Jackart waxes lyrical about the demise of the iron horse and the rise of the driver-less car. I believe Tim Worstall has made similar comments in the past. However, I wouldn’t be writing off the railways just yet.
Assuming – and for the sake of argument, I will assume – that there is universal take up of the driver-less car, it will take decades before it is universal. A motor car is a big investment and people do not make this investment lightly. So, therefore, it will take several decades to work through the system before everyone has one of these on the driveway. In the meantime, we have vehicles that will be interacting with human drivers. Humans are very much analogue creatures, so reading the road ahead and anticipating their actions as well as the outcomes of whatever else is going on around us will make it very interesting. Sometimes the indication of a change in circumstance is so subliminal we almost don’t realise we’ve seen it. Drivers and riders will talk of a sixth sense. There was something they saw but it was subtle, so subtle they weren’t consciously aware of it. Whether algorithms can do this remains to be seen.
However, this rather brings me to my main point. Not everyone will want a driver-less car. I certainly don’t. I do not as Jackart does, regard the drive as dead time. I drive – and ride – because I like it. The sensory feedback from operating a motor vehicle provides a satisfaction like no other. Given that I drive and ride because I enjoy it, why, therefore, would I buy a vehicle that does the job for me? Why spend thousands of pounds on something that is designed to deprive me of that pleasure? For me, the journey is as important as the destination – the ride to and from work is a form of relaxation before and after the day’s business. It is not – very much not – dead time. Especially when I am doing it on the motorcycle. Unless you regard leisure as dead time – in which case you are dead to the world already.
Jackart talks of us all effectively having our own taxis. Well, yes, if you want a taxi and I’ve taught folk to drive and ride who would probably be better off having a taxi than being a menace on the roads. But If I feel the need for one, then I’ll call a cab (why buy my own?). My need is relatively intermittent. Indeed, I will do whatever I can to avoid using them. And, frankly, if I want to make a long journey without driving or riding, I’ll take the train. The beauty being, I don’t have to invest thousands of pounds to do it. I buy a ticket as and when I need it.
Another area the utility argument falls down is that many of us choose to use our vehicles for holidays and day trips – because we like to ride and drive them. Especially if we have spent hours lovingly restoring them. Yeah, that’s right, the plethora of one make owners clubs, classic restorers and enthusiasts will still want to use the highways for their intended purpose. And circumnavigating roads such as the cirque de navacelles while not controlling one’s own vehicle removes almost all of the pleasure of the experience. There is nothing exhilarating in being taxied along such wonderful roads.
So, if you fancy a driver-less car, fine. But I’ll be sticking with my manual one that I can drive not because I will necessarily drive it better than the algorithms (although I probably will) but because I enjoy it and it is a part of what makes life worth living.
Absolutely – the idea that driverless cars will entirely or largely replace conventional ones is pie-in-the-sky. It takes a very narrow and simplistic view of how people actually use cars – not to mention motorbikes.
What they might do is put a lot of taxi drivers out of work, but it’s hard to imagine that a driverless car with all its sophisticated tech will actually work out cheaper per mile than a 10-year-old Skoda Octavia SD driven by a Bangladeshi immigrant.
Quite frankly, I wouldn’t get in a driver-less taxi. While I will use a driver-less train that operates on strictly controlled infrastructure, I’ll trust to a human interacting with the analogue road systems before I trust a machine. While that may seem irrational it is a perfectly reasonable reaction and one that I suspect many will share. It is why, after all, we don’t have driver-less mainline trains despite the technology being available to do it.
I don’t see why we can’t have both.
Wouldn’t it be nice to lock your car onto the system on, say, the M6? People drive too close and half of them are probably just following the car in front anyway. That is why slow-moving motorway traffic always produces its crop of ‘shunts’. I’m sure these sort of roads could be relieved by Channel Tunnel-type shuttle (not the old Motor Rail!) if we can’t have guided cars.
