this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
1385 points (94.0% liked)
Fuck Cars
9662 readers
136 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You say that as if those threads are actually a common thing, and not just a strawman accusation from the fevered dreams of car-brains.
Go into a thread on autonomous cars and all you'll hear is about how they're useless and we don't need them because we'll just eliminate all cars before they're ready.
I have literally never seen that argument made.
Usually, what I see in those threads are a whole bunch of people arguing that autonomous cars would be some kind of silver-bullet panacea for traffic.
Frankly, what you wrote sounds like a strawman misinterpretation of an argument I myself make: I argue that autonomous cars are not a solution, but not "because we’ll just eliminate all cars before they’re ready." They're not a solution simply because they're still cars, and therefore take up the same grossly excessive amount of space as non-autonomous cars do.
Yeah, the only things autonomous cars might reduce are:
It's the same fundamental problem that electric cars have: geometry. Cars -- even if electric and self-driving -- are simply grossly inefficient at moving people for the amount of land they require:
The velomobile (electric or manual) is the most efficient transport in energy per mile. You could easily design something like a self driving podbike, maybe a little bigger, weighing maybe 100kg.
And self driving also allows for new configurations, e.g. two seats that face each other because you don't need a steering wheel. That means much more narrow and aerodynamic "micro cars" that could solve a lot of edge cases for people who can't drive or not that long or fast (50kmh / 30mph). They might compete with a big bus.
Except that the jury is not "still out" on number two, it is simply a matter of time, engineering, and training before they are statistically safer than humans.
Waymo's cars are already safer than humans in their limited conditions.
I agree that they're already statistically safer in limited conditions; the key part is when/if they will surpass in a wide range of conditions, including heavy snow or the disorganized and often unmarked roads of developing countries, for instance. For what it's worth, however, I do think the tech will eventually get there.
Just an observation, humans aren't able to navigate heavy snow and disorganized traffic any better. We guess where the road should be, what the conditions are, and where other cars are, and commit with full confidence in our lack of knowledge. It works OK, but there are infinity examples of it not working. Literally any logic behind navigating these scenarios is better that what we can do with our feeble meat suits.
My only point is that if I'm being super pessimistic about timescales, I'm estimating ~30years for self driving cars to clearly surpass human drivers, and multiple generations before you eliminate human error from dangerously designed roads, to drunk driving, to distracted driving, to sleepy driving etc.
Your failure to provide a reliable source for your claims is not my problem.
If you cannot provide a reliable source of your claims, your claim will be dismissed.
Congratulations that you haven't, that's evidently because youre not in there correcting people when they claim that autonomous cars aren't a solution.
As long as cars are on the roads and humans are driving them they will continue to kill and maim people. Autonomous cars are the only remotely viable solution to that. They might not be fully ready for all situations yet, but they will be ready on the scale of a decade or two, whereas reorienting north American society to minimize human drivers (get everyone to move out of their homes in the suburbs and country) will take literally generations.
No, that's defeatist bullshit.
It's called risk analysis / wisdom / not planning exclusively for the best possible outcome in case the world doesn't go exactly you as you hoped it would.
Your failure to provide a reliable source for your claims is not my problem.
If you cannot provide a reliable source of your claims, your claim will be dismissed.
I mean, y’all literally call the place “fuck cars.” You call anyone that disagrees with you a “car-brain.” Not a lot of nuance.
As someone scrolling by from all, I’m actually surprised to see any acknowledgement that some people may need to rely on private automobiles.
Maybe y’all need to work on your messaging.
Messaging is for urbanist and transport subs, this is a place to bellow "fuck cars" until your voice is hoarse.
If you do want a serious discussion of posting here is just going to frustrate you and give you a very weird idea of the movement.