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First, I think that true self-driving cars in mixed traffic is a pipe dream. I don't care what the tech professionals say. I use their other products, and I know they're not reliable. (I'll refrain from telling you about the "smart"phone alarm that never seems to go off when you want it to, and does go off when you didn't program it to do so. :) Almost missed some appointments and Amtrak trains because of that.)
I would tend to agree with you, specially given the crisis of software quality (or lack thereof) coupled with the other discussion about crisis in management that we had elsewhere. At present the method of fixing such problems seems to be the Onion approach. Add another layer fixing a few glaring problems and add an additional pile of its own, and go onto the next layer. It is well attuned to the capitalist paradigm of digging ditches and filling them as you go along. As for which of the collective bugs poke their heads out at the end, well that is an ongoing experiment in life. :D

But then again that is how life works too, so it is possible that we will just have the self driving cars become full blown participants in the existing demolition derby on the roads, and there will be quite a bit of fun figuring out who to ascribe blame to for accidents caused by design and programming errors.
 
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I would tend to agree with you, specially given the crisis of software quality (or lack thereof) coupled with the other discussion about crisis in management that we had elsewhere. At present the method of fixing such problems seems to be the Onion approach. Add another layer fixing a few glaring problems and add an additional pile of its own, and go onto the next layer. It is well attuned to the capitalist paradigm of digging ditches and filling them as you go along. As for which of the collective bugs poke their heads out at the end, well that is an ongoing experiment in life. :D

I disagree. The rate at which software and computing power develop is stunning.

In the 1980s most computers were still clunky machines where you had to type something at the prompt line and if you got just one character wrong the computer couldn't work out what you meant and you could type it all again.

Today we have things like facial recognition software and even simple cheap devices like your smartphone can work out who is in the photograph. It's a different world and if we could teleport somebody from then to today's world they would think we had invented magic.

Give it another 20 years and I don't see why all the bugs of autonomous cars shouldn't be ironed out.

Autonomous cars don't need to be 100% safe to be accepted (an impossibly high target). They just have to be safer than human drivers.
 
I disagree. The rate at which software and computing power develop is stunning.

In the 1980s most computers were still clunky machines where you had to type something at the prompt line and if you got just one character wrong the computer couldn't work out what you meant and you could type it all again.

Today we have things like facial recognition software and even simple cheap devices like your smartphone can work out who is in the photograph. It's a different world and if we could teleport somebody from then to today's world they would think we had invented magic.

Give it another 20 years and I don't see why all the bugs of autonomous cars shouldn't be ironed out.

Autonomous cars don't need to be 100% safe to be accepted (an impossibly high target). They just have to be safer than human drivers.
:D
 
As an interested bystander, I've read quite a few articles and books about autonomous cars. I fully agree that the mix of self driving and standard driving will be really, uh, interesting.

One of the biggest problems is liability and the current insurance/legal system. You aren't going to be able to buy an insurance policy that just covers drivers, as today. The insurance will have to be baked into the price of the car or perhaps the registration. It would help if more states were already no fault, but the ambulance chasers won't allow it.

Rather than Tesla style fancy lane holders which work until they can't see the lanes, I think the real progress will be in local pizza delivery and in large office complex mini-shuttles. I'd be happy to jump into a self driving shuttle to the cafeteria building. It could easily coexist with people looking for parking places.

I-95 on a Friday night with Beemer speed demons, not so much.
 
The weak link in autonomous vehicles - even when "perfected" - is inconsistencies in the road markings and signs needed to support them from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Until those are standardized on a nationwide (or North America wide) basis self-driving vehicles can never be truly autonomous no matter how smart they are. The cost and scale of achieving this support structure will dwarf the development of the vehicles themselves..
 
Amen. First of all, there are a zillion places where the line markings are either nonexistent or conflicting. My local freeway is being repaired and has two almost identical sets of line markings about 18" apart.
You really have to think to determine which are correct. And then there is weather. I can recall many rain storms where I just couldn't see the road any more and pulled under a bridge to chill until it got better.
 
