Last night I dreamed that the majority of western commuters were riding carbon fiber hybridized e-bicycles. Most were folding e-bicycles leaving train stations to go to their places of business and schools. I only saw a handful of cars and trucks. They were primarily of commercial designation.

Can you see this happening in the not too distant future?

No I don't see people giving up their cars for a bicycle anytime soon.. Bicycle commuters are always gona be in a minority. We are living in the age of machines and computers...No physical effort required on the human part to get from point A to point B. I do believe that flying cars are part of the future.

Hey there Wolfchild,

I can absolutely imagine more individual air travel for the future!

- Slim

Neah, not gonna happen. Alternatives are just too easy and tempting and luring. Imagine an 11 degree with some windchill. A car with a remote start. Start it around 10 min. before your commute. Walk into a nice toasty warm car, hit the pedal, and voila at work !

Alternative - Put on gears and layers for about 30 min. And then start commute. Probably at half point, shed a layer or so ... Arrive at work. Spend another 30 min. getting the layers off. Repeat in the evening :-P

Keep dreaming. The majority of Americans will only move under their own power as a last resort.

Yeah sorry, but Wall-E is more likely in our future.

If anything, it will look more like China does today.

Automated cars are the future. Collision rates will plummet, commuters freed to do whatever in their commutes will give them eternal happiness, big oil and car companies will be able to sell millions of their next 'big thing' smart cars. Insurance biases against cars w/o automated systems will be unfavorable enough that many people will be forced to buy a new car.

If said automated devices can better detect bikes than their human counterparts then we'll be in business. Who cares if 99% of society is still in cars if it cuts down on the number of angry motorists?

Would love to see an automated car try to navigate through a snowstorm. Frankly I think we're a long ways off. You can signal a driver to give you some room if you're nearing a some debris in the road, or if want to make a left turn. Frankly pedestrians and yes some cyclists can behave in pretty unpredictable ways that I don't know how well an automated vehicle would react to.

Maybe more, but not in any kind of serious numbers. There's been talk of flying cars for decades. There are major, major problems even if the technology is there.

What would the rules be?
Can you just fly any route?
What about bad weather?
Do you really want a stream of cars flying over your house day and night?
Mechanical problems? It's one thing to have your car stall on the freeway, quite another in mid-air.
Fuels Costs. Air travel takes tremendous amounts of fuel, - especially for take offs.

We forget infrastructure, and I'm kinda surprised sometimes at the simple logic. Slim, living in the West, you should see this clearly - things are too far apart out here to think that folks will give up cars. Rail service, being almost nonexistent, would be horribly costly to replace cars with. The city of Portland is a great example: The MAX lines are considered by the builders to be such a wonder, but ridership doesn't even begin to put a dent in the cost, and the cost of the system is almost totally funded by the residents of the city, not the riders. Shy of outlawing cars (not inconceivable in Portland), ridership exceeding more than a few percent of the available seats on the Max is a pipe dream.

Europe is a perfect example of the ideal mass transit environment - numerous villages/towns/cities liked by rail lines, with population density such that cycling/streetcar/taxi works well in the towns. Try connecting Medford, Eugene, Salem, and Portland in a manner that would result in riders - ie, get the train off the freight lines and onto dedicated passenger rails - and count the billions of dollars it would take and the years to build. In my lifetime, it simply isn't going to happen. It is far more efficient to improve the automobile's efficiency in fuel usage than to spend the billions on the infrastructure when we can't even fix potholes.

My commute pipe dream would be bike lanes without doors, drivers trained to look for cyclists, and storm drains that won't eat my front wheel. And I'd take a street sweeper every once in a while.

And no flying cars. You think drivers are bad when they're attached to the ground?

Well, before cars were common people often got from city to city and town to town on rail.

Who funds the costs of building and maintaining the local streets? Drivers? That's a myth.

In Minnesota at least, state and federal gas taxes along with other "user fees" only pays for about 25% of the cost of building and maintaining roads in major cities and older suburbs. Most of the state gas tax goes to highways which benefits more rural users, though they still have trouble funding maintenance of their local streets and feeder roads.

So the idea that streets are "user funded" and pay for themselves is a myth. In many places roads are deteriorating quicker than than they can be repaired even with the subsidies.

This doesn't even take into consideration "externalities" - pollution that adds a financial burden to our societies. And how much is it costing us to have that air craft carrier group patrolling in the Persian Gulf in order to keep the oil flowing?

So yes, public transportation is heavily subsidized. So is auto transportation. We just don't like to think of it that way.

Google's already got a fleet of automated cars that have been racking up tens of thousands of miles. Not an expert on the field but they're using a combination of radars and image processing, and it's likely that those tech combined give you a more accurate vision of what's in front of you than what a person would see, even in something like a snowstorm. Articles from a year ago point out manned drivers had to take over in oddball situations like a bike running a red light, but these are safety situations that you can program for and avoid (in the case of a biker avoiding debris you could recognize the hand signal through visual sensors, or the movement of cyclist heading into traffic lane, or both). And the more automated cars there are in the system, the less these safety stop situations will occur anyway, as they'll be in constant check with each other.

