Waze Wars
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@masonwheeler
It skirted the wall for several metres if I remember correctly.
Belgian bus in a perfectly straight Swiss tunnel ...
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@Luhmann Also, seatbelts are mandatory for busses doing long trips over here for some years now, for longer trips at least (i.e. not inner-city & suburban mass transit).
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@blakeyrat You haven't told us any of the details of your brother's brilliant plan, but if the labour costs of hiring drivers killed it, it might become viable again with the development of autonomous vehicles. I'm pretty excited to see how transportation changes in the next few decades based on that single technology.
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@another_sam Right; in fact I just invented a plan to save the entire world, which isn't viable now but it'll be great when we invent Star Trek transporters. I'm going to bore the shit out of everybody at a party by explaining it in great detail.
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@blakeyrat While teleportation would be quite convenient, replicators are the technology that fundamentally changes everything.
Anyway, the real diffrerence here is that unlike teleportation, autonomous vehicles are not soft sci-fi, they are a real thing that exist today and are likely to become widely available in a relatively short period of time.
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@another_sam The other difference is I was making a joke and you were not-getting-it-at-all.
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@blakeyrat I sometimes can't tell the difference between you making a joke and you making a sarcastic put-down.
Also, I bet you're great fun at parties.
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Though I remember this one hitting the news
It would have done so because it was a rarity.
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@blakeyrat said in Waze Wars:
increase usage by hundreds of percent
@blakeyrat said in Waze Wars:
3-4 times more drivers
That would still be more profitable, even if the ticket price was reduced quite a lot, surely?
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@another_sam said in Waze Wars:
@blakeyrat You haven't told us any of the details of your brother's brilliant plan, but if the labour costs of hiring drivers killed it, it might become viable again with the development of autonomous vehicles. I'm pretty excited to see how transportation changes in the next few decades based on that single technology.
The technology that has me excited is Hyperloops. Autonomous vehicles might make it more productive to get from point A to point B, but being able to put A and B 10x further apart will really change the way people live!
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@another_sam said in Waze Wars:
Also, I bet you're great fun at parties.
That assumes he's ever invited to them.
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@another_sam said in Waze Wars:
unlike teleportation
Just to be pedantic… teleportation is a real thing…
just not terribly useful as of yet
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@masonwheeler said in Waze Wars:
The technology that has me excited is Hyperloops.
Don't bother getting very excited about them. The people backing the development have no clue just how expensive it will be to build the tracks required, or how the economics of the carriage sizes and service frequencies will work. Expect real construction costs to be similar to HSR, and with the sizes of
trainscarriages in use, expect stupidly high ticket prices.
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Don't bother getting very excited about them. The people backing the development have no clue just how expensive it will be to build the tracks required, or how the economics of the carriage sizes and service frequencies will work. Expect real construction costs to be similar to HSR, and with the sizes of
trainscarriages in use, expect stupidly high ticket prices.I'm not expecting that at all. It always amuses me when people say things like this, as if they somehow think that a bunch of really smart engineers can be working specifically on a certain project and yet somehow 1) totally miss something that's so obvious that John Q. Layman notices it right away and 2) remain ignorant of it even when everyone's blogging about how big of a problem it will be.
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@masonwheeler said in Waze Wars:
It always amuses me when people say things like this, as if they somehow think that a bunch of really smart engineers can be working specifically on a certain project and yet somehow 1) totally miss something that's so obvious that John Q. Layman notices it right away and 2) remain ignorant of it even when everyone's blogging about how big of a problem it will be.
Yeah, what's up with those clueless engineers, anyways? Just there to take the suckers' money?
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Don't bother getting very excited about them. The people backing the development have no clue just how expensive it will be to build the tracks required, or how the economics of the carriage sizes and service frequencies will work. Expect real construction costs to be similar to HSR, and with the sizes of trainscarriages in use, expect stupidly high ticket prices.
Sounds like Dahir Insaat is doing the work.
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@masonwheeler said in Waze Wars:
The technology that has me excited is Hyperloops. Autonomous vehicles might make it more productive to get from point A to point B, but being able to put A and B 10x further apart will really change the way people live!
Hyperloops are cool and Imma let you finish, but autonomous vehicles make decentralised transport more efficient (and safer and convenient and so on) while hyperloops centralise it further. They're really very fast trains, which is awesome but I think the impact will be less.
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@another_sam said in Waze Wars:
Hyperloops are cool and Imma let you finish, but autonomous vehicles make decentralised transport more efficient (and safer and convenient and so on) while hyperloops centralise it further. They're really very fast trains, which is awesome but I think the impact will be less.
