I did, about a day after posting my comment. Well worth watching. Clearly, I'm just retroactively prescient.

Articles like this are almost as popular with news sites as "chocolate/beer/wine/cheese/bacon cures cancer!". From what I can tell, the publication was written by a summer intern who is about a junior in college, by reviewing other publications and making some guesses from the data contained therein. It's a good thought piece, i.e. "Hey guys, there's a lot of stuff that we haven't really done much to improve yet, maybe we should look into that." The publication doesn't make an argument that "electric cars are evil." It doesn't even have any real data of its own. And well over half of the particulate matter that they attribute is just stuff that was lying on the ground and the cars kicked up into the air; and because they claim that an EV is 24% heavier, it will kick up 24% more PM in its wake, which is probably not true. I'd be willing to bet that even if EVs average 24% heavier, they are probably not also 24% larger and 24% less aerodynamic; and the size and shape of the vehicle matter at least as much as the weight in creating a wake, if not more.

On top of that, I don't know that reduction of particulate matter has ever been a huge concern for the EV market. Generally, the concerns are more along the lines of reducing CO2 (/CO/NOx/HCHO/NMOG/NMHC) emissions, oil consumption, monetary support to unfriendly OPEC nations, required maintenance, or fuel costs; or increasing support of new technology, renewable energy, etc. But, PM is certainly a health concern, so maybe the article's best use is just to point out that, as long as we're making a lot of other changes in our transportation system, maybe we should consider how we can change it to reduce PM emissions as well.

TL;DR: Science reporting fails again.

The problem is that a lot of companies (and, at their behest, some of the regulators too) are going for a slow takeover of driving by computers. Today they can do a little bit of driving mostly on the highway. Next year, they'll handle some city driving too. The year after that, they'll handle areas without good lane markings, the next year get a little better still, etc. But they still need a person there, because what if the car encounters a woman in an electric wheelchair chasing a duck around an intersection with a broom and doesn't know what to do?

This is one reason why Google's approach is better - build the car to handle everything, even things it has never seen before. Otherwise, you end up with a human who hasn't been paying attention for the past 15 minutes and is suddenly expected to come up to speed (or get his girlfriend's pubic hair out of his face) and take over driving in the next second in order to avoid an accident.

Yes, this times 1000. And, FWIW, the article isn't slanted this way, only the summary is. The article is much more straightforward, although they don't explicitly call out mismanagement.

Honestly, I think we'd be better off just getting used to the fact that sometimes bad people will get on planes, and security doesn't need to keep the casualty rate to zero; just discouraging most of the bad guys is good enough. We don't require that cars protect you from every possible way you could die in an accident - we just require them to be pretty good at protecting you most of the time. That's what I'd rather have the TSA's replacement tasked with.

If I traveled internationally more than once every 2-ish years, I'd consider it. But in my case, I had this choice:
1. Get fingerprinted at a nearby (5 miles) H&R Block office for PreCheck tomorrow.
2. Get fingerprinted and interviewed at the nearest major international airport (40 miles) two weeks from now.

I chose option #1. It was even completed fast enough that I was registered to get PreCheck for my next flight later the same month. Option #2 would have likely taken more of my time than I'd spend just waiting in customs lines over the next 5 years. But yes, for many people, Global Entry might be a better option.

My car (about 6 years old now) already has those two features. Newer models certainly do a better job than mine, but I have a few comments...

For the Lane Departure Warning, my car won't even turn it on unless you're over 25 mph. It's really meant for highway driving, not city driving. They're applying this treatment only to roads with a speed limit of 30 mph or less.

For Collision Avoidance (my car calls it a pre-collision system, because it won't actually avoid an accident, it will only reduce the severity); it does need to know whether a stopped object is in your lane or not, but it's not using the camera and lane departure warning system to figure that out. The LDW can be very unreliable (a sudden shadow like an overpass will confuse it, as will a break in lane lines from a merge or exit). Instead, it uses the steering angle sensor to figure out what direction you're going. I also think it might be a little more prejudicial against stopped objects; it assumes that if it's already stopped, you probably saw it well in advance, so only when you're indubitably going to smash right into it will it brake. This is how they avoid braking every time you pass a parked car at the start of a curve. On the other hand, if there's a fast-moving object in front of you and it suddenly starts a rapid deceleration, then it's a safer bet that it's on the road with you and not just a random object on the side of the road - and thus it will brake for you.

Yes, there are tons of traffic studies done on all sorts of changes to roads, and when they make a big change like this, they'll often take the opportunity to study it again to make sure it had the intended effect.

