Capitalizing Chinese is correct, so it saved Zoidberg from Zoidberg!
As I was leaving the hockey game last night, I came up with the nightmare scenario: 10,000 fans emptying out onto the street, all trying to hail their car. Which one is mine? Where do I go?
This is a problem that parking garages solve. Do you solve this by continuing to keep the parking lots/garages at all the sporting venues and telling the person to come to the spot? Who pays for parking?
Well indeed. The problem isn’t the responsible companies, it’s the irresponsible ones.
Just tell people they shouldn’t have had kids. :)
Or 100,000 at a college football game or 55,000 at a MLB baseball game.
All these Internet start-ups are all trying to replicate what your mom used to do for you.
Naw man, it capitalized future, I just edited it.
Also, in terms of the timeframe:
We have electric cars now. It’s a solved problem. They’re not perfect, but they work, and are vastly more reliable than automated cars are now. And we also have an unbelievably pressing global emissions emergency, which electric cars could go a long way to addressing (at least in conjunction with renewable/nuclear power). And yet even those countries that are talking about phasing out combustion engine cars are only talking about stopping new sales in 2030 or 2040. It will take another decade for a meaningful number of those cars to come off the road.
Why would the transition to automated cars be quicker, when there are none available now and the people making them haven’t even begun to solve the hard problems?
Ooo, available in my area. I could just imagine the conversation with my wife if I wanted to try it out with our 6 year old. Cracking up just thinking about it. She won’t even let us use a non blood related family member to babysit. That doesn’t mean others wouldn’t use it. There are people on the opposite end of the spectrum I am sure.
Smart phone integration and a line with an attendant to make things speed along. They would just be stuffing people in the cars, wouldn’t matter which one you got in, you can direct it after you sat in it. Most would have the location queued on their phone ready to share, the rest could type it in while you navigate away from the cluster fuck that are large events. Which would no longer be such a cluster fuck if you removed the human driver element.
I would predict other companies optimizing for the crowds as well, enticing people to walk X distance away from the snarl to hop in a car waiting for them, since presumably the logjam would be the roads. Who knows what other creative solutions will be brought to bear. This will become a software problem.
Because while I want an electric car, I tend to buy a car and drive it into the ground. I have no real reason to get a Tesla other than consumer lust and I have solar panels. A fully automated car however? While I might not buy the first one off the lot I wouldn’t be far behind.
I have a couple friends who have made the move to electric cars. One guy has a Fiat. It can’t climb the hill to his cabin and hold a charge (55 miles, 5k climb) and so he needs another vehicle to do that. Another guy bought a Chevy Volt and is very pleased he can make it 150 miles to his coastal place. He admits there is no way that car could ever take him to LA.
Huh? Isn’t that a hybrid and has a gas tank?
This is legitimately a great idea for a story thread on the show.
I would change it a tiny bit to fit their usual dynamic though by having Mitch call Lyft and have the van come, and the guy is super nice and friendly and the puppy is awesome and drive away, and then when he tells Cam about the guy, Cam reads it completely wrong and starts freaking out, which convinces Mitch to freak out too.
And either way it’s done, another car shows up right after the first one drives away. The new car announces that they are the Lyft driver (but it turns out the company had a glitch and two drivers were dispatched for some reason).
Unless I misunderstood him, and I don’t think I did, it is full electric. He even talked about some device you use in the car instead of braking to help extend the range of the batteries.
Confusingly, there’s a Bolt (fully-electric) and a Volt (range-extender gas engine plug-in hybrid). I think I got those the right way around.
Maybe he had the Bolt then. He did like that after trading in his previous car, getting tax rebates and a state of Calif and local Air Board rebate he paid only $12k for it.
Again, I’m not saying that it WOULD change – I’m just warning against the (very common) tendency for people to believe that the way things are done today is the only way or the best way. It’s not – contractors behave the way they do because the current technology that best fits their work habits (pickup trucks) are cheap and reliable. If something better/cheaper/more reliable came about, they’d change their ways of doing stuff.
And for the record, I spent many summers working on construction sites.
Since the ending time of the game would be fairly easy to predict, the auto-cars would be swarming the area starting some time before the end of the game and continuing for some time afterwards. The algorithms would know about how many people are present in the stands so there would be roughly enough cars showing up.
You would walk up to the first auto-car in the queue, sit down, look into the camera, and say “home, please”.
The departure area outside the stadium might have different colored lots so that people who are heading east all go to one colored loading zone to facilitate ride-sharing.
The entire process of finding an auto-car and heading out would probably take a fraction of the time it would take you to walk to your parked car and fight your way out of the traffic.
Yes, and the mechanism of moving 10,000 people would be elaborately choreographed, like an animatronic ballet, to minimize traffic and travel time. That’s actually a great example of how automated cars could dramatically improve on the clusterfuckage we experience today.
How would sports venues, teams and venue owners, feel about losing all that parking revenue?
I don’t know that anyone would ask their permission.
Is is common for the teams to own those lots? Here they’re all owned by the city or private vendors. Obviously for the city there’s no shortage of ways they can get their tax revenue. I couldn’t care less about the guy who happened to own land near the new stadium that’s now charging $50+ a car for parking.
Teams and cities/counties fight over the parking rights. It is a huge chunk of money. I would imagine in many cities the parking is limited, but very expensive. In other cities there are huge lots seemingly going forever.
Someone would end up losing, but I doubt it would in the end change things. It might effect the costs of building/operating stadiums though.