Lauren WeinsteinL.A. residents are finding creative (and simple) ways to disable disruptive Waymo robotaxis (as I predicted long ago would come to pass with autonomous vehicles).
https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/25/us/santa-monica-waymo-battles
mike805@lauren So why can't these charging lots be somewhere outside the city? Or at the top of a mall's parking structure, which is presumably empty at night? Electric robot taxis are a potentially green alternative to LA's parking nightmare, but they need to not be a nuisance or people are going to mess with them.
@mike805 They are no better a solution than human-driven taxis, which would at least provide work for the drivers and be far better suited to deal with exceptional situations. And not further enrich fascist Big Tech.
@lauren Human-driven taxis are never going to replace private cars, unless you bring in a servile class to drive them.
Robot taxis could eventually be the primary mode of transport in cities. You could then have smaller parking lots, and charge people to park.
Robot taxis could either seat four with hard partitions between them so people would feel safe sharing, or they could be half-wide and share the lanes.
They can form convoys when they are all going to the same area, reducing traffic.
Wulfy#Robotaxi is not a solution to a city transit problem.
It's a solution to a #crapitalism problem.
*ANY* portion of profits diminished by labor is unacceptable to capitalists.
@n_dimension @lauren So what is a solution to a city transit problem? Even cities with conventional mass transit have a lot of traffic. Robotaxis solve the end to end problem without having 90% of the cars idle and hogging space at any given time.
Yes you will still want a metro to take people from residential areas to work and back. Robotaxis are a better solution than private cars for everything else.
Robot buses would be useful for taking people to concerts and the like.
What is the solution to a city transit problem?
Plentiful and affordable city public transportation.
I have lived in 4 large European cities and many smaller cities.
The best (Vienna, Stockholm) are such that unless you have a special need (heavy delivery business, travel out of town), public transport is not just adequate. It's SUPERIOR to owning a car.
I lived in Vienna for 6 months and in that time I have never once regretted not having a car, even travelling to the outer suburbs.
An old friend of mine lives in a Dutch small city where there are no cars. It's all bikes. You can still own a car, but it's parked at the outer rim.
Remember that the US reliance on cars is 👉ARTIFICIAL👈
It's a result of a concentrated effort by the oil industry to actively DESTROY Municipal transport. They bought many trams, light rail and rail systems only to shut them down.
Damper 🇨🇦@n_dimension @mike805 Robocars are a "solution" in search of a problem. They are a quintessential example of Big Tech groupthink -- and believe me, I've been in meetings where I've seen first hand how that works! ANY problem that you can name related to taxis in a city can be solved with human drivers who have VASTLY more flexibility in unusual situations, rather than subject human passengers to face those situations alone in the back seat with no human driver to assist them or get them out situations that a remote center controller can't handle. And this is just the beginning. Wait until people REALLY get angry, and start doing things like jamming the mobile frequencies these vehicles use for contact with central, leaving passengers stranded. The ways that robotaxis can be rendered useless are almost unlimited. And the more that Big Tech pushes this stuff, the more likely you are to see more of those methods deployed by angry residents of these cities.
@lauren I have a whole rant about autonomous cars. I build autonomous helicopters for the DoD. I know exactly how we plan the development and testing, to ensure we are never a danger to anyone. None of that was done for driverless cars, and it *will* go bad because of that.
And, even theoretically, they can't work the way people want them to. To make them safe and effective, you would end up re-inventing public transportation. So why not just do that instead?
@agreeable_landfall Exactly. What these firms are doing with robocars is the polar opposite of MIL-SPEC.