Reorte

Those other questions sound disturbing quite honestly - I've always had a problem with attempts at getting more information out of people than is strictly necessary for the reason for whatever it is you're doing (assuming they're not optional).

Covid shifts the boundaries but not to the most absolute extremes.

The test centre I took my test at got around that by having a set of plates mounted on a wall, and a line at the right distance, so it was "third from the right, second down" (or whatever).

Well the carnet tickets sounds good. The rest? No idea to be honest, the usual (generally justified) scepticism of any change is at play. I suppose the worry is whether it's another move towards a railway run even more by politicians.

Because people have to take some degree of responsibility for themselves. A world where everything that might be a bad idea is banned isn't one I want to live in. Covid might push the threshold for that a bit but it doesn't push it to the extreme.

These days anything other than extremely simple unchanging black and white certainty is called "confusing and ambiguous." You're not telling me exactly what to do, with no chance of deviation in the future (foreseable or otherwise)? Confusing and ambiguous! How am I suppose to decide what to do if something might change and if something isn't labelled 100% absolutely safe or not?"

Played a little of Mass Effect legendary edition. So far the changes seem to be relatively minor even in the first game. It looks a little better and plays a little better but it's still close to the original. The improved looks are AFAICT new textures but no model changes or additional objects. The supposed better new Mako handling turns out to be terrible (it's camera relative, so moves in the direction you're trying to look in - yuck!) Fortunately you can turn it off on the PC. The added boost helps get it up some of those hills though.

I wonder if there's a chance that driver was thinking "the train's going slowly and can see me so it should stop and wait until I've moved, trains have brakes don't they?"

You don't need to take it again but AIUI you'll be driving illegally if you can't. It just doesn't get checked.

AIUI it was never supposed to be a fixed timetable, although there's always the risk of being treated as one. A change in May and a month to see what the impact would be seems to be the basis of the June date, which is a reasonable way of approaching things. We might quibble about the details but an approach which boils down to reacting to the situation on the ground (having planned for various possibilities), with the best case course plotted out is surely the way to do it.

That brings us back to the question of where do you put them all at 3 am when hardly anyone's travelling anyway. I don't get the "labour and materials locked up in idle vehicles" point.

The question is whether the standing-doing-nothing-age really matters; I'd argue that it doesn't carry much of a cost for a modern car with good rustproofing, and would guess that it's more for a train. It's only if a car sits doing nothing for weeks you start to get problems. That suggests that near 90% of the current number of cars will be required regardless then; enough cars are required to support the peak demand.

Car manufacturers are going in that direction to be fair. Cars over ten years old that don't look like wrecks on wheels aren't that uncommon. When I was small anything of that age in even half decent condition would be because it was very carefully looked after. Bodywork deterioration used to be a major problem and isn't really any more. The engine going is likely to be what spells the end of most current cars, a complex mechanical device with many moving parts that isn't always looked after very well, and even they often seem to last longer than they once did (most should go well over 100 000 miles). And electrics should last even longer; battery degradation doesn't look like it is as much of an issue as initially feared. If there's any depreciation built in it's most likely to be in the form of electronics and encouragement to scrap still functional vehicles. And an autonomous car that relies on communicating with others is at a bigger risk of obsolescence as standards change than one that's an entirely self-contained, independent vehicle. Unfortunately the vision of the future where we do something doesn't look very positive either, and whilst logically we're sometimes faced with having to pick the lesser evil it's not all that great when the best you can hope for is it happening after you're gone.

But since those vehicles would be getting used more (assuming there is a saving in the total number of vehicles - probably won't be as big as some think, since a large proportion are in use at rush hour) they'll just wear out quicker and need replacing quicker. Add in the journeys running without anyone in them and all you've done is reduced the useful lifetime mileage per vehicle. An all electric fleet will wear out more slowly than a conventional one but that's a change that's coming anyway, human drivers or not. Admittedly that assumes that current vehicles keep going until they're beyond reasonable economic repair and makes no allowance for losses due to accident damage and any change in the amount of that there'll be (a small proportion of vehicles but a less insignificant proportion of cost due to insurance).