From my reprint of a 1928 or '29 RR Official Guide I'm amazed at the ubiquitous passenger service. Many of the towns no longer show up even on robust road maps that States issue (some of which still include all rail lines). The towns which still do are often very small in population. Even larger towns lack public transportation at least when the bus disappears. Most poverty is in rural areas, so long-distance roadworthy cars are few. And many, such as the young or elderly do not have a car anyway and couldn't drive it a long way if they did.
 
Autonomous cars don't need to be 100% safe to be accepted (an impossibly high target). They just have to be safer than human drivers.

Psych studies show that in order to be accepted they need to be *100 times safer* than human drivers. Yep. Not kidding. People vastly prefer being killed by a human than killed by a robot. It's going to take a long time to get there.

Of course, autonomous trains are already there. Turns out being on rails makes the problem a lot easier.
 
I'm afraid you're probably right.

Though I would like to think there must be innumerable communities whose Greyhound service, however unglamorous, is their only connection to the outside world for those who don't drive. I would hope that politically there must be at least some minimal recognition of that. Especially in the present days in which infrastructure is such an important word.
The Greyhound map is well-hidden by Greyhound, because it's a mismanaged company going bankrupt, but here's a 2019 version:

https://www.greyhound.com/-/media/greyhound/images/discover/2019-greyhound-network-map.pdf
Leave out "partner carriers" (the green lines). The orange lines ("Greyhound Express") only serve the largest cities. If you only look at the blue lines, the first thing you'll notice is that most of Greyhound's lines are parallelling Amtrak rather than going in different directions. So there aren't as many of those "Greyhound-only" communities as you'd think. :-( Most of the remainder are actually following railroad routes too...
 
Areas like much of nYC where parking is both difficult and expensive make car ownership a challenge....Lots of weekend car rentals and companies like "Zip Car" thriving...Of course homes with parking, or developments or buildings with free or readily available parking also exist. My garage (same coop where Railiner lived) is $46, considering the extra storage space I get with it, totally worth it...
And just like the monthly carrying charge for the apartment, way, way, below what the market rate would be for the garage. You have to be on a a very long waiting list to get one. Or even an assigned outdoor spot. As original's in that co-op (Feb, 1954) my family fortunately had one...
 
Psych studies show that in order to be accepted they need to be *100 times safer* than human drivers. Yep. Not kidding. People vastly prefer being killed by a human than killed by a robot. It's going to take a long time to get there.
Actually, human preferences are even worse than that, assuming that the psych studies are correct. It appears that people prefer having 100 people killed by humans rather than a single person killed by a robot. But this turns out to be consistent with other risk assessments that people tend to make irrationally, too.
 
Transportation is in a very sad state in this country. Amtrak is a bright spot even with its huge problems. Air travel is truly bad, and then it gets worse. Greyhound is really unreliable, and the clientele can be very unusual. I tried Megabus a few times. Unreliable as well, and standing on a corner in sleet isn’t reasonable. My proposal would be to do what they do in Europe. The busses are collocated with the train station and connections are easy. Basically, Amtrak thruway on a massive scale. Build a true, national ground transportation system. I’ve ridden the intercity busses in Mexico, and they’re amazing. Clean, comfortable, reliable. Everything Greyhound isn’t. I truly want Greyhound to thrive because Amtrak can only really prosper with an interconnection to a vibrant, connecting bus system.
 
