Poll of the Day > Does society need to eliminate driving?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Do the pros of self-driving vehicles outweigh the cons?

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Society would benefit from transitioning to greatly reduced car use and car ownership.

This doesn't even require self driving cars. A great solution, where applicable, would be greater dependence on train and bus systems for local travel, high-speed rail between major hubs, and car rental only when the other options don't connect you to where you want to go.

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Driver's licenses are to big an investment, for most people to accept they become obsolete anytime soon.

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I wonder how much of an impact remote working will have on car use going forward.

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No, yall just need to git gud

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Clench281 posted...

Society would benefit from transitioning to greatly reduced car use and car ownership.

This doesn't even require self driving cars. A great solution, where applicable, would be greater dependence on train and bus systems for local travel, high-speed rail between major hubs, and car rental only when the other options don't connect you to where you want to go.

Tell them to update the infrastructure completely.
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Nichtcrawler X posted...

Driver's licenses are to big an investment, for most people to accept they become obsolete anytime soon.

Yeah, all those people who think "I PUT ALL THAT EFFORT INTO GETTING MY LICENSE so I'd rather pay more money and be forced to drive myself, instead of spending less money to get a ride where I want to go"

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Clench281 posted...

Yeah, all those people who think "I PUT ALL THAT EFFORT INTO GETTING MY LICENSE so I'd rather pay more money and be forced to drive myself, instead of spending less money to get a ride where I want to go"

EFFORT, time and money.

Also, sunk cost fallacy is strong.

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Modern cities, especially in North America, are designed around car ownership. It's one of the biggest mismanagement of resources in human history.

Correcting it either requires a huge increase in buses (as well as an increase in comfort and quality on those buses, God I'm glad my 40 foot limo days are over) or completely redesigning cities (not even possible).

Let's just hope we can get a clean, reliable, abundant, and affordable way of producing individual vehicles that run on a renewable power source.

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Yes

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Nichtcrawler X posted...

EFFORT, time and money.

Ehhhhh.

I had maybe 5 hours of driving experience when I did my road test. Passed on the first try. Driving is pretty intuitive.

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faramir77 posted...

I had maybe 5 hours of driving experience when I did my road test. Passed on the first try. Driving is pretty intuitive.

So you are some kind of driving savant, most people take many, many more. ( or a country that expects almost nothing in the examination)

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If people take that much effort to pass a driving test, given how simple the tests are, maybe they shouldn't ever actually be driving

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There are studies that show that the road-dependent urban planning of modern US cities is unhealthy for people...


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Clench281 posted...

If people take that much effort to pass a driving test, given how simple the tests are, maybe they shouldn't ever actually be driving

Even a normal lesson package is much larger than 5 hours here. The skills expected here when having that license do not come that quickly or easily.
Just that your country has low standards in such, does not mean other countries should as well.

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Nichtcrawler X posted...

Even a normal lesson package is much larger than 5 hours here. The skills expected here when having that license do not come that quickly or easily.
Just that your country has low standards in such, does not mean other countries should as well.

... So you're arguing that you should keep cars irrespective of any actual benefit or detriment, appealing only to the sunk cost that you already admitted is fallacious thinking?

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I am just saying many people would hold it of on the premise of "I got this license for a reason and it cost me, so I am gonna use it".

Could even turn into a group court case against the government. As they required it and made it expensive and then just made it obsolete. Many people would consider that as the government wasting/taking their money.

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Not completely but it would be best if we reduced their usage greatly.

faramir77 posted...

Modern cities, especially in North America, are designed around car ownership. It's one of the biggest mismanagement of resources in human history.

Correcting it either requires a huge increase in buses (as well as an increase in comfort and quality on those buses, God I'm glad my 40 foot limo days are over) or completely redesigning cities (not even possible).

This, very much.

But even worse than cities, the entire concept of the suburbs revolves almost entirely around cars. There are plenty of places in the US where you will pretty much die without a car of your own. To change that, you would have to radically restructure both the infrastructure and economy of the world in ways that are borderline impossible without causing a dynamic crisis.

People act like the last year and a half were the worst thing any human has ever had to endure. There's pretty much zero chance those people would be willing to endure the sort of radical lifestyle changes necessarily to eliminate cars.

It's part of why even pro-driverless car advocates have admitted in the past that a full driverless future is probably unlikely (at least in our lifetimes), and that the more likely scenario is a focus on driverless public transport. A slow incremental changeover would probably take decades to get to the point of eliminating personal transport entirely, but it's also about the only way it would ever feasibly work.



faramir77 posted...

