Now is an opportunity, perhaps first in ~100 years, perhaps last, to recover the streets for unaugmented humans: slow down cars in urban areas, increase qualifications for humans to drive, eventually ban human drivers entirely, leaving only automated vehicles with enough sensors and going slowly enough to reduce auto-related deaths for pedestrians and passengers alike to zero.
If automated vehicles become popular, I predict new crimes will be added in addition to jaywalking. Cyclists may be restricted and anything else that confuses AI drivers. If certain intersections or sections of road consistently confuse AI drivers, automakers will lobby for ways to change these roadways. I suspect calls for AI regulation by people like Elon Musk are really attempts at regulatory capture to make automated vehicles possible and dominated by the first market entrants.
Absolutely. I see this here on hacker news with people excited about the notion of doing away with stop lights so that AI traffic can flow easily. People are completely ignoring the existence of pedestrians and cyclists. It would not be surprising to see a new crime of "hindering an autonomous automobile" be lobbied for.
It's only a matter of time before some stupid kids start jumping in the way of self-driving cars to make them brake hard. That's when we'll see the anti-pedestrian regulations appear, by my estimation.
Self driving cars are not magic and judging their braking distance is not much easier than with a human driver. I think kids trying that will quickly find out that it's not too hard to make an autocar hit a human. In other words, I think the problem would quickly solve itself.
In bad neighborhoods, the carjackers(might not want a autonomous car though) or robbers might just roll a beach ball into the street to stop the car or maybe just a cheap open umbrella. I can imagine those people who practice "rolling coal" doing the same thing to rich autonomous car riders or just throwing a beach ball out the window on an interstate. Lots of possibilities that security researchers will need to consider.
Rolling a ball on the street is probably enough to stop human drivers as well. Is carjacking that much of a problem where you live? I've never heard of anybody being carjacked here. I guess you could equip your car with one of these devices if you're concerned:
Um where do you think this is happening exactly that people know that beachball = carjacking? Based on the language used, I suspect you aren't in such an area and are coming up with an unrealistic scenario here.
Given that autonomous vehicles are supposed to lower the amount of traffic accidents, they should be programmed to exclude the lethal traffic accidents which are justified (basic on split-second information, live a little). At least beach balls will be relatively easy to recognize with computer vision. Problem is those pesky hoodlums will start dressing up as beach balls, throwing inflatable dolls in front of cars. And if you think that's a crazy idea, just wait and see what the actual future comes up with.
Honestly, the 21st century is basically clickbait: You won't believe what happens next!
Autonomous cars have a lot of data gathering sensors - even if the car doesn't know something is going on, logs of what happened will greatly aid the police in their efforts to track down the criminal.
If carjacking becomes a problem the cars will figure it out and start locking all the doors. Or if the car is unoccupied, let the carjaker in, then notify the nearest police station it is coming in with a criminal.
Maybe in situations where someone throws a beach ball in front of your car and your immediate split-second reaction is to turn your car into a murder weapon directed at the first "hoodlum" you spot who may or may not have thrown this ball.
That is a complex question. I see both sides of the issue and a lot of grey area between (I'd be shocked if I foresee even 10% of all the things philosophers will consider).
I'll just say that it is an option with some merit. Depending on the technology and the local situation I might or might not be in favor of it.
Not to mention all autonomous cars will undoubtedly have video evidence of what happened. The kids won't have a chance of proving their case if they get hit.
To be fair, regulations put in place because kids are jumping in front of cars could be anti-pedestrian, but it could also just be anti-fucking-idiot if drafted well.
i don't understand; it is already a violation of traffic law to jump in front of cars. if you survive the punishment meted out by physics, the cops can fine you. what change do you think would be made if folks started doing it more often?
In Chicago, at least, that would be implicitly legal, unless the car actually hits you:
9-60-060 Pedestrian crossing.
[...]
(b) No pedestrian shall suddenly leave a curb or other place of safety and walk or run into the path of a vehicle which is so close that it is impossible for the driver to yield.
Yes. If the car hits you because you stepped out in front of it and the car did not have time to stop while going the speed limit with a driver paying attention to the road, the pedestrian is at fault and can be ticketed. If you don't survive the encounter, at the very least the driver doesn't receive a ticket.
Your comment reminded me of a Sci-Fi novel I read when I was a kid, it was a mystery with the background being a fully automated world, a fairly central point was that all vehicles were self-driving. Standing in front of cars to stop them was somewhere between a fad and a minor rebellion against the status quo.
Ever since self-driving cars started being a thing I keep being reminded of this book, and am half-waiting for at lease that part of it to come true.
I've been searching for a bit now, and I still haven't find it. I think it was from the 70s or 80s.
Abruptly stepping in front of a vehicle is basically already illegal in the US. So no need to pass laws, except maybe to clarify the use of recordings from the vehicles as evidence.
Of course that won't stop the behavior completely but it won't be a free for all either.
Well, implicitly, I meant to hint that after one or two incidents, the lobby might convince the legislature to swing way too far in the other direction. (A very common tactic. You can't just hand liability from one party to another, not in an area people know and care about.)
