It’s really not, there’s plenty of videos showing they have trouble interpreting road markings, and also hallucinate cars, walls, and people around them.
They have lots of problems. The video of the one blowing a stop sign in San Fran wasn’t because other cars are around.
The Chinese Tesla that sped to it’s death randomly, wasn’t because other cars were involved.
Nah, it’s the last 20 % that are so hard. Roads with bad markings, custom traffic signs, construction sites with confusing routing, police giving directions, dirt roads, parking on private property and all the myriad of other non-standard situations that we can easily navigate without even thinking.
Don’t forget weather!
And what about the Pedestrians?
And cyclists…
Roads are for cars.
Yes, autonomous vehicles will probably be better drivers than the a stage human when the technology is more mature. As far as I know, in an idealized futuristic city any cars would be autonomous. The issue is that they’re all cars, and so have some inherent problems with efficiency and safety that can’t be fixed by self driving.
The real solution to unsafe roads is trains. Worried about pedestrians? Put the trains underground or up high, where pedestrians aren’t. Crashes? You rarely have two trains in the same place at the same time. Drunk/reckless/otherwise stupid drivers? Trains have much more well trained and vetted drivers. And that’s not talking about all the efficiency side that trains are really good at.
Cars can still address the last-mile problem
Well, yeah, human drivers are the real problem. They’re really bad at it - easily distracted, use poor judgment, have terrible sensors, and currently cause over 40,000 deaths per year in the US alone.
Replacing any number of them with objectively safer drivers would make the roads inherently safer.
Pretty sure 1 ton of metal crashing into you at 35 mph is going to be deadly no matter what controls it. Educating drivers and reducing driving complexity is not going to change the fact that you are interacting with a deadly hazard on a daily basis
https://www.qlicksmart.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Hierarchy-of-Controls-HD-1536x1152.png
Watch this Video by NotJustBikes. It’s an hour long, but since I saw it, I’m not that interested in self-driving cars anymore.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=040ejWnFkj0&pp=ygUgbm90IGp1c3QgYmlrZXMgc2VsZiBkcml2aW5nIGNhcnM%3D
Car companies bought public transport networks to kill them and sell their cars. What would cities look like if all cars are self- driving? The answer which NotJustBikes assumes is more plausible than I’m comfortable to admit.
You’d probably also need infrastructure built for autonomous cars, which might not happen.
They could build these like metal lines that go everywhere to guide the vehicles and call them rails
Probably too much infrastructure though
Yeah, having rails stopping at every single building would probably be a bit of a project
Maybe we could just put some smooth multipurpose surface down instead
Maybe people can walk like functional cities, instead of being phat
Good thing disabled people don’t exist or that could be a problem
Blind people cannot drive. They exist. Or how about people too young to get a driving permit? Or people who cannot afford to buy, maintain, insure and store a vehicle?
Reducing car dependency increases mobility.
Not everybody can walk, champ.
Pedestrians and cyclists are also a thing. I do not trust any type of vehicle around them.
I do not trust cyclists around vehicles either. I hope everyone can agree for better cycling roads, separated from motorized vehicle roads.
I do not trust cyclists around vehicles either.
That’s cute, but the untrustworthiness really only flows in one direction, and it’s not the one you wrote. There’s a reason roads never needed traffic signals or a whole bunch of rules until the automobile showed up, and why multi-use paths closed to automobiles still don’t.
