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the Dutch train system is so incredibly cool, you can get from one end to another end of the ‘main’ part of the Netherlands in an hour and its so easy to just get to any station anywhere and then you can just go everywhere for so incredibly cheap. Literally the only thing you need to get anywhere in the Netherlands is a bike and something to buy train tickets with. You dont even need to buy tickets, you can just tap your debit card on the gates in the entrance station and then tap it when you exit and it just handles everything for you
you can even tap on sone bikes to rent them. everyone saying owning a car makes you free can suck it
Well, the automotive industry has been working on making self driving a thing, and I recall when they first tried to tackle the problem of lane keeping.
The first proposal was to embed magnets or similar into the road surface that the car could have a set of sensors for to determine if it was drifting left or right in its lane.
Motherfucker, that’s just a virtual track for your dumb four-wheeled mini-train.
It didn’t catch on, but AFAIK it was implemented in small areas as a trial and it performed adequately given the technology of the time.
So I’m out here going, why the fuck are we pretending that vehicles are not just rail-free personal trains?
The first proposal was to embed magnets or similar into the road surface that the car could have a set of sensors for to determine if it was drifting left or right in its lane.
That’s a thing for forklifts since what, a century? Even better, they use a wire with a set frequency instead of magnets, it’s called wire guidance system.
TIL. Thanks for that. I wonder what frequency they use…
5g from the covid vaccines of course!
That’s the end game for self-driving cars. They can drive close enough together to draft, efficiency goes way up. If a problem happens ahead, they communicate back so that pileups don’t happen.
I am looking for intersections with two catepillars of drafting vehicles that slightly intersperse to cross each other at right angles by microtiming the gaps to avoid collisions by microseconds.
IMO, the big strength with self driving cars, if we ever get there is that level of car to car communication. The vehicle will be able to communicate ahead and see the best possible route, and where there’s congestion etc, then optimize the drive to avoid unnecessary delays.
A big problem with human drivers is the tenancy for ghost traffic jams to occur. There was a test they did with about 10-20 drivers of all varieties put into cars and told to drive a circle track, following eachother. No other instructions were given. All they need to do was keep distance in front of them and everything would be fine, what was observed was that some drivers went more quickly than others, and would brake to a near stop when they came close to the person in front. In doing so, everyone ended up basically in stop and go conditions.
IMO, that test exemplifies the problem with human drivers. Put enough of them on the same road and given enough drivers and enough time, traffic/congestion will create slowdowns that otherwise shouldn’t exist.
Taking people out of the equation means that all of the cars can accelerate at the same time and travel in tight packs, so merges are effortless because the entire system is working together to ensure that merging vehicles are able to merge (allowing sufficient space for them to merge), and perhaps more importantly, the merging cars will match pace with the flows of traffic already traveling on the road. Those are the two main tenants of a zipper merge. Find space to merge into, and match pace with the vehicles in the lane you are merging into. Seems that a lot of people forget that last bit.
So rush hour nonsense will at least be reduced.
I read a study once that covered the stop and go traffic wave effect. Apparently all you have to do to stop the wave propagation as have a couple of drivers with a two - three car buffer. The first person to not have to come to a stop in the wave has the power to more or less reset and stop the wave.
How do you prevent people from squeezing into your buffer?
Yep. I do this all the time on highways. I’ve seen dark red traffic lines on Google Maps as I’ve driven over them turn green.
Patience and the efforts of a single person in a wavefront can make an enormous difference, like a rock sticking up from a pond.
video of a ghost traffic jam test: https://youtu.be/Suugn-p5C1M
That’s not true I likewise “invented” a blimp. With sails so it can really catch the wind.
Shit you may have nerd sniped me.
Could a blimp be sailed like a boat? I don’t think so, it’s a different physics problem. A sailboat is both hydrodynamic and aerodynamic, it’s touching water and air, a blimp is only touching air. A sailboat can sail into a quartering headwind by turning the yards so they form an airfoil creating lift like an airplane wing in a mostrly forward direction, and it keeps from sliding sideways by the mass of the water interacting with the hull. A blimp with masts wouldn’t do that, the wind will act on the envelope to just push it downwind, the sails might be able to drive it slightly forward so it goes slightly off to the side of downwind?
