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QuarkJets posted:Okay but you've already gone from "definitely not more popular" to "only slightly more popular", and my only position was "autonomous cars could help somewhat". So we're now on the same page and are just discussing the degree of effectiveness They can't really help at all. Shuffling a few cars, even a few hundred, off the road means nothing when the traffic you're dealing with on a daily basis in a major metro commute is hundreds of thousands. There is no evidence that self-driving cars will actually drive down the cost of "rideshares". They will by necessity cost more to purchase in the first place than regular cars for quite some time (sensors aren't free, the self driving software isn't free) and may have higher maintenance requirements in order to ensure that all sensors remain unobstructed and functional which simply isn't present on a person driven car. Considering we don't have any true self-driving cars yet, it's very premature to assume their additional costs will necessarily be higher than the low wages human drivers tend to make. PS: uber isn't "ridesharing" and neither are taxis. They're paid transport. Ridesharing would be normal carpools, where nobody is paying money, or perhaps only pay a small amount to cover gas. Cingulate posted:Imagine "that noise" with energy prices compatible with <2°C warming. I'm not sure what you think you mean here - massively increased fuel taxes to offset global warming costs? Mere global warming on its own isn't going to make energy more expensive. Plus actual fuel/energy price increases would tend to lead to real public transport modes becoming more viable, not having a regular rear end car becoming more viable. angryrobots posted:I don't think that they will. Most people like to have a set schedule for their commutes, I don't think either parties in this scenario will accept the ambiguity as you've described it. I agree. It's been a major problem in getting people to accept carpool since the 1930s. We have those in places like the DC metro area, where it's called sluglines and slugging. Drivers willing to carpool drive into various park and rides and business parking lots, pick up people going in the same general direction, and then drive. There's even a few sites to direct newcomers to the practice as to which places will be best to get to which parts of the city. Note of course, that this system works because there's fairly major concentration of employment in DC and the inner suburbs, and a robust public transit system once you've gotten into that area to finish a commute if the driver isn't going particularly close to where you need to go.
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Mar 9, 2017 17:40
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Oops.
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Mar 9, 2017 22:27
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fishmech posted:They can't really help at all. Shuffling a few cars, even a few hundred, off the road means nothing when the traffic you're dealing with on a daily basis in a major metro commute is hundreds of thousands. Your position has shifted from "autonomous vehicles won't increase carpool rates at all" to "they'll increase carpool rates a little", and now you're back to "not at all" again. It's like I'm talking to a brick wall. I've given you some nice points, why don't you try addressing those instead of dismissing them or making semantic arguments?
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Mar 9, 2017 22:33
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Doom Rooster posted:Who would be creating, hosting and maintaining this hypothetical centralized car sharing platform? How would it be different than the sparsely-used UberPOOL, just without drivers? It doesn't matter, and the differences would be that the driving and the logistics are autonomous, so no additional effort needs to be spent on the part of the driver. Manually checking for ride-seeking people who are along your route and who are going your way is a hassle, pressing a button to have your car pick up someone with a mostly-common route is easy.
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Mar 9, 2017 22:36
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I could see it helping a bit, but at the end of the day most people don't want to relative strangers (or even co-workers) in their car with them if they can help it. Some of them will, and autonomous cars may help them but it isn't going to change the basics of the issue unless you start getting really intrusive into people's lives (live feeds into all cars/all those with empty seats are fined by the minute). Also, I am pretty skeptical it is also change the issue of traffic especially when almost of all of our grid system is inflexible at this point. If anything I could see autonomous cars inducing demand to the point any improvements in efficiency are ground down by pedestrians/bikes/"legacy" drivers. I will say this as well, having living in parts of Europe and some of the more livable cities in the US, having walk able neighborhoods is actually really enjoyable and makes life a lot better. I could see autonomous cars only more or less just tripling-down on the issues that are already plaguing life in the US, which I think is car-culture itself.
