Solution to Traffic?

[thisintegrated]

Saw an annoying post on reddit today suggesting trains are the future.  Everyone over there seemed to think that trains really are the solution and self-driving electric cars are nonsense.

I can't hold everyone to the standards of an ENTP??, but trains are such an idiotic replacement for self-driving cars, I just have no words.

I believe I've considered every solution imaginable, so I have my own strong opinions on this.  But I do want to hear from others.

[Carl-Richard]

whY nOt bOth? ?

[AtheisticNonduality]

2 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

whY nOt bOth? ?

I know.

Walking and biking should be used for short distances and self-driving cars, private or public, for longer distances. Having train passages cutting through, over, and under cities all over the place is a good way to make what would seem like a nightmare, but it actually makes sense to orient society away from cars to an extent because of how cluttering and polluting they are; but still, much of that can be taken care of by designing cities for walking and biking through compacting tall residential buildings in close proximity to truly needed buildings, as opposed to a labyrinth of cars going by where access to anything is tiring.

[thisintegrated]

1 hour ago, Carl-Richard said:

whY nOt bOth? ?

You get the worst of both worlds.

 

1 hour ago, AtheisticNonduality said:

Walking and biking should be used for short distances and self-driving cars, private or public, for longer distances.

Yep.  

 

1 hour ago, AtheisticNonduality said:

Having train passages cutting through, over, and under cities all over the place is a good way to make what would seem like a nightmare

Yes.

 

1 hour ago, AtheisticNonduality said:

but it actually makes sense to orient society away from cars to an extent because of how cluttering and polluting they are

Yeah, cities must be made for people.  No exceptions.

So many alternatives to cars.  E-scooters, skateboards, even detachable rollerblades are coming back.

Tunnels are an option, but only practical in a handful of cities.

Soon we'll have self driving pods (self driving cars the size of a motorcycle), and drones that can fly people.  Once we have drones we won't even need elevators for high-rises, and we'll have nothing stopping us from building way higher.  Drones can double up as cars and personal elevators.  Food can be delivered to a balcony.  Literally everything can be simplified with drones.  Where are trains in this picture?  When self driving single-man cars that cost next to nothing are available, where tf are trains in this picture?  Would anyone pay a premium to get on a crowded train?  No.  If someone wanted speed for extra cost, they'd just use a drone.

And how far away are we from this future?  We already have 100% functional driving cars.  We're basically already there.  By the time the £120B+ HS2 comes around, no one will even need it.

Edited June 7, 2022 by thisintegrated

[Arthogaan]

Trains actually are the most elegant solution in many problems:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oafm733nI6U&ab_channel=AdamSomething

[thisintegrated]

11 hours ago, Arthogaan said:

Trains actually are the most elegant solution in many problems:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oafm733nI6U&ab_channel=AdamSomething

So the video says self driving cars are bad because, even though they fix having to wait for a green light, pedestrians still can't cross roads safely.

And you suggest that this means trains are the more elegant option.

 

But you must see the problem here..

Trains have literally every disadvantage of cars, with none of the advantages.  Not only are train tracks insanely expensive, but pedestrians can't cross them even where there's zero traffic.  (btw terrorism/hacking of self-driving cars is a really dumb argument, not even worth considering here.)

Cars are also far more versatile.  Let's say it's impossible to make a city 100% vehicle free just yet, but you still wanna make it more pedestrian-friendly.  With trains you'd have to commit to expensive infrastructure which you'll have to get rid of anyway in 50-100 years.  And you'll also cut the city in half for that time period with a railway.  If instead of trains you went with mini-self-driving-cars, and you had regulations on speed and number of lanes, and maybe even external airbags, then really cars could mix with humans no problem.   That's actually how horse carriages and early cars used to be a hundred years ago.  They just mixed with the pedestrians.  Self-driving cars, with their superhuman reaction times and situational awareness, would be even safer than the system we already used to have many years ago.

 

[zurew]

1 hour ago, thisintegrated said:

Self-driving cars, with their superhuman reaction times and situational awareness, would be even safer than the system we already used to have many years ago.

Yes, and also it could work as a hive mind. All the self driving cars would know all the other self driving cars location and where they want to go, so they could find the best and most fast ways to get to their location. Also parking wouldn't really be that much of a problem, because that self driving car don't need to stop anywhere, it could detect the least occupied places and go there without blocking anything or any other self driving car's way.

Also as time goes on, more and more things can be done from home. There will be a point, where you won't really need to leave your home for almost anything. If one thing that we could learn from this covid pandemic, is that we can make things manageable from home. School can be done from home, most work can be done from home all the other stuff can be done from home. Soon drones will be used to deliver a lot of different kind of stuff, so because all of those, there will be a lot less reason to go out and to occupy roads and sidewalks.

The more worse the traffic gets, the more reason we will have to make everything manageable and accessible from home.

The future is here.

