Raising prices is the short (immediate) term solution to making people happier (trading a small $ amount for the sizeable convenience of always finding a spot during your commute). And then places with high prices and full lots should rocket to the top of the parking-expansion list.
^ Ten years is a long time. Ten years ago smartphones as we now know them were in their infancy. Think of everything your phone can do today. We are in a similar position now with self driving cars. I think it is reasonable to assume that in a decade a car driven by itself will better be able to handle pedestrians than a car driven by even the most capable human.
Why do people park? It is worth asking because the motivations are going to be changed by self-driving cars.
Today, people park because:
1) Owning a car seems the cheapest, fastest, most predictable way to get access to a car. You keep one at home (and like to have one at work) because so many trips start/end there. But if an on-call car is nearby it could be faster for you to "step into it" than for you to un-garage or scrape or start it.
2) Driving oneself seems the cheapest, fastest way to get access to a driver that you trust. "You" have always assumed that you knew the best way to get places, particularly your tricks for "the back way". But now Waze "sees" that just as easily.
3) Parking nearby (if it can be assumed...or even if you're crazy for thinking you can) shortens the "terminal walk" at the start/end of trips. But if there's a curb you could be dropped off at, that's much better than parking even very close.
The reason we owned a car on Mission Hill and had a resident parking sticker (and now do in Chelsea) is because my husband works in Needham and the Commuter Rail schedule doesn't work with his schedule. I work in DTX though and need the direct transit connections. It puts us in a situation where we're forced to own a car for his work, but I never use it and take the T everywhere. When we go out somewhere downtown, we just park at Wonderland. We don't drive to destinations downtown.
Ten years is not really a long time It goes by waaay too fast. Sigh.
Anyway, regarding 'innovation', I think we're pretty good at benefiting from Moore's law, but that doesn't necessarily translate into the real world. As a computer scientist, I have a rather healthy skepticism for technological 'solutions' to everything, even while I seek them. I think it's rather telling that while we've become very good at making gadgets, and communications are amazing these days, we are still dealing with many of the same problems that plagued us in the 19th century: housing, transportation, segregation, education. Details have changed, but the overall questions remain the same. We have safer homes now, but affordability is still a crisis. With regard to transportation, we actually went backwards for a long time: we were able to move faster and faster but distances grew even worse. And speaking of 'technological utopianism': crazy people propose nonsense like the Hyperloop, while we can't even run the trains on time (or at all).
So yeah, we've seen a lot of improvement with regard to packing a lot of computing power in a small piece of hardware. That can result in some pretty cool stuff. But it's not necessarily attacking the truly hard problems. Remember, in the 1950s, computer scientists estimated that we'd have the AI thing tackled in ten years or so. It's 2015, we're not any closer, it seems. But we can build powerful supercomputers that can kinda, sorta match the pattern recognition ability of a two year old dog.
So count me as skeptical that we can 'solve' the fully-general self-driving car problem within ten years. If 'real intelligence' driving a car follows GPS and drives a car onto train tracks every month, what makes you think 'artificial intelligence' is going to do any better? But I do think that if you define the problem down, and scope it carefully, then we might be able to get something. So we'll see automatic protection systems that stop your car before a crash, for instance, which is already happening. Or perhaps on the highly regulated environment of the highway, you'll have the option of autopilot. And perhaps some vehicles can move autonomously along carefully studied corridors, with automatic protection systems in place to guard against crashes.
But I think we're a long way off from the point where you just type in an address and an autonomous vehicle shows up within 2 minutes to pick you up and drop you off anywhere in the world. I think that's quite possibly an AI-hard problem, and we know what happens with those.
Lol, no.
Hybrid cars hit the market 15 years ago. Today they make up around 3% of sales.
Rear view cameras have been around for over a decade. Only because of a federal law are they slowly finding their way into all cars.
You do realize that all the current self driving cars require a fully mapped route right? As in, they cant even navigate a parking lot on their own?
And no current model can drive in rain or snow.
Think 50 years
You do realize that all the current self driving cars require a fully mapped route right? As in, they cant even navigate a parking lot on their own?
