http://www.tgdaily.com/trendwatch-features...reets-of-berlin

This could end sobriety as my gaming group knows it.

I want one of these, but capable of operating anywhere not just in a specific city

Funny how the requirements are more strict for the computer then for man, yet they are less likely to make mistakes once they have the skills in place.

It's because a human who makes a mistake is simply being human. A machine that makes a mistake leads to the company that made it getting sued for a lot more due to releasing a defective product.

If I thought Europe would take me I'd consider moving just for this. I hate driving. Unfortunately I am almost positive in a game of Red Rover I'd rank somewhere behind Carrot Top and Gary Busey.

Pfft, only 20km driven.

Try 140,000 miles.

As yet humankind is more able to learn from mistakes. A guy makes a boo boo, he doesn't do it again (OK, OK, able to, not guaranteed to). A program makes a mistake and the program will repeat it ad infinitum, until the car gets back to the shop.

Two quotes from the Google article above:

"But of course, to be truly safer, the cars must be far more reliable than, say, today’s personal computers, which crash on occasion and are frequently infected. " Imagine what a virus could do on a busy highway.

"The car can be programmed for different driving personalities — from cautious, in which it is more likely to yield to another car, to aggressive, where it is more likely to go first. " The 'Transporter' virus, anyone?

The German Gridguide system is called ALI, by the way

Well, we now people for a long time. So it is quite a safe guess to assume what they do and what they do not. (Not considering crazy people, but crazy people will bea problem for trafic in any case...)

With a robot it is not that easy. The car getting stuck in a loop, the computer crashing or anything and bang it goes...

That, or nobody wants to tell the truckers union they're redundant.

Well, Rojas has been working on this since the late 90s (ever since he came to the FU back when they brushed up their Compiter Sciences), and the robotics lab at FU is one of the best worldwide.

However, the track they're talking about mostly is 6-lane streets and Autobahn, if they take the obvious route. Starting at Messedamm going onto the Autobahn, exiting next sortie at Kaiserdamm, then left through Kaiserdamm, staright over Ernst Reuther-Platz, following it to the Victoria Collumn, and then on through 17th June. There's three really difficult points: the slip road at Messedamm (bloody maze and lots of traffic of confused people coming in via AVUS from the southern outer ring highway), Ernst Reuther-Platz, and the Great Star, otherwise the car can go straight, stop at red lights and be overtaken. Little chance of spontaneously crossing pedestrians like on smaller streets or cyclists - most of these aren't suicidal enough to try their luck on these streets. If it manages that track entirely going through side roads, then we're talking.


Based on which data?

Also, there must be a human driver present because in case of autonomous control, it's the company producing the controls who's at fault if the car runs over a kid, pedestrian, idiot cyclist or wildlife sich as boar or foxes (which are a lot more common in the city than you might think).

Having had a mangy fox take up residence in our barn* a few times, I am not surprised in the least (we're not in the boonies, either. We've got suburbia on all sides). Now an elephant is something you won't expect to see in a city.

*I had so much trouble typing this word, it's not funny.
bo...
br...
bw...
ban...

You are acutally not allowed to break for small wildlife, such as foxes.

Depending on the load, flat bed trucks aren't allowed to stop for anything short of "human." Too many and the load can break loose and kill the driver (I've been told it's good for "one emergency screeching halt").

It's true. It's seen as a safety hazard to other drivers.

I've often wodnered why so much time is spent working on makign individual cars drive autonomously and why more effort isn't put into researching how to automate the roadbed. By designing millions of cars to drive independantly we're not really solving any problems or improving the current systems. In fact we could be making them worse.

...and as long as they are used in precisely the same environment for which their skills were developed. RL example from RoboCup Germany (two years ago I think), one team had obviously tested their robots in light conditions different from those at the competition. So on the field, the robots misclassified their own shadows as obstacles and did evasive maneuvers, until the team simply switched off obstacle detection...

Several reasons, some good some bad.

A good one is deployment cost. An automated roadbed is essentially an all-or-nothing expense, and is not useful if done below critical sizes.

Another good one is deployment flexibility. An automated roadbed is a fixed route and is less useful for those not on the route. Autonomous vehicles, on the other hand, have significantly greater ranges of useful origins and destinations. Rephrased, the roadbed may be ideal in getting from A to B, but users have to get from X to A and then from B to Z. With autonomous vehicles they can get from X to Z without worrying about A and B.

A bad reason is selfishness. People like to believe they're unique, and have their own transport on demand without needing to share or be significantly concerned with others. The autonomous vehicle plays upon that belief.

A lesson. There are three feasibility tests, and a successful project must pass all three.
Engineering: Can it be built?
Economic: Can we afford it?
Political: Do we want it/will we use it?

The roadbed can pass the political, eventually. The hurdle is a lot lower for autonomous vehicles.

I would disagree that there is more of an engineering hurdle in the centralized system then in the car based one. RFID tagging embedded in license plates could go a long long way to enabling such a project. There would be a matter of gettign the sensors on the roadbed but their already looking at sensors in thhat vein to catch speeders and weigh trucks in motion. Lojack and other systems can already track cars fairly granularly. I know these arn't directly applicable but I just can never figure out why so much time and attention in making a car drive itself around all the plausible risks and vagaries of traffic when the answer is to work to eliminate the vulgarities of traffic leaving the cars autopilot to worry about non vehicle related items.

I didn't say it had a lower engineering hurdle. I said lower political hurdle.

Yeah, but have you ever seen a fox using the sidewalk of a mid city street carrying a neatly folded Mcdonald's takeaway bag in it's mouth? Because I have.


You sure? I knowyou're not allowed to run over the larger, hunt-heavy animals, but have to brake and try to evade, at least that's what I was taught. So in the end they ask you to commit suicide so treefuckers and hunters are happy.