Let's just hope we can get a clean, reliable, abundant, and affordable way of producing individual vehicles that run on a renewable power source.

Even if they were completely equal in other ways, this would still be the far more important factor than whether or not cars are driverless, because the environmental impact of driverless cars would still be fairly significant. And most people who advocate for scaled back car usage don't really consider the major impact of product transport and delivery - planes, trains, boats, and trucks are more or less in constant motion in the modern world, using resources and producing waste. You'd have to start converting all of those over to clean energy alternatives as well, not just people's personal vehicles.

But even if we were able to completely convert every vehicle in the world to clean alternatives and every transport and personal vehicle was completely automated, then you'd have the added problem of all the people who used to drive for a living now out of work. Which is where you start getting into discussions about things like universal basic income.

People who think problems are easy to solve and advocate for the easiest, most obvious solution usually just create new problems for the next batch of people to have to fix. Especially in the modern world, most big problems are more a tangled mess of integrated systems rather than a single point of failure, and require far more thinking and complex solutions than people are willing to commit to.
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My own opinion is that the goal should be a system like the LoGH OVA had in place for cars.

While private cars are (probably) a thing in it, most are fully automated taxis, which can be switched to manual control at will.

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Clench281 posted...

great solution, where applicable, would be greater dependence on train and bus systems for local travel, high-speed rail between major hubs, and car rental only when the other options don't connect you to where you want to go.

I take it you live in the city? Busses / trains are not going to help people who live in small / rural towns


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Public transportation isn't as reliable as cars and never will be, let's not act like it is possible. Cars offer freedom to go wherever you want whenever you want.

We should also consider the fact that some people enjoy driving.

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Nichtcrawler X posted...

So you are some kind of driving savant

No, he's pretty normal lol most people can pick up driving pretty quickly

FrozenBananas posted...

I take it you live in the city? Busses / trains are not going to help people who live in small / rural towns

Hence me saying "where applicable" ?

Small/rural towns don't have the same massive traffic and congestion problems that cities do.

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honkzilla posted...

No, he's pretty normal lol most people can pick up driving pretty quickly

Nope, 5 is little. Quick google told me 39 is the average.

Edit, which is less than the numbers I found when searching in English.

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Ah yes, the classic "I quickly googled a phrase that would return results that back me up, didn't bother to vet anything for credibility, and didn't bother to google phrases that might produce contradictory claims"

I appreciate it when people do this, it's like a giant "nothing I say has value" sign lol

The 39 hours is according to the CBR ((Dutch) Central Bureau Drive-ability) from asking candidates in 2019.

The English numbers are from the UK, mentioning 45 hours of lessons and 20 hours of private practice.

I know nothing about the UK system, but I do trust the CBR in this case.

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Lol buddy we're not talking about the posted requirements, we're talking about how long it actually takes a person behind the wheel for the first time to learn to control the car. It's actually pretty intuitive and does not take all that long, 5 hours of practice to go from zero experience to reasonably competent and in control under typical conditions is pretty normal. Like if it actually takes someone a full work week's worth of driving to get to that point they probably have a learning disability

An aside: if you think everyone who gets their license does the full requirement of private practice I have a bridge to sell you lol

honkzilla posted...

Lol buddy we're not talking about the posted requirements, we're talking about how long it actually takes a person behind the wheel for the first time to learn to control the car. I

That is the average I am giving you. The 39 hours is the average numbers of lessons people took here in 2019 before passing their exams.

honkzilla posted...

An aside: if you think everyone who gets their license does the full requirement of private practice I have a bridge to sell you lol

Considering "private practice" is not even a legal thing here, no. The driving lessons themselves should be enough.

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Nichtcrawler X posted...

That is the average I am giving you.

You literally prove in the next sentence that you're talking about something else lol

Nichtcrawler X posted...

Considering "private practice" is not even a legal thing

Holy fuck are you seriously backpedaling on the stats you provided to support your own argument?

Lmfao I'm done dude, you're a clown

honkzilla posted...

Holy fuck are you seriously backpedaling on the stats you provided to support your own argument?

I never gave private practice hours for the Netherlands.

honkzilla posted...

You literally prove in the next sentence that you're talking about something else lol

Ah yes, being "able to drive" and being "able to drive well enough to pass a legal standard" are two different things, I agree.

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Clench281 posted...

Society would benefit from transitioning to greatly reduced car use and car ownership.

This doesn't even require self driving cars. A great solution, where applicable, would be greater dependence on train and bus systems for local travel, high-speed rail between major hubs, and car rental only when the other options don't connect you to where you want to go.

this

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Nichtcrawler X posted...

