastructure realities of the US mean that cars still exist?
Those services are necessarily more expensive than the likes of trams, that much is simple physics. Also, you’re going to get the burger flipper fired if you make them rely on waymo, to wit, all those waymos blocking traffic because they don’t know how to continue on, having come across something unforeseen. What if there’s a game in town and our flipper needs to get to work but can’t afford the rush pricing waymo introduces because unlike public transport, their prices aren’t regulated and the hedge funds owning waymo would never accept a situation in which they can get less than 20% ROI on every single vehicle they put out there. While getting subsidised by tax payer money in the form of the streets they’re using.
Why are you so insistent on rubber on asphalt over steel on steel? Automation is much easier and further along on tracks. Why such a fanboy for private capital over the freedom of a municipality to come together and solve a problem in a cheap and affordable way?
Also please don’t tell me that 10-lane highways are easier to cross for pedestrians when the cars are autonomous.
Lol, you so insistently want to believe that I’m a car loving tech bro that you’re literally not reading anything I’m writing.
I’m pro public transit, I agree that it’s more efficient and produces better cities and communities than ones built around cars, I tend to vote socialist, and don’t own a car and have no love for them or what they’ve done to society, however, I’m just not delusional about how long it takes to a) built enough mass transit that people don’t need cars and b) move everyone to live and work near that mass transit and c) to solve for every edge case like the elderly, people driving out to remote cottages, deliveries, the sick and elderly, getting around in inclement weather, etc.
Even if you had the public and political willpower to enact those changes (which you very very very clearly don’t), it would still take longer to do all of that, by like an order of magnitude, then it will to improve self driving cars and make them widely available. Self driving cars we’re talking like a decade, the kind of societal changes you’re describing take a generation. You literally have to wait for every suburban stick in the mud to be willing to move out of their home or die before you can achieve your car-free dream.
The kind of changes I’m talking about are happening, even in the US, right now. It’s you who’s lobbying against them by saying “can’t be done”, “not fast enough” completely ignoring what’s happening in actual cities all over the place. How about “hey why are the Mormons of all people more progressive than our city”, instead?
Also for an purported supporter of public transport you ripped into /r/fuckcars quite a lot. WTH are you even doing over on the snoo site.
No. Railcar suburbs once existed and existing car-dependent single-home suburbs can be turned into them by, as I already explained, densifying around the stations. Which has been done, and is being done, and would come soon also to your city if you bothered to argue for it.
As to me personally: I never owned a car. Never needed one.