Seems like safety won't be an issue in the future with self driving cars, because they will all be standing still in a traffic when we all use them

8 days ago by AloneDownUnder to c/showerthoughts

So self driving car brands are currently in the process of offering subscription based self driving features.

Soon these subscriptions will be cheap enough for everybody to abandon public transport and get into their self driving cars instead.

This means that everybody will be in their cars and it will create the biggest traffic jam in human history!

And finally, self-driving cars will be totally safe and able to drive completely unsupervised! While standing still in traffic going an average of 5 km/h...

It will be beautiful (/s)

Munkisquisher 32 points 8 days ago

This is a much talked about risk in urban planning, where empty cars going slowly around inner suburbs will be cheaper than parking costs. The "zero occupant problem"

Congestion pricing, taxes based off mileage or driving time and providing depots on the edge of cities are ways to combat this

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FriendOfDeSoto 20 points 8 days ago

The "zero occupant problem"

The fact that this has a name is such an indictment of failures in urban planning. I'm going to assume an American coined the term because a lot of other places have not fought the idea of public transport as much as the American automobile industry.

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EndlessNightmare 2 points 7 days ago

I think it's called "deadhead miles" in other contexts, like with shipping.

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AloneDownUnder 5 points 8 days ago

That would make sense actually. How would congestion pricing work though? Like you have to pay for the duration you occupy the road? How to track this?

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Munkisquisher 3 points 8 days ago

It's only really trackable with a gross amount of surveillance, either gps based inside the car or cameras on every street

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AloneDownUnder 2 points 8 days ago

I suppose they could do something like the toll roads, where you drive through a coil and trigger a wireless badge. Everytime you trigger it you will pay a certain fee. If you don't have a badge, your license plate is recorded and you get sent a fine. Similar to speed cameras you already have.

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EndlessNightmare 3 points 7 days ago

where empty cars going slowly around inner suburbs will be cheaper than parking costs

Parking Lot Piercer

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daniskarma 11 points 8 days ago

The best commute transport is the one you don't have to use.

Remote work is the solution.

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Allero 5 points 8 days ago

Remote work is amazing, and honestly office jobs should move to that.

But then there's plenty of jobs that require you to be present in person and do things in the physical world.

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Colonel_Panic_ 5 points 8 days ago

It's a win-win.

Office/computer/phone type jobs get to stay home, satisfaction and productivity goes up.

In person jobs now have far less cars on the roads every day, rush hour isn't as much of a problem anymore, less time and $ wasted stuck in traffic.

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EndlessNightmare 3 points 7 days ago

I have an in-person job, and I absolutely loved the big WFH push during COVID.

WFH helps you even if you personally can't do it.

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Fondots 1 point 7 days ago

I have an essential job and basically had to work as normal during COVID

I already commute at kind of weird times and basically never have to deal with much traffic anyway, but with almost everything else shut down and no one else on the road I averaged about 1mpg better than I usually do just from not having to deal with even that little bit of traffic.

And that was basically only for my commute into work, I go home at about 3AM, so even on a busy night I see maybe a dozen other cars on the road, so nothing at all changed there.

Just due to where I live and work and the hours I work, it's probably never going to make much sense for me to take public transit, I'd pretty much be the only person ever riding that bus or train or whatever at those times (and there probably wouldn't be too many taking that particular route at other times for that matter) and the nature of my job means I'll probably always have to work at least part time in-person, but getting everyone who possibly can to WFH and/or take public transit means less traffic for me.

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ICastFist 3 points 8 days ago

But how will the managers improve morale if they can't stay behind you to ensure you're working? Won't somebody please think of the managers!?

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ohshit604 3 points 7 days ago

Remote work is the solution.

Only if your job involves a desk and a computer. For now I don’t think many warehouses workers or mechanics want to take their work home with them.

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AloneDownUnder 2 points 8 days ago

Sure, remote work is nice. But there are plenty of reasons to go outside and travel around for other reasons. Holidays, trips, visiting friends, retirement.

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daniskarma 2 points 8 days ago

I think if the number of travels is nor al big (once or twice a week) it's not a problem people using cars.

The big problem is when every single person use the car minimum of twice a day, all at roughly the same hours and going to the same places. Plus all the other leisure travel.

Just cutting out work commute would solve a lot of problems and a big chunk of energy consumption and pollution emissions.

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AloneDownUnder 1 point 7 days ago

Yeah, I live in a pretty car-centric place and I basically go do groceries during a working day in the late morning or early afternoon.

At that time the streets are empty and the stores are calm. If you try to go at any other time, it's just jams everywhere and all the parking spots are completely filled up

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Apytele 9 points 8 days ago

This was an episode of doctor who.

