But Cletus can’t fit his 10-foot-tall, 8-foot-wide, cyclist-crushing, peelout-producing penis replacement in a normal parking garage! Who will think about poor Cletus?
Regardless of anything else, there are no circumstances under which companies like Uber would decrease traffic. This is because of two effects: Firstly, any regular car ride replaced with an Uber ride will result in more road-hours, since there is now a car travelling to your pickup point as well travelling on the road after dropping you off.
Secondly, the convenience of Uber can cause more travellers taking a car instead of public transport, again increasing the total number of road-hours.
Is there even a hypothetical scenario under which any of these private hire companies would reduce traffic? The only theoretical benefit is that less parking spaces are needed.
I rented from them once, didn’t have a choice, my car was totaled. They tried to make me pay a late fee for something I returned on time, my insurance agent chewed them out for that hardcore. I didn’t pay those fuckers a dime, and I sincerely hope someone was fired.
If the people living in apartments had a say in how they were built… yeah
Nobody chooses to live in a fucking tin can hanging from suspension wires that is so poorly insulated you can hear every bird flying into the windows as though you’re inside a bass drum.
The sounds of my neighbors at 3 am snoring are not a feature you can call part of the “shared experience.”
The prospect of being trapped together because the elevator went out and there’s a fire… oh so joyous. Not to mention all the people’s pets that get left at home throughout the day and I can hear crying with desperation to be let out as though they’re in the next room…
I’m quite happy not to live in a fucking modern apartment thank you very much.
I live in a 51 story condo tower and it’s great. Thick concrete walls, can’t hear a thing. High above the street, so not much street noise gets up to my unit. The hallways are pressured higher than the units, so smells don’t get out.
It’s great; I never want to live in a house, and deal with all the shit that comes with that.
A 51 story tower sounds like a nightmare in any kind of emergency. The hallways are pressurized so one infected person can spread the latest virus to every apartment on the floor, and if there’s a fire, you get to see just how short the ladders are at the local fire department. I lived in a well built three story apartment building at university, literally only one year old when I moved in. The noise was minimal due to lots of concrete construction, but the general consensus was in any kind of earthquake the entire building was going to be a death trap due to a lack of emergency exits with external staircases.
I’m never sharing walls or living in a multistory building again unless it can be designed to my spec, and I’d want it built to withstand 10,000 year events because 100 year events just aren’t really uncommon anymore.
The hallways are pressurized so one infected person can spread the latest virus to every apartment on the floor,
The opposite actually, since the one infected persons virus stays contained in their unit. We had virtually no spread of Covid in the building during lockdowns, with infected people’s illness staying contained to their unit.
and if there’s a fire, you get to see just how short the ladders are at the local fire department.
The fire department doesn’t need ladders to get up the building, the all concrete construction prevents fires from easily spreading unit to unit. We’ve never had a fire spread from one unit to another in the 13 years I’ve lived here.
in any kind of earthquake the entire building was going to be a death trap
Also false, tall towers can easily be built to be Earthquake proof, just look at Japan, or LA.
Seems you don’t really know anything about the actual construction of tall towers or what it’s like to live in them, and are just going by false convictions.
You might want to listen to the first season of The Big One, which was on NPR. One of the things they talk about is how many towers haven’t really faced a big quake since they were built, and the City of LA refuses to say which buildings won’t stand up to even a medium quake. Quake liquifaction is a thing you should read up on; it’s scary because it’s a distinct possibility in some of the most populated cities in the world. Japan has done a great job of building earthquake resistance into their buildings, but again, very few of them have actually faced a massive, local quake, so it’s all based on best guesses. I know my single story isn’t coming down like a tower, and I can personally turn off my natural gas line to reduce fire risk. Towers don’t have individual gas shutoffs AFAIK.