Once we have dealt with the road users that just want to go somewhere that will leave room for a bit of fun on the winding roads for the rest.
Quite possibly. I am not arguing against a possible “both” option, merely the suggestion that one will overtake the other or that this is even desirable. If utility is all that matters, then I’ll slit my wrists now.
As a non driver all of my 48 years I would be quite happy if we returned to the horse and cart.
As for the driverless car I have one thing to say about that BAH HUMBUG.
So how long do you think it will be before it becomes an offence to drive manually if a driverless option is available, or at least ‘assumed guilt’ if you are driving manually and involved in an accident?
Personally I have no intention of equipping my Morris 1000 with artificial intelligence, but then again I wouldn’t attempt to hammer it up the M6.
“…or at least ‘assumed guilt’ if you are driving manually and involved in an accident?”
Slow down there! We’ve not – yet – established that the car is always at fault in crashes involving cyclists. There’s a ways to go… 😉
Don’t give the bastards ideas…
The aggressive pedal cyclists are already pushing for a law to make car and lorry drivers to blame, regardless of how ill behaved the cyclist is.
The driverless vehicle is a golden opportunity to stop all this self indulgent driving.
Cars could bre banned and only buses/trucks operate.
On the basis of ‘ Is your journey really necessary?’ ( see WW2)_. Most people could walk. After a short period of learning again.
A good start to let the elected people do what they should.
You know that democracy has got out of hand.
New transport technologies have rarely entirely displaced existing ones. The only time that happened was with the horse, which was effectively replaced by the internal combustion engine. And even today, you can still find people riding horses on roads, so even they’re not extinct.
One of the key drivers (sorry!) of the self-driving car push is that it reduces the need to own a car in the first place. For the vast majority of its life, a private car sits, rusting and depreciating quietly to itself, on a driveway, by the side of the road, or in a car park.
If cars can drive themselves, you can avoid owning one entirely: most companies envision something along the lines of the “zipcar” system becoming the default model, with private car ownership becoming less and less necessary over time. Given the ever-rising costs of insurance, maintenance, and so on, this is a good thing. (Especially for younger drivers who will no longer be faced with four-digit insurance costs.)
Fleets of very similar vehicles would be on call, driving people to and from work / the nearest station / the shops / schools / whatever. When you’re done with the car, it drives itself off to its next customer. No need to park it at all, which frees up masses of space in towns and cities. (During quieter hours, these cars would simply drive themselves to the fleet owner’s depot, which could be located on the outskirts of town.) And it won’t be just cars either: buses would also disappear over time as the same technology can be used for them, removing the need for fixed routes. Don’t want to pay too much? Call up a self-driving (mini-)bus if you don’t mind sharing. Want privacy? Pay for a single-occupant vehicle with a table and free WiFi. The rich can lease specific vehicles if they wish, with the advantage that, if they live in, say, a flat in Chelsea, they can still tell their vehicle to go park at a suitable depot out of sight, rather than on the street outside.
I don’t think the technology will work for motorcycles as there’s not much benefit to be had. (There are also some obvious usability and safety issues involved given how motorbike steering works.)
The train will remain as it’s already a driverless vehicle. Train drivers have never steered the things to begin with and signalling is moving towards full automation already. (Metro systems are already there, but they tend to have very simple networks. The West Coast Main Line is a whole order of magnitude more difficult to automate.)
Some less-used routes might be better converted into automatic-vehicle-only roads, but the major routes will remain as they’ll still offer much greater speeds. (Chances are that some train operators would even invest in their own automated road fleets and offer through ticketing, feeding their rail services.)
Note that this also means that we would no longer see narrow Victorian streets of terraced homes rammed full of cars parked on their pavements. Instead, such roads would become free of vehicles, making them much safer for pedestrians and cyclists too.
I give it about 20 years or so before the very idea of owning your own car is limited to hobbyists.
