We could also imagine a world in which more subtle attacks could reliably and fairly quickly cause injury/fatality accidents, which might appeal to terrorists.
People do destroy yield signs and other safety critical road infrastructure now. I've known more than one person with an appropriated road or safety sign as a home decoration.
The only way I can see that working is if there is some kind of geographic location of various stops and the like, but at that point, you need consistent connectivity to obtain that kind of data, right? May work in larger towns and cities, but what about rural areas?
In a wired world the distance to everything is zero. If you can find an 'in', you can carry out this attack in any place in the world, from the comfort of your nerd cave or barracks.
Fortunately there was almost no traffic.
Signs get vandalized or stolen all the time here in Uruguay. Mostly vandalized.
It's easy to say they are better, when there are so few of them. (Compared to the amount of human driven cars)
Aren't sanity checks basically common sense? I would suspect they already play a major role in making autonomous driving a reality.
We won't lose that capacity.
I am extremely skeptical that beacons, sitting out in the heat, and the sun, and the cold, and the rain, and exposed to whatever we use to maintain roads at that juncture, will not be "a wear item".
I do not think people have a solid grasp of how many millions of miles of road would need to be technified for self-driving cars to be widely viable.
Most likely, it's going to be a niche thing, tightly restricted to certain places that can afford to build and maintain the infrastructure.
If we're going to beacon up a road, they easily make the most sense.
The interstate system already has working self-driving, even without any beacons. Inherently-safe roads like interstate freeways are already almost solved, and you can already buy a Chevrolet today that can self-drive the interstate system 99% of the time.
It's all the dangerous roads that need the help. The ones with bicyclists and pedestrians and parked cars and uncontrolled access and such.
Curbs, signage, lights, poles, drainage infrastructure, lower lifts of asphalt and granular material, ...are all non-wear items. This doesn't mean they never need to be repaired, but rather that they tend to get replaced after unintentional damage. Off-surface beacons (what the original comment suggested) would be in this category.
And you say "private contactors will save the day", please, stop drinking the Ayn Rand Cool-aid.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_train_syst...
Self driving trains will require more coordination, with central dispatch to tell them when/where to go. That leaves the intelligence on the train much more basic.
Self-driving implies intelligence, and fully-automated trains simply follow rote rules, and apply the emergency brakes if something unexpected happens. Not intelligent.
Put another way, self-driving has unbounded complexity, while a fixed number of vehicles on a protected, grade-separated railway is not very complex at all.
Cars are already equipped with suites of sensors giving them far more complete information than any human can process. Cars can already react faster and hold lanes with more precision than humans can.
What’s lacking is general intelligence. The ability to creatively respond to unexpected situations, even when it’s something you’ve never seen before.
Autonomous driving is a marginal improvement on an already deployed technology.
The overhead lane markers in Hokkaido work well, but would be an expensive retrofit elsewhere (not the poles themselves, but the foundations)
The nails aren't structural, only a signal.
Multiple nails mean the signal is highly redundant, depending on density.
Regular maintenance could detect weakening signal (rusting nails) and result in new nails being inserted.
Iron oxide remains (weakly) magnetic.
Treatments (galvanised nails, coated, etc.) could slow corrosion.
In peacetime, self-driving cars are a nice-to-have that can save many billions of driver hours and a few traffic fatalities. In wartime, they're literally a matter of life or death. The side that can handle all of their logistics without exposing their precious humans to enemy fire has a huge advantage over the one whose supply lanes can get picked off one by one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Aid_Highway_Act_of_195...
There were of course other civilian concerns as well, but Eisenhower's arguments at the time of the plan primarily cited the importance of Germany's autobahn system during WW2 as a justification.
FWIW though, it probably is possible to use this sort of technology for buses and shuttles. You can’t fix markings on ALL the roads, but you can make sure the markings are good enough on main arterials to have a dedicated bus lane.
From one of my previous comments on a different post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19638171
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Reducing the number of cars (and therefore traffic) on the roads will benefit everybody You seem to have a rose-tinted view of the world we live in.
Have you ever had to commute in less-than-ideal
conditions?
Heavy snow? Sleet? Black ice?
Have you ever lived in places that are not
perfectly flat? or lived in places that
are hot that make bicycling unfeasible?
