Did no one stop to think about this? It is extremely far-fetched at best.
>safety regulations could be greatly relaxed.
No, at least not if the author's vision of 200mph average speeds is to be taken. When a mistake or malfunction happens at that speed, safety mechanisms will be imperative. Furthermore, having a mechanical car does not prevent: someone else running into you, a deer running in front of the car, etc.
> children could own cars
But they wouldn't, because the purchase would still be in the name of the parent. Furthermore, do you see parents sticking their 6 year olds on the subway just because they can? No. A very few do it and get ostracized by society.
> 3. The beverage industry will go.
False assumptions without supporting data, but I have no facts to counteract it.
>4. Speed limits will be unnecessary
Oh really? So we won't need limits for the existing drivers who aren't using driverless vehicles? How will the 200mph traveling car navigate around all the 60mph traveling ones? Furthermore, is every car going to be programmed to go slow in pedestrian zones? How do you enforce that without speed limits? The current Google Car wasn't jetting 200mph down the 101, it was driving under the speed limit in residential neighborhoods.
> The map will shrink greatly.
No. Fuel costs and traffic don't just magically disappear because of your fantasy land.
> Urbanization will reverse. Why pay $3,000/month for a flat in Manhattan when you can get from 100 miles upstate to work in 30 minutes?
I will. Just because you can live outside the city and travel to it at a faster rate does not make it a given that one would choose to. Urbanization has been the greatest driving factor of population trends in the last century. If anything, if what is proposed came to pass, you would see increased urbanization of small towns/suburbs.
>Airlines will be devastated. Why fly from New York to Chicago?
No. It will still be faster to fly. Are you serious? I mean gee why fly from New York to London when I can take a speed boat and have it take three days? I mean, seriously?
>9. Other forms of public transport won’t fare much better. A driverless cab won’t cost much more than a bus (which also will be driverless) but will be a hell of a lot nicer.
I'm sorry, I don't live in fantasy land where fuel costs suddenly become irrelevant. Fuel costs make up at least 16% of the overall cost. And there will still be a premium because people will be willing to pay it.
Yes, a driver less car will make someone a lot of money. Does this equate to the above points? No, the author's hypothesis has no basis in reality and no facts to back it up.
do you see parents sticking their 6 year olds on the subway just because they can?
Maybe not 6, but certainly 8 year olds are quite capable of using public transport and happily do so in many parts of the world. I know I was taking the bus to the library when I was 8 or 9 and the train into town when I was 10, and that wasn't strange in the slightest.
There's also a big difference between asking a child to navigate public transport and putting them in a trusted taxi to school, which is all an automated car is. If the trusted taxi is cheap enough, you'd only have to be confident that the child wouldn't hurt themselves en route.
I definitely agree with your sentiment, but then I go talk to parents. Parents are protective of their kids. Some are loose, but others are not. I don't have kids, but have worked with them extensively, so I will refer you to some discussions around the issue:
Regarding independence of young children, Penn and Teller did a fascinating episode about stranger danger. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfrSoiaLixg The full episode is on Netflix. You may not agree with all the ideas, but watching the full episode probably won't be boring to you if you feel strongly about this topic one way or another.
Some or all of it may end up being B.S. After all, where's my flying car. But much of it may end up being true. In 1975, someone told me that everyone would some day have their own, personal phone number, that was just for that person, and I thought that was pretty far fetched. Who really knows?
"Theories have four stages of acceptance:
i) this is worthless nonsense;
ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view.
iii) this is true but quite unimportant.
iv) I always said so."
- J.B.S. Haldane, 1963
"All great truths began as blasphemies" - George Bernard Shaw
Yeah, but how would you drive a driver-less car on a Somalian road, for example? Or through Cairo, or Istanbul, cities not known for their tight traffic regulations? After all we've had the Prius for ~10 years and it has failed to take over the world.
> No. It will still be faster to fly. Are you serious? I mean gee why fly from New York to London when I can take a speed boat and have it take three days? I mean, seriously?
I never consider flying from edinburgh to london, a journey I make fairly regularly. the flight takes 3/4 hours less, but door to door ends up around the same time, and is far far less comfortable than the train.
> I will. Just because you can live outside the city and travel to it at a faster rate does not make it a given that one would choose to.
I dont think he was trying to say every single person would move out of the city, just that it would be an attractive option for more people, which isnt really arguable in the hypothetical situation that commutes are fast and comfortable
Agreed, but I could imagine one implication that might be revolutionary for urban areas. With driverless cars, it might easily become much more economical not to own a car at all. Even when one does own a car, they don't have to park it within short walking distance form their destination, as the car parks itself.
