evilweasel posted:

Tesla is also a luxury car company though, and they're spreading their R&D for their more limited self-driving over fewer cars as a result. There's certainly going to be an attempt to capitalize on the software and recoup R&D, but I think you're underestimating the value of sticking something in a car that sells millions of cars and making less per car than sticking it in a luxury car and charging a lot more for fewer units. It also seems like they're doing the luxury thing as sort of a way to make back the R&D money with imperfect self-driving like Tesla and other car companies are doing.

But if you're the first one to market with a fully self-driving car and you know you have enough of a head start on your competitors, it seems to me you're far better off coming out with a line of self-driving cars for every market niche and trying to blitz your way to hilarious market share, instead of focusing on profits at the high-end luxury market. You'll get more money and your competitive position will last longer.

dex_sda posted:

Even if you can't build a subway, dedicating a lane to trams works well and they can be electric and clean and fast and comfortable. You can even get whatever remaining buses for less common routes you have on the same lane and they'll avoid the worst of the traffic this way.

But that's again, very expensive, and it'll only get worse if you look to the autonomous car future (which is a terrible solution to the problem for a variety of reasons, many of which boner confessor brought up). It's hard to say how we could possibly tackle this problem in the future.

Soylent Yellow posted:

Firstly, I'd be surprised if the R&D on the technology has gotten to the point of reducing the per-unit price to something that makes sense in a mass-market car.

Xae posted:

Most metro areas aren't built around a Central Business District where everyone commutes to and from everyday. The majority of traffic is point to point, not hub based.


The cost of tearing down and rebuilding a several county metro area to work with a heavy mass transit approach would be astronomical. Or even the disruption from huge zoning changes would be dramatic.

Getting more capacity from our existing infrastructure is a hell of a lot smarter than changing an entire metropolitan area to fit a different model.

Yeah, we could design brand new cities that are much more efficient than our current ones. But the cost would dramatically outweigh any gains.

Soylent Yellow posted:

Restricting the initial release to a luxury car makes sense for a few reasons. Firstly, I'd be surprised if the R&D on the technology has gotten to the point of reducing the per-unit price to something that makes sense in a mass-market car. If the price of the autonomous feature pushes a budget car up to around that of a luxury car anyway, then a lot of people are going to hold out for the price to drop. Secondly, the final format of the technology and more importantly the legal implications of that technology is still far from certain. Much better to take a risk on potentially having to recall 20,000 cars than 2,000,000.

Xae posted:

Most metro areas aren't built around a Central Business District where everyone commutes to and from everyday. The majority of traffic is point to point, not hub based.


The cost of tearing down and rebuilding a several county metro area to work with a heavy mass transit approach would be astronomical. Or even the disruption from huge zoning changes would be dramatic.

Getting more capacity from our existing infrastructure is a hell of a lot smarter than changing an entire metropolitan area to fit a different model.

Yeah, we could design brand new cities that are much more efficient than our current ones. But the cost would dramatically outweigh any gains.

boner confessor posted:

i never understand how people can be all "well we can't tear everything down and start fresh" like anyone even said that was feasible. just add and retrofit one link at a time. when people say "thing needs to change" they're not implicitly saying "thing needs to change tomorrow". claiming the thing you don't agree with is tantamount to building a tower to climb to heaven is just absurd and rhetorically defeatist

Xae posted:

One link at a time?

Autonomous cars will be here decades before your transit dream at that pace.

And does changing the time table change the volume of work required? No.

You're talking about some sort of century long urban planning scheme.

Urban planning can help, but not in the timelines you're taking about.

boner confessor posted:

this assumes the average consumer actually WANTS a self driving car. i think people are generally positive about the technology but definently hesitant to trust it. you tun the risk of trying to push a product onto a hesitant consumer base and burning yourself

Peanut President posted:

evilweasel posted:

I assume the vast majority of self-driving cars will initially have it as a setting and retain the full ability to drive it manually for that exact reason. If people don't want it I assume they pull the computer out and charge them a little less but the sensors are probably cheap enough you just leave them in.

boner confessor posted:

what is my transit dream, since you're so well informed on things i haven't said in this thread

meanwhile, dallas has become the largest light rail operator in the us because of steady expansion which is impossible, apparently

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

Peanut President posted:

His post was "we can't just BUILD INFRASTRUCTURE" so thanks for proving my point.