Driver's licenses are to big an investment

For me, driver's ed consisted of a total of 24 hours of classroom time spread over two weekends (boring as hell, as one can imagine), followed by 10 hours of in-car education (with a few hours between of personal practice). The road test and actually receiving my license then took about an hour and a half total (including getting to and from the DMV). Calling that 40 hours of total investment seems pretty reasonable, plus several hundred dollars (between the driver's ed program and the cost of the license itself).

That wrapped up over 6 years ago (could have been 16, but I didn't bother getting my license until I was almost 25), and I've done enough driving since then (and saved enough time/money in doing so) that 40 hours is utterly negligible. I really don't think that anyone that didn't *just* get their license actually feels that the amount of time and effort getting that license would be wasted if they never drove again after tomorrow, and even then, a shift like this would happen gradually and with plenty of advance notice such that people could choose not to invest the time if that investment wasn't going to be worthwhile. The investment required to get a license is completely irrelevant.

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Solid Sonic posted...

Do the pros of self-driving vehicles outweigh the cons?

Well, I mean, that's kinda still driving >_>

That said, self-driving vehicles would generally be an improvement if not for hackers/governments/sentient AIs overriding the controls to murder people. Outside of that, the faster self-driving cars become the norm, the better.

DrPrimemaster posted...

I wonder how much of an impact remote working will have on car use going forward.

Only a certain number of jobs can be done remotely, and most jobs that can be done remotely still aren't done remotely. However, a commute only has so much impact on traffic.

faramir77 posted...

Modern cities, especially in North America, are designed around car ownership. It's one of the biggest mismanagement of resources in human history.

Well, I mean, they were originally designed around horse & buggy use I should imagine and cars just replaced those >_>

That or it's smaller areas evolving over time where you can't possibly the infrastructure built before you know it's going to be a bigger place.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

But even worse than cities, the entire concept of the suburbs revolves almost entirely around cars. There are plenty of places in the US where you will pretty much die without a car of your own. To change that, you would have to radically restructure both the infrastructure and economy of the world in ways that are borderline impossible without causing a dynamic crisis.

You could probably change some of that with zoning but yeah, suburbs much more than urban areas require driving.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

It's part of why even pro-driverless car advocates have admitted in the past that a full driverless future is probably unlikely (at least in our lifetimes), and that the more likely scenario is a focus on driverless public transport. A slow incremental changeover would probably take decades to get to the point of eliminating personal transport entirely, but it's also about the only way it would ever feasibly work.

Uh, what? Kinda feels like things are being conflated? Because self-driving cars doesn't mean "no personal transit" and getting to a driverless future wouldn't be entirely hard to do, once we have the technology, although the amount of subsidies will vary on how quickly you do it. If you're doing it over a 30-year span (which is still within *most* PotDers' lifetimes, you'd probably only need subsidies right at the end to help people buy used self-driving cars who can't afford them (ie, final five years) when a ban is going into place on manual driving cars.

Granted, that assumes you could pass an initial law mandating that all new cars sold in the US are self-driving.

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Nicht is always so weird about everything. I don't think at all about what a huge burden it was to get my license. It's like a total of 10-20 hours of classes, waiting at the DMV and doing the road test combined. The rest is just practice driving which isn't the most fun but at least you're driving. And since I was 15/16 at the time it was pretty exciting (and scary) to be behind the wheel, it's not something teens think of as a big chore

Solid Sonic posted...

Do the pros of self-driving vehicles outweigh the cons?

If all cars were self driving it'd probably stop a lot of accidents so yeah lets do that

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I will never use a self-driving car... At all...

Nor will I support the plan mentioned in my other topic of getting rid of all car ownership, and having only access to self-driving cars... That said, it won't matter as that won't happen in my lifetime...
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honkzilla posted...

No, he's pretty normal lol most people can pick up driving pretty quickly

This can be true. I first drove at the age of 12 and had no adult passenger to coach me. Hardest part was figuring out where the lever to put it in reverse was. (It was a truck so it wasnt in the center like most cars) I only drove on a private dirt road so I wasnt really endangering anyone.

But had it been the truck I drive now I probably would have had issues. It steers like a tank as some people have told me and has a really touchy gas pedal that caused me to fail my driving test on the 3 point turn portion as the instructor said had their been a curb I woulda jumped it. I wasnt used to the touchiness of the gas pedal at the time

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Clench281 posted...

Yeah, all those people who think "I PUT ALL THAT EFFORT INTO GETTING MY LICENSE so I'd rather pay more money and be forced to drive myself, instead of spending less money to get a ride where I want to go"

I just like being able to drive myself around...