All concrete construction reduces the risk of small fires spreading, but like the Twin Towers proved, once the building is on fire the only way down is the stairs, because external ladders aren’t tall enough. It also doesn’t help when the buildings are clad in flammable materials, like the residential tower in the UK that went up like a candle. I literally don’t stay above a certain floor in hotels when I travel in the US because even the FDNY’s tallest ladder only goes up 137 feet (41.75 meters for the metric lovers). Internationally, I don’t stay above the fourth floor, because most fire departments don’t have ladders to reach much higher than that.
That your building escaped without people inadvertently infecting others is great, but I hope you realize that part of what made Covid so dangerous, especially in the first year, was that it could spread before symptoms presented strongly, and that there was strong asymptomatic transmission. It’s not crazy to think some of those characteristics will be shared with other, much more deadly, viral strains, given that we’ve seen such hopping in bacteria. That’s why antibiotic resistance is so dangerous; germs share with each other. Positive pressure in the hallways being a positive presumes contagious individuals know they’re contagious and will stay inside their flat until they’re no longer contagious. I don’t think I need to tell you how unlikely that is for large segments of the population.
I know my single story isn’t coming down like a tower,
No, but good chance it collapses anyway. I know 100% my building isn’t going to fall due to an earthquake ever.
And those towers in parts of Japan and LA have faced severe earthquakes without collapse.
but like the Twin Towers proved
Several entire floors were destroyed and set ablaze simultaneously, blocking off the stairwells and ensuring an incredibly large part of the building was on fire at the start. Not in any way comparable to a standard fire starting in a condo tower.
like the residential tower in the UK that went up like a candle
Sure, and in any sane country that’s entirely illegal to do. There are zero buildings with flammable cladding in my city. And having seen apartments on fire in other buildings, and that fire failing to ever spread to another unit, I can indeed confirm that most buildings do not have fire spread between units.
Internationally, I don’t stay above the fourth floor
Utterly ridiculous of you, that is a completely irrational phobia. If tall buildings were as dangerous as you think they are we’d have millions of people dying in them annually, but we don’t. Even considering some of the shoddier builds in China, apartment fatalities are rarer than people dying in their own houses.
was that it could spread before symptoms presented strongly, and that there was strong asymptomatic transmission
And yet in a positive pressure building it did not spread, even with confirmed cases in some units it never spread to any neighboring units. We would have been very aware if someone had been symptomatically spreading it in the building as we would have had cases spike, but that did not happen. So no, even a very transmissible airborne virus will not spread between units in a well designed tower.
After figuring in all the time it takes to earn enough to pay for a car, time spent maintaining it and gasing up, as well as the actual time spent driving, you still only get about 4 miles per man hour.
I wonder if there’s data out there on life expectancy for people who walk a lot vs those who drive everywhere. I bet the miles per man hour would go down even further if you factor in years of life lost from being sedentary behind the wheel instead of walking.
the problem isn’t the car, but the salary, which is basically straight theft, and that is eating on the Mh (man-hour). if one were paid twice as much, that would translate to 8 mile per Mh, also imagine there were one seat cars, instead of paying for a 5 seat car, u would save at least on half as much of the car cost ( also a 1L for 100km engine locked at 90km/h for speed is also logical), which translates to 16 miles per Mh, so on and so forth…also taxing the rich and subsidizing public facilities will extend Mhours way more…
if u want to transport friends and whatnot, then dont come complaining about car cost…i was just trying to optimize car use cases. sure u wanna go camping ? might as well buy a AWD car for a trip per year and pay for the fuel of daily work commute. might as well buy two cars in this regard…if only public transport was that reliable, and also wages were fair…
The difference in fuel use between a two wheel drive and AWD vehicle is negligible, you might as well have an AWD. Especially if you don’t commute in your own car.
u would think a 1L gasoline engine with 86Nm of torque would serve awd in rugged terrain ? unless u live in the us, where even front wheel’s are run by 2 liter diesel, at 360Nm
The running cost of a vehicle is less than a dollar per KM, if you buy second hand you’re not losing much money to depreciation, and it takes me an hour to do an oil change, which I do every ten thousand KM.
