Episode 156: The Ultimate Urban Circulator

Is everyone ready to go?

Does everyone have

the fucking button, Dick?

Yeah, I know I hit the button, but that doesn't mean that like Devin couldn't edit out the first part of the podcast before everything is okay.

Anyway,

Marcus, is your recording going?

Uh, yes, I have Audacity on.

Okay, okay, in that case, yeah, we're all good.

Uh, hello, welcome to Will Air's Your Problem.

It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides.

I'm Justin Rozniak.

I'm the person who's talking right now.

My pronouns are he and him.

Okay, go.

He a him.

He and him.

Yeah.

I'm November Kelly.

I'm the person who's talking now.

My pronouns are she and her.

Yay, Liam.

Yay, Liam.

Hi, I'm Liam McAnderson.

I'm the person who's talking right now.

My pronouns are he, him.

And we have a guest.

Yes.

Hello.

Longtime listener, first-time caller.

I'm Marcus.

My pronouns are he, him.

I think that's illegal now where I come from, but you know,

we'll get into that.

We will.

And we're looking at a box with some wheels.

Oh, she's beautiful.

Yeah.

Little sort of gloss enclosed toaster.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I actually quite like the way this looks.

I'll check my notes here.

The future of transportation.

They're so confident of that that they made a whole video.

to tell you that it is the future of transportation.

And you can tell because all the people whose salaries depend on that being the future of transportation say that it is the future of transportation.

If it's not the future, why does it have all the cool like circuits on the side?

Yeah, it's got hexagons.

That means future.

Well, I mean, I guess this one can't be the future because the company that made it is bankrupt.

Oh, well, that was

the beginning of

where your problems are.

Yeah.

Getting hauntology.

This is a lost future.

Yeah.

So I feel like you need like some kind of voice filter and like some John Cena intro music to say this.

But today, we're going to talk about Jacksonville's ultimate urban circulator.

Whoa.

Are you blown away, Nova?

Are you fucking blown away by this?

No one in Britain is naming anything as cool as the ultimate urban circulator, let alone designing a little like molecular logo for it.

No, actually, the molecular logo is what you're supposed to like call it, the U2C.

Oh, that's way less alleged.

Do you get it?

That sucks.

That's not as good.

I think they

only need to lean into.

Yeah.

I would sooner say that I was getting the circulator, you know?

The cirque.

Yeah, I know.

I know this is about engineering disasters, and I will say this is, I guess, an impending disaster technically.

Oh, we do those.

We count those.

We do count those.

Great, great.

It's too far in motion to prevent at this point.

This is like an imminent train wreck.

And we'll get into how.

We will.

Like the last one we did that was an impending train wreck turned out not to train wreck on time because we said that the the Mexican Navy was going to kill Amlo and then they didn't kill Amlo.

They did not kill Amlo.

Wait a hold of your end of the bargain, stick heads.

Yeah.

But

before we talk about the ultimate urban circulator,

we have to do

before you do that.

Before you do that, can you do Sunday, Sunday, Sunday in that voice?

Sunday, Sunday, Sunday in downtown Jacksonville, the ultimate urban circulator.

Beautiful.

Thank you.

Very appreciate it.

Ultimate news.

Well, you'll never believe it, but the country has once again suffered a tremendous loss.

Yes, it's very sad pictured here.

The country is in mourning as O.J.

Simpson's funeral train winds its way to our nation's capital.

So the thing is, when O.J.

Simpson died, you reacted in the exact same way as when you found out that Ruth Bader-Ginsburg died.

We just weren't recording at the time.

We were not recording now.

There's no record of that, you know?

No,

you can pretend.

You can open up the 9-11 episode and play that bit right now on your own YouTube.

No one has to edit it in or anything.

We don't need that.

Anyway, yeah, OJ Simpson, famously

comic actor,

football player.

Yes.

Not murderer, legally.

Legally not a murderer.

Yes.

Acquitted of murder.

Yes.

Only guy to ever rush for 2,000 yards in a 14-game season.

There's something to be said for that.

He was really funny.

I've seen the naked gun movies.

He was really good in them.

Like,

people critique those performances, but I thought they were good.

And yeah, also did not murder his

girlfriend's ex-wife.

Ex-wife.

This is the issue with OJ: is that, you know, I'm old enough to know

who he was, but young enough to not remember.

the fiasco over the trial.

He was, he was, yeah, I was,

trial was like 94, 95, and then the civil lawsuit was like 97.

Yeah,

my favorite tweet that I saw about this was just a guy sort of like faux realization going, he wasn't really trying to get that glove on.

No, I will say that uh, O.J.

Simpson was an absolute bastard in his profession in his personal life, and I don't

have anything positive to say about uh perpetuators of abuse,

and that he'll pay for it at the gates of hell.

And uh, you know who his lawyer was?

Uh, was

robert kardashian um patriarch of the kardashians so wow yeah a real legacy there you know from from like uh doing some of the scummiest legal work going in los angeles county which is saying something which is saying something too incredible to see the class structure uh reproduce itself you know

yeah you know the the armenian ssr tried to like uplift these people but what can you do?

What are Alan Dershowitz's kids doing?

Does he have kids?

He might not.

Hold on.

We're going to look into this very strongly right now.

And by that, I mean I'm going to Google it on my phone.

You can't Google Alan Dershowitz's kids without getting some of the things that he's said.

He's three kids.

He has three kids.

One is a film producer, one is a professional actor, and one is a lawyer for the WNBA.

So

good for all of them, I guess.

Other than being Dersh, yeah.

Yeah, I guess so.

And I mean, you can't choose your parents, right?

It's like, what a dersh bag.

You go back for the holidays and you're like, so dad, what's up with you?

And he's like, I am

railing against everyone on Martha's Vineyard who is canceling me merely for the crime of saying many, many heinous things.

And it's like, that's cool.

I did like a play or whatever.

I did some like WNBA litigation,

you know?

And he's like, let me tell you why I don't believe pedophilia is a mortal sin.

Now,

get the charts.

But yeah, no, I mean

the OJ trial and then like civil lawsuit and also the white Bronco chase and things such as this.

Many of our listeners will be too young to know what any of these are.

And maybe I don't want to explain them, you know?

Yeah.

Because maybe shut up, you know?

Yes.

The glove didn't fit, so they did acquit.

I mean,

what else can you say?

Just one of the like all-time pieces of like jury shenanigans.

To be like, well, this glove is like slightly too small for his hand.

And it was found at the scene of the murder.

Therefore, he didn't commit the murder because he can't fit into this glove.

It's beautiful.

Isn't the real story of just that the LAPD was too racist to prosecute the crime?

Yeah, that was it.

Yeah.

And also, the sort of like

thing at issue was:

is being insanely rich and famous enough to get you off a murder charge, even if you're black in an insanely racist justice system?

And the answer is, yeah, at that point.

Apparently, yeah.

Well, RIP to the juice.

In other news.

Also, his victims and

many people.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Which is probably all

affected by him.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Some more stuff came out since he died where it's like, yeah, fucking

Rob Kardashian showed up at UCLA with like a suitcase full of money to make some allegations go away kind of thing.

Yeah, I saw that too.

Yeah.

We should.

He's dead, right, Robert.

not Rob Kardashian.

The dad.

Yeah.

He's the dad not Rob?

No, the kid's also Robert, dude.

It's real fucking weird.

But the dad.

The dad.

That was weird as giving all those dead daughters K-names.

That's...

And yeah, I just...

Ugh, Courtney, Kim, Chloe, Rob.

I also can't type, so I fat-fingered this and I

typed in Dober Kardashian.

Yeah, he is dead.

He has been dead for like 21 years at this point.

So I think we can

safely

defame Robert Kardashian, yes.

It's the United States.

You can defame anyone.

Yeah, that's.

I'm Jake Rowling, for instance.

Unlike me, J.K.

Rowling is a

pet.

She's a Holocaust denier.

Whatever.

Wait a little bit for that one to come out.

Keep it in.

Keep it in.

I don't give a shit.

I'm an American, baby.

This is the

dig about this company.

This company is registered in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

I have to share a country with that woman, please.

I'm begging you.

Stick to bleeps.

Oh, God.

So,

in other news,

Israel blew up one of Iran's embassies or consulates, and Iran has now reversed the usual bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran into Israel being bomb-bomb bomb bombed by Iran.

Yeah.

Not very effectively, but that's just kind of the point.

That's only like a 2% effective rate or something.

Well, they didn't kill anyone,

which if you look at that as being on purpose, is pretty impressive.

And the whole kind of run-up to this, which was like very heavily trailed, it was like very heavily warned.

Everybody knew what was going to happen well in advance.

And the whole time

the Israelis were like preparing for it because the Iranians were like going to everyone involved and being like, we really don't want to have to do this.

Don't make us do this again for real.

You have put us in this position where we're like, we are obliged to lightly bomb you, you know, just fucking draw a line under it.

And of course the Israelis don't want to draw a line under it and they want to like fucking bomb Tehran about it.

No, they want to nuke Tehran.

They do.

And as we know, whatever, what is it, the Samson protocol?

Which is just the...

Yeah, the Samson option.

That's not a...

That's a rumor, though.

Yeah, although...

Rumor that's real, but a rumor.

I feel like with nuclear ambiguity, all you're ever going to get is a rumors that and like Mordecai Venunu, you know?

But yeah,

essentially, Iran and the U.S.

being the adults in the room

have put Netanyahu at the kids' table.

Unfortunately, he is at the kids' table with his nuclear weapons,

and he doesn't like it very much.

Last thing you want is someone at the kids' table with nuclear weapons.

This is a sure way.

I'm going to make Thanksgiving go so poorly.

Yeah, this is going to turn the 4th of July into the 4th of shit for sure.

Do you think we're going to make it to the 4th of July?

Interesting.

Yeah, so no one knows what the Israeli retaliation is going to be.

The U.S.

and its allies are trying to lean on the Israelis to be

more sensible about this.

Fucking good luck with these assholes.

Right, they have,

it's irrelevant largely.

I mean, the other thing, too, is like, I'm really tired of Joe Biden doing the, like, leaking statements telling us how disappointment he is.

Yeah.

It's like, all right, man, what do you, what are you going to do about it?

And he's just like, nothing.

And it's like, okay, well, I'll just go fuck it.

It's a variation of that tweet, right?

Where it's like, but Biden is always like, I'd like to know who the president of Israel is so I could have a word with that guy.

I, I am just, I, I feel, I feel pretty confident here that probably nothing is going to happen.

But the issue is that I'm also consistently wrong about foreign policy all of the time.

Yeah.

I love you to death, but yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, that's no good.

Yeah, so we'll see.

In the meantime, what has actually functionally happened is that there's been like a very, very expensive firework show, as you've seen here, where Israel and the US and France, Britain, and Jordan, for some fucking reason, all sort of like shot down these like drones as they came in.

Which, cool you know clearly this was an attempt to be like we have satisfied our own like sort of constituency here please just like let it end there um and you know

we're gonna see how how this escalates probably

not well

is my opinion meanwhile the the genocide continues apace by the way oh yeah they're still doing that i've i've been surprised at seeing the death toll still hover around 30 000 it feels like they're just not able to count anymore.

That's literally it.

It's like at a certain point, like the sort of mechanisms for recording this stuff break down.

Yeah.

I mean, Biden's big thing was that he was able to increase the number of aid trucks and reopen the Arts crossing and stuff.

Yeah, exactly.

Right.

Wow.

That's, that's, that's nothing.