A cost that'll have to be borne however we travel. The car that gets used twice as much wears out twice as quickly; once you get past the big drop from driving the car off the forecourt how much of the depreciation is from time unused rather than mileage used? Particularly now that they don't turn into a heap of rust after the first passing shower.

I suspect it'll probably end up with the usual bickering; one person's utopia is another person's dystopia, and the usual insistences that any preference for anything past is rose-tinted specs and a bunch of explanations about how things were and how they are, operating under the assumption that someone couldn't possibly have a markedly different preference in reality and it must be down to ignorance. Personally speaking whilst even if I wasn't so depressed wouldn't expect my utopia to ever become a reality, but would regard it as a guide to the perception of change - does it nudge the world towards or away from it?

Maybe thought "not on the track so clear"?

I know all about laziness - suffer from plenty of it myself! But I'd be very disappointed with myself if I resorted to getting machines to do things I can easily do myself, like washing the dishes. I have limits of course, I like to keep a reasonable level of hands on but there are pressures from the other direction, which is why I have a washing machine for the clothes (but prefer the extra effort of hanging them up to dry than chucking them in the dryer).

I've done enough grumbling about it over the years that I'd have though you'd all be sick of hearing of it! Ideally - and without any regard towards the practicality of it - a less developed, less technology dependent, quieter, slower-paced world with human interaction being a fundamental part of everything we do (Covid pandemic excepted!) More hands on without all the rough edges being smoothed away. I place a massive amount of importance on the aesthetics of my surroundings - that's hugely important to my mental health. That doesn't necessarily mean pretty and twee everywhere, but an utterly 100% individual subjective view of what and what doesn't feel right. Changes there depress me immensely, and are possibly the main reason for my complete loss of hope. Obviously I can't expect to be the sole arbiter of what goes and what doesn't but that doesn't change the effect. When the world was more like that there were of course a lot of serious downsides that I'm glad lie in the past; I'd hope for a world that uses its advances primarily for keeping them there (and for entertainment); being told I've got to have a machine do things I can do I find pretty insulting.

I'm speculating here (always something frowned on on here I know!), but as time goes by and more measures and changes are made most of the more obvious causes of an accident (serious or otherwise) have been reduced. So when they do happen there's a good chance of it either being due to something non-obvious, or obvious but with a big question of "how has that managed to happen these days?" In either case it'll take more effort to get to the bottom of it.

Hope's something I lost a long time ago although I also suspect that we'd be hoping for rather different worlds anyway. Car ownership is often criticised as a consumerist show-off thing, and whilst it is for some I do believe that for most a car is just a tool, and like most tools that are regularly used it's generally far more practical to have your own. If anything tinkering around with car ownership is the wrong thing - it's the practical necessity of needing car use that's the real issue there; many of the claims about self-driving cars just appear to be trying to come up with ways of keeping up the current trajectory of increasing car dependence rather than look at the underlying causes.

Another unpleasant vision of the future IMO!

Enough of a difference (and bear in mind the roads still aren't going to be free of pedestrians and cyclists), especially considering the additional driving empty mileage? My suspicion (and that's all it is I admit) is that road capacity issues are primarily caused by the capacity through pinch points, e.g. junctions and vehicle speed differentials, e.g. HGVs and cars.

They'll all have to park up somewhere when not in use, not many people travelling at 3 am.

Just as many roads needed if there's still just as much travel, even if it's not in peoples' own private cars. In fact if you've got cars driving around empty to pick people up you've increased the amount of travel. Increasing road use is down to increasing population and more centralisation. Different models of car ownership will be tinkering at the edges, at most. It may result in fewer cars in total (somewhat questionable, a large proportion of travel needs to be at the same time) but if they're doing more miles then they won't last as long so more will need building. Electric cars are more likely to reduce that demand though, particularly if batteries last long enough - historically it's the bodywork that spelled the end of a car, these days it's the engine, so electric should be the next step along to longevity.