This article is a little light on thesis, but legit.
Personally, I’d like to tie a vision of autonomous vehicles to a broad rethinking of transit and public ownership. What if training data was shared, so instead of allowing Google to create another monopoly we deliberately cultivated a diverse market? What if we designed roads to accommodate autonomous van pools and also bikes and more light vehicles?
I love buses too, but a van pool is materially different. Buses travel fixed routes. A van pool can act as a shared taxi that shuttles people directly between points of immediate departure, transit stations, and final destinations.
Years ago, Microsoft was doing some R&D on autonomous vehicles in a mock city built for it. Instead of each vehicle doing all of the processing, the fake city was built with wireless markers to GIVE the car the information. Like instead of having to “see” a stop sign, the stop sign told cars it was there.
It would be complicated and expensive to implement on a mass scale but I thought it was a really cool idea.
Effectively, this has been an ongoing initiative across DoTs for a long while now. The issue is that it’s a hodgepodge approach baked piecemeal into various grants and other programs. But, yeah, digital, vendor agnostic, secure transit infrastructure is always on a lot of DOT folks’ minds.
Sure. But it’s not like the technology they developed is useless outside of an autonomous city, I’m sure they went into it knowing it would never be implemented for real.
This article is a little light on thesis, but legit.
Personally, I’d like to tie a vision of autonomous vehicles to a broad rethinking of transit and public ownership. What if training data was shared, so instead of allowing Google to create another monopoly we deliberately cultivated a diverse market? What if we designed roads to accommodate autonomous van pools and also bikes and more light vehicles?
We can dream better than this.
I for one believe we’re capable of building trains
We could even call them busses
I love buses too, but a van pool is materially different. Buses travel fixed routes. A van pool can act as a shared taxi that shuttles people directly between points of immediate departure, transit stations, and final destinations.
Years ago, Microsoft was doing some R&D on autonomous vehicles in a mock city built for it. Instead of each vehicle doing all of the processing, the fake city was built with wireless markers to GIVE the car the information. Like instead of having to “see” a stop sign, the stop sign told cars it was there.
It would be complicated and expensive to implement on a mass scale but I thought it was a really cool idea.
Effectively, this has been an ongoing initiative across DoTs for a long while now. The issue is that it’s a hodgepodge approach baked piecemeal into various grants and other programs. But, yeah, digital, vendor agnostic, secure transit infrastructure is always on a lot of DOT folks’ minds.
That test sounds like a model trainroad but for billionaires.
Sure. But it’s not like the technology they developed is useless outside of an autonomous city, I’m sure they went into it knowing it would never be implemented for real.