That's shitting in my hand.

And a lot of the stuff when it gets to the Israelis have to actually do it, it turns into, you know, let's not and say we did, right?

You know, we tell Biden that we're letting in X number of trucks and then the trucks go in half full or whatever.

It's just, it's breathtakingly cynical.

Um, but as it has been from the start, so you know, pleus sa change.

Um, you know, if you're hoping for any kind of like uh

like

outrage in a like genuine sense from Iran or from Hezbollah, well, no, they're like regional actors and they have the sort of commensurate

interests and alignments and sympathies.

But like,

yeah,

I think we're well and truly in the realm of like geopolitics.

And it turns out that geopolitics is something that sucks because it's about sort of like considering the big picture when the small picture is, you know, genocide.

Yes.

Surprised the trucks can get in at all.

There's no roads left.

Yeah, yeah.

Now that we're thoroughly bummed out.

Well, since we're thoroughly bummed out, I would call that a successful

section of the goddamn news.

Ultimate news.

Yes.

So, Jacksonville.

Hey, Marcus, are you still with us, bud?

I'm still.

I just didn't have much to add.

I'm so sorry that we like stunned you into silence with all of our horrible takes.

Yeah.

Can't be like that.

I've heard worse.

Marcus.

Tell us about Jacksonville.

It looks beautiful.

Yeah, I am stunned that you found such a good picture, especially your your recent one, because there's supposed to be like in every news thing about Jacksonville, there's like this big orange building in like the middle of this picture that got torn down like four years ago and like no one's taken new pictures.

So they do that with B-roll of Philly of the Sixers, whether we're on national television, they'll show B-roll from like 2017.

It's like, we have a bunch of new buildings.

I think this is a funny insult to any city to be like, yeah, something happened in Berlin today.

Here's a like, his file footage, and it still has the wall in it, you know?

Yeah.

But I mean, on the bright side, you guys have more buildings than you had before.

That's crazy.

Yeah.

But let's see.

This is the temp largest city in the country.

I don't know if you want to believe that, but you're supposed to.

It's home to big corporations like

CSX.

Yeah, America's biggest.

They killed O.J.

Simpson.

Yeah.

We forgot to mention

they did derail the Trap of Canada train two days ago.

Yeah,

this is the joke that we were going to do in the news that we forgot to do.

The big train full of oranges.

Well,

great work.

But yeah, their building is actually to the left of this picture, so you can't see it.

But there's also a big fountain there.

That spot where that building used to be, they were going to build a big skyscraper.

And that just got canceled like a couple weeks ago because money.

And to the right, we have our football stadium, stadium, which you know, you also can't see in this picture.

Which actually leads me to the next slide.

I've been there, I went to see the Gator Ball there.

It was nice, it was a nice stadium.

What is a Gator ball?

It was one of the annual college football bowl games.

It was between uh Notre Dame and uh South Carolina, and the hated and feared fighting Irish uh beat my beloved game cocks.

Let's see what else is going on.

Well, speaking of that,

that's all I got.

That's right.

Till we die.

But you have the upper right there.

Yeah, we have an NFL team that we're about to spend a billion dollars probably to not lose.

Oh, Jesus.

Nice.

Because Florida, and like a lot of other states, like the state doesn't give any money to football stadiums, which some would argue is a good thing.

But it also means that

now a city has to find a billion dollars for football.

Yeah,

who your football team is shaking down does not really like

make as much odds when everyone is as obsessed with football.

Right.

It's called the National Football League.

The government should just fund it.

Nationalized Football League.

Yeah, the Nationalized Football League.

Yeah, some other contextual things here.

So like I mentioned on the left side, you have

the biggest city in the world because in the 60s, at a time where cities were already starting to kind of crap themselves,

they had the bright idea of like, let's just make the city and the county like one thing.

Right.

They call it consolidation.

So the picture down there is the mayor hanging with whoever that lady is with their new city limit sign.

Pretty hot, but like probably statistically insanely racist.

So yeah.

Florida in 1968.

I mean, I don't know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then on the bottom right, you know, we like trans here, I think.

So that is what used to be, and could be again, could be again, the train station, which is, which was at one point the largest train station like south of Washington, D.C.

It used to be like, that's how you would get to Miami when you decide to go on vacation there.

Nice building.

And you pass through here on your way to a sort of like billionaire's doomed Florida Keys Railroad.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Well, this was the northern.

It was like a 20-year period where like you could actually do that.

Yeah.

This was the northern terminus of the Florida East Coast Railroad.

Correct.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is this entire main hall is still here.

The platforms are all gone.

There's a convention center there now.

Yeah.

Well, it might not be there forever because they're talking about moving it, but Jesus Christ, Jackson.

Classic Jackson old fashioned can't like really figure out where to move it.

So they're still talking about that.

But they only have the 826 and a half square miles to decide.

Yeah.

But you only want to put it in like the couple square miles that are like downtown generally.

Of course, like which spot of that do you want to pick?

Is like it's been a thing.

It's just really funny to kind of on a legislative basis be like the city is extremely large and then not do urban sprawl about it.

Oh, no, no, no, there's urban sprawl.

Don't worry about that.

There's plenty of urban sprawl.

We'll get there.

It's like

a huge per acre

in some parts, yeah.

Yeah.

But to talk talk about the 60s, we can go to the next slide, actually.

Because there's this glorious, this glorious moment, this glorious era of the great society, right?

When Lyndon Johnson is president, it's this whole thing that we're going to build high-speed rail on the top right, and we're going to do like rapid transit instead of commuter rail, and we're going to have these like cool low-floor buses with too many wheels.

I have no fucking clue what this is.

Everything is going to be cool.

Everything is going to look like that kind of like puppet-based animation, like Thunderbirds or Captain Scarlett.

And do not ever ask me about Vietnam.

Yeah, there's nothing happening over there.

Don't talk about that.

Don't worry.

Your train's going too fast to see it.

You can get your beautiful train from your like house to your office at Dow Chemical, where you like invent napalm too.

And then don't worry about what we do with it.

Yeah.

This is called the Great Society, right?

Yeah, and connecting all of it is on the bottom right, the people mover, right?

You're going to be able to like hop on this little thing and just ride it around, kind of.

It's the way of the future.

Way of the future.

It's cool.

Way of the future.

So, you know, we built some of those on the next slide.

Oh, yeah.

Right.

You know, we do the Washington Metro.

We build.

a BART in San Francisco.

I thought it was quite cute how American great society, like transit associations are like, like, and just often given like first names.

Barton Martyr, you know?

Martyr.

Atlanta getting the consolation prize because Seattle couldn't like figure it out.

We love that.

But yeah, so we build a lot of this big transit in a lot of these cities.

And kind of the goal then is like...

Because these metros are doing like the whole commuter rail element, essentially, right?

They're longer, they go faster.

uh the idea then is that once you're in like the downtown you probably need like a smaller thing right to get some of that that's richard nixon i didn't even notice that yeah he's just right there yeah

encrypted

was there a single normal looking photo ever taken of this man in his life no i'm not sure that's possible

yeah so these these great society metros these are

some people call them rapid rail because unlike the traditional subways they extend way deep into the suburbs.

A lot of them are sort of semi-automated or fully automated.

Well, most of them are semi-I'll get to that in the next slide.

And they are, you know, they're very different from the traditional subways just in sort of how they operate, how fast they go, all this sort of stuff.

Which leads us to, I think, something which may be useful to discuss before we get to the second component of the system,

which is train automation.

I've heard of this yes so there's something called ato automatic train operation i want to make a distinction here between the word autonomous and then automatic right

so like autonomous has sort of come to mean every type of system that's like automatic in any way but it's kind of different right there's stages right

You know, an autonomous vehicle, there's this big beefy computer.

It takes in lots of information from like cameras and radars, does a whole bunch of machine learning bullshit.

They actually have a cool word for it.

Sensor fusion.

That's not real.

Sexy.

Yeah.

So

you get your computer doing this sexy sensor fusion, and then it like drives you into a lake or whatever.

Yes, it crashes directly into an ambulance.

Yeah.

And maybe drags you down the sidewalk a little bit.

That's besides the point.

This is also true.

Yes.

When we talk about automatic train operation, trains are not autonomous in that way.

They're automatic, you know, like a toaster.

Sure.

You don't need the big beefy computer because it's a controlled environment.

or should yes you know they don't they don't have autonomy they don't make decisions they don't need ai the computer systems are pretty limited they require limited input from things like electrical contacts to function it's it's why the whole like autonomous car thing is fucked right is because there's too much shit going on on a road whereas a nice like separate like railway, you can you can do whatever you want there.

Right of way, yes.

Yeah.

One thing that's interesting, which I don't think we have in the slides, maybe should have put it that in there, is the automatic highway system of like the 90s, which did most of the stuff that autonomous vehicle manufacturers are still trying to figure out

with like Buicks.

Incredible.

Yeah, but sticking nails into the roads is just too hard.

That's very, very innovative.

Very difficult to do one nail every foot or so.

So you got to want flexibility.

So, yeah, the thing about automatic train operation is these trains cannot see a child and then like Tesla full self-driving.

make an informed and rational decision resulting from thousands of machine years of neural network input to then slam on the accelerator to hit the child as hard as possible.

Because automatic trains don't process information like that.

Yeah, if there's a kid on the railway, the kid gets like mulched because it doesn't be on the railway.

Yeah,

we'll get to that in a second.

That is a large part of what makes, especially the very high levels of automation function are like sealed corridors where a lot of these emergencies theoretically cannot happen or at least in order for them to be happen in order for them to happen the person has to really want it to happen

yeah for sure yeah so you know the other thing is like okay there's no like machine learning involved or neural networks involved here so the software is written by a person so we can sort of assign blame to that guy yeah

also also they work in the rain um

and at night too which is pretty cool yeah and and and they work pretty consistently because you can run a whole system like this, like the DLR, and the stations don't change distance.

The traffic,

it's like very, very controllable.

Yeah, it's all fixed, kind of permanent infrastructure that's really meant to kind of like be there once you build it.

Yeah, so ATO automatic train operation is a 70-year-old technology.

Really?

This is an MP51, I believe.

It ran on the Paris Metro in 1952 to 1956 as a testbed for what we'd now call a grade of automation 2 system.

Raising hand here.

Why does that have rubber tires?

This is a rubber-tired metro.

Yeah, Paris had a few rubber-tired lines pretty early on.

This is because of Michelin having outsized influence.

on everything about

France.

Incredible.

It's also why Montreal has a rubber-tired metro.

Yep, Michelin really tried to promote this system, which isn't actually that much better.

But they still use rubber-tired metros, and there's still a few of them around.

Yeah, so there's a bunch of rubber-tire systems, but that was the Bud Company also tried them for a while, and they would try to run

poorly.

That's one thing that's really great to have on a train is blowouts.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's why they have a redundant steel wheel behind the rubber tire, actually.

That and for going through switches.

Rubber-tired Metro does have just a big steel wheel in addition to the rubber tire.

There's a whole bunch.

That's another episode.

I got the teacher off onto a tangent.

So

we forget that we have homework.

So we'll look at the several grades of operation of metro systems in particular.

A few of them do apply to like mainline trains.

The first one is grade of operation zero.

That is no automation whatsoever.

Just a guy.

Just a guy in there.

Yeah, it's just a guy.

The driver drives the train.

The most extreme circumstance can be something like down here is the third Avenue L in New York City.

They did not even have signaling systems.

It was all done by line of sight, right?

The idea is,

look, just don't hit the guy in front of you.