Centralization has always been a core feature of human nature, and I really don't see how autonomous cars will somehow push back against that. The thing about the hyperloop is that it takes the speed of an airplane and makes it far more convenient, allowing people to get around much further within reasonable amounts of time.
When the automobile was introduced, allowing people to get around quickly, it revolutionized society and completely changed people's behaviors, as immortalized by The Music Man:
Why it's the Model T Ford made the trouble, made the people wanna go, wanna get, wanna get, wanna get up and go
seven eight, nine, ten, twelve, fourteen, twenty-two, twenty-three miles to the county seat, yes sir, yes sir
Who's gonna patronize a little bitty two-by-four kinda store anymore?Last week I saw a topic on here talking about the horrendous traffic congestion in Washington, DC, leading in many cases to commute times measured in hours. This is caused by way too many cars on the road. Put a bunch of people in self-driving cars, and you'll still have way too many cars on the road, and no significant decrease in congestion until the vast majority of the legacy automobiles are out of the system. But allow a significant percentage of those people to live in Baltimore, Philadelphia or Richmond and commute via Hyperloop and you've completely changed the traffic equation!
Range changes everything.
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@masonwheeler said in Waze Wars:
commute via Hyperloop
But Hyperloop won't help much with commuting, as it isn't being designed to have lots of stops or long collections of carriages (which is why they're called “trains”). You don't need a totally new type of train, you need to stop configuring the current rail network to suck and to possibly build a bit more to deal with some of the worst bottlenecks. There's a lot of experience with making trains work very well for commuting in the rest of the world, and there's no reason that things have to continue being bad in the US.
Right now, Hyperloop is actually looking like it will be nothing more than a billionaire's toy.
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it isn't being designed to have lots of stops or long collections of carriages
That's a feature, not a bug. It means you can load and launch them much more quickly. Right now, to get a plane or a train between two points, you need a few hundred people who want to go between the same two points in order to make it economically feasible, which means that getting a ticket becomes a big, messy production of scheduling.
With a Hyperloop pod that only holds a few dozen people, there will be no need for buying a ticket for "Philadelphia -> DC, Monday 6/14 8:30 AM". You can simply buy a ticket for "Philadelphia -> DC", show up at any time, and be able to board and get underway almost immediately.
For longer trips, it becomes even more interesting. Let's say I want to go home and visit the family over Christmas. The current way of doing that is to buy round-trip plane tickets from Philadelphia to Seattle, (a very long flight, during which I'm stuck cooped up inside a cramped airplane body,) then rent a car for the duration, which can be very expensive.
With a Hyperloop network in place I could do something like this: Philadelphia -> Pittsburgh -> Indianapolis -> Kansas City -> Denver -> Salt Lake City -> Portland -> Seattle. Each leg would run at a comparable speed to air travel, and when I felt that I needed a break from being cooped up inside a cramped Hyperloop pod, I'd get out and stretch my legs for a while, maybe grab some food at a restaurant in or near the Hyperloop terminal, then board a new pod to continue on when I was ready. And I'd most likely be able to bring my car along, too, eliminating the cost of rentals!
I'd like to see a train accomplish any of that.
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@masonwheeler said in Waze Wars:
@another_sam said in Waze Wars:
Hyperloops are cool and Imma let you finish, but autonomous vehicles make decentralised transport more efficient (and safer and convenient and so on) while hyperloops centralise it further. They're really very fast trains, which is awesome but I think the impact will be less.
Centralization has always been a core feature of human nature, and I really don't see how autonomous cars will somehow push back against that. The thing about the hyperloop is that it takes the speed of an airplane and makes it far more convenient, allowing people to get around much further within reasonable amounts of time.
When the automobile was introduced, allowing people to get around quickly, it revolutionized society and completely changed people's behaviors, as immortalized by The Music Man:
Why it's the Model T Ford made the trouble, made the people wanna go, wanna get, wanna get, wanna get up and go
seven eight, nine, ten, twelve, fourteen, twenty-two, twenty-three miles to the county seat, yes sir, yes sir
Who's gonna patronize a little bitty two-by-four kinda store anymore?Last week I saw a topic on here talking about the horrendous traffic congestion in Washington, DC, leading in many cases to commute times measured in hours. This is caused by way too many cars on the road. Put a bunch of people in self-driving cars, and you'll still have way too many cars on the road, and no significant decrease in congestion until the vast majority of the legacy automobiles are out of the system. But allow a significant percentage of those people to live in Baltimore, Philadelphia or Richmond and commute via Hyperloop and you've completely changed the traffic equation!
