Elon Musk Plans To Solve Traffic Congestion With Self-Driving Buses (theverge.com) 192
An anonymous reader writes: Elon Musk believes self-driving buses are the answer to solving traffic congestion and mass transit in densely populated cities. Musk has teased the idea while at a transportation conference in Norway, according to Bloomberg. "We have an idea for something which is not exactly a bus but would solve the density problem for inner city situations." he said. "Autonomous vehicles are key... I don't want to talk too much about it. I have to be careful what I say." Elon Musk released the Model X last year with semi-autonomous Autopilot mode, and most recently, announced the "budget-friendly" Model 3 with similar autonomous functionality. There's no question autonomous vehicles are the future. "I very much agree with solving the high-density transport problem," Musk said in Norway. "There's a new type of car or vehicle that would be great for that and that'll actually take people to their final destination and not just the bus stop." The Hyperloop is another example of Elon's vision to revolutionize transportation.
I don't know, Elon... (Score:3)
Can't be any worse than what we've got already... (Score:3, Funny)
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I've said for awhile that the company that can cross uber with self driving and audible to give me a plan where I can pay 500$/mo in order to have a car come and pick me up when I need it will get me to give up my car.
I think a self driving car fleet could make that happen. I'm not one of those people whose identity is tied up in my car, it's just a box on wheels that I use to get from point A to B in the most efficient way possible. Getting from point A to B in the most efficient way is what I want, not
Re: Can't be any worse than what we've got already (Score:2)
I'm not one of those people whose identity is tied up in my car
I dont know about "identity" (I hate American cars in general and GM in particular; I drive a Suburban) but I'm going to suggest that it's a good thing you (unlike me) don't feel a need to be behind the wheel? Why? Because to become truly proficient behind the wheel, you need to be passionate about it... and which you, obviously, are not.
Of course, you also need to not be stupid (I'm not suggesting you are), which of course rules out 40 to 60% of the drivers on American roads. In any case, the solution isn'
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I'm with the AC above - $500/ month? That's a lot of cash. Now I realize that, amortized, that's probably about the monthly cost of buying a [gas] car outright plus fuel and maintenance over a 10-year span. But there's a big difference between a one-time cost and recurring monthly payments: recurring financial obligation.
Personally I prefer larger one-time payments and then having no recurring obligation. (Incidentally, this is why I also dislike the idea of software subscriptions - those pesky recurring o
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I factor in opportunity cost too - I spend 2 hrs a day of my life driving to work (averages - some days it's a lot worse then that). If I could ignore the trip and get work done, I make money that I'm leaving on the table at the moment. Driving time is lost time to me, and time is money so I'd be willing to pony up for the extra time. That having been said, I'd take the deal for less then 500 too if you wanna negotiate them down? :)
And I totally get that there are people who treat this as their hobby, an
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Re: Can't be any worse than what we've got already (Score:2)
No information (Score:4, Insightful)
There is nothing in the article that even points us in the direction of a bus other than "Something not really like a bus". In fact there is nothing in this article that points us at anything
An uberesque vehicle (Score:4, Interesting)
I think he is brainstorming a driverless limo/bus. Without the driver station it could be square to shorten the vehicle. Then separate the vehicle into compartments with say 3 or 4 sections. You can book a whole section for yourself or share. Just imagine a squarish vehicle with 4 sets of gull wing doors.
They don't want to talk about it since it's likely they would be for uber, lift and conventional taxi businesses.
Don't forget once we have driverless the local taxi medallion companies can get in on the game quite easily too.
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I like the idea of footpaths with culverts underneath housing star trek turbo lift style transport. Add an extension to the system for your dwelling or enter via a public access point and either use a private transport unit or a public one. Leaving much smaller roads for cargo and emergency services. Interesting 3D transport system with horizontal and vertical lanes at congestion locales, 1 lane, 2 lanes, 2x2 lanes, 2x3 lanes and 3x3 lanes. The whole idea to avoid all interaction between the transport units
Time for an old Slashdot meme update (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the day, every once in a while someone would propose some "this will solve everything" solution to the problem of spam, and we'd reply with the list of many reasons why it wouldn't work. I feel like we need to update the meme below for all of the technocratic solutions coming out of Silicon Valley nowadays by people who don't particularly live in the real world, and/or are millennials.
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
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Oh boy, are we playing this game again? Do mine! Do mine!