Nichtcrawler X posted...

So you are some kind of driving savant, most people take many, many more. ( or a country that expects almost nothing in the examination)

It requires more on paper. Like for driving school, classes, etc... But many people could probably learn quickly. Especially if you paid attention when other people drove. And maybe ever drove other non-licensed vehicles. While they aren't exactly the same, they have a similar feel to them...
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bet a self-driving car would never go over the speed limit, even on a deserted highway w/ zero other cars in sight
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Zeus posted...

However, a commute only has so much impact on traffic.

Roads are all but entirely designed around commutes. Morning/evening rush hours represent the greatest volume of traffic a route needs to be able to handle consistently, and the vast majority of the vehicles comprising that traffic are single-occupant personal vehicles. Roads that are able to handle commuter traffic are generally pretty empty at other times.

Now, switching half of the workforce to WFH would not simply reduce traffic by half. It wouldn't affect commercial traffic, the relatively small handful of HOV's would only remove one vehicle from the road for 2-7 workers, there would still be people driving around during rush hour for non-commuting purposes (such as shopping on a day off)... That said, it would nonetheless make a huge impact on traffic.

Parking, however, improves dramatically with fewer people driving to work. Get half the workforce working from home, and you are going to see roughly half as much demand for parking space in cities, since cars being abandoned for eight hours a day is the primary driver for that demand.

Krazy_Kirby posted...

bet a self-driving car would never go over the speed limit, even on a deserted highway w/ zero other cars in sight

Oh no, you might arrive 2-5 minutes later! Such horror!

In practice, with self-driving cars dominating and defining how society drives, blanket speed limits wouldn't really be a thing. AI's are capable of assessing the safest maximum speed for a given situation much better than humans are, as well as being able to handle themselves at higher speeds than humans can (by virtue of having vastly faster reflexes). Toss in the ability to communicate with each other to identify the need to slow down long before it's actually seen, plus the elimination of traffic lights and other such controls, and you'll generally see faster travel times in an autonomous system than in one where you're held back by our slow monkey brains.

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Just make this please.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll

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So like am I the only one here that cares that people enjoy driving? No one has one mentioned recreational driving at all

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Muscles posted...

So like am I the only one here that cares that people enjoy driving? No one has one mentioned recreational driving at all

I did in my own topic. This was a little while ago, though. People do like to drive, which is why many won't give it up. Though, some people don't seem to care that many people like it...
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Muscles posted...

So like am I the only one here that cares that people enjoy driving? No one has one mentioned recreational driving at all

Do you like getting stuck in traffic on the interstate, taking an hour to go 10 miles?

Do you like being in city traffic, stopping at every traffic signal, with people consistently blocking the intersection and preventing anyone from moving, where you could get where you want to be faster if you walked?

People who "like driving" like driving on long empty stretches of road. And those aren't the areas that should transition to lesser dependence on individual car use.

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Muscles posted...

So like am I the only one here that cares that people enjoy driving? No one has one mentioned recreational driving at all

adjl posted...

They do [enjoy driving], but that doesn't mean entire cities should be designed specifically to give them that opportunity, nor should they get to ignore environmental concerns simply because it's more fun to do so. There are ways to allow for recreational driving despite pushing mass transit and self-driving options. It's just not reasonable to expect city planning to accommodate an incredibly space-inefficient hobby at the expense of everyone else getting around efficiently.

I specifically responded to you, dude.

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I fucking hate how obnoxiously selfish and stubborn Americans are. "I like this thing that's bad so they can never change it"

It's fine to like things to be clear, but the complete absence of any concept of open-mindedness or necessary change that some people have is maddening

Lokarin posted...

There are studies that show that the road-dependent urban planning of modern US cities is unhealthy for people...

I see no studies.

adjl posted...

A truly insane percentage of available real estate in cities is allocated to parking, space which is either completely empty or is just storing an empty car, and an even greater percentage is taken up by roads.

People are not using parking lots during a pandemic? I'm shocked. Also what does real estate have to do with roads?

zhangliao1 posted...

If all cars were self driving it'd probably stop a lot of accidents so yeah lets do that

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/uber-driverless-fatality.html

Muscles posted...

So like am I the only one here that cares that people enjoy driving? No one has one mentioned recreational driving at all

Nobody likes to recreationally drive with the gas prices the way they are now.
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Why are you like this Rev

adjl posted...

I specifically responded to you, dude.

I was hoping it would be a bigger part of the discussion, you weren't the issue as you actually did contribute

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