Did you have sporting gear / work gear that
you had to lug? Did you know some people have
to fetch their own gear to work
Did you have to take calls during transit?
Did you know its common practice for employees
to call into meetings during their commute and/or
help assist operations via conference calls?
Have you had to shop for more than a baguette
or a bagel at a store? You know how cumbersome
that gets for even a family of three?
Do you have the slightest clue how much casual
violence and crime happen on public transit?[1]
However doing away with cars or vehicular traffic is just pollyannaish madness.
[1]
Teen robbed at gunpoint at Fruitvale, BART officer says writing a report is a 'waste of resources'
https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/bart-police-refuse-repo...
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edit: formatting
No they won’t. This is just willful self-delusion on the part of transit haters.
Most of your concerns are either just plain petty (like, just wear headphones if you don’t like hearing other people) or lacking in perspective (cars kill way more people than whatever safety concerns on a transit system you want to gussy up).
For sure. And I feel like they're going about it backwards by defaulting to maintaining norms of private property and leasing things starting with private/personally owned property and developing ways to lease it to for communal use.
They'd probably have a more viable business model if they had started with communal property and charged rent or usage fees for maintenance instead. Jitney cabs or dollar vans have been around forever, and their big challenge was figuring out how to do dispatch and routing in a way that didn't give people intolerably long wait times.
0 visibility in snow happens often.
The full description of the system can be read at https://path.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/advanced_snowp...
Alaska uses GPS for their precision plowing - https://www.truckinginfo.com/329914/how-alaska-dot-uses-gps-... . Note that to get the 2" precision you need high quality GPS receivers.
> The trucks have two GPS receivers mounted atop the cab. These receivers cost about $10,000 each, Shankwitz says. "That's probably why this hasn't been deployed in many other areas; it's just too expensive and most applications do not require that level of accuracy."
> The two-centimeter accuracy actually comes from a third receiver -- a high-precision, stationary ground-based receiver perched atop a microwave communications tower in nearby Valdez. It's accurate to within millimeters and it acts as reference receiver for the plow-mounted systems.
I don't see this being standard on self driving cars.
That said, ground penetrating radar is being looked at and appears to be a lower price point. https://phys.org/news/2016-06-vehicles-high-precision-advers...
However, I'd argue the lanekeeping and "where am I" problems this stuff solves is dwarfed by the common sense and logical reasoning & recognition problems.
What I think is that self-driving cars may also force us to confront ways in which real-world driving environments are inadequate, so that we can make them more adequate. For example, there are intersections where stop signs (or other signs) are present but not visible. Humans know they have to stop there, so they stop anyway. Self-driving cars could systematically find and report these locations, and might get the city to do something about them.
I live in a wealthy jurisdiction, and the road markings here largely are not what I'd consider to be "perfectly visible". I'd guess that currently, probably 3/4 of painted lane markings have one or more of the following issues: a) obscured by snow/ice, b) faded c) road under construction and lane markings don't correspond to current lanes.
Where the car would freak out and stop, you don't even notice anything is missing.
That obviously has downsides too, but unreliable road markings would be a pretty silly blocker to ever having a self-driving car. that's a solveable short-term problem.
Cars today don't have any defense against people dropping bricks or pouring paint off an overpass, but somehow the system still works.
Between vastly reducing car traffic and separating it from pedestrians the problem of fully self driving is greatly simplified (probably not eliminated).
"We can't even keep the bloody yellow markings on the road visible"
But you are right, road maintenance is never cheap.
It would probably be easier to have a swarm like national airtraffic AI, all cars flying, all cargo in blimps than to maintain a complex ground network of "smart roads"
All the road and infrastructure taxes being funneled by the politicians to, other areas as they see fit to placate their constituencies or finance their pet projects.
Same with out-of-control grossly over-budget projects that dont deliver the bang for the buck.
If we - as an electorate - insisted on superior paint or "marking technology" for surface roads, we shall have them in one form or the other.
Driverless lorries that go from one service station to another will be the first fully autonomous vehicles I think.
Another possibility is Automaker X partnering with comms / infrastructure Company Y (e.g., Comcast). Put another way, if they can get to the point this is the dealbreaker then it's easy compared to what it took to get here.