2013-03-12 Tue

Clear Thinking

I listen to the Quirks And Quarks podcasts, amongst others, but quirksaio_20130105_67357 of 5th January 2013 has an item that caught my ear.

"Self-Driving Cars" is the catchy sub-title. The initial listener query includes (3m 33s All times are relative to the start of my downloaded version of this podcast) " ... in the near future we won't actually have to drive our vehicles; we will simply enter our desired coordinates and the vehicle will skim along a track with some sort of smooth surface to our destination."

Well, that sounds to me very much like a subway train, streetcar or bus in a major city. In other words, public transit. Or at the very least, a taxi-cab.

There follows much discussion about technology, including sensors embedded in the road surface, optical technology on the "cars", and faster response time to so-called accidents about to happen. Autopilots get a good mention, but the focus is on making the vehicles autonomous.

(5m 23s) "Vehicles that can adapt the speed at which they are doing cruise control", "vehicles that can keep themselves within lanes on the highways" and much more.

Seems to me we already have that in the current long-distance coaches (of which Greyhound is an example. It is true that I am defining "vehicle" as "coach plus trained and experienced and dedicated professional driver", but from my point of view, the coach is autonomous in the sense that I board it and don't have to make any driving decisions.

(6m 10s) "It can start to make all the driving decisions that we make regularly, by itself". Sounds like a coach, taxi-cab or bus driver to me.

There's more, but on re-playing the podcast this morning I could not find an idea that was not already implemented in our current life.

Want to work while you commute? Lots of folks do that on a regular basis around Toronto on the VIA rains, GO trains, subway trains, LRTs, streetcars, buses and taxis that pour into, and out of Toronto every day (not just weekdays). Some folks even use the commute time to listen to podcasts or to read a book.

What about when the public transit system doesn't go exactly where you want? Then you call a taxi-cab.

What about small-town Ontario? Well, commute times in and around Orangeville (London, Kitchener, Cambridge, Guelph etc) are hardly a major problem, and traffic is slow and light enough for sane humans to manage without a collision, as thousands of us prove every day.

There is only a need for greater saturation of public transit on, say, inter-city routes.

If you live in a city such as Orangeville (London, Kitchener, Cambridge, Guelph etc) and regularly get stuck on Highway 401 between home and Toronto, consider the impact on your daily life if an every-15-minute shuttle ran between the large parking lot near your home and the fleet of golf carts in downtown Toronto.

We already have rent-by-the-minute bicycles in the downtown core. Why not golf carts?

We already have GO buses that run between cities; they just aren't frequent or regular enough.

We have GPS devices that track our movement to within about 10 metres, I think, so why not GPS transponders on cars and a fee for trips that duplicate a public transit trip? You can still drive from Barrie to Toronto, but if you pass within 300 metres of a transit-lot at either end of your journey, you get billed. And thus you help pay for better public transit.

Ultimately you'll be weaned off your selfish car habit to the better alternative, and free-of-collision responsible way to do things.

And yes, I'm aware that collisions still occur with professional drivers. I leave it to you to locate the statistics, if any, that show that pre-occupied amateur drivers are better than dedicated professional drivers.

SUFE

It's a hobby, a pastime, some say it's an obsession. I don't resist hauling apparently well-working appliances out of the recycle room and tarting them up, or at the very least finding out why they fail.

This is the inside of a water-pic (toothbrush) handset AFTER I'd run all three parts under the tap, and begun to toothbrush-scrub out the nozzle part.

I imagine that people who use a device this dirty are unaware of the build up of grunge inside their devices, but health-consciously and meticulously douse their hands in alcohol-gel on entering and exiting the local hospital.