I have been on Jeff's side of this bet since they announced it. Level 5 is simply too high of a bar to reach in the next few years, and in fact we are going about it the wrong way. We need smart roads more than smart cars.
(Note that there's an escape hatch here, which is that the AI falls back to some human in a call center for guidance to get out of sticky situations. In my opinion that still doesn't qualify as level 5.)
There's such an (exciting!) opportunity for us to create automated people mover systems that connect small and large systems to get people from very close to A to very close to B.
The design and engineering activities involved in solving this would be very enjoyable work, and the human benefits when (eventually) operational would be huge.
Every solution would need to be custom for its city/region, but one of the common ideas is concentric circles of trains, spaced at appropriate(ly large) distances, with trains running between in perpendicular direction. Basically wheels and spokes.
The wheel trains could stay in motion always, only slowing at connection points where the perpendicular trains would temporarily turn and run in parallel. Both trains would slow, cars would connect, passengers would come and go, and then trains would separate. Perpendicular train curves back in for its perpendicular direction of travel, and "wheel" train picks up speed and heads for the next spoke connection. Obviously any problem causes the joined trains to slow, even to a stop if necessary (to prevent human harm).
There are so many different possibilities here, but ultimately I think it should be possible for a human to walk 5-10 minutes to some station, get on some people mover, and eventually get out of another people mover within 5-10min walking distance of their ultimate destination... all without ever setting foot outside of a train aside from start/end points.
Hehe, the tldr was still too long for my time/attention. However...
> It’s much saner to have one car break down and allow 999,999 people to keep on schedule.
Obviously that's very wrong, as we know that one car breaking down on the freeway has a major negative effect on everything behind it. And if it's something bigger than one car... I recall one evening in Dallas when a chemical tanker turned over and created a situation which required all traffic on a major freeway to take an exit, use the access road, and then eventually return to the freeway. Even though it was after evening rush out, the ripple effect eventually spanned to two sequentially related freeways. Basically long road travel in the city stopped for hours.
In my mental fantasy, I see two vertical levels. One is for passengers and operates with more connections and stops, and one is for cargo (where transfers can be fully automated like with a successful airport luggage routing system... or probably some kind of system which Amazon has already perfected at scale).
They two improvements I see over today's public transport realities are:
1. If greenfield is possible, which unfortunately it really is not (unless we are planning a whole new urban environment), there is a physical network design which balances maximum travel time from any point to any point. This would be something elevator designers have already managed for big towers, I would think. But this time, it's in two dimensions.
2. There are novel temporary linkings of different vehicles to allow passengers to transfer from one to another without stopping either vehicle. I suppose in the extreme case, each passenger could be in a small sit/stand capsule, and some plucking and moving of capsules could be done by robotic systems which are aware of everything (including route/dest.)
Really, these are just lame solutions based on our current understanding of nature. Teleportation is the best answer ;).
I can only speak of Netherlands from experience, and it is not what I mean. I don't expect anywhere else has done what I have envisioned.
The usual challenge is that the cities are old and organically structured. So the possible paths for public transport are limited; and there's very little space for big interchanges.
But what exists is way, way better than nothing. With trains, metros, trams, and buses (and walking), you can get around quite well. It just can take a long time due to timing mismatches between modes.
When the tram comes only once every 15 min, and your metro drops you without enough time to walk (or run!) to the tram, it means you now wait 15min for the next one. When I was commuting to work in Amsterdam via tram+metro, it took me at minimum 30 minutes with walk+tram+metro+walk. If I rode my bike, it was the same. But if timings didn't work out well, the public transport option could be +25 min longer... so 55min. And on cold sh*tty rainy days (half of winter), the metro would be jammed with people such that you might need to stand and wait for the next one. The bike option was always possible, but it's no fun to ride in cold rain with wind.
In summary, it was better than 60 minutes of bumper to bumper driving commute in Dallas/Fort Worth, but it had much room for better alternatives... if one could go greenfield.
Train is only accounted for 16% of travel done even in the place where it’s most popular in Europe (Switzerland). So no, train isn’t the answer. An important part, yes.
It would be very nice to be able to "link" my electric car into a convoy of other electric cars at say "San Diego" and allow the system to take said convoy to somewhere in "Los Angeles" and reassert control.
This would solve a lot of the "last mile" problems that we currently have with train stations in the US (need to park at one terminus, need to get picked up at the other, can't deal with accidents on rails, etc.).
It'd be even nicer to have investments in public transport infrastructure to allow large population centers to not depend on cars for the majority of A to B trips.
The problems of last mile train stations in the US are completely self-inflicted, to cater for the current status quo of car-centric development, you don't need massive parking lots in central train stations for the majority of big population centres in Europe.
> It'd be even nicer to have investments in public transport infrastructure to allow large population centers to not depend on cars for the majority of A to B trips.
Your suggestion requires that we demolish and redo entire swathes of cities before we would gain any benefits. My suggestion can be implemented piecemeal on specific corridors and start gaining benefits immediately.
Path dependence is a thing. Political will is finite with short time horizons. Something which can be implemented piecemeal is less optimal but more likely to gain enough momentum to deliver real benefits.
That's just kicking the can further down than what's been already kicked. If the only matter for political will is short-term gains then there's absolutely no possibility of revamping decrepit and inadequate structures such as the lack of public transportation in the US.
At some point it'll be needed to do it, the longer the wait the more painful it will become. As you pointed out, it's already pretty fucking painful to achieve it, introducing new features unto an inadequate system is just compounding the issues in the long-term for just a small short-term gain, it's not really smart to do it.