Yeah, try not to.

That's the rule.

That's the entire rule.

And

one of the things about it is you could achieve very high train frequency that way.

They were trains every like 45 seconds on some of the busier Manhattan L's.

I mean, as long as no one screws it up, then it was pretty cool.

This is entirely based on don't fuck it up.

And if you have on-street light rail,

if you have on-street light rail without dedicated lanes they still operate like this i mean it's the same as driving a car at that point yeah

um great operation great of automation one this is

most mainline trains um you have manual operation with some kind of automatic train protection system which prevents a lot of kinds of engineer or driver error right

you ran a red signal because you're asleep or dead therefore power is off.

Power goes off, the brakes go on.

Yeah, that's automatic train stop, and we've had that since the 1890s.

1890s train technology.

That was based on like the train physically hit a board that then broke a bulb in the train line air system, which then dumped the brakes instantly.

Incredible.

Yeah.

So yeah, automatic train stop.

You pass a signal that's a red.

The train automatically applies emergency brakes.

It stops itself.

Everyone is safe.

Then you get fired.

Or possibly you are already dead, in which case they like pull you out of the cab and then you get fired.

Yeah, then you get fired and your family doesn't receive benefits.

These can also be more complex systems like the advanced civil of speed enforcement system that Amtrak has or the European train control system that'll display information about the speed limits, oncoming signals.

The train will automatically break if a speed limit is exceeded.

You still are performing station stops manually, though.

Yeah, these are fun as hell to drive in any train simulator.

Train simulators are so fucking bad right now.

It's insane.

Go off.

Go off, get that place.

Well, that could be a bonus episode, I think.

Yeah, and my contribution to it is like, I'm having fun.

I don't know enough to know why this is wrong.

I'm just enjoying myself.

I just don't understand why if I run a red signal,

the simulation immediately shuts down and tells me it's for my own sake.

That's the guy with the Makarov that they hired to shoot you in the back of the head if you pass a signal at danger.

Do your Rohorans not have this?

I believe that's Great of Automation Negative One.

Yeah.

Yes, driver and political officer.

Yeah.

So then, so that probably had that in the Soviet Union.

Oh, God, I'd love to be a trained political officer.

The train commissar.

Listen, I don't need to know how to drive the train.

I just need to know that you are like following the correct mass line of Marxism-Leninism.

Properly follow proper protocol.

Great of Automation 2 takes this a step further.

This is the Washington Metro here.

This is one of the 1,000 series cars.

They're from like way back in the 60s, I want to say.

More like 70s.

70s.

Yeah, they're old.

They're the oldest cars.

Well, they're all scrapped now, except for two that are a bar.

But essentially, the engineer, at this point, if you're driving the train to go from one station to the other.

through a series of like electrical equipment on the side of the track that tells the train what to do, you may only have to push a button and the train leaves the station and goes to the next one.

Hell yeah.

It's a jobs program.

Perfect.

Exactly.

So

you're still responsible for watching for obstacles on the track, for opening and closing the doors, making station announcements, manually driving the train if necessary, handling various emergencies.

This is the most common grade of automation on automated metros.

And this 70-year-old Paris Metro car can do all of that.

Then you go up to Grade Automation 3.

This is the Docklands Light Railway.

The DLR has no driver's cab, but there's still an attendant on the train to operate the doors, to drive the trains in emergencies.

In this case, they also check tickets.

Yeah.

You've got a button to stop at an emergency anyway for passengers.

So whatever, you know?

Yeah.

If he climbs up, like shimmies up onto the DLR.

and decides to play chicken with the monorail.

Don't do that.

You can like hit the thing.

Yeah, you hit the button.

You know, know,

someone sees a kid on the tracks.

You hit the button, it stops.

That's like

the main safety system there.

Then you go up to Grade of Automation 4.

This is line C on Rome's Metro.

And this involves substantially more infrastructure.

It has a sealed corridor with extra safety systems like sturdy fencing.

It has platform screen doors so people can't fall on the tracks.

Yeah.

Because of that, because at this point, the possibility of most conventional emergencies becomes so remote, Grain of Automation Ford trains can operate with no staff whatsoever on board.

These are very, very.

How likely is that?

How likely is what?

To run it with absolutely no one on board.

Well, so they're very expensive to build, but they do exist.

Okay, that was my question.

Yeah, so this is sort of...

This is sort of...

These are becoming increasingly common.

They're very expensive to build, but very cheap to operate because

no people, right?

I mean, Glasgow Subway is in this situation now where they have trains that could do this

and they want to kick out all the stuff and just run them driverless.

And they can't yet, but they hope to.

I mean, I think Glasgow has a situation where the stations are so old and so narrow,

you probably could not do that without substantially reconstructing the system.

Oh, they've been trying.

Tiny, tiny, narrow platforms are going to have like full platform screen doors on them and everything.

That's just going to be like going into a sardine can.

Yep.

I mean, listen, I would rather have the sardine can than the current thing of like stand on this one girder like you're sort of like a you know uh guy building a skyscraper in 1920s New York City.

This to this side of you, death.

To this side of you, death.

No, give me the platform screen doors.

Give me the screen doors.

Yeah, the screen doors are a good idea.

I mean, if you see some of the older subway infrastructure, this is like a really good idea just in general sometimes they're hard to install they're certainly expensive to install but they do stop lawsuits yeah as well as stop crazy people from shoving you onto the tracks because they don't like your face exactly

um

so yeah i guess the point here is we have had this technology to automate trains for a very very long time

The very modern systems, again, they're getting more sophisticated and they're getting more expensive, but they are getting much safer and more reliable.

These things don't, you know, these, these, but it's just that this is such an old and refined technology.

You know, the oldest trains that were automated, like this MP51 here, you know, this was developed when vacuum tubes were king.

And, you know, there were, they didn't even have transistors yet.

Some of them ran on relays, right?

Oh, yeah.

You know, you don't need extremely high-tech systems to automate

metro systems, at least.

There's, you know, you could run this off of a big sort of drum of punched paper, like a player piano.

Exactly.

You know, and right.

Because, like, a lot of the work here ends up being done by the fact that, like, yeah, it's already grade separated.

You're usually going to have platform screen doors anyway.

You know, so there's like, there's nowhere for people to like run and cause problems.

Yeah.

And then, and then, and so they do rely on infrastructure and technology.

They also rely on like consistent scheduling, you know, railway design.

That's why automating mainline trains is much more difficult.

Um, they've tried to, uh, they sort of work on sealed corridors, like dedicated high-speed lines.

Um, but on like mainline trains, none of this technology works very well because there's just too many things, too many variables to deal with.

Yeah, too much weird shit.

It could throw a bunch of weird signals at you, could throw like signaling forwards at you.

There could be a bunch of like railway children from the film, The Railway Children on the Railway.

Yeah, there's uh situations like uh in the United states you can't use automatic train stop in a lot of places because uh big-ass freight train if it applies the emergency brakes you're going to cause the derailment you tried to prevent um sure so so anyway women like tied to train tracks you know like gotta watch out for that man tweaking his uh his mustache yeah slightly yeah yeah um

that would be uh what's his name snidely whiplash snidely whiplash is that the guy that's the guy from Wacky Races?

Yeah.

Oh, I was thinking Dick Dastardly for some reason.

Oh, maybe you're right.

Yeah, I think so.

Dick Dastardly's from Wacky Races.

Yeah, who is it?

Whatever.

Dick Dastardly sounds like he probably had a previous career in that before he got into motorsport.

I wonder where that came from as a like trope, aside from anything else.

Like,

do you think it was originally serious?

Like, originally, like, a horror thing?

Like, entirely possible because it would have been like silent films and early.

Yeah, dude, like, 1880s saw to you and be like, you know,

but by being like habitually late, in many ways, you have like run people over with a train every day.

Uh, so now you're going to find out what it's like to like get run over by a train.

I assume that's how the saw movies go.

I haven't seen one.

I want to play a game,

but I don't know how you just wake up in like a dirty bathroom that has train tracks in in it.

I don't think that'll work.

Maybe in like the middle of the tunnel somehow.

Yeah, but the train's going to come like every four minutes.

You have not a lot of time to set this up.

I was going to say, yeah, you've got to be like pretty hot on the like tying women to stuff front to be able to get that done without getting hit by a train yourself.

You got to go real quick.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's like you have 40 minutes to solve the puzzle and then the train that's coming is the cardinal and it's delayed hours.

Woman has long since freed herself and it's just like, all right, I'm going to go.

I'm going to smoke.

Do you want anything like this?

Precision scheduled railroading has in many ways been the death knoll of

the tying women to railroads.

Our finest heritage.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And they say America has no culture.

And in the interest of time, I would speak about attempts to automate freight trains and how they're extremely stupid, but that could be another episode.

Automation of trains in certain circumstances is very, very, very effective.

One of which is, of course, the people movers.

Controlled environment, grade separation, regular schedule,

nothing unexpected, no railway children, no women tied to things.

No railway children for the movie Railway Children?

Getting tied to a monorail in Jacksonville.

Oh,

it's not a monorail yet in this picture.

Just being tied to a monorail rail and being held captive by a man who keeps insisting that Trevor Lawrence is the future.

Yeah, I think the long story short about the Great Society people movers were they were a great idea that they fucked up unimaginably badly.

That tracks.

The Lyndon B.

Johnson story.

Yeah, I mean, in a nutshell, yeah.

You end up with this this whole position where everyone and their mother kind of initially wanted a people mover.

And then by the time like the USDOT actually gets around to saying, okay, we'll pay for your people mover, a lot of those cities have already backed out.

In some cases, it was like they decided they didn't want to pay a local share or that like they couldn't really find a way to make it work in their downtown.

So in the end, you only get really just these free.

You get Jacksonville in the top left, where you can see that old train station back there you get detroit with their like weird loop uh that was supposed to like connect to like a big rapid transit system that got like canceled and then you have miami which is like the one success story of this whole thing that worked because right the whole the whole system is premised on like um you take the high-speed, the rapid rail subway system from your suburban house into downtown.

There's a limited number of stations, but then you're going to be able to get on a people mover, and that's just going to bring you directly to whatever the hell building you live in or you work in, where you design

agent orange, but oranger.

Yeah, like sort of agent, fuck.

What's the I was trying to think of like an orange monster and I couldn't think of anything.

So, oh, it's gritty.

Yes.

But yeah, sending gritty to Vietnam.

There's an idea.

But yeah, everyone kind of realizes at some point, like, oh, wait, you know, we can't build the rapid transit system.

So especially in like Jacksonville and Detroit, you get the like last minute idea that maybe instead of trying to just, you know, build a rapid transit system, you're going to have people essentially drive like 90% of the way to work.

and then park and then get on the people mover for the last like half mile to your dow chemical office.

I mean, if nothing else, it puts the giant parking lots slightly out of downtown.

It could do that.

It could.

It could if you actually like didn't build those parking lots.

But, well, you can see them.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And especially in Jacksonville, you get this like weird last minute like decision to, because they just built that, turned the train station into a convention center.

And they didn't build any hotels next to the convention center.

So the idea was, okay, let's put one station there and then let's make it go like half a mile to where the hotels are downtown, like in the center of downtown.

And that will make people use it, right?

It did not.

It's sort of retroactively justifying the system somehow.

Essentially.

So that's how you end up with like the report in 1990, which is the year after the Jacksonville system opens, where they pretty much immediately say like, wow, this did not work.

You know, it gets like maybe a thousand riders a day.