I saw them around here somewhere. I haven’t bothered to run them personally, but after ditching my car and WFH, suddenly I can afford to support my wife and child while they both go to school - by way of explaining why I haven’t put the assertion under a microscope.
Couldn’t conjure up the source I got it from though. After some random figures looked up and shitty napkin math, I would only be able to argue for about 22 miles per Mhour for the average American.
As someone working in embedded machine learning, I can say two things:
Deep learning models, as powerful as they are, are the epitome of black box. We know they work, but we’re still struggling to understand how they work. Further, they fail in oftentimes really weird and unexpected ways. So if we want to build safety-critical systems that depend on deep learning, that’s a very tall order. And I don’t think we’re there yet with the tech.
I’ve never worked with automotive embedded software, but my understanding is it’s very hard and very complicated, and there’s a real shortage of embedded engineers going into automotive. Trying to build incredibly complex, fault-tolerant embedded software systems for a widespread network of driverless cars sounds like an absolute nightmare and an absolutely gargantuan task.
Theoretically, I don’t think it’s impossible to build this vision of the future, but I think it would be stupendously difficult, take a lot more time than tech bros would like to lead you to believe, and ultimately just be a worse transit system than automated trains.
Not to mention being a pedestrian crossing the street in such a world would be a nightmare.
I think 2 would be massively easier to solve if there were no human drivers. Drop private ownership, every car a self-driving uber. We’d need much less of them, they could coordinate without having to account for irrational human behavior. And they could be mandated to always give way at crossings.
Public transport is still superior of course, but I think it’s something that could make cars less objectionable.
It wouldn’t. Have you seen those massive drone light displays? they lose drones during the shows. Nothing indicates that machine learning would fare better. Because reality is way more complex than a computer can simulate. I mean, even in an entirely humanless car network, a single misplaced traffic cone could send the whole system into shutdown. No system is failproof.
I don’t know about that, it’s all about tolerances. Losing a drone from a cloud is probably considered an acceptable loss.
How many trains crash every year (leaving out poor maintenance for the moment)? Those systems are highly complex and almost fully automated. AI’s not even really needed.
Exactly, in a swarm system, losing a drone is fine. A car fully automated network, as CGP suggest, is a swarm system. If they are cars with people inside of it, it isn’t acceptable to lose units, we can’t accept even a single autonomous car randomly losing control into a tree. No matter that humans do that. The system has to be better than humans, not equally bad. Train systems are inherently free from this variation.
Pretty much my thought process. It’s the humans doing human things that are difficult to code for. Honestly just putting Bluetooth in every car so you can see how fast they are moving and maybe predicting their projectory would be useful.
Im thinking birds eye view like in GTA or something. You can see where you want to go and what obstacles are in the way. Gives you a lot longer to react than if it’s just your view out of the window.
That can be done more reliably with lidar. Adding BT and other wireless dependencies to critical control systems opens up new vulnerabilities and attack vectors. Sociopath hackers would use it to fake an imminent collision and cause crashes.
The most efficient path forward is higher density cities, less low density sprawl, and free mass transit (trains, light rail, and buses) to remove the dependency on private cars, then gradually upgrading to driverless only lanes and roadways as private vehicle traffic is reduced over time; much more realistic than waiting for tech companies and politicians to solve complex technical and regulatory problems that could take many decades.
The government should also be directing investment and subsidies to smaller single-person “pod” transport options too, as it’d be cheaper, easier, and more efficient overall if we could accommodate the majority of traffic in both directions within a single car lane, freeing up space for future transition work — after-all, most road traffic is a single person in a 5+ seater car.
Lidar can’t do that. It can ping things but not beyond those initial ones. ? Correct it’s radar but for light ? Obviously BT would create a whole new havock but it might also make life a lot easier because you know where things are that you can’t see.
You can’t see past the lorry in front of you but you can see a car is a few miles away up the road. You’ve time to pass. In the dark you can’t see but BT can.