Why jump in the way? All you need is a showstopper- a cheap chinese gadget that bounces back lidarlaserlight and radarwaves, ahead of time- thus creating the ilusion of a wall.
carjacking vehicles with constant internet connections and GPS's doesn't strike me as an extremely profitable maneuver.
the whole "car detects obstacle in an untrafficed area, stops, door is opened, passenger gets out, passenger gets back in, changes destination to a place not proximate to anywhere they've ever been before" process also sounds like the sort of thing that would justifiably raise a bit of a red flag. maybe not an automated call to 911, but it should probably dump all records to the cloud and trigger a call from an onstar operator or similar.
I think the idea is that they'd stop the car, incapacitate the driver, grab what they can and run like hell.
Besides, if we're talking about this happening in the "bad" parts of town, the car can call 911 and broadcast is position all it likes. There won't be any immediate response.
Finally, people who do this long enough will eventually figure out what to disconnect to allow themselves enough time to do what they want with the car- like today's car thieves do with modern car alarms.
They straight up throw a car in a cube van and drive it off to the chop shop. Not a huge leap to faraday-cage the transport vehicle.. probably acts as one already, come to think of it.
The irony of it all is that traffic signals were introduced to make traffic flow more easily! The primary function of the traffic signal lies not in the red period, but the green. Traffic signals are what lets you blow through intersections with bad visibility at 50 mph, rather thanhave to slow down to 15 and carefully check for cross-traffic.
Haha this is a great example of how North America can use old, tested and proven techniques to make our cities better but instead people are drawn to shiny, fanciful new technologies for a solution instead.
> People are completely ignoring the existence of pedestrians and cyclists.
just because the lights for cars are gone doesn't necessitate that the pedestrian crosswalks and buttons be removed. they might even work more effectively, if they can communicate with all the vehicles in the vicinity.
Much better would be smart traffic lights that allow pedestrians or other roads to cross when there are no cars approaching for n seconds. The number of times I've waited for several minutes at a stop light in the middle of the night...
You can have it both ways -- add a new light state (or just use flashing red all the time) that self-driving cars can ignore.
All other road users have to stop and the light cycles normally. (and during this specially triggered light cycle, even self-driving cars need to stop)
We could end up with roads dedicated to cars being separated from roads dedicated to pedestrians or cyclists. You could imagine if a city was designed from scratch the vehicles could move around almost in tunnel-like back-alleys, with periodic embarkation points into pedestrianized open plazas and boulevards. If Musk's reduction in cost of tunnelling is more than just a pipe-dream, then you might be able to retrofit something like that into an existing city.
But I agree that if autonomous cars come to pass, there will be a lot of pressure to go down the route you discuss.
This is the future of cities. Doing this would open the door for massive efficiency gains. Within these controlled "back-alleys," you could lay down metallic guides for the cars to glide down (dramatically reduced rolling friction losses), and couple vehicles moving in the same direction (dramatically reduced aerodynamic losses). Eventually you could electrify the whole thing so that cars wouldn't have to carry fuel while in the back-alley network
.
It needs a catchy name though. Back-alley is too harsh. Something that represents our aspirations for the cities of the future. I'm thinking "Metro."
I like that nobody caught on. But yes, that's basically a Metro system. The difference is that a Metro system doesn't allow divergence without transfer and it's a "mass transit" system. Autonomous vehicles provide an opportunity to blend controlled and uncontrolled transit paths, privacy, and the ability to diverge without transfer while increasing traffic efficiency, reducing the dangers of driving, and freeing up commuter time for other activities, just like mass transit.
But with a difference of point to point rather than line-based. Autonomous technology will probably mean a kind of union between private and public transport, and between road and metro rail.
> vehicles could move around almost in tunnel-like back-alleys, with periodic embarkation points into pedestrianized open plazas and boulevards.
Sounds an awful lot like a subway or lite rail system to me. I've never understood the fascination with self-driving cars and what they imply for PT--how is such a system superior to a well designed and maintained train system?
I just find it amusing because autonomous vehicles don't really solve any traffic problems. You still have too many cars on the highway at rush hour. Even if they move better, they won't move as well as a train system would for the same number of people in much less space.
I don't really see the difference. You have to return to where your car is parked, too. And you have to transfer your belongings from your car to e.g. your house and so on.
Yeah. Something like that would solve so many problems.
We could really hide the rails underground and at last free the roads again for people to use, like the article says it was in the 1920's. We could reduce automotive accidents to a bare minimum, which btw is the main selling point of self-driving cars, far as I can tell. We could reduce pollution by a factor of 10, probably, which is the much bigger problem that the industry isn't try to sell a solution for - because more cars are not exactly what you'd call a solution to it. We could make our cities places for humans, rather than noisy, dirty, polluting, often deadly machines. But, no. We gotta have more cars. Because you can't stop the march of progress.
> If certain intersections or sections of road consistently confuse AI drivers, automakers will lobby for ways to change these roadways.