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Mar 9, 2017 22:55
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Ardennes posted:I could see it helping a bit, but at the end of the day most people don't want to relative strangers (or even co-workers) in their car with them if they can help it. Some of them will, and autonomous cars may help them but it isn't going to change the basics of the issue unless you start getting really intrusive into people's lives (live feeds into all cars/all those with empty seats are fined by the minute). I agree with everything here; no one is saying that autonomous vehicles are going to solve climate change, but they do stand a chance of relieving congestion a little
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Mar 9, 2017 22:59
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Well there's your problem: quote:Was this hyperbolic advancement of the venerable molten salt technology intentional? MIT’s Smith, who blew the whistle on the claims, says it was innocent. The founders didn’t subject their initial calculations and claims to any kind of peer review. Smith told Technology Review, “They didn’t do any of this intentionally. It was just a lack of experience and perhaps overconfidence in their own ability. And then not listening carefully enough when people were questioning the conclusions they were coming to.”
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Mar 9, 2017 23:01
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Trabisnikof posted:Well there's your problem:
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Mar 9, 2017 23:03
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QuarkJets posted:Your position has shifted from "autonomous vehicles won't increase carpool rates at all" to "they'll increase carpool rates a little", and now you're back to "not at all" again. It's like I'm talking to a brick wall. I've given you some nice points, why don't you try addressing those instead of dismissing them or making semantic arguments? Yes, there would be some. In the context of the argument to actually solve the problem, not enough to make a even a measurable difference. So technically "increase carpool rates a little", in effect "won't increase carpool rates at all" (read, not enough to be remotely useful). Hope that helps. QuarkJets posted:It doesn't matter, and the differences would be that the driving and the logistics are autonomous, so no additional effort needs to be spent on the part of the driver. Manually checking for ride-seeking people who are along your route and who are going your way is a hassle, pressing a button to have your car pick up someone with a mostly-common route is easy. It matters a great deal who creates and manages the service. It would need to be governmental at that scale, otherwise you have multiple competing private companies segmenting an already small market. Would you say that "The government tracks and CONTROLS where your car goes" is something that the general public is going to want to sign up for? As far as ridership goes though, people need reliability when it comes to getting to work. Any privately-owned fleet would be an unreliable, logistical nightmare. Owners would need to be able to tailor their profile to allow for adoption (tolerance for how out of the way per rider? Total added ride time allowable, flexibility of those metrics based on increased % payment, etc...) If you live in a neighborhood that normally only overlaps into the path of 2 people headed near your destination, one decides to call out sick to work and one goes into work an hour early for some reason, meaning you have no available ride that day, what do you do and more importantly, how do you even find out that nobody will be available that day? Unless owners are required to adhere to some sort of contract of availability, the answer is "You find out by the time you are already running late by nobody being there." Any form of contracted obligation not only significantly reduces the likelihood of owner adoption, but would open up a whole host of other issues. As someone who works in a logistics field of the tech industry, I am telling you, a version of this that is efficient and reliable enough to promote heavy adoption is literally not realistically possible. Edit: QuarkJets posted:I agree with everything here; no one is saying that autonomous vehicles are going to solve climate change, but they do stand a chance of relieving congestion a little If your goal is to just get someone to admit that yes, 50 out of 2.5 million people travelling during rush hour in a major city might use this and find it useful, so that you don't have to admit that you are wrong, then yes. There are hypothetical users that a system like this would work for if you could magic it into existence, but not close to enough to make an appreciable difference to rush hour, so who the gently caress cares? Doom Rooster fucked around with this message at 23:18 on Mar 9, 2017 |
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Mar 9, 2017 23:12
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QuarkJets posted:I'm not even talking about scenarios where your car is picking up people while you're not in it. The ability to press a button to have your car fetch up to 3 additional passengers during your normal commute to/from work would probably increase carpooling rates by a non-negligible amount. All that you'd need to automate is the driving and the pickup logistics. I think that a lot of people would probably be willing to add 20 minutes to their commute for an additional $20 I think you're only considering this halfway. Once you have a solid autonomous car pooling solution, owning a car at all becomes obsolete. This requires a critical mass of both users and a fleet of vehicles of various sizes. Users simply enter their starting point and time, and destination. The autonomous system can then route its vehicles to accommodate these requests. Users can be presented options at different prices - if you live somewhere with insufficient density (or just want the privacy), you might choose a small individual vehicle at a higher price. If there are enough people on your route, you might be presented the option of a multi-passenger car, or a van, or a bus at a lower price. Same goes for how much priority you put on speed. Need to get there directly as fast as possible? You would again pay the higher price for the individual vehicle (or to be the last pickup/first destination on a dynamically generated route if possible). Have some spare time? Then your route might include more pickups/dropoffs, or even a transfer to another vehicle. Prices can also be adjusted based on usage, so if you have the opportunity to shift some of your transportation needs outside of peak hours you could pay less. Theoretically, once the software exists a system like this should be inherently cheaper than owning your own car just by virtue of higher utilization. The worst case scenario would be if you only ever choose the option for an individual vehicle at peak hours and there is no additional marginal utilization for that vehicle. But even in that case your costs (in an efficient world) would simply be the price of the vehicle because paying for drivers has been taken out of the equation. The only additional cost is maintaining the software infrastructure and that's not going to be all that significant with a broad enough user base.
