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What a 160-year-old theory about coal predicts about our self-driving future (www.theverge.com)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Enticing though they are, such arguments conceal a logical flaw. As a classic 19th-century theory known as a Jevons paradox explains, even if autonomous vehicles eventually work perfectly — an enormous “if” — they are likely to increase total emissions and crash deaths, simply because people will use them so much.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (13 children)

This is a fundamentally flawed argument.

First of all, if people are getting to where they want to go faster, easier, and happier, that is a good thing. If you want to argue that everyone needs to be a hermit who never leaves home and orders everything on Amazon then you will never get your way because people fundamentally want to travel to see the outdoors and nature around them, to see their family and friends, and just to adventure. Eliminating vehicle deaths by making travel impossible is not a noble goal.

Secondly, it's based on the idea that people even can drive more than they already do. Road congestion in most major cities is already the limiting factor that pushes people to bike, walk, or take transit. Even if AVs make it easier and cheaper to take car, you're still not going to do it during rush hour when you can bike.

Thirdly, it's based on the idea that AVs are only going to be slightly safer than human drivers. We have no reason to think that's the case. Humans are fucking terrible drivers, and it's highly likely that AVs will be several orders of magnitude safer than the average human driver.

Fourthly, it ignores other secondary effects to AVs, like suddenly not needing nearly as much parking, freeing up both parking lot real estate, but more importantly, freeing up on street parking, creating more room for actual traffic to move, and their increased patience not causing constant traffic jams because they tailgated someone and then slammed on the brakes.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 month ago (4 children)

Eliminating vehicle deaths by making travel impossible

And here we see decades of automobile industry propaganda in action. There is only the car, or no mobility whatsoever. You remember how everybody was just trapped inside their houses for centuries until the Ford factories started cranking out Model Ts?

Cars will never be a sustainable solution to mass transit. The immense amount of waste in materials, energy, and land use will not be offset with AVs. I don’t think AVs are a bad idea in and of themselves. But, as the article points out, they’re not going to solve any major problems.

I had never really considered how induced demand would apply to AVs…

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

And here we see decades of automobile industry propaganda in action. There is only the car, or no mobility whatsoever.

Please cite where I said that.

You remember how everybody was just trapped inside their houses for centuries until the Ford factories started cranking out Model Ts?

Um, yes. Obviously not remember directly, but that is what is in history books.

Most Americans lived in small rural communities and seldom left their farm and immediate community. When they travelled at all it would be by horse and buggy, and would take forever to get to the nearest train station, and then forever from the end of the line to wherever they had to go. If people lived farther away you would see them once every couple of years and otherwise letter write them. Cars fundamentally changed how much the average person travels in their life by huge orders of magnitude, and society is now oriented around individual families and communities being much more spread out. I think this is flawed, but I also think it's unlikely to change given the realities of basic things like housing costs making it unaffordable to live where your parents did.

We should build out robust train networks to reduce as many cars as possible, but at the same time the idea that you'll eliminate cars completely is quite frankly, completely divorced from reality. I personally do not own a car and have spent a used car amount of money on a cargo bike to avoid having to buy a car. But guess what? There is still a very clear limit on the size of object I can transport (smaller than virtually any piece of furniture), it's unpleasant to infeasible to use in the rain depending on the load, and it is flat out unusable in the winter with snow and ice, so I end up using a car share service semi-regularly. I've thought about putting on bigger wheels, extending the bed, adding better suspension, a roof, and another set of wheels for balance, but now I've invented a car. And that's not to mention driving out to nature preserves for camping, hiking, rock climbing, mountain biking etc. nor visiting family and friends who live out in the country not near any bus stops or train stations.

As long as cars exist, AVs will be better than human drivers, and literally no one has ever presented a remotely feasible and practical plan for eliminating cars.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

As long as cars exist, AVs will be better than human drivers,

this is at obvious odds with the current state of self-driving technology itself--which is (as i noted in the other comment) subject to routine overhyping and also has rather minimal oversight and regulation generally. Tesla is only the most egregious example in both respects; even stuff like Waymo is pretty much entirely reliant on taking their word for it that the technology would be safer than humans (which meshes awkwardly with well publicized problems and efforts to hide robotaxi safety records).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

this is at obvious odds with the current state of self-driving technology itself–which is (as i noted in the other comment) subject to routine overhyping and also has rather minimal oversight and regulation generally

All cool tech things are overhyped. If you judgement for whether or not a technology is going to be useful is "if it sounds at all overhyped then it will flop" then you would never predict any technology would change the world ever.

And no, quite frankly those assertions are objectively false. Waymo and Cruise's driverless programs are both monitored by the DMV which is why they revoked Cruise's license when they found them hiding crash data. Waymo has never been found to do so or even accused of doing so. Notice that in the lawsuit you linked, Waymo was happy to publish accident and safety data but did not want to publish data about how it's vehicles handle edge cases, which would give their rivals information on how they operate, and the courts agreed with them.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/12/human-drivers-crash-a-lot-more-than-waymos-software-data-shows/

Since their inception, Waymo vehicles have driven 5.3 million driverless miles in Phoenix, 1.8 million driverless miles in San Francisco, and a few thousand driverless miles in Los Angeles through the end of October 2023. And during all those miles, there were three crashes serious enough to cause injuries:

In July, a Waymo in Tempe, Arizona, braked to avoid hitting a downed branch, leading to a three-car pileup. A Waymo passenger was not wearing a seatbelt (they were sitting on the buckled seatbelt instead) and sustained injuries that Waymo described as minor. In August, a Waymo at an intersection “began to proceed forward” but then “slowed to a stop” and was hit from behind by an SUV. The SUV left the scene without exchanging information, and a Waymo passenger reported minor injuries. In October, a Waymo vehicle in Chandler, Arizona, was traveling in the left lane when it detected another vehicle approaching from behind at high speed. The Waymo tried to accelerate to avoid a collision but got hit from behind. Again, there was an injury, but Waymo described it as minor. The two Arizona injuries over 5.3 million miles works out to 0.38 injuries per million vehicle miles. One San Francisco injury over 1.75 million miles equals 0.57 injuries per million vehicle miles. An important question is whether that’s more or less than you’d expect from a human-driven vehicle.

After making certain adjustments—including the fact that driverless Waymo vehicles do not travel on freeways—Waymo calculates that comparable human drivers reported 1.29 injury crashes per million miles in Phoenix and 3.79 injury crashes per million miles in San Francisco. In other words, human drivers get into injury crashes three times as often as Waymo in the Phoenix area and six times as often in San Francisco.

Waymo argues that these figures actually understate the gap because human drivers don't report all crashes. Independent studies have estimated that about a third of injury crashes go unreported. After adjusting for these and other reporting biases, Waymo estimates that human-driven vehicles actually get into five times as many injury crashes in Phoenix and nine times as many in San Francisco.

To help evaluate the study, I talked to David Zuby, the chief research officer at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. The IIHS is a well-respected nonprofit that is funded by the insurance industry, which has a strong interest in promoting automotive safety.

While Zuby had some quibbles with some details of Waymo’s methodology, he was generally positive about the study. Zuby agrees with Waymo that human drivers underreport crashes relative to Waymo. But it's hard to estimate this underreporting rate with any precision. Ultimately, Zuby believes that the true rate of crashes for human-driven vehicles lies somewhere between Waymo’s adjusted and unadjusted figures.

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