It costs millions to run.

It's not a big enough system to really justify the cost of doing all of this automation, you know, of building all of this totally dedicated infrastructure.

So you get that line that the recommendation is that no funding be made available at the time.

Brutal.

It's already built at this point.

Well, the first like 0.7 miles, they originally wanted to build like several more miles of it, essentially,

to kind of go from like two different ends of downtown.

And they wanted to build like a north-south part.

So they had pretty like lofty plans.

But the Department of Transportation says like, we don't feel like this is a good investment.

And then Congress decides, nah, let's do it.

Send it to the rail experts, you know?

Right.

So the big like surface transportation funding bill of like 1991, Jacksonville gets this little earmark down at the bottom right there that says that, yeah, actually

the Secretary of Transportation has to negotiate a deal with the Transportation Authority to fund the next phases.

So that 1.8 mile extension.

Before we go to the next slide, I would like to point out another major problem with these systems, which is vendor lock-in, right?

All of these different people mover systems use entirely different guideways.

They use entirely different systems for traction.

The exception being in Detroit, where they at least use two steel rails like a normal person, although they use weird linear induction motors on the bottom.

So if for some reason you want to extend the line or you want new vehicles, you have to go back to to the same company that manufactured the system.

You're not getting competitive bids on any of this.

It's a beautiful piece of like diversity in

bidding.

Let a thousand people movers bloom.

Yes.

Yes.

Soon people will be building people mover systems in sheds.

You'll have your backyard furnace for casting people mover.

parts.

This just reinforces again my thing that like it's too much variety.

You know, just do there should be one train.

It should be called train.

It should be made by the train factory.

I've been saying train company.

Well, it doesn't help that like a big part of this was the people movers are supposed to be like this essentially like demonstration program.

So it's supposed to be like, hey, like, let's showcase like trying all these different options.

See which one works.

And the answer is none.

Well, you'll see when they built that 1.8 mile extension.

Oh, I'll feel foolish.

The guideway changed.

How did that happen?

Yeah.

So

before that, really quick, just kind of a general overview of like, what is the funny logo people here?

It's a really cool logo.

I've really,

it's really nice.

Some kid designed it, I think.

So you had like originally like this agency that got created by the state.

Their job was, hey, let's build highways.

So you see kind of in the top right there, that's them building, I believe that's I-95 there.

And then on the bottom is like also part of I-95.

You can see like the Florida East Coast Railways tracks, like just kind of squeeze through the middle there with some future great crossing accidents, I'm sure.

Yes.

And then in like 1971, so that's like after like 20 years or so, 15, 20 years,

all the like last big like local bus like private company goes bankrupt.

And so someone has the bright idea of, well, why don't we just make the highway agency do the transit too?

So they go from being

very roads guys, you know, buses run on roads, sensible.

Right.

So they make the expressway authority the transportation authority.

Oh, boy.

Oh.

And so that leads them.

Sorry.

So that's that's how it's gone in many states.

I mean, you know, a lot of places that still have a Department of Highways and nothing else.

Right.

So you end up with also this weird problem in the 90s then when they're trying to expand it, like you said.

And that one company, we can actually go to the next slide, right?

The one company, I just kind of like the vibes of these photos here.

Oh, yeah.

No, these are cool.

Right.

So that French company, Matra, that built like this original system

is running into kind of some trouble with like a system in Taiwan, I believe.

And so like they just kind of bail on doing the extension themselves.

Well, he's also using Mitchell and tires here.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure.

A kind of French Lyle Lanley figure.

They love finding new reasons for people to buy tires.

I mean,

yeah, I mean, they have that whole like restaurant guide off of that.

That's a scam to sell people tires when they drive to the restaurants.

It's all big Michelin.

That's not his name.

His name is Bibendem.

If you get a Michelin star, you should be obligated to sell tires at the restaurant.

Can you imagine?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Have you ever seen, you ever seen all your

fine French cuisine served in just a big tire?

Yeah, tire.

Yeah.

Have you ever seen the old Michelin ad where Bibendam, the Michelin guy, is like eating, like he's like toasting with a wine glass full of nails and shards of glass?

Sort of horrifying moment in marketing history, but the idea is that like because Michelin tires are like strong, they'll like just chew up nails, whatever, and like your like pussy woke tires, which won't, you know.

The old Michelin man is absolutely fucking terrifying.

Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, to be honest, the new Michelin man is pretty terrifying, but the old one was used to, yeah, no, horrifying.

I had a bowl of nails for breakfast without any milk.

Remember when the Michelin man was hard, yeah,

but yeah, uh, so the French actually kind of give up at this point, which means that they have to find someone to not only.

I heard you bite your tongue on that one.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

Oh, come on, man.

That's like, it's like one, it's the one bad thing about me.

It's my love for the French.

So they essentially have to look for someone else to like fix the existing part and then also expand to the new part, which leads them to Bombardier.

Oh no.

So if you actually want to go back one slide,

that actually leads them to build the monorail, like the literal monorail

that they go with.

It's cute.

Yeah.

It's supposed to like be able to be made longer.

And then Bombardier decides that like, nah, they're not building any more of these.

We're done with these French guys.

Give me a guy who speaks French way worse.

Yeah.

So rubber-tired Metro, just smoking corruption.

Metronom monorail.

So yeah, so they kind of spent essentially the rest of the 90s like converting the people mover into a monorail and then extending the monorail a few more stops.

So they end up at a point where they build like two and a half miles in total.

But this still kind of doesn't quite go to the places where stuff is happening because, like, at that point, like, Jacksonville's downtown is kind of not doing as much.

All the malls are being built, like, way out in the suburbs.

And so, you have like this whole like weird, like, decade and a half period of trying to make downtown Jacksonville, like, matter.

And none of it really comes to fruition, which leads us to really

the next slide.

We arrive in like the early 2010s at this point,

where the previous CEO gets like ousted for,

if I remember right, it was like a thing about like bus driver background checks.

Oh, good.

Oh, fun.

Oh, like going full Uber and just being like, nah, don't fucking worry about it.

I love the municipal scandal.

You know, like, that's the kind of level I want my scandal pitched at.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

So that guy gets like ousted.

And they look for a new guy.

And this is the guy, right?

I had someone who like works in the industry tell me like, this guy has has a really compelling like life story uh because like he started out like driving trains uh for the new york subway uh worked his way up a bit there then became like ceo of marta in atlanta at like 39

which you know doesn't happen often that hard uh and then blew the budget on photography

yeah uh and we'll get there But uh, so he runs that for like a couple years and then uh goes to run Marta or not Marta, Muni in San Francisco.

So many M's.

Runs Muni in San Francisco for another like five years

and then like gets not necessarily ousted, but like leaves.

But he's in like the sort of contrary of like 20 guys in the country who can like run one of these systems or are like believed to be able to run one of these systems, right?

Right.

So, you know, so in like 2012, like Jackson will think like, oh, wow, we got like a great deal.

We have like one of these really cool guys.

And obviously, he seems to think so with his, with his photos.

Yes.

So we need to get that like a menswear guy in here to like judge the suits.

But like

they're good photos.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's sort of inspirational staring into the distance.

Look, he's got that down pat.

Yeah.

I mean, even with the headline there that he's got his eyes set onto the future.

Okay.

Which I think really kind of sets the tone of where this is going.

So let's go to the next slide, slide, actually.

Yes, so it's 2015, and a couple problems have cropped up.

One of the whole issues with people movers is like a lot of that stuff's not really like super built to last, like technology-wise.

Well, by the time this, the stuff, like uh, you know, all the concrete crumbled, we were supposed to have invented Great Society 2, right?

So, yes,

what's funny is like

yeah, great, great society too.

Racism ended.

You can get to like your your job at Dow Chemical to the like second.

The Vietnamese are still getting napalmed.

We're doing super Vietnam to another planet.

We're doing like hell divers, but instead of super Earth, it's super Vietnam.

Yeah.

Yeah, but like this point, the concrete actually isn't doing too bad.

And that's especially a good thing because when you take the federal government's money for like one of these systems, or really really for any like transit like infrastructure

you have to like use it for a certain amount of time like it's it's lifespan essentially

you can't just like give up on it or else you have to give the feds their money back

none none of these people mover systems can be torn down without paying the federal government a lot of money that's fantastic

some of them are maybe starting to get old enough where like that might almost be the case but especially a decade ago in jacksonville like that wasn't true uh because the last like bits of the system had only been built in like 2000.

So you, you, you really kind of have to do something.

But your problem at that point is that stuff is starting to just like not work.

Like some of the monorail trains, like they're like the computers that operate them are just like giving up.

This was programmed by like one French-Canadian man who has long since retired.

Yes.

I think it's even worse because I think like that company was like an acquisition.

Bombardier acquired a company that actually made them.

And I don't know if they kept any of those guys.

Yeah, you know, by that point,

landing the Black Hawk next to the guy fly fishing, being like, We need you back for one last mission, one more job, kind of thing.

Please tell me what this comment means.

Calis Tabernacles,

so then that's kind of like why do the notes just say Algeria is French and always will be.

I don't.

Good sign, I'm sure.

So one of the problems you get up to with two at this point is that there are only kind of so many ways you can do something with this infrastructure.

So you got to like upgrade trains and try and figure out how to make it useful.

And so they try to go to the federal government in like 2013 to say like, hey, give us like a small grant to like extend it to this one neighborhood where stuff is like happening and also like upgrade the trains because they're like breaking down.

And the Obama administration says, nah, you're on your own.

Oh, cool.

Hope for change.

So, yeah, so it's that it's a discretionary grant.

I think a lot of the cities use that money for like streetcars and street improvements and stuff.

And they were only asking for like 20 million here, but they didn't get the money.

So too bad.

Seems like a pretty good deal, all things considered.

Well, I don't know.

Obama didn't think so.

It's It's not a that's not a huge amount of money for a short extension.

I mean, that is

if you're just if you're just going into like an extra neighborhood, 20 million.

I mean, think about the infill station they built on Washington Metro

a few years ago.

It was like $500 million.

So, Great Society 1, you commit like unimaginable war crimes in Vietnam, right?

You get trades that work, but you get a people mover, at least the people move around on time.

Great society too.

You commit unimaginable war crimes in Afghanistan, and then you don't get the people mover.

Yes.

It fucking sucks down here.

You just thrive to your job at Dow Chemical.

I want to give a quick shout out to Philly's finest ice bar, cheese steaks, and pizza in Jacksonville Beach, where my wife and I went.

And at one point, I walked in wearing a Hassan Reddick jersey.

What's up?

And the guy said, welcome to Mecca with his arms raised.

It was.

Hell yeah.

I love Jacksonville, man.

Yeah.

So, like, two years after that grant, they decided, decided, okay, we need to like, I guess, go bigger then because clearly a modest expansion won't like cut it.

So they launched this whole like modernization program where they spend like essentially a year like debating, you know, what should we do?

And so they decide like the mantra they come up with is like keep, modernize, expand.

Yeah.

I mean, this is.

This map is, I guess, from what my limited knowledge of Jacksonville does, this makes a lot of sense.

Most of it does, yeah.

Again, I don't know.

I've been to Jacksonville once in my life.

Extra bridge

is maybe asking for a lot.

Yeah, that's going to be difficult.

Yeah, okay.

Which they did cut because, like, you're not going to spend that money on a bridge, another bridge.

The operating pattern here, also, I don't understand at all.

It's a big thing.

I think the idea was supposed to be essentially like point-to-point almost more.

Oh, my God.