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Mar 9, 2017 23:16
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Doom Rooster posted:Yes, there would be some. In the context of the argument to actually solve the problem, not enough to make a even a measurable difference. So technically "increase carpool rates a little", in effect "won't increase carpool rates at all" (read, not enough to be remotely useful). Hope that helps. Dude you can't simultaneously claim that the demand for such a service would be negligible and that the demand for such a service would be so great that a government agency would need to be created to manage it
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Mar 9, 2017 23:22
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QuarkJets posted:Dude you can't simultaneously claim that the demand for such a service would be negligible and that the demand for such a service would be so great that a government agency would need to be created to manage it I seriously cannot square how your brain works with my own reality. I never said that the DEMAND would be great enough to need governmental assistance. The scope of such a project, and the implications of what would need to be covered, would likely need to be governmental in scale. Also, good job very carefully misinterpreting one specific point, then blowing right on past all of the other challenges.
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Mar 9, 2017 23:29
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All over the internet, the topic of self driving cars produces really bad discussions.
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Mar 9, 2017 23:33
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QuarkJets posted:Your position has shifted from "autonomous vehicles won't increase carpool rates at all" to "they'll increase carpool rates a little", and now you're back to "not at all" again. It's like I'm talking to a brick wall. I've given you some nice points, why don't you try addressing those instead of dismissing them or making semantic arguments? It's not my fault you refuse to read. The problems with carpooling are not solvable at all by adding self-driving cars to the mix. Your points are bunk, particularly your belief that the self-driving cars should cost less money to operate in any sort of near future situation. You just need to get over the silly little idea that the existence of self-driving cars solves routing problems that have been known about for decades. Really, by far the best equipped entities to work with that are public transport agencies, and even the best funded ones have problems supplying a lot of needs because some routing situations are simply difficult to serve without impacting other, more-used, routes. QuarkJets posted:I agree with everything here; no one is saying that autonomous vehicles are going to solve climate change, but they do stand a chance of relieving congestion a little No. They do not stand a chance of that. Cars are cars, and population is increasing regardless. You can't solve car-induced congestion by using a fancier kind of car. It's extremely rare that the margin between levels-of-service on the road can be solved by just removing a few cars, it's usually gradations of much more cars. AreWeDrunkYet posted:I think you're only considering this halfway. Once you have a solid autonomous car pooling solution, owning a car at all becomes obsolete. I think you're missing a lot of what people use cars for. It's not just pure transport, for millions of people their automobile is used to haul a trailer, or is used as a secondary place to store things outside of where they live, or simply something they can take to some place, where they must travel for business or pleasure, at a moment's notice. An "autonomous car pooling solution" doesn't work at all for storage, and has severe problems for things like say hauling a camping trailer out to a campground for a week, or for providing the kind of immediate leave-where-I-am-right-now a lot of people want. This is a common problem, people get to into thinking of the stereotypical commuter who spends most of their time driving in a regular commute on a fixed route, with maybe a detour every few days to hit up a supermarket. That's an easy use case for a self-driving car thing to slide into (and of course, also to not really reduce car usage), but it doesn't work to all the real reasons there's so many private cars in EVERY country. QuarkJets posted:Dude you can't simultaneously claim that the demand for such a service would be negligible and that the demand for such a service would be so great that a government agency would need to be created to manage it Demand for public transport in many places is negligible, it's also never the less a project of such a scale that only government can handle it. Learn to think for once.
