How? The traffic is the movement of vehicles. Can you save traffic by increasing the volume of trafficked things? How would AI vehicle coordination work with non-AI participants (i.e. meatbags)
I didn't want to discuss it further, and I also don't think this is a priority for Google, but I don't think that humans need as many cars as there are to go places. Key to reducing traffic would be to stop blocking huge parts of dense cities with parked vehicles, and ultimately, drastically reduce the number of personally owned vehicles.
People don't pay for the external costs of their vehicles, so it should be required to use vehicles efficiently.
This is not a technological question, but a political, and Google ain't going to solve it without an incentive.
But autonomous vehicles could in theory transform car traffic by huge amounts in dense areas, without sacrificing mobility. Munich is a metropolitan area.
The biggest hindrance to mobility in large cities are usually cars and car infrastructure themselves, because the incentives from countries and for companies are to waste space and energy, and subsidize that.
Ride sharing with autonomous vehicles could reduce need for private cars enormously. Not that I think it's gonna happen in Munich because of Google now.
The technology could just help with it.
Alas, Sorry, I wrote quite a bit already, but I don't want to expand on this repetitive discussion for my own sanity.
And yeah, when people want to have many cars and money can be made by building many cars, even subsidized by the state, the we will continue to block more space with them and build more.
"Meatbags" want it, since the successful lobbying of automotive industry to subordinate all public space and resources in the first half of the 20th century.
But this is not AI coordination saving traffic. It's 'sharing economy'. And its already here and it sux. All the bicycles which can be borrowed for a few cents per minute didn't replace personal bikes, anywhere, I think. At least in Germany they created many problems for what seems a tourist convenience. Even worse with scooters...
Same with car-sharing. In theory good but in practice I'd rather own my car 100x than finding a car, making photos to record any damage, handling rubbish from others etc.
Hm, I see that is a problem, yes, but I thought we were talking about autonomous driving?
The crappy share-bicycles that nobody is responsible for also are kind of the opposite of the lender-owned car sharing car that might have predatory lending conditions.
In the end, what I would much prefer is sharing, yes. Vehicle infrastructure is public property after all.
I don't think providing better mobility that does not force everyone to have a car, at least in densely populated areas, would require a radical shift to a "sharing economy" for everything and anything.
You don't buy a car to leave it running in your garage. It is not simply a good that you possess, to use it, you already require a "sharing economy", just a different one. Car traffic is subsidized by everyone.
But I get that most people have issues with this idea.
And it is not for me to decide.
What I mean is simple: how public space is used is never an individual decision. The collective move to individual car ownership for everyone as a given neccessity for a normal life is not something that naturally comes from the existence of cars as a technology, it is a political decision.
Car owners don't use their cars on their own property. And the more cars we use, the less mobile we are, in cities.
Now I'm knee-deep in the discussion I didn't want, I won't see this changing in my lifetime I guess, I think it demonstrates a fundamental flaw in economic logic to treat car ownership as something that is only the responsibility and freedom of individuals, because cars are only useful when everything is built for cars, and in dense areas, this restricts the freedom of others, it's not only about the freedom to have a car.
Everybody is free to buy a car and put it into their garden.
Btw, I agree about the crappy bicycles, like I said, I don't get why you equate this with every idea about changing traffic policies around cars, which are not something that revolves naturally from the right to own property. The topic is that using cars for anything requires to use other's property.
The ages-old urban planning discussion.
Again, I got myself into this discussion that I didn't want and that tends to make me misanthropic, so I'll check out here. I'm also in working hours and need to leave.
Oh, I agree that people don't pay for the external costs of their vehicles and that reducing the number of cars is what makes the cities great again.
My gripe with the autonomous cars is that they still need to park _somewhere_. They might park further away, but the company that parks their car closest to the pick up point will have an advantage over competition and thus the incentive would be to have the cars as close to customers as possible (lower cost of pickup, quicker turn around, potentially higher price for faster pickup).
In the current phase it just displaces the need for taxi labor. In the long term, you could technically remove all signage and have V2V communication to define vehicle movement without ever stopping. Example you could make an intersection where cars zigzag through each other instead of stopping.
All this being said, it’s no replacement for competent mass transit.
It should be doable with cooperation between the two, right?
If we add that FSF aims to provide free alternatives to some vendor blobs the landscape begins to look promising.[0]
One party to provide needed specs for hardware, one party to free the hardware from vendor blobs and another party to merge this into a working product.
> My take would be that underwater temps cannot get below freezing
Yep, density of water changes with temperature—it's the only thing that has that phenomenon—and therefore the colder water is always at the surface. That's actually what made life possible since life could survive despite a frozen surface.
Happy to be proven wrong, but that's what I learnt making cocktails and investigating clear ice :)
Lots of things change density when temperature changes. Water is unique that below 4°C, it gets less dense as it cools - and that trend continues even through the phase change. That's why, as you mention, ice floats, and the surface freezes first, and fish can live below a frozen surface.
Freezing point of water changes with salinity and impurities. By definition a liquid cannot be below its freezing point until it has completed its phase change.
Superheating, too, and that's something that can happen in a microwave, occasionally causing severe burns when superheated water flash boils. AFAIU, it's the same phenomenon--lack of nucleation sites to kick-off the phase transition.
Yes. My point was that it's easier(?) to get below freezing point above water than below. So while the cold air keeps the upper part of the iceberg (relatively) intact - it will slowly melt below the sea until the center of gravity changes enough to flip over.
I know in some places taxis are considered public transport. But I do not agree with that. It's still a car with one or two passengers. The only similarity with public transport is that you can use it while under influence.
They still have to park somewhere... And the service (Waymo or a future competitor) that has it's cars closer will win more customers or can charge higher fees for faster service. The parking infrastructure might move a bit. But it won't disappear. I'd wager it'll even increase.
You don't have to nuke anything. Every street is fixed/rebuild from time to time (30-40 years). The steps to follow are:
1) Allow mixed use zones.
2) Update the specs how the roads/streets are supposed to look like.
After that, grab a pint and watch how your neighborhood transforms.
Because most buses have terrible service and people are confusing the service with the vehicle. Where buses get good service they get used.
When the bus is once per hour nobody uses it except those who have no other option and those are people who likely have 'issues'. Those people exist in every city but they a rarely seen anywhere else because they are a tiny minority of all people unless you look for a place they concentrate.
Build a useful bus system and people ride it. However a useful system is expensive and so you can't get the money. In car cities 'liberals' support transit for other people not themselves and so they object to the costs that good transit would cost. If they had good transit it would save everybody money over their cars, but even 'liberals' can't see that that and so won't support it.
Oh I fully agree. One thing that (I think) is being overlooked is that when some people switch from cars to public transit, the congestion eases. One doesn't have to make everyone switch to buses/light rails. Just enough for everyone to benefit.
