I-57 Alignment Question

[bugo]

I might perhaps be a little optimistic, but I think if self driving car technology improves enough to become widely available and affordable in new cars then it will create a new revolution of highway travel. People will get out on the roads a lot more, particularly on longer distance road trips if they can kick back and let the car do the driving. That would create more demand for good quality highways. And limited access freeways would have fewer obstacles for self driving cars to negotiate.

I'd love to be able to throw my stuff in a car after work Friday and drive 600 miles to see family in Colorado without having to worry about getting there really late at night. If I get tired I would have the option to let the car take over the driving chores. Or I could let the car drive the whole way while I watched movies, did work, etc. It would be awesome. I could actually make the return trip later, even on a Sunday evening and still be able to get to work Monday morning and still be reasonably well rested.

Self driving cars will be a disruptive technology. They will affect business and leisure in ways few have yet imagined. I think self driving cars will be disruptive to the politics currently screwing up the nation's ability to build any big things. Highway corridors that currently seem impossible to finish right now (such as I-73 & I-74 or a billion dollar bridge over the Mississippi for I-69) might become more feasible a decade from now.

Not me. I love driving. I wouldn't feel right if the car drove itself. Besides, I have terrible motion sickness and it would take me about 5 minutes riding in a self-driving car before I got vertigo and vomited all over the car.

[TheArkansasRoadgeek]

I might perhaps be a little optimistic, but I think if self driving car technology improves enough to become widely available and affordable in new cars then it will create a new revolution of highway travel. People will get out on the roads a lot more, particularly on longer distance road trips if they can kick back and let the car do the driving. That would create more demand for good quality highways. And limited access freeways would have fewer obstacles for self driving cars to negotiate.

I'd love to be able to throw my stuff in a car after work Friday and drive 600 miles to see family in Colorado without having to worry about getting there really late at night. If I get tired I would have the option to let the car take over the driving chores. Or I could let the car drive the whole way while I watched movies, did work, etc. It would be awesome. I could actually make the return trip later, even on a Sunday evening and still be able to get to work Monday morning and still be reasonably well rested.

Self driving cars will be a disruptive technology. They will affect business and leisure in ways few have yet imagined. I think self driving cars will be disruptive to the politics currently screwing up the nation's ability to build any big things. Highway corridors that currently seem impossible to finish right now (such as I-73 & I-74 or a billion dollar bridge over the Mississippi for I-69) might become more feasible a decade from now.

Not me. I love driving. I wouldn't feel right if the car drove itself. Besides, I have terrible motion sickness and it would take me about 5 minutes riding in a self-driving car before I got vertigo and vomited all over the car.

How do you get to work? Do you teleport? If you can't be a passenger, then what can you be?

Are you into being strapped to the roof?

[Rothman]

A driver.  Some people don't get carsick if they're the ones driving.

[TheArkansasRoadgeek]

A driver.  Some people don't get carsick if they're the ones driving.

I know, I was trying to avoid the obvious.

[Henry]

There are currently other gaps in the Interstate system. I-49 has multiple gaps, some of which will take decades to fill. The same goes for I-69, I-73 and I-74. I-11 is sure to fall into the same camp. In the first 20 or so years of the Interstate highway system many routes had substantial gaps all over the place. Any highway system is going to be a continual work in progress.

And I-87 too.

So where's the pressure for West Virginia and Ohio to build I-74?  There doesn't seem to be much pressure for PA to finish I-99 or NY to finish I-86, either.

Had there been any, then NJ (and/or PA), DE, MD and VA would have lots of pressure to build their own sections of I-87, however far out of grid it may be.

[US71]

I might perhaps be a little optimistic, but I think if self driving car technology improves enough to become widely available and affordable in new cars then it will create a new revolution of highway travel. People will get out on the roads a lot more, particularly on longer distance road trips if they can kick back and let the car do the driving. That would create more demand for good quality highways. And limited access freeways would have fewer obstacles for self driving cars to negotiate.

I'd love to be able to throw my stuff in a car after work Friday and drive 600 miles to see family in Colorado without having to worry about getting there really late at night. If I get tired I would have the option to let the car take over the driving chores. Or I could let the car drive the whole way while I watched movies, did work, etc. It would be awesome. I could actually make the return trip later, even on a Sunday evening and still be able to get to work Monday morning and still be reasonably well rested.

Self driving cars will be a disruptive technology. They will affect business and leisure in ways few have yet imagined. I think self driving cars will be disruptive to the politics currently screwing up the nation's ability to build any big things. Highway corridors that currently seem impossible to finish right now (such as I-73 & I-74 or a billion dollar bridge over the Mississippi for I-69) might become more feasible a decade from now.

Not me. I love driving. I wouldn't feel right if the car drove itself. Besides, I have terrible motion sickness and it would take me about 5 minutes riding in a self-driving car before I got vertigo and vomited all over the car.

How do you get to work? Do you teleport? If you can't be a passenger, then what can you be?

Are you into being strapped to the roof?