You ban all mass mailing other than those for which the receiver has explicitly opted-in, and can easily opt-out. Nasty fines and rapidly escalating penalties for repeat offenders. Everyone's free to forward any spam to "violations@spamcop.gov", and any sender submitted more than a threshold number of times gets tracked down, investigated, tried, and penalized (the point of spam being to extract money from the recipient, senders can only obfuscate th
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I had a similar idea for getting rid of scam phone calls. A national (or whatever government level) whitelist, coupled with personal whitelists. Any number not on either your whitelist or the national one simply can't get through, they get a busy signal or something. Companies can register to be placed on the national whitelist, but must prove their validity etc. Abuses can be reported, and fines, suspensions, bans, etc. can be imposed if necessary.
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The trouble with the spam thing is that it applies to spam not to anything else. Whereas there are in fact hybrid legslative-market based-technical solutions which do ease congestion as you might see in many major cities.
For example, on the technical side you need a network of public transportation including busses, trains and underground rail. Not only that but they can be tied together with a good tracking system making it very easy to not only plan journies but find accurate up-to-date information for ma
Re: Time for an old Slashdot meme update (Score:4, Interesting)
What's funny is that the spam problem was solved years ago. Can't remember the last time a piece of spam hit my inbox. You need a new example.
Well, I'd put it more as:
(-) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
For the most part, and for most consumers, there now IS a centrally-controlling authority for email: Google. And if they're not using Gmail, they're using Yahoo Mail or Hotmail/Live/Outlook.com. Combined, they can basically dictate filtration rules for non-business US spam filtering. And for B2B spam filtering, there's a whollle lot of outsourcing that gets done to one of very few vendors. The meme writers (and all of us back in the day), didn't foresee that distributed (ISP-level or lower) email that you use Eudora, Entourage, Thinderbird, etc. would go away for most users.
It's worth noting that outside the US, and especially in developing areas, spam is still a pretty big problem, even moreso if you consider security/attack vectors as "spam"
What's the difference? (Score:4, Informative)
How is this different from buses with drivers? That hasn't solved the problem. (Not sure there really is a problem)
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picks you up and takes you from exactly where you are and where you want to go. city buses don't do that
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no, because it's carrying a bunch of other people who have most of the route in common. Taxis are very fuel and time inefficient by comparison, hell this is the first thing Musk ever thought of that makes sense. Overpriced electric cars, such that the extra cost is more than double any possible savings in fuel cost of comparable normal car, doesn't make sense.
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Are bus drivers so expensive? (Score:2)
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Drivers represent something like 80% of the vehicle costs, yes. A diesel powered bus costs about $300,000 as a one time cost + maintenance and last 10 years. and in major US cities a bus driver costs about $60,000-90,0000 per year, plus another $25,000/yr in health costs, retirement costs and administrative costs.
You can buy one additional bus for every three years of employing a bus driver.
And since you don't have to deal with humans, you can run the buses 24 hours a day, 7 days a week at t
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There are a lot of other costs. Cleaning crews, maintenance crews, stations, graffiti, etc.
Realistically this won't solve anything, the issue isn't the driver, its the other people on the bus (which would be worse without someone in charge) and its far less convenient than your own car which takes you directly from A to B more quickly. As someone who doesn't own a car (by choice), by the time I walk to a bus stop I could have driven to most of my destinations.
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The big thing about busses, commuter busses, etc, is that one bus that holds 50 cars worth of people (the average commuter car holding 1 person), only takes up three "car spaces" on the highway, in the city, etc. 50 cars take up the space of 50 cars. Plus the "gap" space between them for safety.
Even if you switched to 12 person buses (three compartments of 4 people each) running a sort of uber pool that ran in a loop, you're looking at huge advantages. And you don't have to worry about graffiti when
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That's why they choose to drive.
Most choose to drive out of laziness and sloth. In a dense urban environment, there are precious few reasons for the vast majority of people not to walk the last few blocks from a bus-stop to their destination. Exemptions go to those who are physically incapacitated or are carrying one or more large objects where use of a hand-truck would be impractical. Otherwise, if you have the ability to use your legs, get off your fucking lazy arse and walk, dammit!
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If your plan is something more like shared taxis than traditional buses (say 10-15 seats and door-to-door service, pickup on demand within 15 minutes) then there are many fewer passengers to share the cost of the driver, and I imagine it would be a significant part of the cost.