Range changes everything.
The funny thing is that some crazy people already do that.
If you can tolerate a 3 hour drive in each direction, you can live like a king in PA or WV on a DC salary.
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There's a lot of experience with making trains work very well for commuting in the rest of the world, and there's no reason that things have to continue being bad in the US.
Mu. Our trains are excellent. Don't fuck up our freight rail system.
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@boomzilla said in Waze Wars:
There's a lot of experience with making trains work very well for commuting in the rest of the world, and there's no reason that things have to continue being bad in the US.
Mu. Our trains are excellent. Don't fuck up our freight rail system.
He's specifically talking about commuting (passenger rail) and you try to refute his point by talking about freight rail?
Mu right back at you.
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@masonwheeler said in Waze Wars:
@boomzilla said in Waze Wars:
There's a lot of experience with making trains work very well for commuting in the rest of the world, and there's no reason that things have to continue being bad in the US.
Mu. Our trains are excellent. Don't fuck up our freight rail system.
He's specifically talking about commuting (passenger rail) and you try to refute his point by talking about freight rail?
Mu right back at you.
No, you're wrong. I don't think you could reasonably make good freight and passenger rail coexist. Commuting rail only really works in super dense metro areas and so is a crappy solution for most of the US.
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You need something different for US than in EU because US is so much larger. And passenger and freight are just separate things - even in The Netherlands, which is only 300km across, freight and passenger rail are kept separate, with the largest freight routes (like Rotterdam-Ruhrgebiet) on dedicated lines, and other routes being time-separated with freight running at night.
I'd say the long-distance high-speed trains also run on their own tracks, and I believe they do in many key regions in Europe, but over here they've not yet found out you cannot have a high-speed train go from Amsterdam to anywhere and also stop in The Hague Central.
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@masonwheeler said in Waze Wars:
Centralization has always been a core feature of human nature
I disagree. Centralisation has been a consequence of the need for people to come together to work, shop, etc. As transport has increased the speed at which people can commute (mostly in the 20th century) and people can live further from work, suburbs have sprawled further and further.
@masonwheeler said in Waze Wars:
Put a bunch of people in self-driving cars, and you'll still have way too many cars on the road, and no significant decrease in congestion until the vast majority of the legacy automobiles are out of the system.
Autonomous vehicles can presumably be programmed to drive and route more efficiently, but that's not the point. @blakeyrat was talking about some kind of super-efficient transportation system where the only (major?) barrier was the cost of labour. I'm imagining autonomous buses on flexible demand-driven routes, which would eliminate many cars, but he hasn't given us any further details so I'm off on my own with my shoulder aliens.
@masonwheeler said in Waze Wars:
But allow a significant percentage of those people to live in Baltimore, Philadelphia or Richmond and commute via Hyperloop
How far away are those places? Why don't planes or fast trains work for those people to commute? How do you get them from the Hyperloop terminal to where they actually want to go?
@masonwheeler said in Waze Wars:
You can simply buy a ticket for "Philadelphia -> DC", show up at any time, and be able to board and get underway almost immediately.
And when everybody turns up to go to work at the same time?
@masonwheeler said in Waze Wars:
And I'd most likely be able to bring my car along, too, eliminating the cost of rentals!
I'd like to see a train accomplish any of that.Are you afflicted with the same "What's Google?" disease as @blakeyrat?
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@another_sam There is basically one place you can do that in the US the southern third or so (probably less) of th e US east coast. I looked into doing it once and it's not economically sensible.
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@another_sam said in Waze Wars:
Are you afflicted with the same "What's Google?" disease as @blakeyrat?
Well, that particular service will be discontinued by the end of 2017, by the way.
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@Rhywden I'm kind of surprised you can double-stack cars on Europe's tiny-ass loading gauge.
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@blakeyrat said in Waze Wars:
@Rhywden I'm kind of surprised you can double-stack cars on Europe's tiny-ass loading gauge.
German engineering. Bigger is not always better. Though that fact will probably be lost on a US-American.
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@blakeyrat said in Waze Wars:
@Rhywden I'm kind of surprised you can double-stack cars on Europe's tiny-ass loading gauge.
If you look closely, it's just cycles and really short cars on the bottom. So you can only double-stack for certain values of "car".
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@dcon Meanwhile in the US loading gauge:
Yes, those are 737s.
Here's a fun one:
That's 2-story commuter cars, minus their bogies, on top of flatbed cars.