So you

know, push a button in the train to take you to a station.

Something like that.

Oh, boy.

Okay.

All right.

The trains.

Yeah.

Then you have to pick like a technology, right?

Because clearly the existing monorail won't work anymore.

So you need something else.

Oh, no.

And luckily.

I don't know what the next slide is.

No.

Luckily,

hold on.

Sorry, Margaret.

It just so happened, very luckily for them, right at the time that they were talking about this,

Bombardier, again,

it turns out, had created essentially a new version of the original technology, the original French stuff that was used.

They were first engineered at Monorail?

Well, the People Mover.

Yeah, the original People Mover.

It was like

weird rubber tire thing.

But now it could do Quebecois swears.

Yeah.

And they were actually like...

Yeah.

So they were actually at that time too, like under contract to build one at O'Hare.

Because O'Hare, it turns out, was one of the places that also built that original technology, and they needed an upgrade too.

So, it was like, you know, there was this perfect moment for like this synergy.

Oh, geez, I said synergy.

That's weird.

That's allowed.

Yeah.

So, there was this moment for like, hey, you know, these two systems kind of need new things at the same time and use kind of some more infrastructure.

So, you know, why don't we just do that?

But, but then, you know, there was a surprise.

Uh-oh.

I don't know if here's where you would put

something crashing through walls noises.

Terrifying noise.

Yeah, the Kool-Aid man comes through, but

he's the Lyft man.

The Kool-Aid man comes through like 15 minutes late.

Yeah.

And surge pricing.

Yeah.

So you get to like, I believe it's August 2016 at this point.

And like the co-founder of Lyft puts out this like huge manifesto that in a nutshell is basically like, guys, we figured it out.

Self-driving is real.

We did it.

It's real.

It's strong.

It's my friends.

No, you can't.

It's definitely happened.

No.

Yeah.

So, next slide, actually.

This is an incredible chart.

Would that it were so simple?

By 2025, private car ownership will all but end in major U.S.

cities.

Yeah, I'm sure we're still on schedule for that, right?

No, no.

Yeah,

I'm pretty sure it's like 2045 right now.

It depends how bad the Israeli retaliation to Iran gets, you know.

Every year, I feel like it's every year I feel like it's two years later than it is.

I'm pretty sure I'm in 2045 right now.

How old are you?

Actually, don't.

He's like aging in dog years.

Yeah.

He's a strange bird.

400 years old.

Yeah, so we essentially end up at this point where it's like, oh, well, yeah, autonomous vehicles are like here.

We sorted it out.

Basically, any like second now, we're going to start using them on streets, and it'll only get better from here.

It's gonna go great,

yeah.

And we're gonna have FSD, like full self-driving.

It's gonna be basically, yeah, we did it, we did it, chat.

Uh, and someone in charge of a transit agency who used to work in San Francisco, uh, I guess, really seemed to

dig it to buy it.

Oh, no, uh, which leads us to uh don't tell me that they at the farm on

this

for for those of you who are on audio only uh let me explain this chart yeah good thing

i'm gonna in uh 2017 we will mostly have or we will entirely have human ride share drivers but by the middle of 2017 we will start to see autonomous fixed route transit um which is going to peak in the sort of march of 2018 Yeah, will peak in March of 2018 when we invent autonomous vehicles that can go under 25 miles an hour and then gradually die off, but we'll still keep having human rides drivers because we can pay them so little.

And then we're going to have slow-speed autonomous vehicles are going to start taking up the majority of the share of all traffic on the road, I assume.

And then, of course, we'll have full autonomous driving starting sometime in 2020.

And then I guess this graph goes on forever until we fill the solar system entirely with cars.

Well, Elon Musk did send the one Tesla to space.

Yeah, that's a good start, actually.

That's one more car than was in space before, which is an infinity percent increase.

Unless you count the moon rover, which I guess is a car.

It's an electric car, too.

So

two EVs in space.

Well, we're not going to really have progressed as a civilization until we can get a good old-fashioned gas car into space, you know?

Rolling coal on Mars.

But yeah, so you have this, you know, really ambitious dream.

And clearly, right, this is the future of transportation.

But you have this kind of pesky problem now that you've already spent all these years and time and probably money on

moving towards planning to upgrade your monorail with like normal stuff that works.

So you need to fix that.

Yes.

So we go with this chart on the right where we come up with some criteria that you need for your new people mover system.

And of course,

the first thing about your people mover that's like almost the most important thing is that your people mover should definitely work at grade with intersections.

Oh my God.

Right.

Yeah, that definitely is

a feature of the technology I would like to have.

Right.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay.

You know what I mean?

And it's also.

It's actually building more like sort of grade separation, you know?

No, what if it worked at grade?

What if just like the wizard will do it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, the magic box will simply drive.

And so you also need operational flexibility.

When I hear flexibility in transit, make it more rigid.

Genuinely, though.

For once in my life, I am right about this.

Oh, well, too bad.

It has to be able to respond to changing demands.

Like, for example, obviously, a thing you want from a fixed transit system is that trains should just randomly connect to each other sometimes, right?

They couldn't figure it out with Skybus, and they can't figure it out now.

No, no, but here, all we have to do is call it platooning.

They did figure that out with the

they actually did figure that out with the automated highway system in the 90s, but that requires a small amount of infrastructure.

No nails.

No nails.

No nails.

Definitely don't do that.

So essentially, you can kind of see the chart, what gets weighed and how everything scores.

You have like the APM beam, which is just another monorail.

You have the APM rail, which would have been that Bombardier thing.

And then you have like, I think they said the new technology.

Audio, video.

And then the dread initials, which I know about because this was the proposal that they tried to do and they cut the Glasgow Airport rail link.

I see the fucking horror sigils PRT, personal rapid transit.

Morgantown's cute.

I will not ride in the pod.

Eat the bugs, ride in pod.

The issue with the Morgantown PRT is that it works.

And November has to get to West Virginia, and we will be her accompaniment.

Yeah.

And we'll just ride the PRT all goddamn day along.

So, yeah.

So

that brings us to, of course, this total ranking at the end where, wow, surprise.

Autonomous vehicles are

number one.

Wow.

They're the preferred technology.

It's crazy how that works.

Yeah.

Who could have fought?

And in fact, we can actually do this really easily because all we have to do to fit this is take off that little monorail beam in the middle, right you just have to just take that little bit off and just make it a road and it'll work yeah just just just pave it over with asphalt and um

oh my god i mean every fucking study has these like evaluation matrices and they're all like just completely arbitrary um

but someone has to fill out these big tables it's like so that you can choose the answer option you want like what is what what is your maintainability oh well my fucking uh transit method has a maintainability of five.

What?

What is five?

What does that mean?

Presumably

you've written

several.

Well, that's in the waiting chart, but presumably you've written several hundred pages explaining that earlier, which is, you know, no one's ever going to look at.

Yeah, I think the excuse they came up with was that maintainability means that if you use the vehicles a lot, can you easily change things out in the future?

And the idea they come up with is the explanation at least is that

it doesn't work for monorails because it's proprietary.

Your APM rail vehicle is a little more common.

The autonomous vehicle isn't common right now, but so many people are investing in it.

There's so much investment.

This is going to go great.

It's going to go fine.

This won't be an issue in the future.

So it gets a four.

Yeah.

Sure.

Because why the hell does the existence

dumb money?

We've also found that

autonomous vehicles are four in reliability.

They are

two in proven technology as opposed to PRT, which there was at least a few systems running at that point.

Yeah.

This is so goddamn dumb.

You got to consider, Liam.

You know, you got to think about the new paradigm.

I don't want to think about the new paradigm.

I want

some wires.

I want to put it on

implementation.

Talk to me about fucking agile.

Talk to me about waterfall.

I fucking hate agile.

Well, this would probably be a third rail powered system if it were designed to.

I'm going to show you a third rail.

No, it needs batteries, actually.

I've got a flexibility.

No, no.

Operational flexibility.

How else would you get a five for operational flexibility?

So, yeah, so you get that whole tech spiel there.

But we can go on to the next slide, honestly.

So, yeah, you get to December and we're going to do it.

We're going to replace the Skyway with driverless vehicles.

Yes.

Right.

Because, like that one report at the bottom says, this is evolving at such a rapid pace, a rapid pace, that within a short amount of time, it will be able to accommodate.

It'll do whatever you need it to.

It'll work.

It will only improve in the future.

It's going to work.

I would point out that the current system, the system they were using was completely driverless.

I do not even believe they had an attendant on the trains.

They did not.

They should have had some more safety improvements to allow that to happen, but it was built in the 80s.

So, you know, everyone was like, well, if a kid falls on the tracks, what are you going to do?

yeah, it's gonna work, okay?

It's it's gonna work, yeah.

You can tell because it has the future all over it.

This is entirely a system that was, you know,

all

of the all of the documents for this were written by a hype man.

Um, if you, if you look at the sort of background hoardings, you can see that has a bunch of like cool words that imply technology like network and intelligent and interface technology, yeah, interface, fashion,

yeah, but

slam algorithms.

That's the one that kills the kids, I assume.

There's also, I guess this is as a service question mark, but like the second from the left along the bottom row is mass.

Yeah, mobility as a service.

That's what that is.

Fuck off.

What is that?

That's the same as

mobility is a service.

Give me the chemical guys back.

You know, they won't misgender me, right?

But at least they don't try and sell me this shit.

No, they will do it under cost, and they will do it

on time and under budget, and they will call you slurs you've never even thought of.

I pay Amtrak far too much money for a regional ticket, and they provide me with the service, which is being in another location.

But you don't do it through an app, right?

I do do it through an app.

Yeah, but

it's not the future, though.

Yeah,

I guess it's not the future.

Trains are too permanent.

They're too fixed and stuck in place.

So ideally, like like the uh the the i don't know the

ethereal ai angel comes and plucks me out of my chair and puts me somewhere else

yeah that's

innovation yeah

but now uh you know they have to prove that it works right so it's time to launch the the test and learn program is what they call it so next slide so it's 2017 in that last like picture this is essentially the next like four years in one slide.

They're so ugly.

All of them.

Every single one in a different way.

Well, let's see.

That top left and the bottom right one, those are

that's a French one.

If that's in a constellation.

The Nuya.

Navia, I think it is.

I can't read it because they've stylized their logo too badly, which just kind of

refines a bunch of my objections here.

Yeah.

And then you have uh the the ollie is the one on the bottom left uh which is also the one we saw at the beginning that's the toaster yeah uh yeah cool thing about it it's 3d printed uh

i i've heard that so many times about this vehicle and i'm like why should anyone give a shit about that because i guess i think i i know it was like it means you could make a lot of them i guess or something but that's what a factory is that's not how you make a lot of micro factories because the factories are small, I guess.

So next to my

next to my backyard 3D print,

they're reinventing Maoism.

And then

you're going to 3D print your micro-mobility as a service in your backyard, and then you're going to use it to run over sparrows.

Yeah.

Yeah, and then, you know, they get the chance.

You also have that one in the top right, which is just like one of those small shuttle things that they put an autonomous kit.

It's called a kit.

They put a kit on it.

You've done a kind of like bus J-DAM.

Perfect.

It's just a dumb bus with a GPS slapped onto it.

I think I've seen these in zoos before.

Yeah.

And you also get the chance, obviously, the world ended a couple of years ago, in case you missed it.

Yeah, yeah.

New York City was destroyed.

Yes.

Right.

So they get this bright idea that, oh, yeah, I guess I should know that Jacksonville is, for some reason, one of the free places in the country that has the Mayo Clinic Hospital.

