Autonomous vehicles, planes and high speed rail

[FlyerInHi]

Yeah, but If you say vehicles can’t be autonomous anywhere unless they have a backup driver, then you’re making the technology more expensive and you’re shrinking the market.

You need the effective hand of government to carve out markets and get rid of the chaos autonomous vehicles can’t deal with yet.

You need the invisible hand of the market and the effective visible hand of government, for in a 2 handed world, the single handed is handicapped.

[FlyerInHi]

CNBC on why the US has no high speed rail and shit hole rail service.

[The-Shoveler]

We need Metro Rail!!, HSR not so much.

I need to go to the bay area maybe once every two years.
The plane works.

[temeculaguy]

My vote is on autonomous electric cars and solar. While I have not taken the plunge on EV or Solar I’m watching both carefully and have a 3-5 year range in which I’ll probably do both. It is a tricky math question to determine rooftop solar needs without knowing the draw of the car(s). Autonomous is something I’m somewhat at the mercy of technology and the main benefit of traffic relief depends on mass acceptance, so that may come a little later but I see it as the people’s choice here. Ultimately it should eliminate traffic when fully implemented. Rail and busses will never work here unless something like a hyperloop with individual cabins can be developed. I’ve been on mass transit in many cities in the US and abroad and it will never work here because of our liberties, freedoms and rights. The homeless and mentally ill are not/rarely forcibly institutionalized here and I believe never will be again. It’s trending towards addicts not being incarcerated either. Those are your mass transit fellow riders. Plus germ phobia seems to get worse every year, people wipe down their shopping carts nowadays, at medical offices and hospitals people wear medical masks as self protection as opposed to the sick wearing them to prevent contagion. Sharing space/seats/air will not increase, it will decrease. It hasn’t hit air travel due to the costs being prohibitive for most and the live attendants instilling order. This isn’t a personal preference, it’s an observation.

I believe a friend of mine summed it up best when I told him that if we get autonomous cars you can drive to work and while at work your car can work as a driverless uber until you need to go home. Once you get home, it can go to work while you sleep. His response was, “no thanks, I don’t need some strangers boogers under my seat or some knuckleheads unwashed hands on my steering wheel after he scratched his balls, let alone 50 of them a day. I also don’t share my toothbrush or underwear while I’m not using them”

Home solar, EV cars and autonomous driving solves all the problems with mass transit at least within a few hundred miles and air can handle the long distances.

[The-Shoveler]

EV car prices, charge times still need to come down quite a bit IMO (and a heck of a lot more charging stations before we can really see mass acceptance).

Currently I think a EV Leased car would work well if you only need to commute say less than 30 miles one way.

I Think we need some time to see how well these batteries hold up over time, not really saving the environment or anything else if you must replace the batteries very 6-8 years.

[FlyerInHi]

i support metro rail also.

Can you imagine a 30 mile commute? That’s 50km. Most of the world would think that as crazy!

[The-Shoveler]

Average commute time in LA is 55 minutes (or about an hour).

I am going to say that is probably about 30 miles.

SD is probably a little less that that.

(I actually think the numbers above are low and in reality are probably considerably more).

There are probably a lot more of these stories out there as well (below).
Nurses resort to extreme commutes for better pay
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/nurses-resort-extreme-commutes-better-pay-jaimy-lee/

[Myriad]

[quote=FlyerInHi]CNBC on why the US has no high speed rail and shit hole rail service.

https://youtu.be/Qaf6baEu0_w%5B/quote%5D

So the episode didn’t really touch on population density and transit interconnect. They indirectly touched on the subject of reach-ability of users to transit.
But I thought the best was the CA HSR PM who was really super positive on the building of a 165 mile segment to reach 3M people for $30-50B.