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Mar 9, 2017 23:47
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Doom Rooster posted:I seriously cannot square how your brain works with my own reality. I never said that the DEMAND would be great enough to need governmental assistance. The scope of such a project, and the implications of what would need to be covered, would likely need to be governmental in scale. Services that automatically connect willing drivers to willing riders already exist and automobile manufacturers are already working on the autonomous driving aspect. Can you specify which aspect of this idea is so gargantuan that it would require the government to step in? Are you assuming that all autonomous vehicles would be forced to participate or that the cars wouldn't have their owners inside of them? Because I am not talking about those kinds of scenarios
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Mar 10, 2017 00:02
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QuarkJets posted:Services that automatically connect willing drivers to willing riders already exist and automobile manufacturers are already working on the autonomous driving aspect. Can you specify which aspect of this idea is so gargantuan that it would require the government to step in? Everything about it? You're describing building a form of public transit system. This should be done by a government if you want to try to ensure costs to the users stay low enough to be usable by the mass public, as well as ensuring it can operate well with real public transit on the ends of rides. Also don't forget the criminal enterprises you talk about rely on vastly underpaying drivers, breaking all sorts of laws, and burning millions to billions of dollars in venture capital to actually function, so you can hardly say they're something that can function long term the way government run services can.
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Mar 10, 2017 00:12
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Pander posted:the fact that the people burned most by fantastical claims here are silicon valley investors like Peter Thiel warms my heart. Nice meltdown.
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Mar 10, 2017 00:30
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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blowfish posted:Nice meltdown. I can't meltdown, I'm a molten salt reactor. Unless...
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Mar 10, 2017 00:57
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Having dedicated parking bays in prime locations specifically for car pooling could help encourage people to carpool. If the time saved from having awesome parking bays outweighs the hassle of carpooling, then there will be more carpooling. Its a super cheap intervention as well.
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Mar 10, 2017 02:05
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How much energy is spent by personal transportation versus commercial trucking? If we're looking for technological solutions to reduce energy usage, shouldn't we focus on the bigger pieces of the pie chart?
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Mar 10, 2017 02:47
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Infinite Karma posted:How much energy is spent by personal transportation versus commercial trucking? We are focussing on the biggest piece.  "Energy Use" https://www.c2es.org/energy/use/transportation Also, freight vehicles are typically loaded full, not much room for improvement there. Passenger vehicles are typically largely empty and going to the same place and heavy congestion. Getting the same people into fewer vehicles is an obvious solution but is difficult to achieve. Better public transport is probably the best option by far. BattleMoose fucked around with this message at 03:06 on Mar 10, 2017 |
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Mar 10, 2017 03:04
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Infinite Karma posted:How much energy is spent by personal transportation versus commercial trucking? This is hard to say, but the average person in the US drives 13,500 miles per year, while the average trucker drives ~80,000 miles per year. However there's only about 4 million total people who are commercial truck drivers. (And the actual miles traveled vary wildly, long haul transcontinental truckers are going to put in a lot more distance than those doing within-urban-area delivery and short hauls from intermodal transfer points to destinations). The legal limit on how much a trucker can drive per year for commercial service is around 230,000 miles, because the current driving limits per week are 70 hours and 65 mph is about the maximum you could consistently average across the time when you account for having to make fueling stops and the actual pickups and deliveries. Just going off these, we can say that the general public drives their cars a little over 4 trillion miles per year while the trucks are covering around 300 billion miles. However, trucks are usually a lot more efficient with fuel usage than cars already, and there's also not much in the way of making trucks use significantly less energy while still traveling safety (after all, they still have to haul around tons upon tons of goods, and that will require quite a lot of energy to accomplish). fishmech fucked around with this message at 04:14 on Mar 10, 2017 |
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Mar 10, 2017 03:09
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4 billion or 4 trillion miles per year?
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Mar 10, 2017 03:18
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BattleMoose posted:Having dedicated parking bays in prime locations specifically for car pooling could help encourage people to carpool. If the time saved from having awesome parking bays outweighs the hassle of carpooling, then there will be more carpooling. Its a super cheap intervention as well. No, it's really not. Parking space is an awful use of urban land. If you want to cut down on car usage what you should be doing is eliminating parking spaces altogether. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_hive/2010/06/theres_no_such_thing_as_free_parking.html
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Mar 10, 2017 04:10
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ohgodwhat posted:4 billion or 4 trillion miles per year? Yeah, trillion, sorry.
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Mar 10, 2017 04:14
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Phanatic posted:No, it's really not. Parking space is an awful use of urban land. If you want to cut down on car usage what you should be doing is eliminating parking spaces altogether. No poo poo. You are suffering from some Nirvana fallacy there. I am *NOT* advocating for more parking spaces. I am advocating converting EXISTING parking spaces into CARPOOL SPACES. This would be an improvement on the current situation, ie, something that is better.