I doubt that attitude will ever catch on. Maybe I'm being overly optimistic, but it seems to me that there's a healthy suspicion about AI drivers.
So far at least, the attitude taken by, well, everyone, is that AI drivers are untrustworthy until proven trustworthy. If AI drivers can't cope with the various challenges of real driving, then the AI drivers are to blame, not the external factors.
If they work well, AI drivers will be permitted to drive. If they do not, they will not be permitted to drive. At no point will they get to dictate what other road-users may do. Our Ludditism will see to that.
When 80-90% of car driving population have switched over to AI driven cars, the focus of Ludditism probably shifts to something more emerging technology and the great majority of people will just nod their heads in unison with those lobbying automakers.
It is not particularly difficult to imagine the general public swaying even to some opposite extreme, supported by some reasoning like "he probably did something wrong to get killed, the AI cars make very few mistakes."
Yup. The first thing I think about wrt to driverless cars being adopted en-masse is how trivially easy it would be to DDoS them.
Literally just stand in front of them and there will be nothing they can do. Once people get used to zero social repercussions (driverless cars will be empty probably 50% of the time en-route to pick someone up or go park themselves by my estimation) I imagine you will see things like certain folks simply crossing streets blindly comfortable in the fact that the cars will stop for them regardless of right of way.
Many will disagree that this will happen, but I think many underestimate the antisocialness of folks when there are no consequences.
And then you remember that as part of the passenger safety case for driverless taxis, there will necessarily be cameras and microphones and the ability to lock the doors and redirect the taxi to the nearest hospital or police station, right?
When we were building the Heathrow Pod[1] -- which is effectively an autonomous taxi system -- this was an objection that people raised all the time. In practice, it took approximately zero instances of bad passenger behaviour for people to catch onto the fact that the interior of an autonomous vehicle that can deliver you non-stop to airport security is really the last place on Earth that you'd want to engage in anti-social behaviour.
Presumably not if you own the car. Sex in public (including in buses, subways, etc.) is already illegal in many areas, and cab-company equivalents would presumably get to set their own rules as they do now.
> Cyclists may be restricted and anything else that confuses AI drivers.
I don't think that will ever happen. It may even be the opposite: AI will drive in a way it will always be able to stop if there's a possibility that there's someone behind some obstacle that may jump to the road at any moment.
Worst case scenario, beacons become mandatory. Cheap and anonymous beacons you have to carry when you're near a road. Smart phones may include such functionality.
This is the same United States where just about everyone already carries a tracking device by choice, where lots of people have installed 24/7 network-connected microphones in their homes, and where everyone believes you need ID to fly. This is the same United States where a common political argument is that of course ID should be required to vote because ID is required for everything else, and citizens should just carry ID. This is the same US where a special police force arrests and detains citizens and forces them to prove that they're actually citizens. It's been a long while since we actually objected to the "papers, please" world.
After all, these beacons are not mandatory - they're only needed if you want to use the roads as a pedestrian or cyclist. If you don't, you can drive your car like any real (read: non-poor) American, or use a taxi or bus. Pedestrians already aren't permitted on highways, what's so different about restricting pedestrians on surface streets?
And if you don't carry the beacon, that's not illegal, it's just your fault if you get hit by a car. It's not the government forcing you to carry it, it's algorithms and corporations, which makes it okay, right? If these beacons are produced by the free market, why should government regulation step in and stifle innovation?
I'm going to assume this is a good-faith argument and not a "bury them in BS" reply:
> This is the same United States where just about everyone already carries a tracking device by choice.
Sure, that's a very reasonable counter-point, however not everyone does.
> where lots of people have installed 24/7 network-connected microphones in their homes
Plenty of folks find asking a wiretap for pancake recipes fine, and there are plenty that balk at the thought. This Christmas my sister bought everyone Amazon's cute little NSA Listening Post™ - was fun how quickly the look of disgust crossed their face when I explained that every conversation would be recorded and store in Amazon's data centers... and probably a few three-letter agencies.
> and where everyone believes you need ID to fly. This is the same United States where a common political argument is that of course ID should be required to vote because ID is required for everything else, and citizens should just carry ID. This is the same US where a special police force arrests and detains citizens and forces them to prove that they're actually citizens. It's been a long while since we actually objected to the "papers, please" world.
There is an insanely large leap between having an ID for a few specific purposes and being mandated to carry a homing beacon.
> they're only needed if you want to use the roads as a pedestrian or cyclist.
The post I replied to did not state "to use the roads" - it stated general use of mandatory beacons. You're moving the goalposts.
> And if you don't carry the beacon, that's not illegal, it's just your fault if you get hit by a car. It's not the government forcing you to carry it, it's algorithms and corporations, which makes it okay, right? If these beacons are produced by the free market, why should government regulation step in and stifle innovation?
If the AppleMobile hits me because I don't carry an iPhone, you can best believe they will be sued into oblivion. Remember, this is litigious America!
The Evangelical community would surely denounce a mandatory tracking device as the work of the Antichrist, and I would love to watch politicians shit on that high-turnout demographic.
