624
Self-driving Waymo cars keep SF residents awake all night by honking at each other
(arstechnica.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I remain irritated we're spending so much money on self driving cars instead of buses, trains, and improving our living spaces to support them.
Like you could spend billions to try to get self driving cars to work, and get part way there. And you'd still have a car-first dystopia.
Or you could spend billions to deploy buses and make walkable neighborhoods. Well understood, many good side effects.
Trains are way easier to make self driving too, we've had autonomous trains since the 60s.
The only reason trains are not self-driving is humans designed the whole system in a too complicated way. Trains had all the ingredients for safe self-driving for decades.
In the US a few decades ago the big rail companies were given the ultimatum to upgrade their safety infrastructure or have a national speed limit of 79 mph imposed on them.
Guess which they did?
Trains have even more obnoxious horns though.
And are legally required to blast them in populated areas
They usually only use the horn at crossings. Automated trains are grade separated. The SkyTrain rolls through Vancouver all night and you can hardly hear it.