Posted on 07/21/2012 12:05:53 PM PDT by garjog
California’s proposed bullet train between Los Angeles and San Francisco—which Gov. Jerry Brown is likely to sign off on soon—has been characterized by the Obama administration and its other supporters as an effective way to reduce highway congestion.
These costs amount to more than $100 billion annually in wasted time and higher fuel expenses. In fact, a much better technological solution is on the horizon, if we pave the way by getting rid of obsolete highway design.
It is already possible to imagine a world in which you could predict exactly how long it would take to drive in your car from one point to another. No worries about rush hour, vacation congestion, bad drivers, speed traps and accidents. You could also text while you drive with no safety implications.
All this may be possible thanks to a “driverless” car that does a human driver’s normal job and much more. The car is operated by a computer that obtains information 10 times per second from short-range transmitters on surrounding road conditions, including where other cars are and what they are doing. That’s exponentially faster than the human mind can process the same information.
By gathering and reacting immediately to real-time information, the technology can drastically reduce highway fatalities by preventing collisions. It also can significantly reduce delays by creating a smoother traffic flow and rerouting drivers who have programmed their destinations.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.wsj.com ...
Go pimp your blog somewhere else!!!
I’ll drive my own the way I want to, the way I want ( 20+over the speed limit), and when I want to!!!
What I mean is that we need more professionalism behind the wheel, not less.
The idea of driverless cars is fine for some limited situations but the idea that it would be useful for every day driving is foolish.
Agreed. When you automate a thing for people, their ability to do that work themselves atrophies, and in time, vanishes completely.
I made a similar point upthread. There are countless examples of this effect at work in the 20th century, when new technologies replaced peoples' need to do certain types of work.
We can accomplish the same thing by simply leaving our system of free individual transport the way it is.
You don't seem to get it. The system you're promoting is exactly the sort of thing that tyrants, totalitarians, leftists, and big government bureaucrats love. It's tailor made to take autonomy away from the individual, and transfer complete control of movement to the state.
No matter what you might think of the technological benefits, such a system will be abused by the government, and will result in the unintended consequence of reduced freedom for the citizens.
Again, it is not about individual cars, or the ability to drive them.
It is the reality that the theory that it will solve congestion, which for the individual means avoiding congestion, one way or another so as to save time that the congestion seems to be wasting.
Slowing cars to a crawl, stopping cars from entering a space, rerouting cars to some theoretical alternative merely solves the technologists goal of not seeing cars bunched together; period. The methods of doing it do not, in the end, result in drivers getting to a location in less time, because the methods involved take time from drivers - slowing them down ‘cause they’re too close together, or rerouting them to an alternate that in affect will take just as long or longer.
In the end, when people realize that, they will conclude - why pay for something that serves ‘can we do this’ goals of technologists, but in the end does not serve their goals - saving them time.
What will save them time will be to be released from the restrictions of the road, in the air. That’s where the “accident avoidance” technology will be put to use, when, and in the manner that, it will be popularly accepted.
“Ingenuity” on its own, regardless of just what it is that people want, serves inventors and technologists only. It is not, on its own something to be rewarded for no other reason than that is in ingenuous.
The automobile has given humans great FREEDOM of movement. They are not going to sacrifice that to become drones.
“So you think that driverless cars is a conspiracy for the government to take over.”
It is not a conspiracy of “government”.
It is merely the intellectual arrogance of the technologists.
Go sell your junk somewhere else.
In case anyone is still looking at this thread, even after the heated and I think irrational posts against a driverless car network, I am even more convinced it is a great idea that should move forward.
If we want to preserve our car culture in America and prevent liberal bureaucrat social planners from forcing on us rail solutions to the insane traffic congestion that exist in every major city.
How do we keep a system in which you freely choose to get into a car and go where ever you want when ever you want?
Few freedom-loving Americans would choose waiting in line to sit on a bus or train that takes you sort of near where you want to go when an individual car fulfills the ideal perfectly.
If in our major cities we had a computer coordinated network of robotic cars the traffic deaths and traffic jams would be a thing of the past — like piles of horse manure that once covered the street.
Posters reacted hostilely to this plan here.
As best as I can figure, the hostility is due to a negative reaction to any kind of social planning.
These objections are justifiable, as is the fear that a central database would know where everyone is going and where they have traveled.
But, I think that we could ban the collection and misuse of this data.
We could also institute filters to prevent personal data from leaking.
Or we could keep one lane for the old fashioned driver driven cars to placate the paranoid who fear social planning.
I think that once everyone sees that a coordinated network driverless cars gets you to your chosen destination in half the time people will accept the potential loss of privacy.
Just as we do when going on a site like this or Facebook. There are privacy settings and controls that mitigate the loss.
The advantages far outweigh the drawbacks.
Some posters above doubt the technology would work, but anyone who has researched the topic will discover that we already have the technology and there is a growing amount of evidence that driverless cars work really well.
The best argument for conservatives maybe that promoting a driverless car network can be offered as an alternative to the money wasted on light rail and “high speed” trains.
A couple paranoid posters above accuse me of trying to make money off my blog. That is both idiotic and rude.
I posted a link to my new blog about driverless cars to help with anyone who wants find quick links to pro and con articles and videos about driverless cars.
http://dreamtransportation.blogspot.com/
Please check it out. It is an educational blog without any ads, so I don’t make any money. Sheesh.
Computers interfaced by (translation screwed up by) people crash all the time. Embedded systems that don’t have to worry about stupid users installing them incorrectly and removing the config file and other stupid user tricks crash almost never. And the rare occasions they do usually involves things like lightning or dirt.
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