The car companies would need VAST lost property offices! 😆
I also drive for pleasure. That’s the only thing I think about when buying a car. Will I enjoy driving it? I certainly wouldn’t consider buying something that drives itself, I don’t even buy modern cars with gadgets that do things for you. One thing that really annoys me about modern cars is how they moan at you when you don’t put your seatbelt on.
I would be lying if I described driving round here as “enjoyable”, never the less I will NOT have a driverless car – if they become compulsory I will be leaving for pastures new. Quite apart from not trusting technology to that extent, my old Panda has been modified to suit my purposes, and is used as a means of getting around, but also as a sort of mobile workshop. It, and its predecessor, have pulled trailers, gang mowers, heavy rollers, and stranded vans in winter. It’s also small enough to fit inside my friends chicken sheds, and provides me with AC power for maintenance work when the site is shut down. So what use would a rented, automated, car be?
There’s a further point though – government obsession with saving CO2 can be addressed by linking large fleets of autonomous cars together on Motorways and Dual Carriageways. When they are all “talking” to one another the gap between each one can be dramatically reduced, leading to reduced drag, and better fuel efficiency. This isn’t so different from large flocks of birds flying together when migrating long distances. And don’t larf when I tell you that fully autonomous airliners have been mooted, and even “flocks” of 3 or 5 flying in close formation, exactly like the birds I’ve just described.
Nothing can go wrong, go wrong, go wrong, go wrong, go wrong………
Straight line thought Mr Longrider. Because we own cars that need drivers, ergo we shall own driverless cars.
An important feature of driverless cars is…. they don’t need drivers, which means you don’t need to own a car, you can order one, like a taxi, by phone or Internet and it will arrive at your door, take you to your destination then go off to the next job.
Trains will not disappear overnight, but then nor did stage coaches.
Hands up all those with a fax machine.
I won’t, for the same reason I don’t use taxis. They are unnecessary. I have a motorcycle ready and waiting in my garage and outside, should I need it a motor car, that I can drive wherever and whenever I choose. I don’t have to order it, I just get in it and go wherever I want. And, frankly, I am not willing to trust my life to a machine that cannot, with the best will in the world, read the road and anticipate events because it cannot think.
(Why does the comment box have a really long, narrow, column of pointless “emoticons” wasting a ton of space before the genuinely useful checkboxes? I have no desire to ever use that “commentluv” bollocks as I can’t be bothered with my own blog. I tried it, realised I wasn’t getting paid for it, and shut it down.)
Meanwhile, back in the nut-cave:
I don’t believe self-driving cars will *entirely* displace human-driven ones. People still maintain working steam engines and there are even more willing to keep “classic” cars and drive them down to Brighton once a year; human-driven cars in general will still exist for much the same reasons.
Personally, I love driving long distances. I’ve driven London-Rome and back on numerous occasions. However, I *detest* driving in urban areas. Which is why I drive a 16-year-old Mk. 1 FIAT Punto on rural roads some distance from the nearest major town or city. (Anyone who still believes the Romans only ever built arrow-straight roads really should give the ones around here a try. Driving along them is exciting—in much the same way that being in a 747 jet that’s just had all four of its engines decide to shut down mid-flight is “exciting”.)
Nevertheless, as someone who’s worked for decades in IT, the notion that a car driving along a road cannot “think” or “anticipate” is rubbish of the highest order: driving is a learned skill. If we can learn it, so, in theory, can a computer. Google and others have already proved that such cars *can* cope with driving in today’s traffic. As self-driving vehicles increase in number, so infrastructure will be improved and adapted to help them.
Humans cannot know where all other vehicles in the immediate vicinity are, nor where they’re going. Computer-driven cars *can* be fed this kind of data, so they can make strategic—not just tactical—decisions too.
Computers can already understand our speech, as well as make inferences and decisions based on spoken commands. This is why companies like Google are so heavily involved in the research and development of self-driving cars: there’s a hell of a lot of very deep AI stuff going on behind their services.