I don't know if this is what Musk has in mind, as the fine article is nearly contentless. (If so, it is hardly an exciting new idea.) I think that a service like this would get many people to go carless. It would do for me.
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London buses are expected to have a £350,000 cost over their 14 year lifetime, while ba
Moving the headstones not the bodies (Score:2)
"Just add X to the roads we have" doesn't consider the long term and may not be the best choice, especially when it's time to try to add more road capacity.
Dear Elon..... (Score:2)
No. Perfect the self driving Semi Truck and get robotic trucks out there to replace truck drivers. you can drive at the speed limit for 24 hours and get there faster than the current drivers that speed and overall drive like turds making things unsafe. plus you can get the trucks to drive in trains saving fuel in a huge way. Imagine 30 truck trains on I-80 across the country.
This is where it needs to happen.
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Electric semi's are already in development and testing. E.G. http://www.popularmechanics.co... [popularmechanics.com]
Presumably this concept is aimed more for suburban areas, where hopefully semi's aren't a significant portion of the traffic.
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Now imagine being the human driver who needs to merge into that lane.
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No, you need to get cargo off the highways and onto trains which are much more fuel efficient. Forget the Hyperloop for people. Make it for cargo and get the trucks off the highways. I was leaving Toronto late one night and it was mostly transports. And a lot of those trucks are all heading to the same place. Use shipping containers, put them on trains, and then use trucks to do short haul for the last leg. Then by getting the trucks off of the highways we make them safer and we don't have to keep expand
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And the weight of those transports is what destroys roads the most compared to regular cars and trucks, so that's another plus for that idea.
The US has a driver culture and a rider culture (Score:3)
The driver culture considers owning one's own car as a crucial element in their self-image of freedom. Historically, they have voted for transit systems only when they think buses and trains will take enough loser-cruiser-users off the road to lessen the traffic around their treasured freedom chariots.
But if ridesharing services and autonomous cars proliferate, a large number of new users will unwittingly move over from the driver culture to the rider culture. If you get used to Ubering and riding autonomous cars in the city, even you hold on to a weekend land yacht of your own, you will now be a lot friendlier to the idea of riding a multipassdenger transit vehicle when this will save money than you ever were before.
Just take ... (Score:2)
Gradual change into public transport taxis (Score:2)
I predict...
0. Self driving buses might work well. But I think the breakthough will begin with...
1. Taxi companies will run fleets of self-driving taxis: alledgedly safer driving, less risk of driver/passenger abuse, cheaper.
(Initially the public sector would not do that because of "joblosses". The private sector has no such qualms.)
2. Once the risk of joblosses is past, then taxis would evolve into public transport, because...
3. Private car ownership would decrease, due to:
- convenience (available
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Densely populated cities (Score:2)
The problem here is precisely the dense population. Most places with horrible traffic don't have anywhere near the population density for a plan like this:They are traffic nightmares because they have huge, low density suburbs, making any bus system fail, even if the price of running it went down in half. LA, Seattle, Austin, DC.. Buses don't fix that. Improvement on buses would probably fix San Francisco, and might help in NYC, but those are places where buses are already usable.
Oi vey! How NOT to solve a problem. (Score:2)
There are ALREADY known issues with driverless CARS being plonked down into mixed traffic with humans.
So, he's going to double-down and and increase the weight (under dubious "control") by 8-11 times?
So instead of just endangering a couple people on the road, we can now endanger dozens?
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You're right, nobody should ever think of a new idea or try to solve a problem. Something bad might happen!
One wonders what happens when... (Score:2)
...a Musk bus meets a Google car [wired.com]?
Implying people do or want to ride the bus (Score:5, Interesting)
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If Elon Musk wants to invent something that will improve mass transit, how about a mind control device that will make people actually want to use public transit in the first place?
There's nothing wrong with public transport. I'm sure everyone would be happy to use it. People are however not happy to use a painful slow form of transport crammed shoulder to shoulder in a tiny uncomfortable cabin which smells of BO while being stuck in the same traffic as they would be in their car.
You don't need mind control, you just need good public transport, though I don't think these things can be solved by a self driving bus.
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smells of BO while being stuck in the same traffic as they would be in their car
The first objection could be handled with periodic PSA's about the importance of good personal hygiene in crowded conditions (most people with hygiene problems are oblivious and inured to it and if it is pointed out tactfully, they will be sufficiently chastened so as to fix their behaviour).
