Morning Ed: Transportation {2018.10.03.W}
[Tr1] I feel sheltered… I didn’t know courier flights were a thing.
[Tr2] But who actually wants a driverless boat? Driverless cars are appealing because driving has become a monotonous chore. We still like boating!
[Tr3] I’m pretty sure that eventually pedestrians are going to put something in their wallet so that cars know where they are at all times. People may even come to like it if you throw in other things. The only question is what access law enforcement will have to the information.
[Tr4] A Wazetown illegally put up signs stating that their roads are only for local traffic. The solution, many places back home discovered, is to actually obstruct everything to a single entrance and exit.
[Tr5] Jonathan English says that when it comes to mass transit, if you build it they will come.
[Tr6] Teresa Mull writes about the Subaru culture. I’m quite fond of ours.
[Tr7] Autonomous school shuttles!
[Tr8] Sure seems like Elon Musk is going down.
[Tr9] Babies are only allowed to cry for five minutes.
Rural life pic.twitter.com/onBwwoaTfE
— KeepCalmAndDrawl (@FormerlyFormer) June 1, 2018
Tr2: No human pilot, solar powered, and designed for extended missions. In answer to your question of who would want this, it clearly is ideal for drug smuggling.Report
Good point!Report
or, like the article says, legit scientific and resource extraction exploration missions with greatly enhanced dwell time.Report
I guess that hadn’t really thought that would be enough to be sustainable. But I guess if they’re only looking at building 10-15 a year…Report
If these things can literally run for years, putting ten of the them on autopilot in the Indian ocean may be able to find MH370. At at financial cost for what is a rounding error in what has already been spent.
eta – I’m actually skeptical that these would make effective drug runners, as they’re likely not very good as evasion.Report
The surface versions aren’t, but the subsurface ones are – what with their diving abilities and all.
And submersible robots (called Autonomous Underwater Vehicles or AUVs) were used to try and find MH370Report
Underwater vehicles are of course the most effective search platform to find things underwater – but you run up against energy capacity dwell time limitations.
There is the possibility for an development iteration that creates a surface mothership powered by solar arrays which has UUV/AUVs connected with umbilicals – and now I’ve just founded the Skynet/Matrix Navy.Report
That possibility has been under R&D for several years now but isn’t well funded.Report
The hard part in my experience (which is now over a decade out of date) has been the reliablity of any sort of wire and/or hose that connects underwater two moving things. Water, it turns out, is wet. But really, it’s also heavy, and is capable of generating significant chaotic sheer stresses.Report
And seawater is wonderfully corrosive, especially to things carrying an electric charge.Report
That too. Being ideal for drug smuggling doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have other uses as well.Report
The Navy is using them for all sorts of missions, as is NOAAReport
Put Tr3 and Tr4 together and you have parents in residential neighborhoods being required to strap transponders onto their kids in order to protect them from the autonomous vehicles using those roads in an attempt to avoid traffic on the main thoroughfares. Wrt to just Tr4, I have seen places in multiple different cities where a few strategically placed bollards take care of the problem.Report
Tr1 – I used to contract (well, my company did) to do overnight returns of Federally scheduled pharmaceuticals to distributors on a daily basis. Huge pain in the rear, as the pilots weren’t allowed to know what was being transported so they weren’t very careful with the product.
Tr4 – Long before smartphone tech or really even Google, Sacramento did something like this in one of its oldest neighborhoods as it was between much of the downtown gov. buildings and the freeway to most of the suburbs. Traffic calming they called it. So streets were blocked for through traffic, some forced turns, etc. It was a total disaster. It changed property values overnight, turned neighbor against neighbor, increased vandalism and on and on. They had to change it after a few years, putting in mini roundabouts at every intersection.Report
Tr1 – This was a plot device in the film Eurotrip (it’s how the two guys got to Europe).Report
Will, please ban Dave, eg here and surrounding comments.
Report
Will,
Knock knock.Report