It's like a big deal.

I mean, it's a good thing.

Right.

Yeah.

This is

one of the stunts they did to prove the technology was to transport,

I want to say, like...

COVID tests from one side of a parking lot to another to the Mayo Clinic.

And this proved that you could actually it work in clearly like a busy urban street because a parking lot is the same thing as a busy urban street.

Man, I wish I could get millions of dollars for walking across a parking lot.

You can do it if you get hit by a municipal vehicle.

That's a good point.

Yeah.

Stand in front of one of these things.

So

now that

they've gotten to spend a couple years and a bunch of money testing and learning, they decide that, you know what, it's time to try again.

It's time to ask the government, the president, for money.

So.

I mean, obviously, like President Obama has not responded to like reasonable proposals nor unreasonable proposals.

Yeah, but now there's a different president.

Yeah.

This one wants to innovate.

So they decide that, yeah, let's spend some money.

They get...

This says 25 million, but it's like, it's a split, actually.

Of that 25 million, half of that goes to essentially tearing down a bridge and building a road, right?

Like boulevard conversion type things.

And then the other half is going to create, get ready for this, the Bay Streets Innovation Corridor.

Oh, that's so cool.

Oh, yeah.

I love to live in the Bay Streets Innovation Corridor.

I just, I just looked at this.

This is, they proposed this in 2018, or they got funding for it.

You look at the renders and it's like, okay, you've got the weird autonomous vehicles which are supposed to go up on a ramp up to the the skyway which we'll get to in a bit but they're also saying we're going to build solar freaking roadways oh i was correction correction actually oh no they'd be solar freaking sidewalks what oh i i love to like get electrocuted and also broiled every step i take

I would like to have one of the least efficient configurations for solar power possible.

It's because it's like covered in dirt and like chewing gum and shit.

Yes.

Cleaning up the chewing gum gets electrocuted also.

People keep walking on it.

People keep, you know, you've got to make it really durable.

Yeah, otherwise people will get electrocuted.

On a fucking roof.

There's a lot of roofs.

You have a nice awning and put the solar panels on there.

As long as people aren't walking on it, it's less of a problem.

No, but that's not

innovative enough.

You have to make the innovation corridor innovate, so you put the solar panels on the sidewalk.

Yeah,

I want to say they like wanted like dynamic lanes, so even if they're not using the road as a solar freaking roadway, it has the other things like the lanes can change dynamically.

Uh, using

the lights, you know, I know they have like the

yeah, they use like the normal dynamic lanes as opposed to something incredibly stupid.

Oh, yeah, glowing arrows in the road, I guess.

Yeah.

But, you know, now that they're armed with 12 and a half million from the feds,

they also need local money, right?

So

they will need just a little bit more local money, right?

So they go and they estimate the cost of the full system, right?

The full, I think, 10 miles

is what they're estimating for.

And they go to city council and they ask for

$379 million.

Oh,

wow.

That's a good idea.

Not just betting the farm, betting everyone else's farm as well.

Yes.

Yeah.

And they almost get it.

He deserves nothing.

I'll get to Tallahassee.

Oh, God.

I'll get to Tallahassee.

There's two more things here I want to point out, though, is I did watch the video on this.

You can see that there's like these wave icons above people's heads.

The idea being the entire street would be Wi-Fi enabled.

So if there were an imminent flood, everyone would be alerted somehow,

which you could do with the existing cell system.

Why the hell not?

Yeah, but now you know that you're up to your ankles in flood water on a fully electrified surface.

Yeah, and then also brand new high-tech roads, still the worst bicycle lanes I've seen in my life.

The autonomous vehicles don't even have their own lane

fucking watchdogs um

like watchdogs jacksonville hacking into the ctos to make the bike lane the whole street yeah

yeah may as well at that point you know i i would do that i would immediately kick all the vehicles off and say this is permanently you know until you give me 500 bitcoins this is pedestrianized

yeah why don't ransomware guys ever do anything cool like that exactly

It's always leaked your sex and never like, hey, we're going to pedestrianize the street by force.

Well, that's because we haven't installed solar freaking roadways.

I'm going to.

This episode is making me...

This show usually makes me pretty angry.

I'm going to have to take a walk after this one.

Yeah, I mean,

the assignment I was given was give everyone else my derangement.

So I'm glad to see I'm succeeding.

But next slide, actually.

We might as well get there.

They do approve raising most of that money.

They take away like $132 million that would have gone to all of the other extensions.

But they save a quarter billion dollars to convert the monorail into the podway.

Right.

And then also do like the ramp to the street.

This is actually, these meetings are where I learned about the quote, and maybe some of you have seen me use it,

of that this will make Jacksonville the Silicon Valley of the East.

Wow.

And of course, some of the news articles mentioned here, you know, the need that we have to have faith in that forward.

I love the vote of confidence in telling the guy, if this goes well, you're the hero.

If it doesn't, you're not.

Yeah, it's just.

You either win the game of pods or you die.

Yes.

But yeah, you know, we're going to have faith.

And, you know, clearly, you know,

this is going to innovate and it's going to work.

Right.

And we're even going to

put out videos saying that anyone who complains about this doesn't understand it.

This is a faith-based transportation system, maybe one of the first ones.

Where the angels come in, I suppose.

It's like this, the subway in Mecca.

If God will send his angels, but it's just, it's just an appointment.

So, so obviously, as we can tell from this slide,

it all worked.

And, you know,

pods went on the streets and they all worked fine.

And then the next slide proves that, right?

Of course.

Right.

Oh.

Please listen to

about every episode of Trash Future.

that we've ever done to find out about how maybe the autonomous vehicles are not that good.

The whole industry is collapsing, it hasn't fully collapsed, but it is collapsing.

It has been like an active collapse for the last like two years at this point.

It's almost as if all of that VC money that went in on the basis that full self-driving was an inevitability, it's almost as if those guys weren't that smart and didn't, in fact, see something that nobody else could, but were just kind of like easily duped.

Perhaps, but uh, some bankruptcies happen, of course.

You have uh,

the 3D printed shuttle guys, local motors,

they run out of money.

You have the French guys, Navia,

they also run out of money.

That's crazy.

You have crews, which General Motors spends $9 billion

on autonomous vehicles, and then they block an ambulance.

And then they also drag a pedestrian down the street.

And then GM decides that maybe $9 billion is enough.

Sort of sort of widely hated,

very easily sabotaged.

You can put a traffic cone on the hood and it just stops dead where it is because there's nothing to do about it.

Right.

And the company they partner with that will operate the shuttles essentially for them with this complicated P-free arrangement with possibly unlimited liability for the city.

But anyway,

that company launches a shuttle to pilot because everything is a pilot still.

I think JTA's like actual plan is supposed to be the first production operation of this because I think they even have to charge fares.

I think that's what the federal grant says they have to do.

But yeah, BEEP launches a pilot in Orlando just down the just down the highway.

And two days later, it hits a bus, or maybe the bus hit it.

It crashes.

It crashes.

It crashes with a bus.

And then, yeah, the guy they hired from Amazon

to run this stuff for them

gives up and leaves, which is a good sign.

He's actually at

vice president, I think, at the utility company now.

So, you know,

these guys, they can only fail upwards, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's going to deploy autonomous shuttles to deliver your natural gas.

Oh, God.

Just like as a pod car arriving, just full of gas.

Yes, exactly.

It'd be like, you know, bicycling around with a propane tank.

So, okay, so clearly there have been some problems, right?

You know, this hasn't gone.

You know, yeah, a few minor setbacks.

So, you know, really,

you know, what's the right course of action here?

What do y'all think?

I mean,

you've already spent all that money.

Let's let's get sunk cost with it.

Let's throw

cost sounds good to me.

Yep.

The only way out is through.

That's right, baby.

And always do rate in Jacksonville, actually, because the next slide.

Going through now, keep going.

So we spend some more money.

The original phase, that base reinnovation corridor, was originally estimated at 44 million.

Right.

And so the breakdown was essentially, you know, the feds give that 12.5 million.

The state gives another like 13 million.

And then the rest is like a weird split of like JTA puts some money in.

The city's utility company puts in some money to,

well, it's more of like an in-kind thing because they're going to do like infrastructure stuff for the innovation corridor.

And so that would have all totaled to like 44 million.

But they run into some issues, like needing to build a new operations center because the other like two they have don't work, I guess, for this.

They're designed to maintain real vehicles.

Yeah.

Yeah, like buses, which Matt Ford says are

really

too big and inflexible, which is why you need smaller vehicles.

And then the other is designed for like the existing Skyway, which I guess also wouldn't work.

So they end up deciding, yeah, we'll raise the budget.

We'll make this cost $65 million for the, i believe it's 12 to 15 shuttles uh that will then run to a stadium that holds like 60 000 people i'm not that good at math but that's way more

that's way more than a regular like

40-foot bus

like for the equivalent amount of buses like 65 million dollars

don't worry about that roz

it's fine well you got to consider you know this is an innovation project, right?

Yeah,

we're introducing autonomous vehicles to America and the world, really.

Right.

Right.

So, you know, why would you worry about those things like cost-benefit, right?

Yeah, the people riding those pods, right?

They're going to be inspired, and that inspiration is going to lead them to become like the next Jeff Bezos or whatever.

You can tell your friends that your single seat on your autonomous pod, you rode in a like a three and a half million seat or something like that.

Yeah, it's like sort of cost-to-seat ratio that's like up there with F1 or being like an F-35 pilot.

Yeah, exactly.

Actually, I am curious what the cost-to-sit-in-a-seat ratio is once you factor all these things in.

Hi, it's Justin.

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Back to the show.

But

another kind of little issue crops up with not the base reinovation corridor, but with the converting the skyway portion.

So you might remember earlier that I mentioned that the plan was just pop off the monorail beam and put a smooth running surface like a road and just run the pods on that.

But this little issue kind of comes up with that, which is that that running surface, the road, is like probably a couple feet below where the platform would go.

This is like the most obvious problem that should have been caught, you know, within 30 seconds of someone proposing the project.

I think at one point, like the talk was maybe they just like ramp up at a station to do that.

And I think they like ran with that assumption for like a couple years.

And then I think then realized it wouldn't work.

Yeah, you're going to add a lot of like area that's difficult to maintain.

And all of a sudden, you know, if you, if you're like, I want to do a routine repair to the bridge, I have to send in people with confined space training.

It's not a good solution.

So new plan, and apparently this is how we get to it costing a quarter billion dollars to do this conversion on the system that originally cost like 180 million.

just going to rip the whole top half off.

Cool.

And that's what we're looking at here.

The proposal to kind of just build these entirely new

beams or girders.

This is just kind of like this is our beautiful, elegant, sort of like structural solution.

Decapitate the fucking thing.

This is like someone who just can't stop redecorating.

It's like, well, we had one Skyway, then we converted it to a new system.

Now we're converting it to another.

Just one more Skyway.

Well,

a big part of the argument for this is that it's this whole idea of they call it being vehicle agnostic.

So the idea there would be that once you've converted it into being an autonomous vehicle like road,

you could just run any autonomous vehicle on it because that's how that works.

Yeah, the autonomous bus, autonomous freights.

Well, buses are too big, but.

Oh, okay.

Oh, I can't run any autonomous vehicle that's useful.

Ross is assuming those exist.

Oh, God.

I mean, you run an autonomous truck up there and then just collapse the whole thing.

No system is vehicle agnostic.

That's fake.