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AloneDownUnder 4 points 8 days ago

I actually saw this one. Pretty funny. For those who want to check it, it's apparently Episode 3 from Series 3: 181 – "Gridlock"

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Rhynoplaz 8 points 8 days ago

But if ALL the cars auto drive, and can communicate with each other, it would probably become more efficient and faster than human traffic.

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SwingingTheLamp 20 points 8 days ago

Not Just Bikes did a video about this exact topic, and how it would turn our cities into dystopian hellscapes. Because we'd have to ban everything except the intetconnected cars from the streets.

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Triumph 34 points 8 days ago

Wait, hear me out.

We make only a few streets for self driving cars only. We could even actively prevent other traffic by fitting the cars with special wheels that fit on special tracks. And to optimize space, we connect the cars together.

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StenSaksTapir 9 points 8 days ago

We could put those roads underground in tunnels so there'll be no interference from other traffic. And then they could go on rails too and maybe make the car bigger so they can fit more people.

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AloneDownUnder 4 points 8 days ago

In that case you would have to ban human-driven cars from the roads no?

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EndlessNightmare 2 points 7 days ago

and can communicate with each other

Good luck getting every mfg to agree with one V2V standard. It's necessary, but it's going to take an act of God.

Someone will insist on being different and not adhering to the standard.

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fisch 5 points 7 days ago

Car drivers fighting against alternatives like public transport and cycling infrastructure and ending up with their streets jammed and their parking spaces taken is my favorite form of irony.

Building safe alternatives to driving is the only way to reduce traffic that has ever really worked in cities.

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vatlark 4 points 7 days ago

Hello, thanks for posting to showerthoughts. This post got reported for rule 2.

The rough idea of rule 2 is that a good shower thought is simple, so it should fit in the title. Its tempting to write a catchy title that is more line a newspaper headline, but that's not the idea of rule 2.

Mind updating the title?

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AloneDownUnder 1 point 7 days ago

I tried, should fit rule 2 now. A bit of a handful now though.

Thanks for mentioning, I should have checked the rules more closely before posting.

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vatlark 1 point 7 days ago

Yeah it makes it a bit if a creative writing exercise.

All good. Thanks for being a part of the community!

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FriendOfDeSoto 3 points 8 days ago

There is an argument that a connected Borg collective of self driving cars would be capable of running vehicles with smaller gaps in between them, thus reducing congestion and improving efficiency in traffic.

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grue 12 points 8 days ago

Hi, traffic engineer here.

That's never going to happen. It's nothing but a tech-bro bullshit fantasy.

Why? Because cyclists and pedestrians exist. In order to make it possible for the kinds of gains you're talking about to happen, every road user has to be an autonomous vehicle, but (aside from freeways) streets simply do not work that way and never will.

(Oh, and also: even at the limit, the best it can ever accomplish is to be an inferior approximation of a train.)

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AloneDownUnder 1 point 8 days ago

I suppose self-driving cars could drive like regular cars on the small roads, but then go to big specialized highways where they can go full speed.

But that doesn't make sense anyway, because that would not save you that much time anymore. And in that case you could just have regular cars to drive to a station with parking and then take the train to your destination

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grue 4 points 8 days ago

We already have those big specialized highways; that's what freeways are. The trouble is, even if autonomous driving were capable of doubling the lane capacity (and IIRC the theoretical best case is actually less than that, closer to a 50% improvement), induced demand is still a thing. It maybe buys you a reprieve for a decade or so, but after that you're right back to "just one more lane, bro!"

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EndlessNightmare 1 point 7 days ago

but after that you’re right back to “just one more lane, bro!

Since you stated that you are a traffic engineer, quick question for you. Are more lanes all together or more lanes separate better?

What I mean is are you better off with 1 highway that has 4 lanes in each direction or 2 highways that each have 2 lanes in each direct. Same total lanes, but split up differently? It seems like adding more lanes to a congested road just makes a bigger mess; a problem in any lane seems to propagate through all lanes.

I know it's a lot more complicated than just building a parallel road, but (in my area at least) the lack of alternate routes is frustrating. The entire highway turns into a parking lot if there's a crash. I also see a lot of near misses due to lane flanking: car in lane A and car in lane C both want in lane B at the same time. More lanes = more likely for this to happen.

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EndlessNightmare 1 point 7 days ago

(Oh, and also: even at the limit, the best it can ever accomplish is to be an inferior approximation of a train.)

Maybe we should work on building out more trains?