Building rail is expensive in the US compared to other countries. With the longer distances in the West and lower pop density, the costs become extremely prohibitive. DC-PHL-NYC-BOS corridor, Houston-Dallas, and South FL are all great candidates for a US version of HSR.
SF-LA – not so much. The problem is once you get to LA, your mass transit options are limited. For a family of 4 not going to DT SF/LA, it’s cheaper and easier to drive.
The only way this is happening is if it’s underground or in the air using a new form of transportation (i.e hyperloop)

As for making CA cities more dense, that’s something that will take decades to occur. At least to make cities as dense as other cities in Europe or Asia that can sustain mass transit. Yeah, there will be some places that will reach it sooner rather than later, but getting projects approved takes a long time due to the process of getting projects approved (And that’s with a city council that ignores local homeowners). (I’m on one of the SD Community Planning Councils) How many decades will it take to get a SR-56 to I-5 interchange, lol?

[FlyerInHi]

[quote=temeculaguy]My vote is on autonomous electric cars and solar. While I have not taken the plunge on EV or Solar I’m watching both carefully and have a 3-5 year range in which I’ll probably do both. It is a tricky math question to determine rooftop solar needs without knowing the draw of the car(s). Autonomous is something I’m somewhat at the mercy of technology and the main benefit of traffic relief depends on mass acceptance, so that may come a little later but I see it as the people’s choice here. Ultimately it should eliminate traffic when fully implemented. Rail and busses will never work here unless something like a hyperloop with individual cabins can be developed. I’ve been on mass transit in many cities in the US and abroad and it will never work here because of our liberties, freedoms and rights. The homeless and mentally ill are not/rarely forcibly institutionalized here and I believe never will be again. It’s trending towards addicts not being incarcerated either. Those are your mass transit fellow riders. Plus germ phobia seems to get worse every year, people wipe down their shopping carts nowadays, at medical offices and hospitals people wear medical masks as self protection as opposed to the sick wearing them to prevent contagion. Sharing space/seats/air will not increase, it will decrease. It hasn’t hit air travel due to the costs being prohibitive for most and the live attendants instilling order. This isn’t a personal preference, it’s an observation.

I believe a friend of mine summed it up best when I told him that if we get autonomous cars you can drive to work and while at work your car can work as a driverless uber until you need to go home. Once you get home, it can go to work while you sleep. His response was, “no thanks, I don’t need some strangers boogers under my seat or some knuckleheads unwashed hands on my steering wheel after he scratched his balls, let alone 50 of them a day. I also don’t share my toothbrush or underwear while I’m not using them”

Home solar, EV cars and autonomous driving solves all the problems with mass transit at least within a few hundred miles and air can handle the long distances.[/quote]

Interesting observations.

Change the urban architecture and you will change the culture. Architects will tell you.

The addicts and the lowlifes loitering about are a western cultural deficiency. It means that society is creating addicts and letting them twist in the wind.

I remember when bangkok opened their skytrain and MRT, haters were saying that they would never keep them clean. Well, their “third world” system is cleaner than anything we have in USA. And Thailand doesn’t have the money to institutionalize the gangsters and addicts. The USA incarcerates the highest population outside of North Korea and a few other countries. That clearly points to policy failures and a culture that encourages addictive and criminal behavior. We need to look in mirror instead instead claiming freedom and liberties.

I love the idea if my car autonomously working Uber while I don’t need it. It like owning an income producing asset. In a productive capitalist society, you don’t want any idle assets. If possible, a factory should operate 24/7. Same goes for houses and cars.

Economists would say idle assets are not generating “utils” (units of happiness or utility) for society.

In some countries, better off people own cars with chauffeurs. When they don’t use their cars, the autos and drivers are for hire to paying customers. Win win!

[FlyerInHi]

[quote=The-Shoveler]Average commute time in LA is 55 minutes (or about an hour).

I am going to say that is probably about 30 miles.

SD is probably a little less that that.

(I actually think the numbers above are low and in reality are probably considerably more).

There are probably a lot more of these stories out there as well (below).
Nurses resort to extreme commutes for better pay
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/nurses-resort-extreme-commutes-better-pay-jaimy-lee/%5B/quote%5D

Long commutes are a problem with the urban architecture (planning, etc. ). It should not be common.

