Driverless cars in Nevada and can we get beyond our greed?

What is it 'bout Scandanavia, eh!

Welcome to Ikea-land: Furniture giant begins urban planning project

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/welcome-to-ikea-land-furnit...

There are feelings you get when you enter an Ikea store. The vertiginous experience of getting lost in their craftily designed labyrinth. The surprise of wandering into something you hadn’t intended to buy. The discomfiting almost-warmth of a fake apartment. The faintly reassuring sense that your children and your car are in someone else’s hands. Then the odd realization that you’re really inside a high-security structure on the distant edge of town.

Would you like to feel that way all the time? The people who run the Swedish home-furnishings behemoth are launching a bold push into the business of designing, building and operating entire urban neighbourhoods. Where once they placed a couch in a living room, the Swedes now want to place you and 6,000 neighbours into a neglected corner of your city, design an entire urban world around you, and Ikea-ize your lives. Their bold, high-concept notion of an urban ’hood could be an important solution to the housing-supply shortages that plague many large cities – but it could take some getting used to.

“We are in keeping with the Ikea philosophy: We don’t want to produce for the rich or the super-rich; we want to produce for the families, for the people,” says Harald Müller, the head of LandProp, the property-development branch of Inter IKEA, the company that invests the profits from the furnishing giant.

“Our approach must be to get the right housing and office prices while delivering very good quality at the same time, he added. “We want to be smart enough in our design that we can offer the product for a reasonable price.”

I recently made the long drive into the vanguard of Ikea’s city-building ambition, in a triangle of post-industrial wasteland surrounded by goods-shipping canals and highway ramps in the far reaches of East London, not far from the 2012 Olympics grounds. Here is the site of Ikea’s effort to bring a very Scandinavian model of urban design and managed living into the English-speaking world.

Amid this 11-hectare expanse of ancient rusting machinery, waste piles and grinding construction equipment is a converted brick sugar warehouse where a team of Swedes and Brits are poring over blueprints and renderings. LandProp Services bought the land in 2009. Their vision is to turn this grey netherworld, once planning approval is done, into a tightly packed neighbourhood they’ll call Strand East.

It will look, once complete, like a reproduction of the sort of historic, chic downtown neighbourhoods you find in the far more central parts of London or Paris, not in this distant expanse of former dockyards and bloodless public-housing project. At its core are straight, car-free streets lined with simple townhouses and ground-floor-access flats in five-storey rows. In the alleyways behind – an imitation of the classic London backstreet, the mews – will be little two- and three-storey homes, all with direct access to the street.

Doug wrote:

Driverless trucks and buses are probably coming first. The same problem to solve but a bigger vehicle with more customers to carry the cost of it.

How much extra would you pay for a self-driving car?

When self-driving cars are consistently reliable, I'd definitely pay an extra $3,000 for one.

I estimate that I drive about 425 hours per year.  Multiply that by, say six years and that's a little more than paying one dollar for an hour of being driven (time I could otherwise use reading -- or, for longer trips, taking a nap!).

Fidel wrote:

I can see it all now. Yep, there we were driving through Kicking Horse Pass with the roads all iced-up, and this driverless 18 wheeler plows right into us. We weren't even paying attention because we was playin' a word game to pass the time. I spy with my little eye ...

BLOOD ON THE ASPHALT!!

Ha!  I used to camp with my folks at the Kicking Horse campground as a kid!  Love that part of the country. 

I don't think it will be long before a self-driving car will drive [i]better[/i] than any human driver, regardless of road conditions. 

Well done, Maysie - another great idea thrown under the train.

Sven wrote:

I like the autonomy of my own vehicle:  I can go [i]wherever[/i] I want [i]whenever[/i] I want. 

That's the kind of selfishness that the oil and gas fascists want to promote.

You really don't get it, do you?

Actually, it's us who don't get it, while the rest of the world already has it: The Toronto Tragedy

Quote:

Grescoe makes the argument that "every time you choose to drive you are, in a tiny way, opting out of, and diminishing, the public realm." When asked if he views transit as a way to then engage with the public realm, he agrees. "Some people will look at me askance when I say that because you have images of Toyko commuters jammed together avoiding each others eyes," but riding transit is a "reminder of the fact that we're all in this thing together and this thing is the city."