The second is fixed by having bus-only lanes or corridors.
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The second is fixed by having bus-only lanes or corridors.
Sure. And traffic problems on highways were supposed to be 'fixed' by having carpool-only lanes.. which end up empty, while all the other general-use lanes are bumper-to-bumper. All having a 'bus-only' lane will accomplish will be to piss off drivers who are sitting in traffic while half-empty buses go whizzing by them. Oh and by the way if we're going to have 'bus-only lanes' then we also need to have protected bike lanes everywhere, too -- which will also piss off drivers. The U.S. is a car-centric countr
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It's not a bus, the article says that. It's public transport, but I think the conveyance is a lot smaller than a bus - maybe a mini-bus size, or even a people carrier size.
The road use enhancements come from multiple such vehicles being able to drive in close formation due to the autonomous and cooperative nature of the system.
And of course even if a carriage only has two or three people in it (maybe 6 people per 10m of road), that's higher density than 1 person in a car (which is 1 person per 10m of road).
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If there were more, smaller vehicles, there could be more routes, in more useful layouts. If the vehicle
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Public transport works wonders in other countries.
Trams and buses already exist (Score:2)
They do solve this problem, even if they currently still need a driver. The problem is that most cities without a well-working public transit system are lacking vision and/or money. But there really is no need for "self driving buses" to implement working, efficient and reliable public transportation.
UberPool with self-driving, electric cars (Score:2)
Original interview (Score:2)
The original interview/discussion is available as an embedded video in this article: http://e24.no/digital/elon-musk/elon-musk-norge-har-en-fantastisk-fordel/23663856
Elon Musk starts talking about it 40 minutes into the video.
Self-driving buses will be far more efficient (Score:2)
I Hate Busses (Score:2)
Buses are expensive.
They provide a monopoly in an area for a particular transportation company.
They are the constant threat to bicyclists.
They are noisy.
In metropolitan areas, people make themselves vulnerable by waiting for them.
In many areas, their schedules and routes are limited to commercial interests.
Smaller personal transportation is a better answer.
"something which is not exactly a bus" != "a bus" (Score:2)
The headline and summary talks about a bus. The quote from Mr. Musk says it's not a bus.
Re:Fucking stop it. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Bull. Everybody and their dog has "planned" autonomous cars and hyperloops, but that doesn't make them inventors. Musk is only different because he has the cash to execute the plans.
Just think of what could be accomplished if we didn't limit innovation to people who won the Paypal lottery...
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eh, self driving bus in inner city sounds very doable and safer for the present compared to autonomous car that has to deal with different environments and high speeds. the tech is already here and sufficient for it
Re:Fucking stop it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, it's called a "train".
There have been self-driving mass-transit vehicles in service for a decade.
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Those train things require rails which is expensive and limiting compared to the autonomous vehicles being developed use existing roadways. Adapting routes due to construction or unexpected traffic jams isn't really an option with trains.
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My wife was looking at a role
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Except there were already successful (and profitable) trolley systems in the 50 largest US cities before GM and the oil industry exerted their influence to have them torn up and replaced by GM buses running on diesel. And existing rails are cheaper to maintain than roads.
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I said "trolley". There is a difference.
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Yeah, if only he was in the position to be able to make this technology that doesn't exist...
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Early-adopter testing has been the launch model for every new technology since the atlatl.
Re: Fucking stop it. (Score:5, Insightful)
So , the Tesla electric cars don't count?
Or, the SpaceX launches of satellites and space station resupply?
Or, millions of solar panels?
What have you done... Ever.
Re: Fucking stop it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Paypal isn't profitable?
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More like a self-driving taxi, I'd imagine. A self-driving bus doesn't have any substantial advantages over regular buses, but a self-driving taxi... might be slightly cheaper. Slightly. It's revolutionary!
Like Uber are working on after hiring a large portion of Carnegie Mellon's robotics department?
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09... [nytimes.com]
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Is that revolutionary? Maybe not, but if it could be made 20% cheaper than driving that's £1,500 I save a yea
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One other thing you won't get with an autobot, someone to intervene in situations.
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One other thing you won't get with an autobot, someone to intervene in situations.
Or prevent situations from happening, simply by being there.
Vandalism, violence, sexism are all curbed to at least some degree by there being a driver present who can observe and report.
