No one was inside a Waymo car as it was destroyed.

A crowd destroyed a driverless Waymo car in San Francisco::A Waymo car was destroyed in San Francisco as a crowd began vandalizing it and ultimately set the car on fire. Nobody was in the vehicle at the time.

  • barsoap@lemm.eeEnglish
    11·
    9 months ago

    You seem to have forgotten the parts of the discussion where you failed to account for even a modicum of edge cases on an even 20 year timeline.

    I never said that all cars must be abolished. Go, go back in the discussion and check. The one group I addressed specifically was commuters: It’s the biggest group, most easy to address to at least 95%.

    Everyone getting around by streetcar suburbs made sense 20 years ago too, but I’m glad we didn’t stop all road safety engineering on the assumption we’d do it just because it the logical collective thing to do.

    If you’re talking about the US: No, the US didn’t suddenly start to safety engineer, they’re still hostile to pedestrians over there. On the contrary, 20 years ago SUVs which make children invisible didn’t really exist yet. If you’re talking about Europe: We never abolished public transit. We made mistakes weakening it, but we didn’t abolish it, and engineering for pedestrian safety goes back to at least the 60s, and by the 70s at least the Netherlands had found their bearings.

    We can probably both agree though, that the actual thrashing of the car was an inevitable result of ever growing wealth inequality.

    Of course. I mean if you want to chauffeur everyone in an individual autonomous taxi during rush hour everyone will need one of those, leased or owned, either way it’s going to be expensive so people understand on an instinctive level that those cars aren’t a solution while wealth inequality persists. As said: Public transport side-steps that issue. We haven’t been able to fix wealth inequality in the last two centuries you won’t do it in the next two decades, or at least we shouldn’t bet urbanism on that happening.

    Meanwhile, roads are up for reconstruction all the time anyways, how about making sure not a single one gets rebuilt along car-brain principles.

    • masterspace@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      9 months ago

      I never said that all cars must be abolished. Go, go back in the discussion and check.

      Yes, which brings us back to the point that if any cars are on the road, they should be autonomous, because autonomous cars have the potential to be far safer than humans.

      Either your point is that all cars can be abolished, or that the deaths that drivers cause don’t matter. Either way you’re wrong.

      If you’re talking about the US: No, the US didn’t suddenly start to safety engineer, they’re still hostile to pedestrians over there. On the contrary, 20 years ago SUVs which make children invisible didn’t really exist yet. If you’re talking about Europe: We never abolished public transit. We made mistakes weakening it, but we didn’t abolish it, and engineering for pedestrian safety goes back to at least the 60s, and by the 70s at least the Netherlands had found their bearings.

      Bruh. Seriously. Are you intentionally being dense? The point is not that safety standards suddenly started 20 years ago, it’s that pursuing increased automotive safety standards was still a worthwhile effort in parallel with building public transit, because guess what, even Europe has thousand of car deaths a year, and it’s worth planning for harm reduction strategies even if we don’t get the overall optimum first choice.

      • barsoap@lemm.eeEnglish
        11·
        9 months ago

        Yes, which brings us back to the point that if any cars are on the road, they should be autonomous, because autonomous cars have the potential to be far safer than humans.

        They’re also going to be far less reliable, we’ve been over this, an autonomous fire truck won’t ram something out of the way because it can’t make the call unless we’re talking true scifi. The cars that will be left will be mostly driven by professionals which makes the gains marginal. And anyway I’m not fundamentally opposed to autonomous cars, have them if you want to cover those last 0.0001% but if you want to solve 100% with them, well, it won’t work. Too expensive.

        I already said all that. You’re re-erecting strawmen.

        it’s that pursuing increased automotive safety standards was still a worthwhile effort in parallel with building public transit,

        Europe already had public transportation and walkable cities. The US doesn’t. And over here btw noone (serious) is hailing autonomous driving as a revolution or solution to anything, even though Volkswagen (in the form of Audi) were the first one to produce an actual level 3 vehicle. And waymo etc. know that they couldn’t get their purported “level 4” vehicles past regulations so they don’t even try, having seen uber crash+burn over here with its skirting of regulations, unlike in the US they’re actually getting enforced. And exist/are sensible.

        • masterspace@lemmy.caEnglish
          11·
          9 months ago

          Europe already had public transportation and walkable cities. The US doesn’t.

          Yeah.

          And over here btw noone (serious) is hailing autonomous driving as a revolution or solution to anything

          Yeah, see above. Europe doesn’t hail autonomous driving as revolutionary because it is a super dense area with a well established train network. Europe is not the whole world. Autonomous driving will develop faster than America will become like Europe, how much money would you be willing to bet otherwise?

          • barsoap@lemm.eeEnglish
            1·
            9 months ago

            Europe doesn’t hail autonomous driving as revolutionary because it is a super dense area with a well established train network.

            Density doesn’t have anything to do with it the US is as if not more dense if you subtract all the void in between places. Even taking the void into account the US has twice the population density of Finland (16.4 vs. 33.6 per km2) yet Finland manages to have public transport in its urban areas. Places like the east cost are significantly more dense than practically anywhere in Europe. California has practically the same density as Spain.

            And it’s not like the US don’t have an established rail network, either – they just let it rot and operate it in a way that doesn’t make rail a viable alternative to driving or flying. With the same rail policy as Europe there’d be a HSR sleeper train from New York to LA, HSR which also in Europe would have to be constructed, first, all that track from the age of industrialisation doesn’t do high speeds.

            how much money would you be willing to bet otherwise?

            How much riots, money, and deaths is the US wiling to bet on autonomous driving to avoid raising intersections when the street gets its periodic make-over, anyway? It’s upkeep in general that costs money, rebuilding them in a sane way while you’re at it costs little more to actually less: Most of their streets are way too wide.