Comments on: What would Aaron Swartz want you to do?

By: Glencora Borradaile

Glencora Borradaile — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 22:55:35 +0000

In response to the first paragraph: I think this is beside the point of driverless cars. I think we need to address the transportation problem on two fronts: reduce the distance that people are travelling; reduce the amount of energy per person-mile (efficient mass transit). Driverless cars won’t drive (ha) people toward either of these choices. Hopefully the cost will be prohibitively expensive until the cost of gasoline gives us some real pressure.

In response to the second paragraph: I’m not sure, but I have seen studies linking increased public transit use after Google Transit has “come” to an area.

By: aram

aram — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 01:05:24 +0000

I guess this is going off-topic, but driverless cars will also help public transit. Most US bus systems would be much more effective (similar fuel costs with higher ridership) if there were twice as many buses that were half as large. In countries where labor is cheap these sort of large vans are common, e.g. in Senegal there are large buses for the major routes and 15-person vans for most others. Robot taxis could be shared as well, and even if not, they would reduce the need for building new cars, which is itself very costly. Eliminating accidents would also permit dramatically lighter cars (only once all human-driven cars are off the road).

Are there statistics about how much of increased public transit use is due to smartphones? (Personally I use buses much more now because I can use maps.google.com in places I haven’t been to before, but I doubt that’s typical.) Anecdotally it seems that people have responded to the need to stay connected by doing things like texting and driving a lot.

By: Glencora Borradaile

Glencora Borradaile — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 01:41:06 +0000

I disagree. Replacing cars with driverless cars may reduce the number of deaths from car accidents, but it will prolong (at best) our environmental crisis. And the environmental crisis causes deaths (anw will do so increasingly) and property damage.

Did you know that those in their 20s are increasingly using public transit? Did you know that that is in large part due to their wish to stay connected while in transit? Give those 20-somethings an option for private transit that does the same thing and the toehold we have on decreased consumption via reduced private-car ownership disappears.

By: aram

aram — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 23:21:27 +0000

Great post! One thing we should certainly do is make sure that our papers are all on the arxiv or some other such repository.

One nitpick: I think it’s unfair to compare driverless cars to public transit, since they are only partially substitutes for each other. But they do substitute pretty directly for our current cars. And making this change, while leaving everything else the same, would mostly eliminate the 1.3 million annual deaths from car accidents (plus the many more nonfatal injuries, and the property damage, which was estimated in the US at 3% of GDP). Surely a biker like you would enjoy a world where cars are all driven by robots. So I think we should all be pounding the table demanding their development!