Cameras are fine, but who are going to watch the cameras? And what to do when one stops working - stopping and auto-calling 911 just in case?
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Even calling it in is intervening, and I wasn't so much referring to major situations, as little things. Like if the bike rack is full deciding whether or not there's enough space on the bus for someone to hold their bike, deciding if someone who can't pay should be allowed to ride, asking people who are being obnoxious to keep it down or get off, telling someone with a large dog that it needs to be muzzled to ride.
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What if you get the nasty, rude, and potentially mentally unstable decepticon?
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You left out the part "Autonomous vehicles are key". So not specifically buses, but this is modern journalism, after all.
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Indeed, small buses, especially if benefiting from the drastically lower maintenance of electric drive, and possibly organized more like a taxi-sharing service. Even just having smaller buses running much more frequently would make busses far more attractive.
Of course the bus driver also sort of doubles as a sort of low-impact security guard, but I could easily see fleets of minibuses in say, Denver, being attended by minimum-wage stoners encouraging people to "just chill out" and doing a little cleanup th
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The bus driver also helps in stopping people from not paying and riding for free.
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True, I suppose I was including that in the "security guard" concept.
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So? Other than the opinions of entitled suburbanite "I demand that you subsidize my roads but don't you dare use My Tax Dollars for transit" assholes, why not just make the fare $0? It's not as if most transit systems fund more than a small fraction of their budgets from fares anyway...
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Thats funny because in the states we absolutely fund busses with public money. You still pay for public transit but it is subsidized. You guys don't have public busses at all? Just private ones?
We have private bus lines too but they are generally inter-city buses.
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electric trains that get you within four blocks are great, I use 'em every work day
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Trolleys, my friend. They're buses before Rockefeller and GM convinced cities to give up their electric fleets for polluting vehicles.
http://www.gutenberg.us/articl... [gutenberg.us]
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Trolley's still require rails which is expensive and not very adaptable to unexpected roadwork or traffic jams. An autonomous vehicle running the same "route" could be rerouted if needed for special events, scheduling, etc.
Re: we already have it (Score:2)
Cars are for people whose commute distance makes taking the buss unrealistic.
Cars are for people whose job hours can vary from day to day which makes bus schedules frustrating.
Cars are for people who once had no other alternative than to take the bus and, after the experience, swore to never step on one ever again.
Cars are for people who don't wish to sit next to the masses in a confined space. Because they include any or all of the following:
The guy yelling into his cell phone.
The guy who forgot what a ba
Re:Bigger Problem (Score:4, Insightful)
What are we going to do with the massive unemployment the horseless carriages will cause? the breeders, the whip makers, the blacksmiths, the hay balers, the veterinarians, the reinmakers, the shit shovelers.....what will we do when the market can't absorb those jobs as mechanical devices have entered there too?
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You are so funny since computer intelligence, artificial or otherwise, doesn't even exist. There has been no significant development in AI since the 1960s other than more raw processing power and storage to throw at a problem. Neural nets? 1950s! symbolic AI? 1950s! ontologies for symbolic AI? 1960s! genetic algorithms? 1950s! But this magic voodoo is going to cause massive unemployment? Hell even for what some call "AI" now there is massive market for developers
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It took more people to maintain a horse than a car.
It takes very few people to raise and care for horses, even including accessories like horseshoes and saddles. 1000 years ago a sizable town could comfortably employ an entire horse industry to serve the local area. No way could one town employ an automotive industry for the local area. Cars are one of the great examples of increased productivity resulting in vastly greater complexity rather than fewer jobs.
Widespread robot cars are still a pipe dream at the moment
Depending what you mean by "robot cars" it's already here. We have lane assist, brake assist, parking
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I suspect you are ignoring the mining, energy resources, refining of various materials, science and engineering, manufacturing, distribution, sales and marketing
Re:Bigger Problem (Score:4, Insightful)
What's he going to do about the mass unemployment he will create?
People don't live to work, people have to work to live. At least until work is no longer required. Then we'll need a new system of distribution. One that does not couple work output to income. Because soon enough work will be the scarce resource.
Not everybody works at a keyboard, kid. (Score:2)
Whatever happened to telecommuting? It was suppose to be the wave of the future but seemingly fell flat.
If your daily commute is a city bus, chances are quite good your lifestyle is closer to Rosa Parks than Steve Jobs.