I know a person who is a professor in NJ with a 10 min commute. The spouse has a grueling daily commute into Manhattan but that should be the exception rather than the rule. Long commutes are very inefficient and unproductive.

I lived in Thailand as a kid and our family lived in a suburban style house, very much like an a suburban American house, complete with American appliances and Carrier AC. The neighborhood has long be razed to make way for condos and high population density. I don’t get why the same can’t be done here. We claim to live in a market economy, but we don’t let the market decide density. Instead we have urban planning akin to communist style decades long plans.

[svelte]

The transition to autonomous vehicles will be long and gradual. We’re not going to have self driving cars that don’t need a person in the driver’s seat for a long, long time no matter what Tesla wants you to think.

The first increment will be cars that can drive themselves on specific, well controlled roads. Perhaps toll roads or HOV lanes. Next, in very well mapped geo-fenced areas, but that may require some sort of street to car communication to bring the safety factor high enough to implement. In both of these situations, there will still need to be a driver ready to take control once the vehicle leaves the well controlled area.

But to be able to program a car to understand all situations that the human mind can interpret instantaneously? We’re a long way from that.

Have you watched the video of an autonomous car following a non-autonomous car down the freeway? The front NA car swerves suddenly into the next lane to avoid a stalled car, and the A car hits the stalled vehicle. If the second car had been a human, the driver may have been able to look thru the front car to see the upcoming stalled vehicle, or at a minimum the driver would likely have swerved just assuming the front car saw something bad.

That is just one example, but there are other situations that humans can interpret but will be very difficult to implement in software.

Maybe I’ve got autonomy on my mind because I read today that a couple made the first porno in a Tesla running on autopilot.

https://www.businessinsider.com/couple-shot-porno-in-moving-tesla-on-autopilot-2019-5

[FlyerInHi]

[quote=svelte]The transition to autonomous vehicles will be long and gradual. We’re not going to have self driving cars that don’t need a person in the driver’s seat for a long, long time no matter what Tesla wants you to think.

The first increment will be cars that can drive themselves on specific, well controlled roads. Perhaps toll roads or HOV lanes. Next, in very well mapped geo-fenced areas, but that may require some sort of street to car communication to bring the safety factor high enough to implement. In both of these situations, there will still need to be a driver ready to take control once the vehicle leaves the well controlled area.

But to be able to program a car to understand all situations that the human mind can interpret instantaneously? We’re a long way from that.

Have you watched the video of an autonomous car following a non-autonomous car down the freeway? The front NA car swerves suddenly into the next lane to avoid a stalled car, and the A car hits the stalled vehicle. If the second car had been a human, the driver may have been able to look thru the front car to see the upcoming stalled vehicle, or at a minimum the driver would likely have swerved just assuming the front car saw something bad.

That is just one example, but there are other situations that humans can interpret but will be very difficult to implement in software.

Maybe I’ve got autonomy on my mind because I read today that a couple made the first porno in a Tesla running on autopilot.

https://www.businessinsider.com/couple-shot-porno-in-moving-tesla-on-autopilot-2019-5
[/quote]

Sounds perfectly reasonable. But what will we do if China moves faster and gets way ahead in implementation, commercialization and patent technology? The same issues are happening in AI and 5G. We are ahead in research so those are races for us to lose (and we would deserve to lose, if we do).

BTW, Tesla are hedging their bets.

[FlyerInHi]

Next generation trains in the northeast corridor to appeal to millennials. Built by the French.

Reliable schedules. That’s a novelty!

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amtrak-new-acela-trains-first-look/

[FlyerInHi]

Wow! 600km maglev train.
Basic research is one thing. Building it is another. I support whoever brings technology into reality for human use.

https://www.cnn.com/travel/amp/china-highspeed-maglev-prototype/index.html

[FlyerInHi]

In China, they have a slide to get out of the elevated train station. What an innovative idea. I love it.

[Author]

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