 

California allows driverless taxi service to operate in San Francisco:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/03/california-driverless-taxi-cars-san-francisco

 

Edited June 7, 2022 by zurew

[thisintegrated]

1 hour ago, zurew said:

Yes, and also it could work as a hive mind. All the self driving cars would know all the other self driving cars location and where they want to go, so they could find the best and most fast ways to get to their location. Also parking wouldn't really be that much of a problem, because that self driving car don't need to stop anywhere, it could detect the least occupied places and go there without blocking anything or any other self driving car's way.

Yep.  There's a video suggesting that self-driving cars won't need trafficlights as they'll be able to communicate with each other much faster that what trafficlights enable.  Arthogaan's link was a video critiquing this idea as "pedestrians can't use the road anyway".

 

 

1 hour ago, zurew said:

Also as time goes on, more and more things can be done from home. There will be a point, where you won't really need to leave your home for almost anything. If one thing that we could learn from this covid pandemic, is that we can make things manageable from home. School can be done from home, most work can be done from home all the other stuff can be done from home. Soon drones will be used to deliver a lot of different kind of stuff, so because all of those, there will be a lot less reason to go out and to occupy roads and sidewalks.

The more worse the traffic gets, the more reason we will have to make everything manageable and accessible from home.

The future is here.

Looks like someone's getting what I'm saying??

20 hours ago, thisintegrated said:

Once we have drones we won't even need elevators for high-rises, and we'll have nothing stopping us from building way higher.  Drones can double up as cars and personal elevators.  Food can be delivered to a balcony.  Literally everything can be simplified with drones.  Where are trains in this picture?  When self driving single-man cars that cost next to nothing are available, where tf are trains in this picture?  Would anyone pay a premium to get on a crowded train?  No.  If someone wanted speed for extra cost, they'd just use a drone.

And how far away are we from this future?  We already have 100% functional driving cars.  We're basically already there

 

 

 

 

1 hour ago, zurew said:

California allows driverless taxi service to operate in San Francisco:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/03/california-driverless-taxi-cars-san-francisco

Soon cars will be an actual investment, not a liability.  Buy a 10k car, let it drive people for you generating 1k per month in income.  Employers start having to bend over backwards to entice people to actually do jobs.  Utopia achieved.

Edited June 7, 2022 by thisintegrated

[Yarco]

Trains work great in dense places like many EU countries or Japan. I took the train to/from work when I lived in the UK and it was great. In the US or Canada not so much. Everything is way too spread out. We have a hard enough time getting cell towers put up to provide good phone coverage.

Trains can also be FUCKING ANNOYING. My city has train tracks that cut right through downtown and a few other high-traffic areas. The trains stop all other traffic -- cars, bikes, pedestrians -- multiple times a day, usually during rush hour when you're trying to get to/from work, 5 - 10 minutes if you're lucky, sometimes for 30 minutes at a time as they move forward and reverse to change tracks or unload cars. To put in one overpass to remedy the situation at one location would cost like $100M.

My preference would be to just get 4x as many busses so they come on all routes every 10 minutes and make them all electric.

Edited June 7, 2022 by Yarco

[Arthogaan]

Well, I do not think that trains are better ultimately. Just it personally seems to me that many of the problems would be solved by them in an elegant way. But I am also hyped about the future of self-driving cars.

For me whether it will be trains or self driving cars it boils down to getting rid of that notion of PROPERTY. That in order to be a free human being you have to have your own car. When you don't have to have your own car (via public transport like trains or great web o self-driving cars) then all the problems with huge space required for cars that sit all day 9:00 - 17:00 in city centres are solved. 

So yeah. I don't really care if it will be trains, buses or self-driving cars. The web that makes owning a car pointless is what I hope for. 

[vindicated erudite]

Design cites better so people have to travel less.

[Ulax]

On 07/06/2022 at 9:20 PM, thisintegrated said:

And you'll also cut the city in half for that time period with a railway.  If instead of trains you went with mini-self-driving-cars, and you had regulations on speed and number of lanes, and maybe even external airbags, then really cars could mix with humans no problem.   That's actually how horse carriages and early cars used to be a hundred years ago.  They just mixed with the pedestrians.  Self-driving cars, with their superhuman reaction times and situational awareness, would be even safer than the system we already used to have many years ago.

 

You just make the trains run underground. The london tube system is great.

[thisintegrated]

1 hour ago, Ulax said:

You just make the trains run underground. The london tube system is great.

Nah, too expensive to build tunnels in literally every single town/city in the world.  Only practical for NYC/LA/London/Tokyo/etc.

We have so much free space in the sky.  Why not just use that.

 

4 hours ago, vindicated erudite said:

Design cites better so people have to travel less.

No matter how well you design a city, if it's big then you'll need transport occasionally.

Cars are rarely necessary for a single person going to work.  But the world has a stupid car culture and doesn't care about finding alternatives.  The majority of cars on the road could be gotten rid of if we just used e.g. e-scooters where possible.  And where cars are necessary, we could have single person cars which don't need traditional car infrastructure.  There are many potential solutions.