> The post I replied to did not state "to use the roads" - it stated general use of mandatory beacons. You're moving the goalposts.
Sorry - my reading was that it was in reply to "Worst case scenario, beacons become mandatory. Cheap and anonymous beacons you have to carry when you're near a road," and so I thought you meant "beacons that are mandatory if you're near a road and don't want to be hit." If you mean "beacons that are mandatory just to be a human in America at all," then sure, I think that's going to be a much harder sell, but I'd also argue that the post you were responding to doesn't require such beacons.
I suppose this all hinges on what "near roads" means.
To me, that includes pedestrians walking on a city sidewalk who might jaywalk as the TFA that started this whole conversation is talking about. Now the only way you can ensure folks have that device is to mandate for everyone. Of course in the US it isn't nearly as common, but I know plenty of city-dwellers without cars. IANAL but I'm having a hard time believing a mandatory beacon would pass Constitutional muster, let alone public support.
Again, it doesn't have to be mandatory from the government. It's just that the car companies guarantee they won't hit you if you have a beacon (i.e., they take on all liability), and they make no such guarantee if you don't (i.e., you or your bereaved family have to go fight them in court, have fun). They will have complicated spreadsheets internally calculating the "acceptable" level of casualties, where they can keep the public convinced that it's their fault for not carrying beacons, and not invest in improving their detection algorithms beyond that. (Engineers working for these companies will earnestly try to build the best algorithms they can, but senior management won't staff or fund these departments any more than necessary.)
I'm curious if you were around and leading a normal adult life before 9/11?
I think you'll find "land of the free, home of the brave" is more or less a cheap slogan once the chips are down and people are afraid.
Exceedingly few people in the US actually care about individual freedom or privacy. 9/11 drove that point severely home to me - those born in the 90's and later will never know the America I once knew, and I'm sure those born before Pearl Harbor and the like would say similar.
The erosion of personal freedom and the expectation of privacy just in my lifetime has been absolutely astounding. Watching basically everyone trade their freedom for temporary security.
Hyperbolic? A bit. But I think if you spend some moments of reflection you'll realize almost none of your fellow citizens actually care. They will play lip service at best until an event happens that scares them, and at that point you're the crazy privacy freak with obviously something to hide.
> every conversation would be recorded and store in Amazon's data centers
I agree with everything else you wrote (I think?), but I thought that the Echo only transmitted things it recognized directly following the activation phrase?
I might have exaggerated / misspoken in saying that, but at the same time it hinges on you trusting that the manufacturer is A) telling the truth and B) that device has not been compromised. It is fair to say that it is always listening. Also possible, is that a device positioned in the kitchen helping being used to lookup a recipe could overhear a sensitive conversation in an adjacent room.
I would bet that the Echo and devices like it are amongst the most monitored consumer devices in existence. Plenty of people either already have enough network monitoring to catch it misbehaving, or will install that monitoring just for the sake of catching it. In a weird sense it's like open source software in that regard. I haven't read all the code myself, I really on group knowledge to reassure me. Same for Echo. As a practical matter the Echo and other similar devices are difficult to turn into full-time listen-and-record devices unnoticed.
I think the GP meant that it's harder for _the vendor_ to do it, because there are assuredly many privacy-attuned nerds who would run wireshark a bunch on it and notice when the $ListeningPost becomes an always-on bug.
I don't think they meant to imply that it would be hard to to cause such behavior via malicious action by 3rd parties.
>I'm going to assume this is a good-faith argument and not a "bury them in BS" reply
That reads so snarkily. You announce that what the other guy wrote sounds like a lot of BS, or you strongly suspect it is (why mention that otherwise) but you will very generously act as though it's not. It's good to assume good faith, not so good to announce it like that.
> After all, these beacons not mandatory - they're only needed if you want to use the roads as a pedestrian or cyclist. If you don't, you can drive your car like any real (read: non-poor) American, or use a taxi or bus.
You just wrote two things:
1) Pedestrians and bike riders should wear beacons or aren't "real Americans".
Yes, that's what I meant to write. Note that those are not my personal opinions (as a pedestrian, cyclist, and non-car-owner, I'd like to think I'm as real an American as anyone else), but I do think they are common opinions in America.
Everybody misinterpreted what I've intended. SHORT RANGE BEACONS. Enough to be "seen" by car AI through obstacles. Here's the imaginary conversation between car and beacon:
- "Is someone behind that parked van?"
- "Yes"
- "Who?"
- "Mind your own business, just slow down in case I decide to jump to the road, ok?"
Good point... Well, that seems easy to police: Have one car patrolling for beacons not attached to what appears to be a person or bike. The only consequence of such troll beacons are cars slowing down on that point, that's all.
Would a beacon have to be a personally associated tracking device? I can imagine carrying a device that just broadcasts a generic "cyclist here, moving this speed and direction" signal, without identifying or being registered to me (bought with cash)
They don't need to mandate it, at least not at first. They can just incentivize it the right way and people will willingly jump on board.