Xae posted:

No, it was "We can't just completely rearrange areas in which millions of people live and work in a short period of time".

Peanut President posted:

Yeah we can, it's called building infrastructure. Do you think a unicorn farts in a forest and the freeway system just appears?

Xae posted:

The cost of tearing down and rebuilding a several county metro area to work with a heavy mass transit approach would be astronomical. Or even the disruption from huge zoning changes would be dramatic.

boner confessor posted:

i never understand how people can be all "well we can't tear everything down and start fresh" like anyone even said that was feasible. just add and retrofit one link at a time. when people say "thing needs to change" they're not implicitly saying "thing needs to change tomorrow". claiming the thing you don't agree with is tantamount to building a tower to climb to heaven is just absurd and rhetorically defeatist

Peanut President posted:

Yeah we can, it's called building infrastructure. Do you think a unicorn farts in a forest and the freeway system just appears?

Xae posted:

Except we weren't talking about building a couple of new rail lines or roads.

People were talking about tearing down and rebuilding a huge percentage of structures in multi-county metro areas to support mass transit.


If people are talking about a mostly mass transit future they are talking about a complete redesign of most urban and suburban areas.

They're talking about a tear down and rebuild of entire metropolitan areas. They are talking about decades to centuries of work as if it is on a similar timeline as autonomous vehicles.

augias posted:

I went back a page to see where anyone said this and nobody said this. Should I have gone back two pages?

Xae posted:

The space around major cities is already being used. People are either talking about going to the countryside and building new urban areas or changing the existing areas to meet the new development models which is a tear down and rebuild.

How else are all these high density urban areas with little to no suburban areas are going to come into existence?

Xae posted:

People are either talking about going to the countryside and building new urban areas or changing the existing areas to meet the new development models which is a tear down and rebuild.

dex_sda posted:

By the process we described, that has been done to good effect in numerous cities with sufficient funding?

And anyway, for a switch to autonomous cars to decrease congestion, you'd have to rebuild a lot of the infrastructure. They aren't magical things that can break the laws of physics. If you have to take into account being in a city not built with them in mind, they can't safely drive in a way that decreases congestion significantly enough to offset the increase in cars on the roads.

augias posted:

I went back again and did not see anybody saying this either. Unless you believe 'building light rail and increasing mass transit over existing congested thoroughfares' means 'demolishing everything and rebuilding everything from scratch'. In which case there is no hope for dialog.

quote:

no, he's not. nobody is proposing this. all stichensis is saying is that single family detached homeownership as a societal ideal is toxic. you're the one extrapolating from there into a call to "depopulate the suburbs". you can make suburbs denser without eliminating them. many suburbs are already doing this. please please please please please do not turn this conversation into a strawman jousting match where you defend the suburban way of life from people who you incorrectly imagine are trying to destroy it

one example is what's called conservation subdivision planning, basically sticking the houses closer together on the same plot of land - preserves more space for the environment, reduces the amount of car travel done within the subdivision, makes mass transit more feasible etc. and this is as a compromise which preserves automotive-dependent detached single family subdivisions

dex_sda posted:

And anyway, for a switch to autonomous cars to decrease congestion, you'd have to rebuild a lot of the infrastructure. They aren't magical things that can break the laws of physics. If you have to take into account being in a city not built with them in mind, they can't safely drive in a way that decreases congestion significantly enough to offset the increase in cars on the roads.

Xae posted:

Good point you haven't contributed much of anything. Most of what you've done in this thread is jack yourself off over how bad cars are and how "toxic" suburbs are.

Autonomous Cars: Auto-Erotic Urbanism


DART took ~35 years of planning and construction for <1% of Traffic in Dallas. If you're considering that a success Autonomous cars will probably behalf way there in a couple of years.


