this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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Like automated driving? Shit isn't working, isn't even close to working to the degree that advocates said it would ten years ago. Meanwhile, public transportation is a tried and true approach that actually fixes issues. It's vastly more energy and resource efficient and does not create socio-economic barriers to mobility.
Yards make sense and that stuff actually is in operation in many places, it's a controlled environment. You'll be hard-pressed to find a modern container terminal without autonomous vehicles.
Long haul does not make sense as that's train territory. Which of course can also drive automated which, unlike self-driving cars, actually a mature technology. Drivers are still used long-haul though because there's need to do non-driving tasks that AI can't do, automated trains are a metro thing.
Last-mile makes approximately zero sense. Parcel pickups are the right solution for standard service and for premium service AI generally won't be capable enough for decades if not centuries to come. You don't want a pharmacy to wait for life-saving medicine because someone put a traffic cone on the hood.
It is working, Waymo is operating taxi services in two cities successfully, and yeah, it's turned out to be a harder problem than initially realized, so were smartphones, now they're everywhere. You know what's a harder problem that will take longer than decades? Reorienting all of society around villages and public transportation and forcing people to move and abandon their cottages.
No one's arguing against public transportation. Stop trying to make it sound like this is a car vs. public transportation thing, when it's people trashing autonomous cars and not other cars.
And because trains don't get you to the last mile, roads do.
Again, you'd still have a delivery person for critical deliveries, they just wouldn't be driving. If someone asshole wants to stop ambulance right now they can too.
It's not that hard and no you don't need to re-do the whole country to make a massive impact. Making a random US city walkable would take like five years max if you actually set your mind to it.
Then why are you bringing up strawmen "but we need delivery vans" when I was specifically talking about individual transportation being bad? Ten cars getting replaced by a car share is good, one car getting replaced by one autonomous car is bullshit: It's not self-driving that will address the systemic issues with transportation. Just as many cars on just as impassable roads won't make them safer for pedestrians. I get being excited by a technology but it's far from a silver bullet, on its own it addresses quite literally nothing of relevance.
As do collect taxis. Do I have to repeat that five times more.
If someone wants to stop an ambulance the driver will go around them, or go out and curse their ass off until they move, or right-out push their car out of the way (because yes with blue lights on you have the right to ram, over here, the offending driver will be sent a bill for the repair of the ambulance and face criminal charges). Good luck teaching an AI to make those calls.
And you'll still have drivers, and it will still be safer if they were autonomous.
So now every technology improvement needs to solve every single systemic problem or it's not worth pursuing? That's your argument? Autonomous vehicles don't solve every transportation problem, they solve the problem of drivers regularly killing and maiming people.
Oh wow, the literal millions of road deaths every year are now "nothing of relevance".
No they're not. Not for the distances covered in many rural areas. Try and wrap your brain around the fact that not everywhere is Europe where there's millions of people packed into a postage stamp.
You literally quote the answer to that:
(Answer merged to here)