I would expect that sort of thing to be focused in certain areas where there are higher accident risks due to inappropriate driver behavior. In general, all the things you listed are done to encourage drivers to drive at a safe speed.

In my area of California, there are a fair number of places that are getting "road diets" where they remove a travel lane and re-stripe. A common change is to take a 4-lane road, reduce it to a 2-lane road, and then add a bike lane in each direction and a center left turn lane. I'm pretty sure I've seen parking both added and removed in various reconfigurations. And most of these 4-lane roads were overbuilt in the first place during a suburban boom; they really weren't meant (or needed) for commuter traffic. There's usually a better road nearby that the traffic engineers are trying to encourage people to use. When these overbuilt roads are available, what tends to happen is some hotshot in a hurry decides to drive 50 mph through a residential area because he can save 10 seconds. Instead, these changes encourage people to stay on the main road at 40 mph.

In general, the total capacity of the road isn't reduced by a road diet; the center left turn lane makes sure that nobody has to wait for left turns, and the bike lane gets bikes and right turns out of the right lane. The end result is that even though there's only one traffic lane, it is more free-flowing than a lane would be in the 4-lane configuration. This is true until you get over 20,000 vehicles on the road in a day; after that point, you do indeed need the extra lanes.

Adding more protected bike lanes can also get more people to bike (and thus fewer people slowing your car down), although that's not something that will happen in any measurable amount by adding one bike lane - that's something you get when you make the whole city bikeable.

That's OK. When we visit, we can still use our native license to drive in most locations (possibly augmented by an International Driving Permit that's basically just holds translated info from our license, but the last 2 times I drove internationally, I didn't need one).

Better keep an eye out for us.

(That said, my parents made me learn and test on stick even though I normally drove their automatic. If I had a choice, I'd probably get a stick, but the hybrids and EVs I tend to like usually have transmissions that don't fall into the manual/automatic dichotomy.)

Well, I suppose you can call it air since 80% of air is, but using liquid nitrogen and calling it "air cooling" is a little bit misleading, don't you think? ;)

I switched from a basic 5+2 day thermostat to a Nest about a year ago (though I wasn't hit by the bug mentioned here). This Christmas, we left home for a few days, but left our dogs there in the care of a dog sitter who stopped by a couple times each day. Normally, we run the heat from about 6:30 PM when we get home, until 10:30 PM when we go to sleep, set to 68F. In the morning, we're not home and awake long enough to make it worth running the heat. It gets down to maybe 62 on a fairly cold day before the heat turns back on.

While we were gone, I wanted the heat to be mostly off, but keep the dogs from getting too cold. So I set it to 60 around the clock. Somewhat surprisingly, that actually used more heat than occasionally heating the house to 68 and then letting it cool off for a while while we were away and didn't need the heat, even though the temperature was lower than it would ever get when we were home.

It's possible some of that difference is because we weren't home; that means a few hundred watts less electricity dissipated from things like computers and the TV to heat the house, or the heat from our bodies helping to warm the space. And our house is a typical older California house that leaks like a sieve, because there's not much ROI on adding insulation in such a mild climate. But it can definitely make a difference to set the thermostat back for a while when you're not there.

Which leads me to one of the things I like about my Nest; I have it hooked up to our smartphones, using the Skylark app. The app uses geofencing to figure out whether we're at home or not. The moment we all leave the circle drawn around our house, it sets the thermostat to "Away" mode. When anybody gets back inside that circle, the thermostat fires back up. The circle can be drawn at quite a wide range; I think anywhere from a few hundred feet to miles, depending on whether you want it to already be at your favorite temperature by the time you get there.

The Nest also lets you set a lot more temperature changes than my old thermostat. That one allowed 4 changes per day, with settings for weekdays, Saturdays, and Sundays. That basically means warm in the morning and evening, cool at midday and overnight. The Nest allows unlimited settings throughout each day, and has a separately-set "Away" and "Safety" temperature thresholds. So I can tell the thermostat to be at 68, but if I'm away it can drop to 55, and if the thermostat is off it can drop to 45 to keep the pipes from freezing. With something like that, you could probably set the "Away" temperature in the summer to even just like 2 degrees higher - enough that you probably wouldn't notice, but could still save maybe 6% or so on cooling costs. (At least personally, I'm more comfortable with the A/C running at 80 than with it off at 78, probably because of the cool drafts of air moving around.)

Overall, I really like it, and it has some nice benefits. Is it worth the $250? Eh, maybe. That is rather expensive compared to a dumb programmable thermostat. But I'm a nerd, and it's a nice nerdy toy, so I'd definitely buy it again.