There's no way you could.

Vehicle agnostic would be like, all right, can I run an autonomous shuttle crawler up there?

Remember what I told you to take it?

I guess they would consider.

I'm sorry.

I was yelling at Roz to take his allergy meds.

But yeah, so you have kind of

on here just the different strategies for like which type of girder would you want to use for this?

If I remember right, I think that that third one is the one they considered the good one.

And we can go to the next slide, too.

They also consider, well, hey, what if we like move, we extend the beams so that they can also go up there?

Uh-huh.

Because, you know, that's that's also a perfectly feasible solution.

Yes.

I mean, you're the engineers.

I'm not.

Yeah, I just got here, man.

I was just, you know, looking at this like, none of it makes sense.

You know, and it's sort of difficult to say exactly because we're not super familiar with the plans.

I just thought these images should be in there

just to show that like they really early on missed.

some very basic

yeah i guess it didn't know what they were doing and just got lulled lulled to sleep by the whole this is the future.

Well, if you just you can you can solve any problem by throwing computers at it.

Um, that's our current paradigm.

Yeah, it's just like throwing whole ass laptops at this thing.

Yeah,

not not the not the not the not the thin lights either, the big, the big shit thick pads from 96.

I'm just finding captions I like here.

I see a label here that says fill pockets with non-shrink grout brackets for aesthetics only.

So, what it what it looks like they want to do here is you would, you would, you would raise the deck entirely by jacking up the existing piers using temporary supports.

Oh, God.

And then you would, and then because of that, you would then have

the autonomous vehicles would then be at the appropriate height for the platform.

Which, again, the whole idea here is

this is supposed to be cheaper.

And this is the most expensive and stupidest thing I think you can do to, you know a uh a simple concrete post-and-beam structure,

a simple concrete pillar, and look how they massacred, my boy.

This is like this is like people who go and get like leg extensions because they're

they're like they're like uh, whatchamacallit, they're they're insecure about their height, and it's like

one of the worst and stupid procedures out there.

It's just and

why do this?

Like, why not simply do like anything else?

Yeah, it's the future.

Yeah, I don't know.

The future, as we know, the future, and they decide to spend money on this, and they don't really want to turn around because it will make them famous.

In fact,

it got them on, well, there's your problem.

So

that's true.

In fact, there's actually a quote of the chair of their board saying the media needs to listen because they're going to be famous for this.

Definitely a fan.

Yeah.

So, you know, they, I guess, know what the objective is here.

And the state wasn't a big fan of that, which brings me to the next slide,

which is that it turned out three years ago, the state

asked them, hey, are you sure about this?

Essentially,

the states of Florida found time to do something besides bathroom cop stuff?

I mean, it was the Department of Transportation.

So I guess it was instead of building a highway, although they do that anyway.

They have limited jurisdiction over bathrooms.

They have bathroom cops.

They're just, you know, playing candy crush.

They don't have anything to say.

So, yeah.

So essentially, you have like this whole bunch of emails where FDOT.

kind of repeatedly asks GTA's executives that like, are you sure this is going to work?

Like, can it actually drive itself?

Can it drive at night or in the rain?

It seems like you're betting the farm on this.

Are you sure you want to do that?

And JTA's response is essentially not necessarily that like you're wrong, but more so that if you're so worried, then we'll reorganize how your money is spent so that this is our problem and not yours.

Oh, that is the mark of confidence.

There you go.

And of course, you know, you flash forward a couple of years.

And now that it turns out that

all of the companies that make these are bankrupt now, or their technology

is even more obviously not ready to work with this, they've decided that instead, in order to meet the deadlines imposed by the grant, they'll simply

buy a van from Ford, like, you know, a passenger van.

What?

Yeah.

And they'll attach.

Say less, though.

Say less.

Love a van.

And they'll attach an autonomous kit.

So it'll sort of jam itself.

The J-DAM is back.

The J-DAM is back.

Yes.

It doesn't appear to be able to work at night yet.

Or in the rain.

Good thing it's never night or rains in Florida.

And of course, if you mention this on the internet,

you get the bottom right there.

Oh, we gotta get blocked by this guy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What's weird is I don't think I was saying anything about

this when he did that, but I don't know.

And yeah, and there's

the personal block from Nathaniel P.

Ford.

Oh, yeah.

And then we've got 483 followers, which is not enough to be this thin-skinned.

Well, you want to just

say something incredibly offensive and then slap it on mute, baby.

Look,

it's always a smart idea.

You know, if you, if you, if you, if if you do a post and it's not a banger, well, just mute it.

Um, don't worry about it for a bit.

Yeah, it seems like he's only got 483 followers.

That's because he's got banned a couple of times for like popping off on Twitter.

Well, you know, I think he gets rewarded in some other ways, which brings me to the next slide.

He's looking for 10,000 of his closest followers, all of who are whom are bots driving autonomous pods.

You go into the pod and it just says pussy in bio.

My hot nudes in bio.

I don't believe you.

I don't believe you.

My hot nudes in pod.

No, this is

this is just a pod.

This is, well, there's your problem, dude.

Weren't you listening?

So

it also comes out last year.

I think people weren't necessarily aware of how much money, like how much money you would ordinarily pay the CEO of a transit agency.

And so we find that for some reason, in that Ford's case, the answer is a lot.

Well, I mean, you have to pay for excellence is the thing.

Yeah.

This is all we're paying for.

Yeah.

Because

11,000 or 21,000 riders a day is very excellent.

Right.

21,000 people.

Can't be wrong.

I mean, it's only like the 10th largest city in the country, right?

So.

Yeah, you know.

Don't worry about that.

It has a total ridership about the same as Virginia Railway Express, which only runs in the peak hours and only on weekdays.

Oh, VRE, baby.

Floridians have a lot better things to do than to be just taking public transport, for instance, like

you know, various crimes that end up becoming like sort of memes.

Meme crimes, you can do it.

You can fight a gang.

Well, that falls under crimes.

That's different.

What else?

Yes.

Crime brackets, not meme.

Exactly.

That's a crime brackets hate.

Oh, welcome to Florida, baby.

You can spend a lot of effort passing anti-trans legislation.

Yeah.

You can require a super majority vote for bus lanes.

You can run for president against Donald Trump.

I have like everyone you know is telling you it's a bad idea and get owned.

And you can also spend $190,000 over five years on travel.

That is a lot of fun.

I'm in the wrong line of work.

How do you get into like managing transit systems?

Like, I mean, podcasting is very, very rewarding, but like, I clearly, this is a whole other league.

Well, we could do more shows.

Then you could spend a lot on travel and expand.

We'll talk about that.

That's a good idea, yeah.

But then I would have to get over the fact that doing an engineering disasters podcast has made me too afraid to fly in a plane.

Yeah, don't worry.

We'll talk to you.

Yeah, do that.

Yeah, we'll talk about that.

So,

yeah, also this year,

the governor signed a bill that

on top of the bus lanes requirements, I'll also say that maybe you can't pay your executives that much.

So I guess we'll see where that leaves, Matt.

Yeah, I mean, you know, that's a good amount of compensation right there, $626,475.29.

Yeah, but how many subscribers does he have on Patreon?

That's your point.

With those twice the numbers, probably not many.

No, no.

I mean, he does get like a bunch of awards, and apparently, that's what some of the travel was for.

So

take that as you will.

Receive an award for my autonomous vehicle system.

Yeah.

I mean, it turns out they give out awards for those in Germany.

And so, you know, he needs to fly to Germany.

Likely place for it.

You know, we'll actually get to that.

But I guess let's maybe circulate on kind of where we are at this point.

point so next slide for that uh oh yeah the van is this the van that is the van the van that's the van

this is the j-dam this is the thing that like they had

this was the compromise that they ended up having to do is a ford transit yes it is 423 it's beautiful i want to case it on the map

this is

just here

i am accepting my six hundred thousand dollars a year in compensation in return you receive trade deal of the century, Van, like kidnapping van, like Minbus.

And I'd also like to, let's see, recap some of the other technical issues that emerged.

At one point, the idea was supposed to be that these things would be able to

go point to point, right?

You could call it on your phone and essentially write it like an Uber to your other place.

Apparently, the problem that emerged there was that you could not keep any consistent headway doing that.

Yeah, that makes sense

that that that does not take a uh a genius to figure out yes well it did take jta like three years so

well boys

uh all the geniuses

is this at least is is this at least driverless

well there's um you see you need something called an attendant and that person has to sit in the driver's seat what and and be ready to drive it look inside driverless van driver.

I like that the driverless system has more drivers than the existing Skyway.

Yeah.

We have to hire a bunch of drivers to like make this driverless.

Yes.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

Let's see.

Another problem that cropped up was the ridership estimates they originally made were off.

And the state called them out for that.

And so you got the revised number.

Again, this is the number to connect from the existing Skyway to the football stadium 60,000 people use.

And you get that average of 250 to 300 riders per day.

Based on

per hour, that's pretty good.

And then

per day.

Okay.

Yeah.

But

people don't want to sit in the driverless van

that has a driver.

i mean i guess i i guess when you could just drive to go see football and drive drunk home like what they sure love doing it i've had a lot of public transport drunk driving oh and then one more problem uh turns out the whole mixed traffic thing doesn't work either uh so we have to last minute uh look for dedicated lanes for for these oh wow that's crazy how that works uh looks like they're getting rid of the uh bike lanes for that uh yeah yeah well here's what i'm seeing:

some completely insane and possibly illegal

ADA issues,

which is just that, all right, we're going from a system that has level boarding.

If you're in a wheelchair, you can just roll yourself in

to something where our autonomous electric shuttle has to stop and deploy a wheelchair lift

to get you in there.

And that's going to, you know, add insane amounts of dwell time.

I mean,

I mean, using wheelchair lifts at this point is

just bad practice.

It's, you know,

effectively useless.

But if you have something that's high floor like that, that's going to be your only option.

This is going to, if, if there are any disabled people in Jacksonville who decide to use this, this is going to be just incredibly slow.

This is going to be slower than walking.

You can can incapacitate this whole system by trying to use this as a wheelchair user.

Yeah, and then if you somehow drive this up onto the guideway, there's only one wheelchair lift.

How do you get people onto the platform when you need to be on the other side?

Oh,

don't worry about that.

If you ride this and you use a wheelchair, you are enlisted in a kind of platforming section.

Yeah, I think, yeah, exactly.

At that point,

you need some kind of like...

you,

I, this is, I don't understand how anyone like, I, I do understand how we got to this point, but, but it's, um, someone should have been able to, someone should have been able to point this out on day one and say, no, we shouldn't do this.

Right.

Yeah, as opposed to day like 2000.

Yeah.

But, but innovation, you know, after eight years, you know, that's, that's what this is really all about, you know, innovating.

Yeah.

You can innovate.

The whole autonomous vehicle economy is just about cycling money through, you know?

None of it does anything, but you can say,

I don't know.

It feels like people are, you know, we somehow have formed an economy where it's, you, you can just shove oceans of money into a hole and somehow things keep going.

But

I don't know.

Don't worry.

It gets a little bit faster and a little bit dumber every time.

AI is like this also.

Oh, wait, faster.

That's a good point.

These I think can still only go like 10 miles an hour.

Yeah.

Jesus fucking Christ.

Yeah.

If I get in a Ford Transit and floor it

and it tops out at 10 miles.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah, you're going to wind up getting on a regular JTA bus, which can presumably use these lanes.

You're going to see like 14 of them go past you by the time you've gone down like three blocks.

