Nah, it’s the last 20 % that are so hard. Roads with bad markings, custom traffic signs, construction sites with confusing routing, police giving directions, dirt roads, parking on private property and all the myriad of other non-standard situations that we can easily navigate without even thinking.
Don’t forget weather!
Pedestrians and cyclists are also a thing. I do not trust any type of vehicle around them.
I do not trust cyclists around vehicles either. I hope everyone can agree for better cycling roads, separated from motorized vehicle roads.
I do not trust cyclists around vehicles either.
That’s cute, but the untrustworthiness really only flows in one direction, and it’s not the one you wrote. There’s a reason roads never needed traffic signals or a whole bunch of rules until the automobile showed up, and why multi-use paths closed to automobiles still don’t.
Everyone makes mistakes. Cyclists and pedestrians are just as imperfect as drivers. I can not trust a cyclist or pedestrian to not maneuver in front of my car unsafely the same way I can not trust other drivers to always be safe. That is literally the entire point of “defensive driving.”
And what about the Pedestrians?
And cyclists…
Roads are for cars.
I assume /s
Yeah not trying to be a douche, but leave that thought in the shower ;)
Well, yeah, human drivers are the real problem. They’re really bad at it - easily distracted, use poor judgment, have terrible sensors, and currently cause over 40,000 deaths per year in the US alone.
Replacing any number of them with objectively safer drivers would make the roads inherently safer.
Yes, autonomous vehicles will probably be better drivers than the a stage human when the technology is more mature. As far as I know, in an idealized futuristic city any cars would be autonomous. The issue is that they’re all cars, and so have some inherent problems with efficiency and safety that can’t be fixed by self driving.
The real solution to unsafe roads is trains. Worried about pedestrians? Put the trains underground or up high, where pedestrians aren’t. Crashes? You rarely have two trains in the same place at the same time. Drunk/reckless/otherwise stupid drivers? Trains have much more well trained and vetted drivers. And that’s not talking about all the efficiency side that trains are really good at.
As far as I know, in an idealized futuristic city any cars would be autonomous.
Neo: “What are you trying to tell me? That any cars would be autonomous?”
Morpheus: “No, Neo. I’m trying to tell you that in an idealized futuristic city, you won’t need cars.”
Cars can still address the last-mile problem
So do bikes, trams, buses, footpaths…
So can apartments
You’d probably also need infrastructure built for autonomous cars, which might not happen.
They could build these like metal lines that go everywhere to guide the vehicles and call them rails
Probably too much infrastructure though
Great shower thought, but as someone who has comfortably rid in Waymos and Teslas the reality is different.
It’s always weird to see the automatic car debate happen on the internet, and then hop in my friend’s car and it drives us from work to his house 40 minutes away without needing any human intervention
It will be an even bigger game changer when all vehicles are self-driving and centrally controlled. No need to stop at intersections. The system will calculate the trajectory of every vehicle so that they won’t crash. A lot of traffic? The system will route different vehicles to different streets.