 

But until the rest of the world develops, such optimization will never be taken seriously.  Why make things better when 90% of the world is living in poverty..  The world is still focused on survival, and flawless systems are an unimportant luxury.  Without Elon, we'd still be decades away from electric and self-driving cars.  The world just doesn't value this stuff yet.

Edited July 2, 2022 by thisintegrated

[Bobby_2021]

On 7/2/2022 at 5:32 AM, thisintegrated said:

No matter how well you design a city, if it's big then you'll need transport occasionally.

The actual solution to traffic is indeed in correct city planning.

You can design the city such that the most important utilities that people need is at walking distance.

Cars are so not human friendly. 

[thisintegrated]

4 hours ago, Bobby_2021 said:

The actual solution to traffic is indeed in correct city planning.

You can design the city such that the most important utilities that people need is at walking distance.

Yes, of course.  Ideally we'd design cities in interlinking hexagons or something, like this.  But it's unrealistic to think you'll never need to travel outside your residential area.  What if there's a nice park on the other side of the city?  Even 1000 years in the future all regions won't be the same.  People will want all essentials within a 5m walk, but countries/cities will still want to be rich in diversity.

[Bobby_2021]

On 7/4/2022 at 4:21 AM, thisintegrated said:

What if there's a nice park on the other side of the city?

Obviously you will need to walk outside occasionally.

You can have a common vehicle center at a walking distance. You can use the vehicles on a trip by trip basis and park the vehicle back in the centre. This will save a lot of space and not everyone would have to buy a vehicle. 

[thisintegrated]

Finally people are starting to listen to me.

 

Go over a dozen generations of prototypes.  Mass produce it.  Maybe experiment with upright version.  Make helipads ubiquitous.  Regulate it.  Automate it.  Sell it for 10k-20k each.  And that's 90% of transport solved.

Edited July 6, 2022 by thisintegrated

[Carl-Richard]

46 minutes ago, thisintegrated said:

Go over a dozen generations of prototypes.  Mass produce it.  Maybe experiment with upright version.  Make helipads ubiquitous.  Regulate it.  Automate it.  Sell it for 10k-20k each.  And that's 90% of transport solved.

Looking at the problems we've had with something as innocuous as electric scooters (certainly in my country), I would love to see the developmental learning curve from implementing such a new type of transport. *ER visits increase by 300%* 

Do you think it would be legal to own one that is not self-driving and hooked up to some kind of collective AI traffic grid? I wonder what type of traffic rules one would have to learn in that case and what kind of technology you would have installed in the dashboard ("please choose altitude level 4 for maximum safety").

[AtheisticNonduality]

35 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

*ER visits increase by 300%* 

Pedestrians decapitated as a routine.

[thisintegrated]

46 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

Looking at the problems we've had with something as innocuous as electric scooters (certainly in my country), I would love to see the developmental learning curve from implementing such a new type of transport. *ER visits increase by 300%* 

The only reason we're having problems with scooters is because of slow Blue bureaucracy.  You think the 50 year old sensors in power give a shit about e-scooters? Or actually doing any work towards legalizing and regulating them?  They're the same people who think that vaping medicinal weed warrants a jail sentence.  All the university degrees, decades of experience, millions in bribes/salaries, and the old farts in power are this useless.  My Ne ideas aren't the problem ..it's those guys.

 

46 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

Do you think it would be legal to own one that is not self-driving and hooked up to some kind of collective AI traffic grid? I wonder what type of traffic rules one would have to learn in that case and what kind of technology you would have installed in the dashboard ("please choose altitude level 4 for maximum safety").

Sure.  But it all depends on the whims of the politicians, and public support.

Why did Elon start out with luxury electric cars, and only later started producing more budget-friendly ones?  Cause whatever he starts with becomes associated with the technology.  The only reason Teslas are trendy among the upper-middle class is because Elon started by producing luxury electric cars and now electrics are associated with luxury.  With drones it will be the same.  If the first mass-produced drones are safe, convenient, easy to control, and easy to force regulation-conformity, then the politicians would have a hard time placing BS bans on drones.  And if the public has a good first impression, and drones gain momentum among the rich, then they'll quickly become unstoppable.

 

46 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

*ER visits increase by 300%* 

9 minutes ago, AtheisticNonduality said:

Pedestrians decapitated as a routine.

Cars have airbags.  Why wouldn't drones have parachutes?  Even if you're buying some state-of-the-art parachute system it's not gonna be that expensive compared to the rest of the drone.  £100 would probably pay for a parachute that's good enough if produced by the drone company.  And a £1000-£3000 parachute would surely do the job if regulation calls for guaranteed safety.

Until the tech's mature, could also limit drones to only fly above roads, and non-pedestrian areas.

Edited July 6, 2022 by thisintegrated