"Install this app on your phone to make traffic lights recognize you when you approach them, for a timely shift to green light"
"Install this app to collect pedestrian-points, exchange points for prices and discounts!"
"Get a better insurance tier for installing this app which tracks your fitness. Do your daily 10.000 steps for a free <whatever>!"
Once enough people jump on board, and it's generally accepted as being "normal because everybody uses it", then you can mandate it and the few people left who resist can easily be branded as "paranoid tinfoil-hat people" to marginalize their opposition.
If you're relying on a smartphone to host a beacon, isn't that already a solved problem?
Smartphones are radio transceivers, I would imagine any anonymous beacon technology wouldn't be noticeably louder than what smartphones are already emitting.
Several states already have laws preventing that requirement. In those states, location-tracking must be opt-in, and must offer an economic benefit to the policyholder.
Any insurer which raises rates to pay for this would quickly lose most of its business unless they're (a) the only insurer in the state or (b) convince the rest of the insurers in-state to collude on pricing. The first isn't the case of any state with respect to auto insurance, and the second is a state and federal felony punishable by many years in jail for any executive stupid enough to participate.
And that's assuming they can get away with the rate increases in the first place. States like CA have insurance commissioners empowered to review and reject rate increases.
let's make walking and biking cool, but not at the expense of fast personal transport (cars).
the best solution isn't to try to slow down the cars but rather to make mixed-use urban areas the default so that walking and biking become the norm. you also get all kinds of other benefits with that (less traffic, healthier air, more fit people, etc)
i agree that driving qualifications should be more strict, but probably in a different dimension than you: test drivers on situational awareness and predictive decision making. fail people for both distracted driving and indecision (and lack of follow-through), as well as not communicating intent (e.g, signaling) to other drivers.
The concept of jaywalking is great for busy roads with high speed traffic. 30MPH+ (50KMPH+) roads should become much better and faster by reducing the amount of pedestrian crossing significantly.
Slower roads (max 20MPH/30KMPH) should be bicycle and pedestrian-first. Cars there should be "guests" catering to the slower non-motorized traffic.
This way we have the best of both worlds: nice & livable urban roads and faster driving in connecting roads.
yes, jaywalking laws are ok on higher speed roads.
my one pet peeve around that is that most californians don't respect the rule that any intersection of two city streets is a crosswalk, whether marked as such or not, and pedestrians crossing at a corner have the right of way. as soon as they start walking, cars must stop for them, even on larger streets (most drivers don't know/rememeber this and zoom dangerously close by).
i think that would be ok too, but the solution i prefer is to narrow residential street lanes (and on other urban streets as well).
all roads, but even residential streets, in car-centric cities like LA seem to be built wide enough to accommodate 747's with ease.
my proposal: rather than 12-15 foot widths, make urban residential street lanes 9 feet wide (cars are typically 6-7 feet wide, delivery trucks, 8 feet wide). replace parking lanes with slightly grade-separated (3-4 inches) bike lanes, leaving existing walkways for pedestrians only.
and make sure these narrow lanes have shoulder lane markings.
Grade separation would work in warm climates, but anywhere it may snow it is somewhat dangerous as hitting the hidden curb could send you out of control.
In one street of my city the parking was replaced with two way bicycle lanes, and there are plastic bollards to separate it from the road (which is probably around 9 feet now as you suggest). Compared to a grade separation that isn’t going to do much if you go over it, if you hit a bollard it’s going to leave a nice permanent mark on your car, so you are going to drive more carefully.
The only issue I’ve seen with this is if vehicles need to deliver to the shops and bars on this street, they have to park in the cycle lane (there is no rear access or parking).
I the city cars are already not much faster than bikes. For distances below 10km or so there is hardly any difference. During rush hours bikes are much faster.
I'd wager that you can reduce the top speed cars are allowed to travel significantly before the effective speed goes down by much, especially if you can improve traffic flow by e.g. vehicle-vehicle communication.
Bikes aren’t faster than cars for the elderly, the vision impaired, handicapped people or small children. I’m all for more bikes and more bike routes, but cars offer more independence for a lot of movement restricted people.
The vision impaired and small children should not be driving anyway. And depending on the "handicap" and the age-related abilities they may also be detrimental to safe piloting of a vehicle. The solution is public transport. (Or tandem bicycles).
Except that one of the big upsides of autocars is this demographic of people. And many (most) places in the US are not conveniently served by public transit. Heck, I live in one of the better places (Portland Oregon) and even in the core of the city it's going to be easily 2x as long to take PT anywhere vs a private car. IMO the big promise of autocars is the potential for eliminating mass transit along with all it's annoyances.
They can ride as passengers. You're arguing that tandem bicycles is a serious solution for the elderly or handicapped people? Is there a community where this is common?
I hope the vision impaired and small children aren't driving cars. And all of these groups would be helped much much more by not designing cities around cars, in the 95% of hours in the day where they are not in cars and need to navigate every day life.
A $60k retrofitted transporter van isn't exactly the definition of "independence".