Computers also don’t need to anticipate quite as much as a human driver because they have reaction times that are entire orders of magnitude faster than ours: in the time it would take you to even *realise* there was an obstacle ahead, a self-driving car would *already* be slowing the car down. We need to look out for pedestrians staggering about drunkenly and looking like they might be thinking of crossing a road because, if we don’t, we might not be able to react quickly enough to avoid hitting them. Computers can do a simple “is there an obstacle in front of me?” test every 100th of a second and either slow down or stop the car long before you’d even realised there was a problem in the first place.
Self-driving cars therefore require different strategies and tactics to human drivers.
Where the computer-driven vehicle would have difficulties is in coping with unusual ‘edge cases’: a chunk of masonry dropping off a bridge as your car is driving under it, for example. Another is exemplified by the post by “microdave”, above: his car use is not the norm. He, therefore, is not the target market and his opinion is therefore quite correct… *for him*. But not for most.
Therefore, even a self-driving car will have a single, rather obvious, “control” for its human passengers: a big red “EMERGENCY STOP” button. Just in case.
It isn’t nonsense at all. Humans can and do see where other vehicles are. I manage it perfectly well. Computers do not think as they have no cognitive ability. Our roads are a chaotic environment and humans are irrational creatures – unlike computers. Consequently, it takes a human to recognise the subliminal messages that someone is about to do something irrational – a check that something is there every 100th of a second won’t tell the computer that, merely that it is there.. There is no way on this Earth that I will trust my life to a machine in such an environment. I will only do so where it is restricted to a strictly controlled and managed environment. I don’t give a fig for what Google say – sooner or later is will go horribly wrong with disastrous consequences for those involved. this is an inevitability.
I note your comments about speech. I have used voice translation software and while it is impressive, it still makes enough mistakes to be a waste of time. I can type more quickly than I can correct the mistakes the machine has made. If driverless cars operate to a similar level of accuracy, god help us.
As far as your comments about the theme are concerned, this seems to be a glitch – the emoticons should be in a horizontal line. As far as commentluv is concerned, if you have no website in your profile, it won’t do anything so you don’t have to do anything (I don’t get paid for this blog either – but I don’t want payment, so it’s not an issue). I can’t help that you don’t like it, but I’m not going to lose any sleep over it or do anything about it either.
“Computers do not think as they have no cognitive ability.”
Cognition is a science like any other. It underlies the design of user interfaces, and has done for decades now. And, yes, we have computer vision systems that can now recognise multiple people standing in front of it, filter out a crowd of spectators standing in the background, and follow each individual’s movements. And they can do so dozens of times per second. That technology can be found in something called “Kinect 2”. It’s a small piece of hardware that is being released in a month or so.
You’ll find it in the box of the new Microsoft Xbox One *games console*. This is a second-generation piece of *consumer electronics*, not some laboratory R&D prototype.
We’re a lot further down this road that most people realise. (Search YouTube for “Audi A7 piloted parking” for a pretty good illustration of what’s already possible with the technology that exists today.)
http://www.zdnet.com/audis-self-parking-car-whats-stopping-the-tech-getting-on-our-roads-7000009891/
Note the Audi spokesman’s point that these features are aimed at removing the boring aspects of driving, while letting drivers enjoy the fun bits if they wish.
But those for whom driving itself is a chore, or even physically impossible—the blind, or badly disabled, for example—will finally gain their full independence too. Chauffeurs and cab drivers will whine and moan, but so did blacksmiths and stable owners when the horse was made obsolete.
Mercifully for Mr. Longrider, this technology is unlikely to be fitted to motorbikes any time soon due to the way they work. You’d be constantly nagged by the computer to lean to one side or the other whenever you reach a bend in the road, or have to make a turn. Which would rapidly drive you nuts.