An automated lane on the highway is among the things being planned here, and one of the few things about this e-mobility bullshit that can be salvaged. However, this makes sense for scenarios where there are few diversions save other cars and moving fast and packing cars tight is imperative. It will not help much in sidestreets or streets wehre there are routinely non-automated trafficants (pedestrians, cyclists, horse wagons....) to be expected. Also, in that case, whoever operates the system is liable for any accident that happens, which may not be what a company or government agency would want. Not to mention what kind of tempting target the wireless infrastructure necessary would be for hackers. And making wireless systems reliably secure is next to impossible.


It would also go a long way to total surveillance of the population.

There is no legal requirement for either behavior. However, the insurance will usually not pay for damage you cause while evading something that wouldn't damage your car.

You mean like a train?






-k

Oh the way rail lines could be improved! The Canadian rail lines used to be something to be enjoyed, now? Horrible.

Still better than flying, however.

Especially to America?

Even In-Canada flights. But, yes, especially to the USA.

"Welcome to the United States, we're now going to molest you, microwave you, and possibly steal things from you. Legally."

To be fair, in some cities, that might be a nice introduction as to what's really going to happen later on, only worse.

New York, New York

There's still people in New York that want to kill me, so I won't be going there any time soon.

I was thinking more Washington, DC, actually. '

Let's get back to GridGuide.

Fair enough.

Personally, I think it's impossible to do anyway other then the inidividual vehicle way. People just enjoy their (illusion of) freedom too much.

What freedom?

Oh, right, I'm not a Sheeple.

Quote from a book I read recently.

"There's three kinds of people in the world: scoundrels, hypocrites, and sheep."

Well, I'm not a hypocrite... Does that make me a Scoundrel, however? I thought I was just some weirdo.

Heh.
Within the context of the book, it was one character (former space pirate) talking about another character (also a former pirate who opposed the government). The sheep were...even more sheep-y (think "human ant colony": every individual is exactly the same as any other, to the point of one planet having forgone names). The planetary rulers were the hypocrites (because they espoused sameness, but were themselves unique).

Oh, almost the way trophy wives are, gotcha.

Well, if your trophy wives are vat-grown brainwashed hermaphrodites, then sure.

Sounds like the perfect trophy wife for me. What's the name of this book/series? Author? How this applies to GridGuide?

Well of Souls series by Jack Chalker.



It doesn't.

It's theoretically doable in countries like Germany or the Netherlands, which, by American/Canadian standards are huge conurbations, but it's really flat out impossible in countries where the population density is as low as it is in the states, not to mention the "is there actually population there?" parts of Canada. I just don't see how this would improve anything, save for making the 1984 ecofascists happy because they have successfully oppressed everybody For The Greater Good.

What would make sense is an autopilot *option* for high-speed intercity/intracity roads. In controlled and half enclosed environments, computers can work reasonably well, and they do have the reaction times to make highspeed travel much more compact. However, outside such an environment, it's far from feasible that a computersized system would work well (maybe in 20, 30 years). Pretty much the Shadowrun GridGuide solution, actually.

That would, energetically, even be as sensible, if not better, than trains; if there're more than one passenger, cars generally are the most energy efficient way to get from A to B. Even compared to fully occupied trains, which is a rare occurrence.

Which, by US and European standards, is everywhere except Toronto, Calgary, and Vancouver.

Hey, now. Winnipeg has a few dozen folks, too!

If you're going to load passengers in the car, you need to compare loaded trains. If you're not, it's better to compare existing to existing.

US DoE puts out a regular report on comparison. The most recent (link) has data up to 2009. Passenger rail in general is 2594 BTUs per passenger mile. Cars in general get 3538 BTUs per passenger mile. Cars does not include light trucks which are worse, or motorcycles which are better. (Table 2-12 on page 2-14 of link. See caveats for error of margin issues; this is averages.)

Actually, Georgia already seemed damn empty to me. Not to speak of the Midwest states. One hamlet every couple dozen kilometers ...


As I said, that's what I do.


Passenger miles in cars are calculated with one passenger in mind, not the maximum passengers. Passenger miles in trains always assume maximum load. Bear in mind, though, that cars usually do not accelerate and decelerate as much as a train does, which usually stop in every backwater along the way (this may be vastly different in the US, but in Germany, the idiotic federal system means a high speed bullet train has to brake to a fulls top every 70 kilometers because every state it passes needs to have an allotted number of stops - there goes your energy saving). A train wastes incredible amounts of energy braking, since we're talking about a mass in the thousands of tons here. If you can accelerate the train and power through from, say, New York to Ottawa, you're doing better than if you stop every 70 km to have passengers look at the empty train station of Hicksville, Backwater County, Nowhereland.

And please, use SI units, not Imperial. Outside the US, nobody uses Imperial.

False. Read the report, it's why I provided the link. Cars are based on a load factor of 1.55 passengers per vehicle. Train assumption is 25.8 passengers per vehicle. Neither is full load or even close to it. Both sets of numbers are based on existing, not ideal, performances.

And the reason for the units is that what's in the reports.

Try Delaware sometime.

There ain't NOTHIN' in Delaware.

Northern Ontario, you're lucky to have ANYTHING for one hundred kilometres, two hundred in some places. Above Gimli, Manitoba is pretty close to the same from what I remember of the map I have to semi-learn for my Government job, with the exception of Churchill, which is North enough to get Polar Bears.

I'm still trying to figure out where all the "Grasshoppers" from Saskatchewan are coming from. (The license plates are green, and it's almost completely flat grassland, thus the nickname.).

...

Hey, how would Gridguide work on Ice Roads?

The technology is already there to get that energy back. Now it's just tweaking and scaling to make it more efficient.