Transportation is in a very sad state in this country. Amtrak is a bright spot even with its huge problems. Air travel is truly bad, and then it gets worse. Greyhound is really unreliable, and the clientele can be very unusual. I tried Megabus a few times. Unreliable as well, and standing on a corner in sleet isn’t reasonable. My proposal would be to do what they do in Europe. The busses are collocated with the train station and connections are easy. Basically, Amtrak thruway on a massive scale. Build a true, national ground transportation system. I’ve ridden the intercity busses in Mexico, and they’re amazing. Clean, comfortable, reliable. Everything Greyhound isn’t. I truly want Greyhound to thrive because Amtrak can only really prosper with an interconnection to a vibrant, connecting bus system.
There is an increasing number of stations that include Greyhound and Amtrak Thruway or other bus services. However, that has mainly been state initiative and them taking advantage of local opportunities. And sometimes things go backwards. The first state-sponsored intermodal station in Oregon was The Dalles, served by Amtrak's Pioneer and by Pacific Trailways, both gone now. Greyhound still serves The Dalles once a day in each direction.
 
Sitting next to a stranger can be pretty miserable on a bus. It would be nice to see some more 1-2 seating. But then again, the experiment of a limo-bus between Boston and New York did not work out.
While LimoLiner failed, others have succeeded. Examples include C&J between NH and NY, Red Coach in FL, and Vonlane in TX and OK…
 
Amen. First of all, there are a zillion places where the line markings are either nonexistent or conflicting. My local freeway is being repaired and has two almost identical sets of line markings about 18" apart.
You really have to think to determine which are correct. And then there is weather. I can recall many rain storms where I just couldn't see the road any more and pulled under a bridge to chill until it got better.

At work we have a yearly event where all the senior engineering staff get together in an informal environment and during the day we have workshops and discuss serious stuff and in the evenings we do more light-hearted stuff. Typically for the opening session we have an external speaker who is typically somebody slightly unusual. Often we have crazy inventors or entrepreneurs or people who invented computer games, stuff like that.

About three years ago we had somebody a bit different. He was a senior developer from the research lab of a major European car manufacturer and he was talking about autonomous vehicles. In his presentation, we walked through real-life situations, sometimes frame by frame, to see how it worked. The software took the picture apart and identified all objects it could and labelled them. For example with 99.5% probability this is a tree. With 68% probability this is a dog, with 83% probability this is a discarded candy wrapper. With 97% probability this is a pedestrian. It was really amazing to see how the picture was analyzed and got most of it right. Sometimes it made hilarious mistakes of course. But it was only a prototype.

And after that there was a continuity and credibility filter. So if the previous stage had said, with 45% probability this is a dolphin, that would get overruled. Then there was also a category for stuff that couldn't be identified.

As a next step all these objects were graded by relevance concerning any risk they posed, any unexpected actions they might take, and any relevance they had on the next decision of the autonomous pilot.

For example if there is a road sign with writing on it, the software had to make a call whether the text should be analyzed and acted upon, for example, reduce speed. Or is it an advertising bill board that can safely be ignored. The location of the sign was also a factor here, but there were quite a few borderline cases. As such it doesn't really matter if one county or state uses a slightly different typeface or color because that's not the sole criterion.

The same with road markings. Lots of stuff was being picked up. Is this thing here a shadow or a crack in the road surface, or is it a marking? Or is it a stain? Lots of context is analyzed here and actions of other vehicles are observed too. For example there was one scene where a truck had stopped on the roadway to unload some stuff and the only way past it was to ignore road markings and cross over onto the other lane which was used by opposing traffic. The car thus had to decide to ignore the road marking and observe oncoming vehicles to identify an opportunity to pull out and pass the truck. Observing the actions of the cars in front also helped here. But it might be that the situation occurs without there being cars to copy so its all amazingly complex yet fascinating. In another scene there had been an accident and cops were directing traffic and the car had to do a left turn despite there being a no-left-turns sign.

All this was a prototype of course and is still under development. But I don't think any problems of this type will remain unresolvable.
 
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Okay… why Portsmouth rather than Boston?
Because they are filling a "niche" market, that is underserved by other direct forms of transportation, rather than get into the fiercely competitive Boston/New York market...
 
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