One way this is a bad thing is applicable whether it's domination by solar farms or anything else; it's a lack of diversification. It's a similar problem faced by the cities of Cupertino and Mountain View in California. Cupertino is dominated by Apple, and Mountain View is dominated by Google. Both of these cities want to be favorable to their respective companies, who pay massive amounts of local taxes. On the other hand, if something goes poorly - for example, Apple hits hard times again and shrinks rapidly - then they're suddenly left with a huge hole in their budget, large numbers of unemployed citizens, and all the resulting downstream issues from that.

The solar business isn't quite so fickle, but it's still reasonable to not want to be boxed in by solar farms. For example, if the companies that maintain them go out of business, or if the maintenance costs of the solar farm exceed the price they can get for the power, the town might suddenly be surrounded by thousands of acres of unmaintained waste. I imagine that these farms will bring a few permanent jobs to the area for maintenance - a quick google shows that a solar farm can create a few hundred temporary construction jobs, followed by 10-15 permanent maintenance jobs. In a town of 800 residents, where maybe half or so are working (ie not students, retired, or family caretakers), then having 40-60 jobs all in the same industry is a pretty big percentage of your workforce, and it can have a pretty big effect if they all suddenly go away.

So it's not unreasonable to limit the expansion of a single industry in a small focused area.

In Silicon Valley, it's not uncommon to see a Google self-driving car, including in commute traffic. They're still in a prototype phase so there's a safety driver inside. There are currently over 50 of them in Silicon Valley and Austin, TX; 30 custom prototype "neighborhood electric vehicles" that are speed-limited to 25 mph, and 23 Lexus SUVs that are capable of freeway driving. They've done about 1.3 million miles in autonomous mode, and get about 10-15,000 miles more each week. They reason that the 25 mph limit on the prototype vehicles doesn't really limit it much, because most roads in Mountain View (home of the Googleplex) are 25 mph residential roads, and the ones that aren't are so congested during commutes that nobody's going 25 mph anyway.

How is that any different from a human driver taking their own car drunk today? At least there's a possibility that the driver might just pass out and let the car do its thing. It remains to be seen exactly how things will work - Google wants to do away with the driver's controls completely, and that's what their prototypes do.

No, I don't think so. There's nothing inherently more "green" about an autonomous vehicle. Sure, a lot of them are EVs - but as some people love to point out, in many areas of the country, much of the electricity is generated by burning coal, so a regular gas vehicle produces less emissions.

I think the main reason for autonomous vehicles is the safety aspect, and that's certainly one of the big reasons for Sebastian Thrun, who led the Stanford team that first won the DARPA Grand Challenge, and later went to Google to lead their self-driving car project. He has recounted how he lost a friend to a traffic accident when he was 18, and a lab manager just a few years ago - and there are 1.2 million more traffic fatalities every year.
There are a lot of other potential benefits, too:
- If the fleet model is adopted, fewer cars are needed - this is useful because a car spends about 98% of its time parked.
- People who are incapable of driving (blind, elderly, etc.) can use them to get around.
- The occupant can read, play games, get work done, etc. rather than needing to drive.
- Aw heck, just go here.

It'll never be flawless. It doesn't need to be - it just needs to be better than Joe Shmoe, and quite frankly, that's not hard.

The article is from Australia and I'm not terribly familiar with the attitude toward public transportation there, but at least in the US, apart from a few pockets in big cities, you will not pry cars from their owners without at least a generational change. Also, the author seems to have no clue just how advanced these prototype vehicles have become; they are very able to navigate among unpredictable obstacles on city streets without being slowed to a crawl. The premise is decent - that autonomous vehicles could be used to boost the use of public transit - but it's not the only thing that will happen; nor do I think it's even one of the primary effects that will result.

Something north of 90% of accidents are preventable; take a look at table 8 here: http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/P...
That table shows the 'critical event' in an accident, which is what made it unavoidable. Just 1.4% of accidents are from an object or animal in the road. Likewise, only 1.2% are due to a vehicle problem, although a large percentage of those are improper maintenance, which would be solved by some autonomous vehicle business models where they are owned and maintained by a fleet company (such as Uber).

So we can prevent 90% of accidents, but you think it's not worthwhile because the other 10% still happen?

Furthermore, if the fleet model is adopted, it actually becomes more likely that safety improvements will make more financial sense; far fewer cars are needed in the fleet, so the costs are amortized over more people. But in either case, safety standards are set by the government, and we can choose to raise or lower them as we see fit, completely orthogonally from whether cars are autonomous or not.