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AloneDownUnder 11 points 8 days ago

But at what point would it just be better to just have a self-driving bus, or even put a railway instead?

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rockerface 19 points 8 days ago

At every point. Public transport is more efficient at transporting people than private cars will ever be. If we have enough of it, it's not even going to be crammed during rush hours.

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Nurse_Robot -5 points 8 days ago

If all cars were driven with good autonomous features (we're a long way off) there would be no traffic. Traffic is solely due to human error

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grue 7 points 8 days ago

No, that's not how traffic works. That's like saying a pipe can flow an infinite amount of fluid when you used a liquid instead of a gas because you got rid of the empty space between particles.

Even with theoretically-perfect timing and control, the road still has a finite capacity because cars take up a certain amount of space, both stationary and moving (following distance is still a thing even with computer control because of the mechanical limitations of brake performance). Moreover, it isn't that much higher than we can manage with humans driving the vehicles already.

The only ways to exceed that limit are to make the vehicles smaller (e.g. bikes) or pack more people into them (e.g. buses or trains).

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Nurse_Robot 1 point 8 days ago

Traffic is massively impacted by people breaking after ending up too close to another vehicle. There are great demonstration videos in the late 90s / early 2000s demonstrating this. I don't anticipate me stating this fact to gain any support, because, you know, Lemmy says AI bad no matter what.

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grue 3 points 8 days ago

You're right: when traffic is at its critical density, that's often what triggers the shift from the free-flow regime to the congested regime. But just because you make computers drive the cars -- even assuming they did it perfectly without randomly braking, which they don't -- that doesn't mean it eliminates that flipping between regimes. At best, it might get you a little bit more capacity before hitting that critical threshold, but eventually it's still going to, and then something -- a squirrel darting into the road, a sunbeam glinting off something the wrong way and momentarily confusing the AI, a bump that disturbs the car just enough to make it slow down a fraction of a MPH, etc. -- is going to trigger that shift to the congested regime anyway.

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SteveGoob 5 points 8 days ago

This is simply not true on its face.

Unlike the thought expirement you're running in your head, the real world does not have the luxury of avoiding the possibilities of sudden mechanical failure, a soccer ball being kicked into the road, or unsecured debris falling out of the bed of a truck. These are privately owned and maintained vehicles after all, under many more engineering constraints and usage pressures than just achieving maximum reliablilty in all conditions.

These things require some degree of margin for error. In general, any car should be able to fully stop before entering the space currently occupied by the car in front of it in order to account for unexpected disturbances. However, as car speeds increase, so do the tolerances required to maintain that safe margin, exponentially in fact.

Removing the human from the driver seat doesn't mean we get to start running bumper to bumper at 70mph; at best it means that cars can get away with slightly smaller follow distances than humans need to account for their comparably slow reaction times.

If you instead believe that we should exert enough control over self driving cars such that we could actually realistically prevent catastrophe while running high speed bumper to bumper traffic, then I have great news for you! We already have that, and it's called a train.

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Nurse_Robot 0 points 8 days ago

It's not a thought experiment in my head. It's a highly studied and demonstrated fact. And it doesn't require bumper to bumper cars, it requires cars consistently traveling with safe breaking distance, something humans didn't do.

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SteveGoob 1 point 8 days ago

I don't refute that. I agree that far too many humans are far too comfortable with unsafe following distances.That's not the claim you made though:

Traffic is solely due to human error

And as I said, it's just simply not true. Congestion happens because car traffic does not scale or recover from disturbances efficiently. Human behavior exacerbates this, sure, but cars are just fundamentally bad at moving people when a road is at capacity. Chalking traffic it up to "human error" alone misses the forest for the trees.

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Vinylraupe 2 points 7 days ago

If all the cars were connected and could take control away from the driver when theres a traffic jam and the road isnt completely blocked, there wouldnt be any jams anymore.

Its humans that fail to dissolve the traffic jam because theres a high amount of coordination needed. And quite the sensitivity on the pedals.

Thats the thing im always looking forward to considering the future of cars. All those cameras and other bells and whistles i never wanted. They should be optional.

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SwingingTheLamp 2 points 8 days ago

This, but unironically. Self-driving cars will completely ruin driving, maybe permanently?

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AloneDownUnder 1 point 8 days ago

I hope not.. Even now I already feel like I want to move to a place where everything is reachable by foot or bike. But with these property prices, that's basically a faraway dream...

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showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:

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showerthoughts

@lemmy.world

login for more options

A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:

Rules

All posts must be showerthoughts
The entire showerthought must be in the title
No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
Posts must be original/unique
Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS

If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.

Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.

go to feed...