Free from strict parking requirements and regualtions cities can become much more friendly to pedestrians, and buildings (especially medium-high ones) may become cheaper and more free in their design.
The problem of dealing with drivers in outdated cars with drivers could be fixed with dedicated lanes. Most large cities have dedicated lanes for 2+ passengers or buses, it should be doable to have them allow driver less cars too.
You really shouldn't complain about someone not having any facts and then fail to provide them yourself. Watch, I'll do the same thing:
>No, at least not if the author's vision of 200mph average speeds is to be taken. When a mistake or malfunction happens at that speed, safety mechanisms will be imperative. Furthermore, having a mechanical car does not prevent: someone else running into you, a deer running in front of the car, etc.
One would presume eventually there would be heavily monitored dedicated freeways for automated vehicles to travel. You could build a single lane tunnel between major cities even, since a single lane is all you need since accidents will become exceedingly rare.
Once you have a dedicated, single lane enclosed highway, a monitoring system can be aware of deer and outside complications and you can surely get up to high speeds.
>But they wouldn't, because the purchase would still be in the name of the parent. Furthermore, do you see parents sticking their 6 year olds on the subway just because they can? No. A very few do it and get ostracized by society.
You do realize how many school children take a school bus every day?
>Oh really? So we won't need limits for the existing drivers who aren't using driverless vehicles? How will the 200mph traveling car navigate around all the 60mph traveling ones? Furthermore, is every car going to be programmed to go slow in pedestrian zones? How do you enforce that without speed limits? The current Google Car wasn't jetting 200mph down the 101, it was driving under the speed limit in residential neighborhoods.
The OP is basically looking on a 25-50 year timeline not a 10 one. Think dedicated automated smart roadways and situations where "manual" driving is as rare as a VHS VCR today.
>No. Fuel costs and traffic don't just magically disappear because of your fantasy land.
You're assuming today's fuel costs. Future cars will be much more efficient, and will be electric so the delivery mechanism will be more efficient as well. Also note automated drivers will be able to use the transmission much more effectively, since they'll be able to be aware of the layout of the roadway and adjust gears accordingly.
> I will. Just because you can live outside the city and travel to it at a faster rate does not make it a given that one would choose to.
He never said nobody will want to live in the city. He said that "commuting" as we know it will be a thing of the past, as you won't be actually losing any time to transportation. So, many people that currently would dread living so far away (but would love to for better scenery, access to schools, etc.) due to the horrific commute may reconsider it once they can actually be productive during the trip. (Not to mention the trip will be a lot faster than it is today for the reasons above.)
Edit: Oh, and to his point about flying. If you do the math, I think you'll find at 200mph door-to-door time between many cities is close to what you'd expect for a flight if you take into account time traveling to and from the airport and time in the airport. This, combined with the fact that traveling by automated luxury car will certainly be more enjoyable than traveling by coach, even if the trip is slightly longer, will make an interesting tradeoff between air and road appear.
> since a single lane is all you need since accidents will
> become exceedingly rare.
So you've got a single-lane highway, packed with cars going 200mph? Accidents will be exceedingly rare? No matter how rare that accidents end up being, they will be national (if not international) news stories just due to the amount of cars/injuries/deaths involved. How many people are willing to hop right back onto a theme-park roller coaster right after one of the cars flew off and killed everyone riding in it? Terrorist attacks on the level of 9/11 are exceedingly rare, but that doesn't stop all kinds of silliness from spawning from it.
> Future cars will be much more efficient, and will be electric so
> the delivery mechanism will be more efficient as well.
This is like the assumption that there is no need to spend all kinds of time worrying about alternative fuel sources, because as the price of oil goes up people will just auto-magically develop new and more efficient fuel sources. It's a law of nature, don't-ya-know! Housing prices will always keep rising. The economy will always keep growing. Trends are always positive, never negative. Inflection points are a thing of the past! We've optimized them out of the system. They now only exist in history books.
You're not being fair to the GP. The things mentioned are just contemporary common sense about the obstactles. If you want to predict the future, I'd say the onus is on you to refute those points rather than the GP providing specific reasoning why all his points won't be overcome.
This all basically comes down to, if one assumes all these things about the future, then the author's claims hold merit. The author should have made that disclaimer if that were the case. Throwing everything into assumptions isn't the way to go. As for facts, especially regarding the idea of 200mph door-to-door I do some in another reply: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2065066
However, the refuting facts should really come from a scientific study, not from me. I'm sure Google is studying such things right now. I'd of course be glad to do some research for some more factual assertations and put it into a blog post if I thought I was going to have a top-voted HN link to it.