I’m aware of the parking thing. Indeed, I am not surprised a machine can do it as it is after all, a piece of piss. The only reason people struggle is because so many of them haven’t been taught how to do it. Why would I want a car that parks itself when I can do it in less time than it takes to set the vehicle to do it? Besides, parking in a tight space brings about its own satisfaction. And there are no boring bits to driving. I enjoy all of them.
That said, I am not opposed in principle to the general idea, but I am opposed to the idea of a digital technology trying to cope with an analogue environment. No computer is going to effectively deal with the little subliminal messages that the human brain can recognise and understand – such as slight movements or making eye contact.
It would also be highly fucking dangerous, because that is not how motorcycles are steered.
You still have to PARK the fucking things somewhere.
What this total wanker, who obviously hates railways (did he mate with either Beeching or the vile Sherman?) fails to realise is that there simply isn’t enough road-space.
Also, in GB, we have already passed peak car use & ownership.
Incidentally, I’m having great difficulty in opening the “brokenworld” page/link ….in fact it won’t open AT A:LL.
Oh and trains, even in the UK are faster.
London-Leeds = 2hrs by train.
By car + fatigue … ??
I’ve just clicked it and it’s working fine.
Jackart is actually a pretty militant cyclist who seldom has a good thing to say about car drivers.
I find this a little hard to reconcile with his otherwise generally sound pro free market ideas.
This is also, obviously why railways in Britain are carrying so many more people, than even 10 years ago – they are obsolete.
What a twat
I think Jackart assumes that any driverless car would include in its DNA “see a pushbike, grovel before it” instinct allowing him to ride even more like a cunt, but the main thrust of his rant, like a number of commenters here, seems to be the assumption that you wouldn’t actually own a driverless car.
While I could be imagine using an optional self drive mode, this surely is to be totally resisted. I can’t even begin to list the ways this could be abused. How long would it be before “don’t need” becomes “can’t have”. And of course, should the first production driverless cars approach the market the process of preparing town and cities for them – removing even more parking spaces, special lanes etc etc – can begin.
I agree. The rise in car ownership is to do with autonomy and independence. To have to call up a “cab” every time we wanted to go somewhere erodes that personal liberty. It’s socialism by the back door. We do not own our own mode of transport and therefore sacrifice the liberty that transport grants us – to go where and when we choose – not when we can get hold of a “cab”. Fuck that, frankly.
And people buy all kinds of different cars depending on their budget and their own personal requirements, and in various ways personalise them to meet their own needs and tastes. They may well leave equipment like child seats permanently fitted and, for example when on holiday, use the car to store personal belongings. So caling up a random cab when required just isn’t going to meet their needs.
Of course individualism is the new bad – even among so-called conservatives. So individual needs must be crushed under the needs of the many for the common good and all that.
“We do not own our own mode of transport…”?
You have legs, do you not? Do you not know how to walk?
Look at a photo of a typical London street taken before the rise of the internal combustion engine and you’d be hard pressed to spot anything other than cobblestones, manure, and a lot of horses (often hired, not owned, incidentally), omnibuses and the occasional, newfangled electric tram.
No tarmac (although that became more common thanks to cyclists, not motor vehicles). No clear, standardised, signage. No coloured lines. No parking bays. No NCP car parks. No mechanical or electrical signalling of any sort at all—certainly no traffic lights or pedestrian crossings that are synchronised across a big chunk of the city.
Such infrastructure requires people to work together to plan, design and build. And pay for it all. In a group. Which is just an old term for a “society” (as in “building society”.)
Socialism, in moderation, can be beneficial. Replace “individualism” (or, indeed, any other “-ism”) in that sentence and it’ll still be true. It’s the “moderation” that’s key.
The 1950s saw cars—your symbols of “independence” and “personal liberty”—given absolute priority by town planners and builders. That ended ever so well, didn’t it?
Marx may have been wrong, but so was Rand. The best solution is rarely as simple as picking your favourite “ism” and sticking with it regardless of whether it’s the right tool for the job or not.