Tag Archives: driverless

The Future of Mass Transit Is Driverless

by EUEJeanaikai Posted on December 31, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

When we talk about driverless cars, we usually talk about driverless cars. But I was musing the other day about other driverless vehicles, and in particular how driverless technology will affect mass transit. I suspect it will make mass transit far more useful and more popular. I’m sure others have written about this in more detail, but here are my musings:

Driverless buses. First of all, if we can build driverless cars, we can also build driverless buses and driverless light rail/subways.

Cheaper buses. Especially in the case of buses, labor is a big part of the expense of operating a mass transit system. If buses become driverless, mass transit becomes cheaper, and that means metro authorities can afford to run buses more frequently. Frequency is one of the key features that determines how popular mass transit is, so this is a virtuous circle. The cheaper it is to operate buses, the more frequently they can run, and the more frequently they run, the more people will use them. Rinse and repeat.

The last mile. Driverless cars solve the “last mile” problem. If I want to use a bus or train to commute to Los Angeles, I still need to get from the station to my workplace. If that’s inconvenient—maybe my workplace is two miles away from the nearest bus stop, or maybe I’m just lazy—then I’ll skip mass transit entirely. But it’s easy to see how you could subscribe to a service that would track your progress and have a small driverless car waiting for you when you get off the bus. Hop in the car and it takes you the last mile. And since the car is driverless, it’s cheap and efficient.

None of this means that cars will go away, of course. Commuting via car will also become more appealing if you get to sit back and relax the whole time. That said, if buses can be made a lot more convenient by a combination of more frequent operation and fleets of little cars for the last mile—and a lot cheaper than commuting as well—driverless technology could be the greatest boost for mass transit since the invention of the subway.

Continue reading:

The Future of Mass Transit Is Driverless

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Future of Mass Transit Is Driverless

Self-driving cars are good. Too good

by DrewKilfoyle Posted on October 9, 2015

Self-driving cars are good. Too good

By on 9 Oct 2015 3:37 pmcommentsShare

Guys, we’re so not ready for the future. The chrome-plated, fuel-efficient, robot-everything future we’ve been working toward? Trust me, we can’t handle it.

Exhibit A: Engineers at Google have been running road tests with a fleet of some 20 autonomous vehicles for six years, and in that time the robo-drivers have been involved in 11 “minor incidents.” I know what you’re thinking: “Not bad! I’d like to see the average human driver cover a million miles without getting into a scrape or 11.”

But with the sensory data of an omniscient god and reflexes that make the rest of us looks like drunk, mitten-handed babies, how did the autonomous fleet get in so much as a single fender bender?

Well, it comes back to said mitten-handed babies. Just because Google’s cars are extremely good at avoiding accidents doesn’t mean they can keep US from hitting THEM. In many of the 11 recorded incidents, a driverless car edging into an intersection or hesitating at a stop sign was rear-ended by an overeager human driver behind it.

That’s right. The robots are here, and they drive like my gran. Where a human driver, used to cruising alongside fellow jerks, might accelerate to cut into the flow of traffic, a driverless car will stop short to minimize risk. Smart? Maybe — but that doesn’t count for much if it’s too smart for the rest of us to catch on.

So we COULD all take a lesson from the robot cars and chill … or, we could program autonomous vehicles to be a little more like us. Which, in the Wall Street Journal, Google admits they’re already doing, by making their cars drive a bit more “humanistically.”

You hear that, future? Stay in your corner. Right now, we need driverless cars that can tailgate and ignore speed limits with the best of us — really, it’s for the greater good.

Source:

All the Accidents California’s Driverless Cars Got in by Being Too Good at Driving

, gizmodo.

Share

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Get Grist in your inbox

See original article here – 

Self-driving cars are good. Too good

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Self-driving cars are good. Too good

Chart of the Day: Driverless Cars Are Coming!

by KayleighFruehau Posted on February 25, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

I consider myself a pretty reckless optimist when it comes to the general topic of artificial intelligence and the specific topic of driverless cars. In particular, I figure that true driverless cars will be here within a decade or so. But apparently I’m not being aggressive at all. In fact, I’m just an old fogey. Via Matt Yglesias, here’s a projection from a recent Morgan Stanley research report:

Damn! “Limited” driver substitution by next year. And full-on driverless cars within four or five years. I sure hope the researcher who wrote this knows something I don’t. If this is all really in the works, it’s pretty awesome.

Visit source: 

Chart of the Day: Driverless Cars Are Coming!

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Chart of the Day: Driverless Cars Are Coming!