Actually, there are many visually impaired people who can, and do, drive. As an example, I know a woman in her sixties who is classed as visually impaired. She can see well enough to get herself about but she can't make out peoples faces until she is fairly close and has to have a magnifying glass to read even fairly large text. She has been assessed as safe to drive, but is excluded from driving at night.
Well, there is a lot of rational thought (and frankly human lives) sacrificed at the altar of the personal automobile. Limousines with 200 hp, huge trucks with bull bars but can't see the pedestrian to the right, sound systems, entertainment systems, licenses that expire never, are checked never, 20% percent of space in SF for storing huge heaps of metal for >90% of the day but "there is no space" and people can't make rent, ..
Well, that depends on the local climate and the rider's constitution.
But my post was not about the relative merits of cycling versus driving. I simply wanted to rebut clairity's point that making cycling and walking safer necessarily makes driving slower.
Transportation cyclist in Texas here. The need for showering is overstated, I think. Even with the summers here I only know one cyclist who would take a shower after cycling, and they only do so for their training, not their commute as far as I know. If you ride at a comfortable pace and are in good shape, I find that a quick 5 minutes in the bathroom to freshen up is plenty, if it's even necessary. I usually wipe sweat off my head and chest and sometimes will change clothes. Outside of the summer these steps are rarely necessary, by the way.
Also, I think I would frequently (perhaps not every time, but at least 25% of the time) beat a driver to the door of my workplace from my apartment because of a combination of cars not actually being much faster than me due to traffic, stop lights, etc. and parking. My parking is so small that it's a lot closer to my building. This obviously depends on where you work, but here it seems to be a major factor. (On second thought this would also depend on which lot the driver would park in. Most would have a long enough walk to make cycling faster or at least about the same. I also haven't done this race, for what it's worth. Anyway, the point stands: travel times for cyclists are not necessarily worse than drivers.)
I had the time in mind. The ambiguity was a consequence of poor writing. I doubt this takes more than a minute or two in reality, and it's only necessary for perhaps a quarter of the year. Averages to around 30 seconds a day if it takes 2 minutes when necessary.
you really don't need to shower and change your clothes. You can if you want to ride your bike fast and push your physical limits, but generally casual biking won't make you sweat more than if you were walking.
What do you mean by casual biking? Walking home takes me a half hour or longer. Biking is less than 10 minutes according to my bike computer. Big time difference. Plus if it's hot I spend a lot less time in the sun on the bike, making biking less sweaty than walking. And I can carry a lot more cargo more comfortably.
We'll always keep roads with high speed limits just for cars (highways). But this expectation that you should be able to drive within your neighborhood at 50 mph is not sustainable.
>the best solution isn't to try to slow down the cars but rather to make mixed-use urban areas the default so that walking and biking become the norm.
hopefully you're not suggesting that cars should be travelling 50km/hr in mixed-use urban areas? Because "slowing down the cars" is a synonym for mixed-use area. That's the same thing, if you continue with car-only roads there's no need to slow down the cars.
This is actually happening. Portland has recently fallen in line with other cities, like Seattle, and lowered thousands of miles of streets from 25 MPH to 20 MPH.
Indeed, but when the automated system driving verifies real-time what the limits of the road are, it is trivial for an "Auto" to dispute and provide evidence.
The only thing these auto-scammers would get are human drivers not driving precisely and accurately.
Generally it only takes one driver wanting to stick to the limit for everyone else to do so too, because overtaking is contraindicated. Which isn't to say that it never happens :(.
I live in Edinburgh, which has been gradually introducing 20mph limits over the last couple of years, and I've actually taken to them much better than I'd expected to: they don't reduce my average speed all that much, especially as the arterial roads are still 30mph, and they're much more pleasant when I'm out of the car.
If they actually start issuing tens of thousands of speeding tickets as a result, someone is going to successfully use Oregon's initiative system to ban those cameras altogether.
That's interesting, because Cambridge, MA made a big deal about lowering the limit to 25 MPH in 2016 - which is still way too fast for most neighborhoods. I'd much rather see it taken down to 20 and even 15 for side streets. The funny thing though is, I haven't noticed one iota of difference in the speed that cars are actually traveling.
That seems to be happening, at least in some European cities. Paris for instance is (very) slowly chasing cars outside of the city. London has the congestion tax. The problem of course is that you need the infrastructure to replace all the cars and public transportation in Paris is close to saturated. Still, it's probably a move in the right direction IMO.
Sometimes it really is a zero-sum game. Pedestrians, bikers, personal cars, buses and trams compete for the same surface area, and out of those cars are the main cause of congestion due to their abysmal people/m^2 value.
> Now is an opportunity, perhaps first in ~100 years, perhaps last, to recover the streets for unaugmented humans: slow down cars in urban areas, increase qualifications for humans to drive, eventually ban human drivers entirely, leaving only automated vehicles with enough sensors and going slowly enough to reduce auto-related deaths for pedestrians and passengers alike to zero.
What about people who genuinely love to drive cars & ride motorcycles? Are we a danger this utopian self automated future? I just don't see it happening. There's so many people that are enamored with cars and motorcycles, who love the sensation, independence and freedom derived from the experience. Older manual Ferraris or air-cooled Porsches appreciate in value for a reason.
