this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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Maybe if we just, I dunno, funded more mass transit and made it more accessible? Hell, trains are way better at being automated than any single car.
That works in a city, it's not viable to have mass transit in every place, you still need cars for total areas
Those areas don't really have silly things like pedestrains, though. They're also far too small of a market to design self-driving cars for.
There are areas that are not rural that need cars, because the public transit sucks.
There's no fast way to go to San Jose where my friend lives from Sunnyvale where I'm staying.
Walking is 3 hours, but walking to a train stop and then walking from the train stop would be about 2 hours. Buses don't connect well either, so it's still like 2 hours after you do all the transfers.
Or I could pay $17 for a Lyft and make it there in 20 minutes.
Yes, public transit should be better in the suburbs, but you're talking about a very large SF bay area that needs better connections from everywhere to everywhere
The SF Bay area needs more funding for transportation, period. The roads seem to always be under construction and the traffic lights just spontaneously stop working sometimes.
Yes, but also improve kid and dark skin people detection tools, they don't work just for driving cars. Efficient, fast and accurate people detection and tracking tools can be used in other myriad of stuff.
Imagine a system that tracks the amount of people in different sections of the store, a system that checks the amount of people going in and out of stores to control how many are inside... There's a lot of tools that already do this, but and they works somewhat reliably, but they can be improved, and the models being developed for cars will then be reused. I+D is a good thing.
An AI that can follow black people around a store? You might be into something.
The trains in California are trash. I'd love to see good ones, but this isn't even a thought in the heads of those who run things.
Dreaming is nice... But reality sucks, and we need to deal with it. Self driving cars are a wonderful answer, but Tesla, is fucking it up for everyone.
Strongly disagree. Trains are nice everywhere in the world. There’s no reason they can’t be nice in the US. Cars are trash. Strip malls are trash. Giant parking lots are trash. The sky high cost of cars is trash. The environmental impact of cars is trash. The danger of cars is trash. Car centric urban planning is trash.
Self-driving cars are safer… than the most dangerous thing ever. But because cars are inherently so dangerous, they are still more dangerous than just about any other mode of transportation.
Dreaming is nice, but that’s all self-driving cars are right now. I don’t see why we don’t have better dreams.
A fellow fuckcars fan. Also important to remember that the US has been systematically lobbied to make public transport, trains, etc way worse.
Chiming in from Seattle, we just built light rail up here and it's just awful how slow they made it. It has its own track... It's insane that it's slower than driving in traffic. But they wanted to serve every neighborhood possible instead of realizing trains are not a last mile solution unless you build cities specifically around it.
Reporting from Vancouver, Canada. Our skytrain system is very fast and reliable. Comes every 1-3 minutes. I’ve never heard any complaints.
I looked this up and I was surprised to learn that the skytrain speed is 25-40km/h (20-25mph) while Seattle’s Link transit goes 35-55mph. That sounds very fast for a city transit system! Are you sure it’s slower than a car in traffic, with all the stop lights and rush hour? I’m skeptical but I’ve never used Link.
Google maps right now puts the light rail at one hour on light rail for what is a 23 minute drive. Last time I rode it, it took over an hour and a half for that same trip, and that's excluding the time waiting for the train.
Trains in California suck because of government dysfunction across all levels. At the municipal level, you can't build shit because every city is actually an agglomeration of hundreds of tiny municipalities that all squabble with each other. At the regional level, you get NIMBYism that doesn't want silly things like trains knocking down property values... And these people have a voice, because democracy I guess (despite there being a far larger group of people that would love to have trains). At the state level, you have complete funding mismanagement and project management malfeasance that makes projects both incredibly expensive and developed with no forethought whatsoever (Caltrain has how many at-grade crossings, again?).
This isn't a train problem, it's a problem with your piss-poor government. At least crime is down, right?