The most amazing part is that autonomous cars have completed 300,000 miles at all. Congratulations to the engineering team!
Around fifteen years ago, I read as a child with fascination an account in Scientific American about an automated highway project where sensors were to be placed every few feet on the road, and cars would follow them, until a driver retook control at the end. I imagined a future network of roads in which cars read from sensors to determine where they were, and was kind of saddened that governments didn't immediately start putting these sensors into highways. This is such a cooler solution, one that doesn't depend on a parallel development of infrastructure, one that would presumably take lots of bureaucratic steps that are naturally associated with usage decisions on publicly owned land (which makes sense).
What this reminds me of, rather spectacularly, is that if one method of getting to your solution fails, either because those sensors didn't work out, or the bureaucracy didn't, if you come up with a solution, and say "oh by the way I did it already", it's a lot harder for anyone to ignore it.
> This is such a cooler solution, one that doesn't depend on a parallel development of infrastructure, one that would presumably take lots of bureaucratic steps that are naturally associated with usage decisions on publicly owned land (which makes sense).
And taxes. Google isn't being funded by our dollars, except through a series of indirections.
That's really just a negative externality of inefficient suburban development. If the 'burbs didn't exist in the first place, there would be no need to subsidize their barely-used mass transit services.
"That's really just a negative externality of inefficient suburban development." Shouldn't public transit cover rural areas and small towns also? Or is the only way to get an efficient transport system to have the entire world living in huge urban centres? Personal mass transit could allow a much wider range of city sizes to be served with relative efficiency.
Mass transit doesn't need "huge urban centers" and indeed can and does serve cities of all sizes. What it requires, though, is a minimum density. You can't serve a small, sprawling city. You can easily serve small, compact cities. Compare, for example, the transit effectiveness between Zurich and Tulsa, cities of comparable population.
Especially if you can finally get high-occupancy vehicles right. Something closer to a 6-passenger vehicle with bus-style seating... if we're very lucky, only with people at most one indirect hop away in your social network?
What? No way, trains/metro are an awful system that needs to be displaced by robot cars as soon as possible. A train is a large vehicle taking a lot of people to somewhere that no one wants to go. A robot car can pick me up at my door and drop me off at the front door of my job. It would only need to drive when there are people who want to go somewhere instead of "every 15 minutes regardless of how few people use it".
Around fifteen years ago, I read as a child with fascination an account in Scientific American about an automated highway project where sensors were to be placed every few feet on the road, and cars would follow them, until a driver retook control at the end. I imagined a future network of roads in which cars read from sensors to determine where they were, and was kind of saddened that governments didn't immediately start putting these sensors into highways. This is such a cooler solution, one that doesn't depend on a parallel development of infrastructure, one that would presumably take lots of bureaucratic steps that are naturally associated with usage decisions on publicly owned land (which makes sense).
What this reminds me of, rather spectacularly, is that if one method of getting to your solution fails, either because those sensors didn't work out, or the bureaucracy didn't, if you come up with a solution, and say "oh by the way I did it already", it's a lot harder for anyone to ignore it.