I almost lament at the future where an entire generation will grow up without experiencing such "archaic, manual and dangerous vehicles" because it will be too expensive, much as classic supercars will remain out of reach for majority of the population.
> What about people who genuinely love to drive cars & ride motorcycles?
I suspect we can find a place for them outside of our most densely populated urban cores. The popularity of cars isn't in itself a scandal. The scandal is that cars still enjoy undue priority in places like Midtown Manhattan, it's that urban neighborhoods were destroyed and divided by interstate highways, it's that most cities no longer function properly for the carless.
You can have high-throughout roads into cities, or hypergentrification in urban neighborhoods as people move closer to minimize transportation needs. The existing suburban masses are not going to vanish into thin air.
Personal cars are already banned in the centers of many cities. Or if not forthright banned, heavy congestion tolls levied. As it should be. It's about your freedom to drive vs. my freedom to not suffer from the negative externalities your driving causes.
As a hobbyist horseback rider, I can tell you what happened to people who genuinely love to ride horses: they became a hobby accessible to those with enough interest and money, and more common in rural areas (since as other comments have pointed out, horses - like cars - make much less sense in dense urban areas).
In my part of the rural US, one can get an isolated hour of horseback riding for $20 or so, or maintain a personal horse for a few hundred a month (if kept at a stable run as a business for that purpose; cheaper if you have your own property suitable for housing the horse).
I can see car garages and designated driving areas becoming the riding stables of the future.
I truly cringe at the thought of a ban on human drivers. There's a considerable amount of freedom in that ability to get in the car, and drive. Otherwise you're beholden to a machine, a corporation, and likely, a government. Trapped and unable to go anywhere unless they authorize it.
This is a huge deal to me that keeps me up at night.
I already see this with public transit. Public transport is a method of population control. You can keep classes of people confined to their neighborhoods simply based on how and where you choose to route buses/trains.
I can get in my car and go anywhere. That to me is the true spirit of America.
Remind me who's building the road infrastructure again?
Your freedom comes at a high price, direct and indirect. Countries with functioning public transportation are providing a lot of this freedom, to a broader population and at a fraction of the cost compared to personal cars.
Nothing stopping you from driving without a license. Sure, there are consequences to getting caught, but people drive all the time without a license. It's a bit different than not being able to catch the train or bus because the nearest stop is miles away.
I think the answer to pedestrians versus cars is the same as for cars versus trains: grade separation.
Turn the sidewalks into elevated walkways. Or use pedestrian tunnels underneath the road surface. Pedestrian crosswalks are a money-saving measure, ignoring one of the many externalities involved in automobile manufacture. Cars simply should not be driving on pedestrian walkways, and pedestrians should not be walking anywhere that does not have a significant physical barrier between them and the massive objects moving at high speed.
Elevated walkways? Half my city doesn't even have traditional sidewalks today, who's going to agree to pay to elevate them?
Around my area, people don't walk for pleasure, mostly, they walk because they're too poor for a car and the public transit system is terrible. Forcing them to climb stairs (assuming they're even physically able; a fair number of pedestrians near here are in wheelchairs) to get out of the way of cars is a non-starter.
You only need to grade-separate the crossings. There are plenty of examples of pedestrian overpasses for busy streets. You can get around a big area in lot of major cities without ever crossing a street at surface-level, but as already mentioned, it is expensive.
(Though I can't imagine people being happy about going up and down stairs, escalators, or elevators every time they want to cross a street.)
The necessity arises from the car-drivers, so you charge them for the pedestrian safety measures, just like you charge them for the creation and maintenance of limited-access highways.
Without crosswalks, there is no pedestrian-crossing phase needed in the traffic signals, so separating the two types of traffic simultaneously makes cars faster and pedestrians safer. The question really is how much drivers would be willing to pay to shave that last minute off their commute.
If you look at projects like Boston's "Big Dig", the answer is that they are willing to spend quite a lot [of other people's money].
Some traffic engineers¹ argue that the problem comes from humans adopting the mechanical role of a "driver" who is entitled to seek the quickest route by a set of rules which they understand and adhere to imperfectly. Instead of trying to encourage everyone to pretend to be a robo-driver they emphasize returning to self-evidently confusing and complex environments which put the onus on the driver to negotiate.
Digging out extensive underground road infrastructure is very expensive. Ask Boston residents if they'd like to do a second Big Dig on a much larger scale to bury the streets.
Elevated walkways would be vastly cheaper, but still infeasible on any current budget. You would end up having to rebuild the lobby of most buildings to be on the second floor, and probably turn the first floor into parking. It feels like one of those utopian ideals from the 50s or 60s that came out before people started thinking about the money.
On the other hand, the downtown area of Chicago was raised up from natural ground level in the 1850s.
Seattle was raised in the 1880s.