Also, to keep it from being blown over you’d have to hang the masts below the airship rather than above like a boat. Bouyancy is much more precious on an airship than a boat because air is a much bigger pain in the ass to be lighter than, so a deep keel full of lead like a sailboat ain’t gonna cut it. Putting the masts on top would be too easy to blow over, if you hung them from below crosswinds might cause a rolling moment but it wouldn’t roll all the way over.
Damn I wish they were still making Mythbusters. “Could an airship with sails sail into a quartering headwind? Or in any direction but downwind?”
I mean, the whole problem with airships is that they’re just big inflatable sails, and to be barely economical they have just enough propulsive power to move about in normal weather conditions. Once they hit bad weather they’re fucked, which is why nearly every airship built before WWII ended up crashing in a storm. They’re only marginally viable today because of weather prediction that grounds them before they hit the shit. Adding sails isn’t going to help anything.
Yeah it’s a terrible idea, airships barely work as camera platforms cum billboards. But sails aren’t just windbags, they can function as airfoils to provide power in directions the wind isn’t blowing. I’m exactly one episode of Mythbusters curious about it. I remember going to a hockey game and the stadium had a remote controlled blimp the shape of a Coke bottle that would fly around the arena, I’d like to attach rigging to one of those and contrive a 5-6 mph wind scenario to see if it can do anything other than go downwind under sail.
remote controlled blimp
I always wanted to get one of these and program it to follow me around the disc golf course with my bag slung underneath it.
Even the slime mould knows it: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/slime-mould-attacks-simulates-tokyo-rail-network
Do you hear that, Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability.
BTC at $101k
Ha! I was thinking along these lines reading science fiction the other day. In every novel where stuff has to get moved overland, it’s always a train. No matter their tech level, trains are the simplest, most efficient solution.
So what you’re saying is the optimal form is some kind of crab train?
As a tf2 player. A crab train is majestic.
Trains only move forward and back. Crabs only move side to side. It only makes sense.
Hey there 👋, I know you mean well by that comment, like I get it, I do. ☺️ But I just wanted to let you know:
THERE HAVE BEEN ZERO STUDIES DONE ON THE SAFETY OF CRAB TRAINS.
ZERO.
But despite that, they are gaining widespread support, and now even people like yourself are calling them “optimal.”
Listen: Someone I know lost an arm in the pincer mechanism of one of these trains. More work needs to be done before we can consider them safe, nevermind “optimal”. Don’t buy into the techbro BS.
Friends don’t let friends crab train.
Hey, when the train needs blood the train gets blood
Choo choo Charlie intensifies
Well if every vehicle becomes autonomous then isn’t that just a large scaled high speed train?
Yes. That is the point. Trains are optimal.
A less efficient train, because it has a bunch of small engines and batteries instead of one big one
But you don’t have to smell unshowered people. I’m willing to sacrifice earth climate for my nose good.
Inter-vehicle cooperation and autonomy makes highways act like trains, yes, with a bunch of unnecessary steps
Minimum rolling friction by having hard wheels on a hard surface. Minimum wind resistance by making it long and narrow. Minimum stop time by having big doors.
BAM: train.
There’s two kinds of ground transportation: off-roading, and should be a train.
I also really like that every time I see some dumb idea to “improve vehicles” there a long comment chain improving it even further into a train.
The children inside make it scary
They make everything scary.
I know, right? Are they passengers, or are they stomach contents. And is there a meaningful difference between the two
the perfect transportation does not e-
Okay I laughed while my exoskeleton genes got activated.
Crab-spotting is completely undervalued as a cultural activity.
Sharing because I was delighted to learn this: trees are also an example of convergent evolution. I’m personally rooting for us to become trees. Pun intended.
Okay so now we are looking at some kind of tree-crab-train as the crown of creation, am I understanding this correctly?
Sounds like a creature from All Tomorrows
That seems unfairly obvious, but I certainly didn’t consider it before.
There’s likely some cases of convergent evolution, but I’m not sure this is settled for all trees.
I’d suspect that at least some trees with last common ancestors that are shrubs have re-enabled genes that enable the tree phenotype rather than independently evolving the tree phenotype.
But still really cool (and maybe turns on exactly how much evolution your consider needs to happen before it’s convergent evolution.)