Hackers can’t do shit. This always gets blown out. Hackers will screw systems and kill people, hackers will do this and that. Yeah I’m sure maybe a hundred can actually do that. So you’ve got 100 deaths.
I think there’s already been 30 deaths on our roads this year. I think the hacker thing is a red herring.
Absolutely agreed but I don’t live in a city so none of those things help me. Cities are pretty easy to solve some traffic woes. But for country it’s much harder and where I need driverless.
Absolutely agree. I was just thinking about this the other day. I just need a tiny transport vehicle for me. I don’t need 5 seats and a boot 90% of the time.
Waaaaay easier. We already have numerous automated metro systems in the world, from Copenhagen Metro to Vancouver SkyTrain to Montreal REM to Honolulu Skyline to airport people movers galore to probably a whole bunch more systems I can’t name off the top of my head.
Having rails, dedicated infrastructure, and a grade-separated right-of-way works wonders for eliminating variables. You don’t even need AI for automated trains.
I have seen some truly terrible takes elsewhere online from New Yorkers who think this is another poor people tax. This is the opposite of a poor people tax. I don’t know where that idea is coming from, but it sounds like a Fox News and New York Post talking point.
I don’t disagree however for people who work in NYC, but don’t live in NYC, there’s some real shit mass transit options and none of the money from congestion pricing is going towards anything but MTA, which is just NYC, not New Jersey or Connecticut.
Honest question: Who are the people who work in Manhattan, live elsewhere in areas with poor transit, drive into the city every day, pay the high parking costs, yet get paid poorly enough that the cost of the congestion toll is prohibitive, such that wasting their free time in standstill traffic is preferable? With unemployment down, why can’t they get jobs closer to home, which may pay less, but don’t have the costs in time and money, so that they come out ahead?
Fair question, I think it harms two groups of people 1) people who live far enough outside NYC for cheaper housing, or people who work hours that aren’t normal commuting hours, where there is no mass transit service at all even in somewhat closer outside NYC areas. With that said, although I’m sympathetic to these somewhat edge cases, I fully support congestion pricing, but think there can be some tweaks, such as funding external to NYC mass transit, and potentially providing some accommodations to these edge cases.
Yeah, exactly. The problem is the poor are kept poor because they have to keep shouldering the costs of other (usually richer) people’s negative externalities. Properly pricing those externalities and using the funds either for a citizen’s dividend or for other beneficial public spending is like one of the most obvious ways to make a more prosperous and equal society.
Just because you don’t tax the externalities doesn’t mean those costs disappear; instead they just get paid by society’s most vulnerable.
Street space is a public good. It is literally land, surface area to be used for something. You can’t create more of it short of demolishing all the existing buildings. Right now like 80% of the width of a Manhattan avenue is dedicated to moving and parking cars. Pedestrians and bicyclists are squeezed into tiny slithers on the sides. It’s a total shame. If you count and compare the number of people passing a given point on a 5ft busy Manhattan sidewalk to the number of passengers in private cars in the 55ft roadway next to it, it’s like a 10-fold difference in 1/10th the space.
Right now, everyone poor and rich at least has an equal access to drive on the roadway (assuming you can afford to maintain a car at all). However, midtown roads are already at full capacity all the time. There exist way more people in New York who would drive if they could, but they literally can’t fit. It takes 1-2 hours to drive into Manhattan. This is considered “typical traffic conditions”. Morning rush hour stretches into the afternoon and merges into evening rush hour.
Effectively, you are trading patience/time for the opportunity to drive in. For every one person who has the patience to wait 1 hour in gridlock, there are 2 more who do not and find alternative ways in. Even billionaire mayor Mike Bloomberg took the subway to work. It was described as “populist signaling” but it was literally faster for him than taking a limo.
Rich people have a lot of money and not a lot of patience. Lots of them would have loved to be able to pay to skip the gridlock, but they couldn’t, until now. They have succeeded in taking this 80% of public space, that everyone with sufficient patience could access, and turning it into a private toll road. That’s why this is a land grab! Doesn’t matter if the fees go into a public fund - if revenue was needed it should have been raised by a progressive tax. A flat fee is the opposite of that!
