<story><title>We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets</title><url>https://twitter.com/Cruise/status/1717707807460393022</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>melling</author><text>“What incredible inconvenience are we trying to solve?”&lt;p&gt;40,000 deaths in the United States every year. 
Hundreds of thousands of costly accidents&lt;p&gt;We can’t get great transportation even in the New York City area. We have 0 miles of high-speed rail, while China built 25,000&lt;p&gt;it’s great that you want to start building some mass transit, but it’ll take a century if we start now.&lt;p&gt;Let’s start by having trains take you to the airport directly…&lt;p&gt;In the meantime, getting self driving cars that are all electric will be a big win. Perhaps car ownership will drop.</text></item><item><author>polalavik</author><text>Out of all the tech problems to solve, driverless cars or driverless taxis has always baffled me. It’s a very complex thing to solve with a zillion edge cases. And for what net gain? What incredible inconvenience are we trying to solve? Lack of good public transit? Let’s solve that instead.&lt;p&gt;Millions of cars driverless or not are not a great solution to anything.</text></item><item><author>xnx</author><text>This is a good move on Cruise&amp;#x27;s part. Cruise is still nowhere near the maturity level that Waymo was at when Waymo first started driving on public roads.&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, we definitely need a real competitor to Waymo. It doesn&amp;#x27;t seem likely, but hopefully some combination of Cruise, Apple(?), Tesla, or another player will be able to have a feasible alternative to Waymo&amp;#x27;s Driver.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>piffey</author><text>There are over 30 US cities with trains to the airport. Another half dozen on the way. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;List_of_airport_rail_link_systems&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;List_of_airport_rail_link_syst...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;US also has almost 350 miles of high speed rail, not 0. The Northeast is where it’s all concentrated with Acela being the fastest.&lt;p&gt;If you live in a major city in the States it’s often way easier and faster to take rail. In Seattle for instance you can beat a driver to the airport every time during traffic. Hell even the LAX station in Los Angeles of all places will be available end of 2024 and that’s the most notorious car centric city in this country. The subway in LA keeps seeing ridership growth. I don’t even rent a car when I visit anymore. Everywhere I want to go is serviced.&lt;p&gt;Lastly NYC is one of the most serviced by transit areas in the world? Are you living in an alternate universe?&lt;p&gt;Mass transit is the solution. It’s vastly cheaper to build, moves more people, and far safer. I’ve got a highway interchange by my house that’s taken a decade to finish while they’ve ran rail and built four stations in that time. That’s a perfectly fine pace given our slow building system with environmental review and the like.</text></comment>
<story><title>We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets</title><url>https://twitter.com/Cruise/status/1717707807460393022</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>melling</author><text>“What incredible inconvenience are we trying to solve?”&lt;p&gt;40,000 deaths in the United States every year. 
Hundreds of thousands of costly accidents&lt;p&gt;We can’t get great transportation even in the New York City area. We have 0 miles of high-speed rail, while China built 25,000&lt;p&gt;it’s great that you want to start building some mass transit, but it’ll take a century if we start now.&lt;p&gt;Let’s start by having trains take you to the airport directly…&lt;p&gt;In the meantime, getting self driving cars that are all electric will be a big win. Perhaps car ownership will drop.</text></item><item><author>polalavik</author><text>Out of all the tech problems to solve, driverless cars or driverless taxis has always baffled me. It’s a very complex thing to solve with a zillion edge cases. And for what net gain? What incredible inconvenience are we trying to solve? Lack of good public transit? Let’s solve that instead.&lt;p&gt;Millions of cars driverless or not are not a great solution to anything.</text></item><item><author>xnx</author><text>This is a good move on Cruise&amp;#x27;s part. Cruise is still nowhere near the maturity level that Waymo was at when Waymo first started driving on public roads.&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, we definitely need a real competitor to Waymo. It doesn&amp;#x27;t seem likely, but hopefully some combination of Cruise, Apple(?), Tesla, or another player will be able to have a feasible alternative to Waymo&amp;#x27;s Driver.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lmm</author><text>&amp;gt; Let’s start by having trains take you to the airport directly…&lt;p&gt;I thought the US had legalised those now, so they&amp;#x27;ll happen as new systems come online.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; In the meantime, getting self driving cars that are all electric will be a big win.&lt;p&gt;Why? They&amp;#x27;re still going to take up as much road space (maybe even more, since they&amp;#x27;ll be moving around empty half the time). They&amp;#x27;ll still be spewing particulate pollution around our city centres - maybe more since they&amp;#x27;ll be heavier. They&amp;#x27;ll be consuming vast amounts of rare earths that could deliver much more benefit if used for electric bikes.&lt;p&gt;Self-driving electric cars will deliver at best a marginal safety improvement and a marginal reduction in whole-life emissions. There are much better ways to improve cities, transport, and lives: road-use pricing, bicycle priority at junctions, better parking laws, building more transit...</text></comment>