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Mar 10, 2017 04:32
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BattleMoose posted:No poo poo. You are suffering from some Nirvana fallacy there. It would probably be pretty difficult to properly enforce, we already have enough trouble keeping people out of handicapped spaces after all. And since a carpooling driver might not have his passengers dropped off or picked up where he parks, it'd be easy for someone to lie that they'll be on their way to pick some people up. Enforcing carpool requirements on the roads is easier, because you can set up cops on the side of the road to easily see if there's only one person in the car, and if you're just on your way to pick up putative carpool riders you ain't allowed in the lane/roadway.
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Mar 10, 2017 04:54
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fishmech posted:It would probably be pretty difficult to properly enforce, we already have enough trouble keeping people out of handicapped spaces after all. And since a carpooling driver might not have his passengers dropped off or picked up where he parks, it'd be easy for someone to lie that they'll be on their way to pick some people up. Absolutely, but you have to start somewhere. At least at workplaces, if you see your colleagues abusing carpool parks, social pressures can be exerted. It costs very little to implement and only a small improvement is necessary to justify that expense. It will take a while for the general public to respect carpool parks. Enforcement could be very expensive and in many instances an improvement could be observed without enforcement, even with people abusing it.
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Mar 10, 2017 05:00
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BattleMoose posted:Absolutely, but you have to start somewhere. At least at workplaces, if you see your colleagues abusing carpool parks, social pressures can be exerted. My workplace does this. Big lot, closest dozen or so spaces to the door are carpool spots. They are almost uniformly empty. The downsides of carpooling aren't compensated for by a primo spot. I mean, I suppose the social pressure works because nobody parks in them, but nobody cares. And lots of employees live in my town, many within walking distance of each other. Prime recipe for carpooling being popular? Nope. Because people who work different projects for different groups also have different schedules and nobody wants to get stuck waiting around the office because one guy got called into an unforeseen meeting.
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Mar 10, 2017 05:39
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Phanatic posted:The downsides of carpooling aren't compensated for by a primo spot. It depends entirely on the context. For your situation it has no effect, big lot, no hassle in finding a park. When there is a shortage of parks (as is becoming more common, especially in CBDs) the appeal of a guaranteed park over having to spend 20+ minutes looking for a park, starts to look more feasible. As has already been mentioned, parking spaces are an awful utilization of land, we should be getting rid of them. That should make parks harder to find and that should encourage greater PT utilization and hopefully, carpooling.
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Mar 14, 2017 02:19
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18 GW of Solar Under Construction in US, another 36GW being planned. That's enough to power close to 11 million homes. http://e360.yale.edu/features/northern-lights-utility-scale-solar-power-spreading-across-the-us
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Mar 25, 2017 07:53
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Charlz Guybon posted:18 GW of Solar Under Construction in US, another 36GW being planned. That's enough to power close to 11 million homes. Is that homes during the day with minimal power draw, or at night when it doesn't work?
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Mar 25, 2017 16:47
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Neither?
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Mar 25, 2017 17:15
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What's the general consensus on Lockheed's Skunkwork's "compact fusion" announcement from about two and a half years ago—bullshit to boost share prices or genuine pipedream? Or will they miraculously overcome the obstacles that have plagued fusion research for decades and deliver a prototype by 2020 like they claim?
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Mar 26, 2017 01:18
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Cugel the Clever posted:What's the general consensus on Lockheed's Skunkwork's "compact fusion" announcement from about two and a half years ago—bullshit to boost share prices or genuine pipedream? Or will they miraculously overcome the obstacles that have plagued fusion research for decades and deliver a prototype by 2020 like they claim? My understanding is that they're still working on it, and the announcement was along the lines of "look at the progress we've made on the modeling and simulation side of things". There's no way to know what their current progress might really be
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Mar 26, 2017 01:38
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If they do manage it I know I'll have to stop ragging on them about the F-35 for a few minutes.
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Mar 28, 2017 23:12
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Westinghouse is bankrupt.
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Mar 30, 2017 20:13
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That's too bad. I weally needed a west.
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Mar 30, 2017 20:17
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It's twue! It's twue!
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Mar 30, 2017 20:18
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Yeah it's big news here, with the reactors they were in the middle of installing (and already $3B over budget). Comments on this article are interesting....The natives are getting restless.
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