May seem like a pipe dream now, but costs of auto accidents are staggering enough that it'll happen, and probably sooner than you'd think.

Wait till gas hits 6-8 $ per gallon.

As a software developer I would find it a nightmare to program something that could reliably interpret hand signals even if we all used the same ones. Navigating through a snow-storm is not just a matter of being able to see, it's a matter of adjusting the way you drive to the road conditions.

If a driver has to "take over" during oddball situations that means that this driver has to be paying attention the whole time. If that's the case, it doesn't matter how many 10s of thousands of miles the Google cars racked up, you still need the driver.

Think about it this way. Toyota has run into all sorts of trouble and lawsuits because of a software glitch connected to their accelerators. It's not enough for it to work reliably 98% of the time. If Toyota can't get something as simple as an accelerator to always work correctly, I'm dubious about a manufacturer's ability to completely automate a vehicle.

Imagine that a software upgrade that introduces a bug. Instead of a driver making a mistake and causing an accident as an isolated event, now you've got the potential for thousands of cars to do the wrong thing under a certain set of conditions. The other thing to consider is maintenance. These Google cars are brand new. What happens to the sensors as they age?

Further imagine a terrorist bent on wreaking havoc. Presumably these cars communicate with each other and traffic control systems. What if these are hacked into? Didn't Iran bring down a drone by messing with its communications?

Sometimes more technology is not the answer.

Ooh, I didn't even think about hackers. Was thinking more about reliability. One way to do it is to make roads for automated cars only and have them all communicate with each other and a central router. Peds and cyclists would need a separate routing system. Even then, hackers become a problem.

my wife has a car that is supposed to warn you if you stray from your lane and actually steers you back. Took a trip recently, and it isn't working after only two years. I have done some work in autonomous robotics. I think it shows a lot more promise when the people you are running over with your automated vehicle are playing for the other team. Unfortunately, there are any number of companies that seem to be working on recreating the boardroom scene in "Robocop" "I'm sure it was only a glitch"

I was thinking that maybe "automated vehicle lanes" could replace diamond lanes on freeways. Basically you'd pull into some sort of staging area where your car would communicate with the traffic control system. It would have to pass a series of self tests and maybe have a recent systems certification on file. You'd enter your destination and the car would get you as close as it could via the automated lanes. It pulls off into another staging area. From there you'd take over, - assuming you're awake.

That way there's no worry about pedestrians, pets, or cyclists or whatever unexpectedly entering the roadway. There's no intersections to deal with. The only other vehicles in those lanes are also automated.

Another potentially useful place for automated vehicles is a busy parking ramp. Imagine how much quicker it would be to get out of a ramp after a concert or some other event if the cars were all automated. So I do think there's use for the technology but I think my commuting days will long be over before fully automated personal vehicles are the norm.

Good idea, there. Though sometimes, all it'd take is people not being a-holes. My one concern about just an automated lane is what happens when deer run across it.

I don't think automated vehicles will ever happen. People use cars to express their freedom and independence and, some, creativity. People also like speed and power. I don't think consumers will allow an automated system like that to fly.

I wouldn't be so sure. While there are some of us who actually enjoy driving (especially my old VWs ), I think most people out there would love it if their cars did the piloting while they sat like a fare in a taxi. At the risk of helping get this thread moved to A&S, I think we will someday reach a point where the statistics compel our lawmakers to mandate computerized driving, and the "motorists" among us will be mocked as "old-fashioned" during the transition. To say nothing of those who want to take their chances with passengers on board!

Sorry about that rant.

- Scott

dreamt about an old girlfriend last night. it seemed quite real but alas it was just a dream. funny thing about dreams

Yeah...Funny thing, indeed!

...And without them, few inventions would be realized!

Pleasant Dreams...

- Slim

Not in the USA. People would rather use an elevator to up one level instead of walking. Cars are ingrained into the American psyche. People at my office, knowing I ride to work, will tell me stories about seeing a "crazy" guy riding their bike on so-and-so a route and slowing down their drive into work, and how it's so dangerous.

The day of fossil fuels will most inevitably come to an end. Our collective world carbon footprint has to get much smaller regardless as to what psyche we currently possess. Our own future generations demand that we put a stop to this insanity ASAP. The sooner, the better. The better for future generations and the better for the health of our present-day world population.

Right now, it may seem cool and trendy to drive everywhere. Our cars serve as economy stimulants and personal status symbols, as well. Convenience is reduced when we are forced to eliminate and curtail our use of petroleum products. We must begin to employ greater mass transit methods of transportation. We must allow the bicycle to play a much greater role in world transportation.

Just like we, as a society, decided to accept rural and suburban-living, we can adapt to a more urban lifestyle, as well. Especially, when the adaptation is crucial to the quality of life for future generations. It would appear that in this instance, intelligence, insight, and wisdom, should automatically trump convenience, cool, trendy, lazy, and ignorance.

- Slim