Mass Transit and great and important, but it isn't a full solution unless we're talking about some sort of FULL COMMUNISM NOW thing where people are forcibly relocated into brand new urban areas.The reason why mass transit sucks in most American cities is because we don't have the density. Trying to say that Mass Transit is the way is implying that you're going to dramatically increase the density of American cities. Which means you're talking about changing entire counties and metropolitan areas.

You can dangle carrots and do it area by area, but we're talking about decades of work. Even as someone who is skeptical about autonomous cars I think the timeline for them is much faster than a timeline for redesigning every metropolitan area.

It makes a hell of a lot more sense to use new technology to increase our existing roadways and supplement with mass transit where we can. Much like what we're doing now. If autonomous cars deliver and let us get by with less capacity on the roadways then by all means lets start increasing funding for mass transit.

Xae posted:

This is an example of a tear down and rebuild. Suburbs already exist. To change to a different design is to tear down what exists today and replace it with something else. To only switch over new construction still leaves huge rear end parts of the inner ring burbs unchanged.

boner confessor posted:

like seriously dude you can densify suburbs on a lot by lot basis using purely market incentive mechanisms. no idea where you're getting this wild scorched earth idea from but i suspect it's your ineloquent stuffed butthole

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

Like everyone will pile up and live in the houses that exist now or you meant hey will tear down the houses and build totally different houses?

Is your plan everyone share bedrooms or they build different bedrooms?

Xae posted:

Even if he waves a magic "densifier" wand the existing streets, water, electric and sewer would probably need to be redone to handle the additional capacity.

And without a magic wand there just isn't enough room in most burbs to throw in a house or two between existing ones.


He doesn't have a plan because he is literally too stupid to realize that there are houses already there with people living in them.

I would love to see the "market based solution" he is thinking of that would get people to hand over 1/3rd of their so they can "infil" some density

Hes either operating on a timeline of the next century or so or just delusional.

boner confessor posted:

lol

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infill

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=infill+development+pictures

sorry dude but you are both aggressively stupid AND you don't know what you're talking about lmao

there are dozens of people studying and practicing suburban redevelopment, retrofit, recycling, infill or whatever you want to call it but i'm sure they're all also delusional compared to xae, sa forums poster who has a hard time reading and remaining calm

boner confessor posted:

lol at oocc being genuinely unaware that people can sell their homes to developers who redevelop the land, for a profit, as a natural market activity

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

Yes, infrastructure problems are super easy to solve if everyone would just sell all their houses and we could just wipe it all out and start from scratch.

boner confessor posted:

please find anyone who said that itt or stop reposting it over and over in an ever more embarassing way. its only a four page thread man shouldn't take long

Raenir Salazar posted:

Basically an advantage of AV's would be that they could in theory sync with each other and with human cars with some simple software/hardware upgrades/sensors to try to keep coordinated with the end goal being 100% AV's.

boner confessor posted:

in traffic planning there's this thing called triple convergence. basically because of congestion, people avoid taking certain routes to save time or annoyance. they either take a different route, use a different method of travel, or take the route at a different time. all this adds up to latent demand - people who would take a trip along a route by a certain method of travel at a certain time, but don't because it's too crowded. if you increase the efficiency of a transportation network, you'll unlock that latent demand and potentially just cause congestion again on the same routes.

evilweasel posted:

I doubt it. That kind of litigation would be very expensive and you'd have to take it to a jury verdict every time, and would still be likely to lose even if you were not at fault because you're asking the jury to believe your expert who interpreted the computer code over their inherent bias that a machine is not as reliable as a person (this is not a "juries are dumb" thing, people have this bias in all sorts of places even when the machine demonstrates conclusively that it's better overall), and it only takes a handful of jury verdicts before your public reputation is trashed and people don't trust your car.


It would be, legally speaking, an insanely dumb idea to mod your self-driving car in any way that might possibly affect its driving. That said, it is not hard to check to make sure that the code hasn't been tampered with and I'm sure they'll be blocking third-party code as much as possible.