And no current model can drive in rain or snow.
Think 50 years
This is so completely and utterly wrong it's hilarious that you included snark in your post. Self-driving cars can easily drive in rain/snow. I believe Google did their first successful snow test a few years ago. What you're citing is extremely adverse conditions. Self driving cars can't drive in stuff like Boston experienced recently - extreme white outs or torrential downpours - where it isn't safe for humans to drive either.
The parking lot issue is not really a big issue at all. The core mechanics of self-driving have all been figured out. It will just take some engineers a few months to figure out how the car should behave in a parking lot vs. on the road.
That being said, I'm not denying that there are still issues that need to be worked out before public use. But they're not huge issues, merely minor kinks, that need to be worked out.
On that note, recently six automakers at CES announced they will have self-driving cars on the market by 2020. Of course, for the first few years self-driving will be a luxury. Just like rear-view cameras, automatic breaking, collision avoidance, etc. were luxuries when they first came out. However I can easily see self-driving becoming mainstream by 2025, if not earlier, when regulators and insurance companies see the reduction in collision frequency brought by self-driving cars.
Chief among these questions is how Google plans to collect information that will be programmed into its cars. Technology Review writes that each time a Google self-driving car gets ready for a trip; engineers make a handful of preparations, including extensively mapping the car's exact route. It is not unlike taking a Street View map of a road for Google Maps, but with the self-driving car, the mapping is much more detailed.
"Data from multiple passes by a special sensor vehicle must later be pored over, meter by meter, by both computers and humans," writes Technology Review. "It's vastly more effort than what's needed for Google Maps."
Moreover, MIT notes that the cars are not 100 percent equipped to handle mapping omissions, such as road constructions, temporary stop signs or lane diversions. Although the vehicles are designed to recognize physical obstacles, they do not know how to respond to certain obstacles. For example, if new traffic lights were put up, the car would slow down as it approaches the stoplight but will not know how to obey it. The cars also would not be able to spot things such as potholes or an uncovered manhole.
I believe Google did their first successful snow test a few years ago.
Another common obstacle the self-driving cars still have not learned to overcome is the weather. While human drivers have something called a brain sitting between their ears to help them navigate their vehicles through rain, fog or snow, Google's engineers still have to figure out how to teach their driverless vehicles to do things such as go slow in wet pavement or estimate the lanes when the road is covered in snow. In fact, Chris Urmson, the head of Google's driverless car team himself, admits the cars have yet to be tested in wet conditions because of concerns posed on the safety of the testing engineers.
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/1...-quite-ready-to-hit-the-roads-researchers.htm"The car wouldn't be able to spot a police officer at the side of the road frantically waving for traffic to stop," says MIT.
The parking lot issue is not really a big issue at all.
On the top floor of a Las Vegas casino garage, the company demonstrated how a modified version of its BMW i3 electric car can autonomously park itself and then can come pick you up when you’re ready to go–BMW calls it the Remote Valet Parking Assistant.
“You can send your car away to look for a parking spot, go shopping and then comes back again when you’re finished,” said Huber.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/aaronti...self-and-picks-you-up-when-youre-ready-to-go/To get readings of its environment, the car is equipped with four laser scanners on each side of the car. BMW also needs a map of the garage. From there, the car’s algorithm can sift through the map and the information coming off the sensors to find a parking spot.
Having to get a map of every single parking garage seems rather impractical for this feature to take off. Werner Huber, head of the research group for driver assistance at BMW, said it can start retrieving the maps straight from garage operators. For the demo, the BMW team created the map of the garage themselves.
Google’s cars have safely driven more than 700,000 miles. As a result, “the public seems to think that all of the technology issues are solved,” says Steven Shladover, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley’s Institute of Transportation Studies. “But that is simply not the case.”
Yeah, I figure we'll get "smart cruise control" that handles highway driving pretty soon, plus more advanced auto-parking, but then it will stagnate as far as actually responsive driving goes while software engineers battle with AI over true driving skills.