The congestion charge will not even decrease the number of cars on the road. Remember how for every 1 driver there are 2 more who wish-they-were-drivers but who had more money than time? Every 1 poor driver taken off the road will be immediately replaced by 1 more private car service Suburban SUV. The rich crave travel away from us poors, in their padded armored tanks, and now they can do exactly that, as they have succeeded in having the legislature kick us off our public land.
The only thing that will reduce car traffic is shrinking the roadways. Take those 5-lane Manhattan avenues, take away one lane and convert it to protected micromobility lane. Take away another and widen the fucking sidewalks! Take away the street parking and convert it to green space with trees that survive longer than 1 year. Add loading zones for delivery drivers. Use the public street space for the benefit of the actual public!
Interesting points here. I hope things don’t work out this way, but I think there is a very strong chance that this is exactly what will happen: the streets of Manhattan below 60th will stay mostly-as-busy, but with more ride shares and private car services, since clear streets means rich people can finally transmute money into quick, private transportation.
I’m curious about this statement:
There exist way more people in New York who would drive if they could, but they literally can’t fit.
I believe there are a lot of rich folks in NYC who would rideshare even more if they didn’t get stuck in gridlock. But I’m not sure we have sufficient evidence to say that “way more people” would drive if there was less traffic. When I lived in NYC (just before covid hit), none of my friends owned cars even though they all had the means. It was just too much trouble to park them and maintain them for the few days a year you need a car if you mostly hang out in the city. And driving is a pain if you’re mostly in a city – the NYC lifestyle is very alcohol heavy and for a lot of folks only spans a couple of miles on an average day. Not exactly a huge benefit from cars there.
100% agreed that we should reclaim parking space and lanes from cars, though. Perhaps congestion pricing will temporarily empty the streets and give the city ammunition to reclaim that space? A smart city would enact congestion pricing, downsize the largest avenues before rideshares figure out a way to exploit the opportunity, and then use that reduced main throughput to justify downsizing and pedestrianizing streets across the city over the next few years. But I suppose they could have done that during the covid traffic downturn, too, like how Paris and London seized the empty streets to expand bicycle infrastructure and pedestrianize streets around schools.
The issue isn’t with cyclists being on the road, it’s with them blocking the road while going significantly slower than traffic. Motorbikes aren’t a similar problem because they’re quick enough not to disrupt everyone else on the road.
Edit: For the benefit of the downvoters - I’m a cyclist, you dopey fucks - I’m just honest about the issue drivers have with us. Making up this bullshit just makes us look like liars that don’t understand the people we’re sharing the road with, and our reality-based arguments work perfectly well. Be better.
Oh - absolutely - I just think that grounding the argument on this dishonest nonsense only undermines a good idea that can stand on the reality of its merits.
…those downvoting a simple reality-check from someone that otherwise agrees with you only demonstrate a willful disconnect from reality.
What are we supposed to do? We can’t cycle on the sidewalk, and if we get closer to the curb, it gives many drivers the false impression that they can overtake without crossing into the other lane, not to mention all the potholes, drains, and trash that we then have to cycle over.
It seems like a dick move, but I promise you that most cyclists are purposefully being in your way to make sure you notice, slow down, and give us space. We’re just as unhappy about being around your car as you are to see us. We’d happily fuck the fuck off to our own little lane if someone gave us one.
I’m a cyclist too - it’s not an easy situation. It’s easy to say the answer is good bike lanes, but we’ve also got to deliver on that. I’m the meantime, it’s a case of riding responsibly on the road - without inventing unnecessary, dishonest strawman arguments about what concerns motorists. That does more harm than good.
People do that all the time in my area. It’s not because it’s “safe”, it’s because they’re stupid. Then they want to join my communities so they can spam it with their stolen bike posts and get help finding them.
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