Contrary to what you may think, I was being thoughtful of this but did not think it required rehashing. You however, exactly reiterate my point, you didn't do any due diligence, just put certainly in italics. How about some facts instead?
Simply go to maps.google.com and search for Chicago, IL to New York, NY. Ok, 14 hours trip currently. Now, let's take a premise of 200 miles per hour. Now, tell me, can you travel 200mph anywhere in Chicago? Can you travel 200mph in Manhattan or anywhere close to it? No. Does your car contain enough gas to go 800 miles w/o stopping. Doubtful, especially at those speeds where your mpg is going to drop off drastically. Even assuming you could achieve 200mph sustained on the interstate you still have toll booths, traffic, weather, construction, curves, exits, onramps, and other real-world traffic scenarios to deal with. This is not a flying car, this car travels on the ground like the rest of them. At the absolute very best scenarios you are still looking at 5 hours to make the trip. I would argue a detailed scientific study on the feasibility of it would put the actual travel time closer to 7 hours even with a car that had a potential of 200mph.
Compare this to flying. The trip takes approximately 2 hours (please check any airline site so you can see for yourself). Let's be generous and add 1.5 hours on the before side and .5 hours on the after side to give us a rough approximation of total travel time from home to destination. That is a total of 4 hours.
The airplane wins hands down. Try thinking about the problem instead of going with assumptions.
I wrote a big counter-argument before remembering my oft-ignored rule about avoiding stupid arguments online. My apologies for wasting your time. I'm sure we both have better things to do.
I get to the airport 2 hours early, plus 30 minutes driving time to and from the airport. So that puts total flying time at 5.5 hours. Add in invasive airport security, baggage fees, entertainment fees, wifi fees, parking fees, etc. For a family of 5, flying costs thousands of dollars. And once you get there, you don't have a car so you have to rent one!
We're not talking about this next year, we're talking decades away. Toll Plaza's, seriously? We have Ez Pass already, you don't think that can be upgraded to handle faster cars?
If it was between paying more for 5.5 hours of flying and paying likely less for 5, 6 or 7 hours of having a car drive me, I would choose the car every time. Heck, if the car can only average 100MPH, I'd leave at 10pm and sleep the whole way!
Just want to point out, regarding gas mileage: If the cars have a dedicated lane, that lane can have a power line running through it. You're basically talking about personal light-rail at that point, for which going 200mph is a solved problem.
>safety regulations could be greatly relaxed.
No, at least not if the author's vision of 200mph average speeds is to be taken. When a mistake or malfunction happens at that speed, safety mechanisms will be imperative. Furthermore, having a mechanical car does not prevent: someone else running into you, a deer running in front of the car, etc.
> children could own cars
But they wouldn't, because the purchase would still be in the name of the parent. Furthermore, do you see parents sticking their 6 year olds on the subway just because they can? No. A very few do it and get ostracized by society.
> 3. The beverage industry will go.
False assumptions without supporting data, but I have no facts to counteract it.
>4. Speed limits will be unnecessary
Oh really? So we won't need limits for the existing drivers who aren't using driverless vehicles? How will the 200mph traveling car navigate around all the 60mph traveling ones? Furthermore, is every car going to be programmed to go slow in pedestrian zones? How do you enforce that without speed limits? The current Google Car wasn't jetting 200mph down the 101, it was driving under the speed limit in residential neighborhoods.
> The map will shrink greatly.
No. Fuel costs and traffic don't just magically disappear because of your fantasy land.
> Urbanization will reverse. Why pay $3,000/month for a flat in Manhattan when you can get from 100 miles upstate to work in 30 minutes?
I will. Just because you can live outside the city and travel to it at a faster rate does not make it a given that one would choose to. Urbanization has been the greatest driving factor of population trends in the last century. If anything, if what is proposed came to pass, you would see increased urbanization of small towns/suburbs.
>Airlines will be devastated. Why fly from New York to Chicago?
No. It will still be faster to fly. Are you serious? I mean gee why fly from New York to London when I can take a speed boat and have it take three days? I mean, seriously?
>9. Other forms of public transport won’t fare much better. A driverless cab won’t cost much more than a bus (which also will be driverless) but will be a hell of a lot nicer.
I'm sorry, I don't live in fantasy land where fuel costs suddenly become irrelevant. Fuel costs make up at least 16% of the overall cost. And there will still be a premium because people will be willing to pay it.
Yes, a driver less car will make someone a lot of money. Does this equate to the above points? No, the author's hypothesis has no basis in reality and no facts to back it up.