[Bobby5280]

Not me. I love driving. I wouldn't feel right if the car drove itself. Besides, I have terrible motion sickness and it would take me about 5 minutes riding in a self-driving car before I got vertigo and vomited all over the car.

That's why the vehicles should have both manual control and self-driving capability. Some conceptual self-driving vehicles don't have any manual controls; owning one of those would be like having a taxi or bus parked in your driveway.

I can recall numerous times driving up I-25 in Southern Colorado late at night, literally slapping myself in the face to stay awake. Most of the time I would get to the destination without stopping. Other times I had to give up and park at a rest area for a few hours, otherwise I was bound to fall asleep behind the wheel and crash. The self-driving option would eliminate that problem.

People of all ages (it's not Millennials) love to multi-task while in the car. I get furious when I see people texting while driving. I once saw one twirp in a red Honda Civic on Cache Road here in Lawton doing a flagrant example of it. He was steering the car with his knees while using his thumbs to work his phone. I was in the center lane and he was in the left lane. I could clearly see what he was doing from my pickup truck. I so felt like ramming his @$$ into the median.

All kinds of negative publicity has swirled around two recent self-driving car related fatalities. A Tesla driver was killed in one accident. A self-driving Uber ran over a woman jay-walking across a street at night. Both incidents grabbed lots of headlines. The coverage completely ignored the likelihood the fatalities could have happened anyway with a human controlling the car. That especially goes for the case of the lady walking her bicycle across the street at night away from a crosswalk. If she had been splattered by a human driver the news would not have made it past the local level. We've had a couple pedestrian deaths here in Lawton recently; none of them made any national news. The roughly 6000 pedestrians killed in 2017 by human drivers didn't gain anywhere near as much press as that Uber accident. The latest estimate from the NSC puts US traffic deaths in 2017 at 40100. The point of listing those numbers is human being drivers have a pretty deplorable track record at this driving thing and it seems to be trending worse with all of the distracted driving nonsense. We're expecting the computers in self-driving cars to work absolutely perfect in all situations when us homo sapiens kind of suck at living up to the same ideal.

There are currently other gaps in the Interstate system. I-49 has multiple gaps, some of which will take decades to fill. The same goes for I-69, I-73 and I-74. I-11 is sure to fall into the same camp. In the first 20 or so years of the Interstate highway system many routes had substantial gaps all over the place. Any highway system is going to be a continual work in progress.

And I-87 too.

The North Carolina version of I-87 is in the same camp as Interstates like I-76 and I-84: they're duplicate routes that will never be connected. It would take a very expensive and convoluted path to connect the NY and NC I-87 routes.

[TheArkansasRoadgeek]

All kinds of negative publicity has swirled around two recent self-driving car related fatalities. A Tesla driver was killed in one accident. A self-driving Uber ran over a woman jay-walking across a street at night. Both incidents grabbed lots of headlines. The coverage completely ignored the likelihood the fatalities could have happened anyway with a human controlling the car. That especially goes for the case of the lady walking her bicycle across the street at night away from a crosswalk. If she had been splattered by a human driver the news would not have made it past the local level. We've had a couple pedestrian deaths here in Lawton recently; none of them made any national news. The roughly 6000 pedestrians killed in 2017 by human drivers didn't gain anywhere near as much press as that Uber accident. The latest estimate from the NSC puts US traffic deaths in 2017 at 40100. The point of listing those numbers is human being drivers have a pretty deplorable track record at this driving thing and it seems to be trending worse with all of the distracted driving nonsense. We're expecting the computers in self-driving cars to work absolutely perfect in all situations when us homo sapiens kind of suck at living up to the same ideal.

I have a feeling that some are afraid of the non-human element -- not that robots are taking over (or they are, each their own), it's just... I don't know.

[Bobby5280]

With the way things are these days I think I would put more trust in a self-driving car not running me over than a good percentage of human being motorists.

I gave up pedaling my trail bicycle to work due to the close calls with cars. Too many just don't pay attention to what's outside their vehicle on or near the roadway. And if they do see you riding a bicycle there is an off chance the car driver could choose to do something hostile toward you (swerve at you, throw stuff at you, honk, flip you off, etc) because apparently anyone on a bicycle is a tree-hugging pansy worthy of a boot to the face. There may be laws on the books to uphold the rights of bicyclists to get a share of the road. But abstract things like laws aren't actually there to physically protect anyone on a bicycle. Laws are only there to be applied to jerks after they do something negligent or malicious. A computer system running a self-driving car is not likely to get road rage, seeking vengeance against anyone or anything it doesn't like that it encounters during a trip.

If I really wanted to push a "con" argument against self-driving cars it might be from the topic of road kill. How much better are self driving cars at avoiding animals crossing the roads than human drivers? Most human drivers won't deliberately run over an animal. Are the camera and radar systems in self driving cars good enough to see small animals. If they do see those animals will they attempt any measures (even if it's just slowing down) to avoid them? Or will they push through as if the animals are not there?