A portion of Atlanta was raised in the 1920s. They actually did rebuild new lobbies on the upper floors, and a lot of the old storefronts are still intact down below.
i lived in boston during (the tail end of) the big dig and remember the excess costs were largely due to corruption and maybe some incompetence. look at how much nicer it is there because of it. i'd vote for it again in a heartbeat (with some better processes and oversight of course).
but yes, underground infrastructure is expensive (maybe the boring company will help drive equipment costs down), but we're a rich nation and we want nice things. i think we can do it if we want to. plus, it creates working class jobs and that makes the economy go 'round.
This was tried on a fairly large scale in Milton Keynes, a new planned city in the UK founded in 1967. The traffic grid is high-speed (and roundabout-heavy), and there was an extensive network of grade-separated pedestrian and cycle lanes.
The results are... mixed. Some people love the place, but the grade separated cycle paths are not popular. Well worth looking at, if this is an area you're interested in.
Umm, sidewalks are a separate right of way with significant barriers (parked cars)? Most train crossings are at-grade and use simple traffic lights. In congested areas, they install gates that prevent cars from barreling into trains.
You're thinking of sidewalks in a city. I don't know about elsewhere, but more populous places in Metro Atlanta have long sidewalks running between subdivisions and retail with no more than a small bump between it and the road.
Sidewalks found in suburban sprawl are purely decorative. Only the very unfortunate walk there because everything is miles apart from each other, making a car mandatory. Meanwhile, even super-dense cities, where walking is obvious, have to fight the ridiculous notion that cars deserve 80% of the street right of way and stupendously subsidized street parking.
No, sidewalks in suburbia are super useful for walking between houses. They're not useful for shopping or commuting, but they let kids walk to their friend's house to play. Not every trip is a commute downtown.
Underground tunnels have a mythos of danger surrounding them. Somehow a tunnel as long as the width of the road is supposed to be a hiding spot for a mugger.
I think we should limit the mass of urban cars, so that they would not be heavier than a golf cart. This way, most accidents would be of no consequence (I remember an out-of-control cart in a football stadium that hit several people and none were hurt), and we could let even younger people drive.
It really makes no sense for an 80Kg person to go around in a 1000kg vehicle.
Mass is only part of the equation. If you move a golf cart at 45mph it's still going to do damage if it hits someone. We have to reduce speed as well and that means it takes longer to get to your destination. There are solutions there (mixed use/high density residential?) but it's not as simple as "smaller cars".
The 1000kg vehicle protects the 80kg person from harm because the 80kg person is not designed to go 100kph.
People tend to get less motion sickness when they are in control of the motion (i.e. drivers are not as susceptible to motion sickness as their passengers). So in this future world you might still be allowed to hold the steering wheel (if you paid for the option of having one in the car at all), but the car will take control from you immediately as soon as it decides that someone might be in danger (just like some present-day cars can auto-brake if they sense an impending collision).
I try to be careful in where I sit on the train so that I can keep my pain to just a mild headache and maybe a little sweating. Just because I don't vomit on you nor complain out loud about the suffering doesn't mean it isn't happening.
Motion sickness comes from the conflict between your eyes and the part of your ear which tells you which way is up and lets you stay in balance. It is way less of a problem in big vehicles where you have a lot of things and people to look at, which experience the same forces as you and so move the way your brain expects. Being in control of these forces is another way of aligning what you perceive and what your brain expects. Motion sickness is very real, don't discount it as a non issue.
Could a windowless vehicle help this? If the car is in control, there's really not any need for windows. I know we are a very long way from that level of autonomous cars, but I don't think motion sickness is the biggest hurdle we will need to overcome. There is room for a lot of creative solutions.
A windowless vehicle makes it worse, because you don't see any movement, you just feel it. As klibertp said....
> Motion sickness comes from the conflict between your eyes and the part of your ear which tells you which way is up and lets you stay in balance.
If there's no windows, then your eyes will say "We're not moving", but your inner motion sensor in your ear will say "We're definitely moving", and you'll create motion sickness.
It's for the same reason some people feel motion sickness in some VR apps that involve movement in the virtual world that doesn't match your real world movement, such as driving a car in VR. Your eyes say "We're moving", but your ear says "No we aren't!", and the discrepancy triggers motion sickness.
The appearance of control might be a better solution for that problem, as the many of the efficiencies gained with self driving cars are not just accidents avoidance.
Part of that makes sense - only automated vehicles will be a great boon. Going slower in already-congested urban areas is a non-starter; it doesn't solve the problem and makes it worse. Automation could tremendously improve the accident rate all by itself anyway.
And until ALL the human drivers are gone, automated ones are going to have to drive 'on eggshells' in case an uninstrumented car happens by. IF it were known for a fact that all cars were instrumented (so the software knew where ALL of them were) then we could even do away with stop lights etc - the cars could regulate intersections 'in the cloud'. And so on.
Which leaves the interesting problem - what do we do to cross the chasm - from all human drivers to all automated drivers? There are few good solutions in the middle.
I would be stunned to see this happen in the US. Culturally we are a long way from accepting such draconian ideas and I don't see that we're getting closer. And even as liberal as I am, I'm glad.