"We all slam our door on the world by getting in the car, by buying the ad line that this is bringing us freedom, by listening to Bruce Springsteen, falling in love with Jack Kerouac. Pining for escape. We're getting sucked in. It's a marketed legend now, the legend of freedom. For me, what you actually get is being stuck in gridlock on some freeway in an irrational transportation system."

Sven wrote:

I like the autonomy of my own vehicle:  I can go [i]wherever[/i] I want [i]whenever[/i] I want. 

Boom Boom wrote:

That's the kind of selfishness that the oil and gas fascists want to promote.

Sven wrote:

If wanting autonomy is selfish, then I'm selfish. 

How do we justify a personal autonomy that necessitates taking away the autonomy of others?

Sven wrote:

I rode busses for many, many years (I didn't get my first car until well after college). Taking the bus blows. 

I would also venture to guess that most people who take the bus for non-commuting would swap bussing it for a car in a heartbeat if they could afford a car (the GHG issue notwithstanding). In other words, if they could get a car, those people would be "selfish" too. 

I think what's silly is that guy down the street from me who gets into his Dodge Ram and then and drives his ample self a mile and half just to grab a coffee at Timmy's. I think that's totally insane. He needs the physical exercise a lot more than he needs to show off his newly washed and waxed truck to customers at Tim's. I mean really! I mean, it's not even a truck anymore. It's a computer with wheels.

Experts predict robots revolution  Will robots be as commonplace in homes as prefab furniture?

And I like riding the bus. Driving just my bad self all over in a car is somewhat anti-social, Sven. There will be an old person or someone who might need your assistance climbing on or off the bus. Or someone may just need your encouraging word. Come on!

*Thumbs up*

Hey we could start a bicycle gang, watson.

I would heartily suggest babblers ignore Sven's adorable baiting and get on with the actual discussion.

John Dulchinos says robots are not the enemy. It's low cost labour that's the enemy.

<a href="http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/john-dulchinos-adept-do-robots-take-peoples-jobs">John Dulchinos</a> wrote:

If you want to look at where jobs are going, it's not robots taking people's jobs; it's entire companies and industries moving overseas. Robots elicit an emotional response from people because they are personified as people, but really what robots do is they enhance productivity and they free people up to do other tasks. In a global economy where cost rules, the only way for Western countries to be able to compete effectively against low-cost labor markets is through productivity gains, and robots are one way to achieve that.

I suppose, though, that low cost labour might think robots are their enemy. But we are not the enemy of low cost labour and vice versa. Not really. The enemies of labour are the usual enemies. And I think we should cut robots a break. Robots may need our help to organize themselves in the future. We should ally ourselves with robots against the usual enemies of labour.

If it is so important to keep millions of paid drivers on the road, rather than turning over that relatively mundane task to technology, then maybe we should cut the size of busses and trucks in half, increase the number of vehicles on the road by 100% (to maintain current aggregate carrying capacity), and...voila!!...we instantly double the number of jobs for drivers!!!

That kind of thinking was illustrated by George Will who said: 

Milton Friedman was an Asian country where the government was extremely eager to show off a public works project of which it was inordinately and excessively fond. It was digging a canal. They took Milton out to see this, and he was astonished because there were hordes of workers but no heavy equipment. He remarked on this to his government guide, who replied, "You don't understand, Mr. Friedman. This is a jobs program. That's why we only have men with shovels." To which Friedman said, "Well, if it's a jobs program, why don't they have spoons instead of shovels?"

Indeed. 

I say: "More drivers...and spoons!"

Milton Friedman's ideology has murdered millions.

A car with no driver? Want to test-drive one, really

Detroit Free Press wrote:

Soon you might be able to do a lot more than just Google a driverless car. You may able to drive one, too.

Google's engineers are inching closer to making the vehicle commercially viable. Part of that process requires discussing the costs of insuring it.

"I think it's time for us to break that cycle and actually bring them to market sooner," said Anthony Levandowski, product manager for the self-driving car. He spoke to the Society of Automotive Engineers World Congress Wednesday at Cobo Center. "I don't think we need to wait 10 years for the next model or body styles to come out to build this technology."

SAE, those guys who rate viscosity of your car oil.

Boom Boom wrote:

You really don't get it, do you?

That's just the kind of consumer they're looking for though isn't it? You know, I wonder if they'll have grocery pick-up apps in both iOS and Android?