Instead of starting to properly address the issue of transportation at scale, your suggestion will just add a component of "smartness" to a system that is already overloaded and definitely not good for society. Car-dependency is not a net positive. I'm not against people using and having cars but depending on them for transportation between large population centres is an absurd waste of resources for a society...
Simple and easy solutions have a tendency to create even larger problems, it's unfortunate there's no political will in the USA to revamp its transportation system because it's clear to not be the most efficient way for your society to move around.
They are absolutely not popular. I've never heard of them, despite having both family and friends who went on yearly car trips across (one or more of) Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Belgium, and Denmark.
Looking into it, it seems they were popular decades ago, but they've been all but shut down by the 2010s due to unprofitability, and only a handful of seasonal routes remain now.
Though who knows, if gas prices keep increasing, they might enjoy a brief resurgence for a decade or so until enough people have switched to EV.
But it will take quite a bit of an increase. I looked at the longest route, 1300km Hamburg-Verona (which would actually interest me!) and it costs 400 to 600€, depending on the date. That's well over twice as much as the current gas prices, even being generous; while I guess it includes sleeping arrangements, you could stay in a very fancy hotel with the money you saved.
There's a high mountain pass with a glacier being in the way, the Lötschenpass. There's only a hiking path over it. A few kilometers to the west, there's another high mountain pass, the Gemmipass that has an extremely steep drop to the south such that in medieval times not even a mule track was possible. People avoided the rockfaces by going over an even higher saddle to which they got on by a steep grassy ridge. Today there's a cable car and hiking path blasted into the rocks, somewhat like the path to Angel's Landing in Zion National Park.
Up to today there are no roads over that mountain range between the Cantons of Bern and Valais for about 100 km. Only the Lötschberg railroad tunnel. People from the eastern part of Valais "have trains you can just drive your car into".
I myself have a customer card of the railroad operator because it's the most direct way to the south, and we go about once a month. They also offer transportation through a second mountain pass to Italy. After 35 minutes of driving and after one hour of relaxing we enjoy Italy's dolce vita.
There are other railroad operators taking cars. I know one in the Canton of Grisons, and between France and England there's another one.
This is a "road smell"; not unlike a code smell, it's when the current scenario has such awkward and ugly (and low chance of success) solutions that you must stop and consider the premise and original goal.
In this case, the original goal is to get people from A to B. And, pardon the pun, but cars and roads are a dead end solution.
Just think about any large scale governmental software project and amplify that 10-100x. That's what I imagine :-)
> The design of the website was overseen by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and built by a number of federal contractors, most prominently CGI Group of Canada. The original budget for CGI was $93.7 million, but this grew to $292 million prior to launch of the website. While estimates that the overall cost for building the website had reached over $500 million prior to launch and in early 2014 HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell said there would be "approximately $834 million on Marketplace-related IT contracts and interagency agreements," the Office of Inspector General released a report in August 2014 finding that the total cost of the HealthCare.gov website had reached $1.7 billion and a month later, including costs beyond "computer systems," Bloomberg News estimated it at $2.1 billion.
> To give a simple example, the US spends a ton of infrastructure. Yet it doesn't even have really smart traffic lights like the Dutch do.
That's not an example of what it would cost, though.
> Just think about any large scale governmental software project and amplify that 10-100x. That's what I imagine :-)
If I imagine the software costing ten million dollars, and then balloon it to a billion, I think that's still only half a percent of the annual road budget.
Same, I don't see it happening unless most cars in the road have the capabality of intercommunication to perform sensor fusion with other cars. This implies that everyone gets on board using the same protocol.
As for smart roads, what would these imply? Bear in mind maintenance costs and the fact that asphalt is 100% recycled and reusable.
Maybe something as simple as an active RF emitter in the reflective or similar spikes added to the road surface. It wouldn't require a networked infrastructure, or complex standards. Just something capable of penetrating feet of snow or inches of dirt and grime.
The car would always have other sensors to fallback on, but this would reduce the amount of time that the DDT disengages due to inclement weather or other road hazards.
Add to this emitters in cones and possibly emergency vehicles.
I don't think adding RF emitters / magnets to the road surface actually solves any problems. A driver needs to know the trajectory of the road several seconds into the future. At useful speeds, that's on the order of 100 meters. Either you dynamically generate a map in a local reference frame, or you localize within a static map in a global reference frame. RF beacons won't provide enough resolution to be useful for dynamic mapping beyond a couple of meters. RF beacons may incrementally help with localization within a global map by providing additional observations for a localization filter, but no one doing global mapping is asking for that since they're already using lidar to do it.
I think useful "smart" road infrastructure would necessarily be horribly complicated, since the point of it would be to offload otherwise necessary complexity from the vehicles using the road. Perhaps the road could track the real time kinematics of all the cars on the the road using some combination of cameras, lidar, UWB, etc. It could then communicate that information via RF to the vehicles that want to receive it, along with local mapping information.
The automotive industry has been excited about "vehicle-to-vehicle" comms for the past 15 years aka V2V. Technically, all the standards that have emerged from the industry's efforts seem lame and nothing interesting has come of it. The FCC granted a chunk of 5Ghz spectrum for automotive DSRC use, and have subsequently taken back most of it for lack of use. It's still allocated for automotive, but it's now in the hands of the cell modem providers to do something useful with it.
How does one power active RF emitters on miles and miles of road surface? The vast majority of surface level roadway doesn’t even have powered illumination in most places, which leads me to think the lowest hanging fruit for this type of thing would be something passive, like the RF equivalent of cats eyes.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-2030-self-driving-car-bet/