... now that I think about it, wouldn't it save a lot of effort to just have a bunch of spare bogies at that shipping terminal? Like, they're dropping it on this flatbed car when they could just drop it directly on the bogies it needs anyway. Huh.
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@blakeyrat said in Waze Wars:
Yes, those are 737s.
You obviously have too many of those:
http://www.aerotelegraph.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/737-2.jpg
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@Rhywden Think about this: the two of those fuselages that didn't get cracked in half? They've both had wings attached are are flying daily right now.
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@blakeyrat said in Waze Wars:
@Rhywden Think about this: the two of those fuselages that didn't get cracked in half? They've both had wings attached are are flying daily right now.
I guess I better make sure to know which airline those are flying in.
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There is basically one place you can do that in the US the southern third or so (probably less) of th e US east coast. I looked into doing it once and it's not economically sensible.
You've lost me, what are we talking about here? Cars on trains? Hyperloops? Autonomous buses?
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@another_sam said in Waze Wars:
Cars on trains?
This. There's one route in the US: South Florida to a town in Virginia about an hour from DC. Passenger tickets might be as low as $150--your car will set you back another $200. And it's probably 6 hours longer than driving would be (not to mention you're limited to the timing of the one trip a day.)
I thought about doing it once but the extra time and cost made it not worth it to me, as I was continuing on up to New England.
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This. There's one route in the US: South Florida to a town in Virginia about an hour from DC
Ah. Well, yes of course cars on trains is going to be shit in the US because all passenger trains are shit in the US. I was responding to @masonwheeler who wanted to see a train do it at all.
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@boomzilla said in Waze Wars:
I don't think you could reasonably make good freight and passenger rail coexist.
Well, you don't want to run them on exactly the same tracks because they've got different acceleration and braking (and different stopping patterns), but running them in parallel can work fine. Or you can take them different routes if that makes more sense.
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@blakeyrat said in Waze Wars:
Europe's tiny-ass loading gauge.
It's the UK that has the tiny-ass loading gauge. Most of the rest of Europe is far more sensible.
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@another_sam said in Waze Wars:
all passenger trains are shit in the US
Right, because we optimized our tracks for cargo, so as to keep trucks off the road, but we've been over this before.
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@another_sam said in Waze Wars:
Ah. Well, yes of course cars on trains is going to be shit in the US because all passenger trains are shit in the US.
That's because we invented this thing called the "airplane" which, it turns out, is a much quicker way to get from city to city.
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@blakeyrat said in Waze Wars:
That's because we invented this thing called the "airplane"
Don't be so sure about that
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@TimeBandit Bullshit. Pearse may have successfully flown first, but he had no photographs to prove it and even his OWN LOCAL NEWSPAPER didn't bother reporting on it until years after the Wright's flight.
That article is a WTF topic on its own. Look at claim 2:
Microsoft did not create the computer desktop and GUI
Alleged Inventor: MicrosoftUh. No.
Henry Ford did not invent the first automobile
Alleged Inventor: Henry FordUh. No.
Is this an article written for retards?
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@blakeyrat said in Waze Wars:
@TimeBandit Bullshit. Pearse may have successfully flown first, but he had no photographs to prove it and even his OWN LOCAL NEWSPAPER didn't bother reporting on it until years after the Wright's flight.
So nothing was invented before the photography was invented ?
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@TimeBandit said in Waze Wars:
So nothing was invented before the photography was invented ?
Photography was over 50 years old by 1902.
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@blakeyrat said in Waze Wars:
@TimeBandit said in Waze Wars:
So nothing was invented before the photography was invented ?
Photography was over 50 years old by 1902.
That's not the question. Learn how to read.
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@TimeBandit said in Waze Wars:
@blakeyrat said in Waze Wars:
That's because we invented this thing called the "airplane"
Don't be so sure about that
As @blakeyrat also mentions, several of those are like 'lol people believe that'? Ford's fame wasn't building the first car, it was mass-producing them. X-Rays are called 'Röntgen straling' in Dutch as in German. And I'm pretty sure several of those inventions listed as 'not by Edison' were not invented, but made suitable for mass use by him.
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@TimeBandit said in Waze Wars:
@blakeyrat said in Waze Wars:
@TimeBandit Bullshit. Pearse may have successfully flown first, but he had no photographs to prove it and even his OWN LOCAL NEWSPAPER didn't bother reporting on it until years after the Wright's flight.
So nothing was invented before the photography was invented ?
Pics or it didn't happen.
The Wright Brothers Didn't Invent The Airplane...And 9 Other Inventors Who've Been Wrongly Credited