I will say, I'm not sure the lanes are wide enough for that.

I'm not exactly sure how wide they are because I'm pretty sure those are repurposing like parking lanes.

You're going to see the buses go past you anyway, though.

Well, I mean, there aren't that many buses there.

Okay, you're going to see two buses go past you

potentially.

Yeah

But there is one more potential saving grace that will fix all of these problems, you know if if Nat4 keeps his job long enough to to make it all happen and and that's the next slide.

Oh boy.

Oh, yeah

Slightly different toaster.

It's yeah So the story here, this is a company called uh

Holon or Holon.

I think their slogan is like founded like tomorrow or something like that.

Stupid.

It's a spin-off of this company that builds like parts for cars, essentially.

They did like a bunch of like EV equipment too.

And they decided to take that and the self-driving part and just spin it off into another company.

And so that's this.

And their thing is called the Mover.

And

starting the big bankruptcy clock.

Yeah.

Well,

oh, Jesus.

Possibly autraire.

It just so happens that earlier this year.

Ooh, designed a bamburina.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It is.

It just so happens earlier this year that

a big company in Saudi Arabia decided to invest a bunch of money into this.

An amount that they will not disclose, but some large amount.

Oh.

I mean,

fantastic, provided it doesn't get hit by the same kind of panic sell-off and like cutback that everything else the Saudi Public Investment Fund has been doing lately.

Like with NEOM, for instance.

Oh, the nub.

Yeah, the nub.

Maybe they'll just like ship you like one wheel of this.

Possibly.

I can't guarantee that because this is still unfolding live,

essentially.

And it just so happens that all of a sudden, a mysterious company that has not been disclosed yet has announced that they would would like to maybe build an autonomous vehicle in Jacksonville.

Oh, perfect.

Yeah.

They are saving a lot of money because they do seem to be using the body from,

what was that car that had the wraparound window, the Toyota Scion or something?

I know.

It was like really boxy.

The Scion XB, bud?

Maybe.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

They're just reusing that.

So that is going to save them a lot of money.

All of this is rug pull.

Like, genuinely right there's so so many times this happened with like autonomous with like a vs with evs before that as well um where like company comes to town whether and there's like inevitably some horse trading and like backroom deals allegedly with like whatever local politician uh and it creates x number of jobs usually in time for an election and then the factory shuts and the company goes bankrupt in like six months.

Now, I can't say for certain that this will happen,

but come back to me in six months.

And if I'm wrong about this, like own me mercilessly on Twitter.

Well, they would have to set up an entire

they would have to set up an entire production line in that amount of time.

Yeah, I mean, they wouldn't have time to do that.

I think the plan right now is they're asking for money now.

They're asking for, I think, is it seven or eight million from the city in incentives?

What is it?

7.7 million in city incentives and and then another 8 million sunka in in state incentives uh and then they would try to build that factory by 2027 i believe yeah end of 2027.

so that's too late to fix the base tree innovation corridor uh for one right that has to be the four advance the the the the feds are going to revoke the money otherwise right uh well yeah they they have to open i think by next year oh my i don't think they can get any extensions for that yeah so they have to do the four advance that has to happen.

Incredible.

Yeah.

Well, best of luck, guys.

Would you like to take this autonomous Ford van with the guy in it that goes slower than you can jog?

Well, possibly two to 300 people pre-pandemic would.

Wow.

So, yeah.

Incredible.

So that has been.

My derangement, I think.

I think I've gotten your derangement.

I'm feeling pretty deranged.

This was the story of the ultimate urban circulator.

Incredible branding.

Yeah, so I don't know.

Maybe there'll be an update next year of, you know, clearly they will have solved all these problems, right?

That will definitely happen.

Yeah, I mean, you know,

I'd love to say, you know, what did we learn here?

But I'm still

stupid.

We didn't need to learn anything.

Yeah, no,

It's relatively easy to

identify a scam, but our elected officials are incapable of that.

That's your lesson, City of Jacksonville.

You got scammed.

You're a pigeon.

I mean,

it must be a beautiful time to be.

one of the people in this ecosystem, right?

To be like a branding consultant, right?

Who gets to do all the hoardings or gets to do all the renders or whatever.

And then you just move on to the next thing, you know?

No, no, that's the worst part is they all feel bad that they didn't achieve the innovation, even though they got a trillion dollars out of it.

You know, all these, all these tech guys are like,

they drank their own Kool-Aid, so they can't even be a good scammer.

Sucks.

If I get scammed, I want the guy scamming me to enjoy it.

Yeah, I would hope the guy scamming me enjoys it as opposed to like, you know,

that's one of the big problems with today's scams is that the people doing it don't even like it.

No joy in it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I want like selfies of you like on the yacht and like Monte Carlo spending my money.

Yeah.

I need we need the monorail guy back

who, you know, sort of

well, as I said, is going to sell you a proprietary guideway system.

That's the most unrealistic part of the Simpsons

monorail episode is that he, uh, that guy would come back for the maintenance contract and make bank.

yeah so uh half half billion dollar self-driving car program is uh it's going pretty well i'm sure yep yeah it's it's so depressing all right yeah you need you need to do the you need to emulate the people's republic of china in this right which is when one of these guys makes enough enemies they execute him you gotta like execute at least one of these guys yeah yeah

i i do think that you you don't have to do it to all of them, but you do have to make an example of someone every once in a while at some point.

Sure.

And like, I know that the way it works in all the places where they do do this is that like, you know, it's all graphed anyway as to who doesn't get executed.

But like, you gotta at least make it a risk that's on the table.

Yes.

Enjoy living dangerously.

Maybe it'll put some relish back into your scam.

Oh, yeah.

I have to say, you know, you might have to, you might be able to enjoy yourself for for once.

You might have a nice day.

Probably.

What we've done, we've really done like psychic damage to the American scammer by not executing them.

Well, you got to keep them on their toes, you know?

Yeah, genuinely.

We got to bring the mob back.

Yeah, that's that's the policy, right?

We got it.

We got to bring back the mob.

If this were entirely done by organized crime, they would deliver a better product.

Probably for cheaper, too.

Yeah, but that's that's not innovative, right?

That's not innovative.

It's not innovative.

The Italian mob are gone.

That's for the Scorsese films.

Today we have to have, I don't know,

a guy who

religiously conserves his body water

as our thought leader.

Or a guy who gets his own offish shower, shower, I think, an elevator.

Oh my gosh.

You see how these things work in fully-fledged kleptocracies, right?

Where the government is like a guy, right?

And he wants to get a prestige project done is he hires a bunch of these guys to do it and says like no expense spared, but if you fuck up, I'll kill you.

And then they do the thing.

Like, and then, you know, then all of a sudden, like, Astana has like a beautiful airport that is empty all the time, right?

Because you got all of the airport building guys in a room and you said, build the best airport.

Here is all the money in the country.

If you don't do it, I will shoot you in the kneecaps.

Yeah, Morocco has high-speed rail.

India has a fully electrified railroad system.

Where else?

Big prestige projects.

Like

that are the line, please.

Yeah, if you want to do big prestige projects, threaten to shoot your contractors.

I think that's what we've all done.

This isn't an endorsement of autocracy.

It's just it's something that they're capable of doing, that we used to be capable of doing, and now we don't.

On a related note, every, well, last year, and I guess also this year, JTA holds this

National Autonomous Vehicle Day event.

So they bring everyone to like the big pod development facility.

And they have a bunch of talks, and they point at some pods going around the parking lot.

Yes, there are people in them.

Don't they have like a demonstrator line running now at like Florida State, or it might be like State University of Florida?

It's the Florida State College at Jacksonville.

They did a big flashy launch for that.

And that's where the quote from the chairwoman going, we're going to be famous for this comes from.

And they do have one pod running.

from one side of the parking lot to the other side of the parking lot.

That's at least what they've said.

I have not been able to confirm that it is in fact doing that

on a regular basis.

That goes from one side of the parking lot.

They unveiled the other side of the pod.

I don't know if it regularly runs.

There may on some days be one pod which goes from what side.

Yeah.

Well, because if it starts raining, they have to like put it away.

And then bring it back out when it stops raining.

Because after eight years, that is the best they can do.

On three weekends a year, we have a pod that goes from one side of the parking lot to the other side of the parking lot.

I'm not sure they run it on weekends.

Let's add this shit, please.

On a Tuesday and Thursday

in August, we have an autonomous pod that goes from one side of the parking lot to the other side of the parking lot.

We are innovators.

That's right.

And I guess the one last note is that one of those companies that presents at the Autonomous Vehicle Day,

it's a company whose chairman is the former Prime Minister of Estonia.

Because I guess that's what you do when you are no longer prime minister of Estonia.

You run a pod company.

Sure.

Yeah, I mean,

this is the thing, right?

This is the other thing in which I'm jealous, right?

Not only am I not getting the like hundreds of thousands of dollars of free travel a year, right?

But like, as far as I know, and please tell me if I'm wrong, because I would like the security, there's no jobs, jobs, like do-nothing sinecure jobs for like ex-podcasters, right?

Like, we stop doing this, nobody's putting us on like the board of a company.

No, honestly,

you have to do like I guess running a transit agency or maybe banking, maybe law.

Because I think all the people on JTA's board of directors are like lawyers and bankers, I think.

So, I don't want to go back to law school,

or do I?

No,

no, no.

Well,

we just have to look this.

Yeah, we just have to hope this particular crift

stays alive forever.

Play his vintage or mother.

Yep.

Yeah.

Well, I don't know.

Convince the city to give you some money, right?

Yeah.

Well, we can make a

podcast innovation center.

Yeah.

We have more board drops, new slurs.

Oh, man.

Well,

we have a segment on this podcast called called Safety Third.

Shake hands with Danger.

Did it get louder?

It sure feels like it.

Maybe.

Howdy, Roz, Liam, and November.

And any potential guest.

Yeah, but that's coward.

That's cowardice shit, though.

Stop hedging your bets.

You can only pick one.

Well, you have to, you have to, uh, you have to, like, what should we call it?

Like, name the potential guest.

Yep.

You have to go into

like the the book of baby names and pick one randomly.

No, no, no.

If you're doing this, I want to hear like your best guess at like each of our horrible secrets.

Oh, no.

Well, this person sent an email specifically to say, to say November, even though in the first email they said Alice.

That's cool.

That's cool.

I like the like update.

Yes.

I also appreciate the screenshots of my farming simulator playthrough.

I have a story to tell that deals with basic driving skills and spatial awareness,

which I guess is something that autonomous pods lack.

And my lack of either of those attributes.

Gosh, is this written by an autonomous pod?

This might be an autonomous pod, yes.

For context, I work on a ranch in Texas.

Oh, boy.

When I'm not feeding cattle or plowing fields, I've been clearing out invasive shrubs with a skid steer and a root grapple attachment to clear up more grassland for our cattle.

Skids are so cool.

Yes.

If you don't know what either of those things are, it's like a mini bulldozer with diesel tens pinchy the claw arm from the acclaimed cold classic Thomas and the Magic Railroad, starring Alec Baldwin.

Okay.

Yeah, I know what that is.

I would also probably call it a bobcat, but you know.

Oh, it's been hours every day ripping these shrubs out of the ground and piling them up in a a burn pile.

Again, since this is Texas, we can do crazy shit like that out here in the open.

Well done.

These shrubs would grow along the edge of creeks, and the particular creek in our property was quite large for creek standards.

Yep, small creek the size of a large creek.

Small creek the size of a large creek.

Oh, that was another news item.

The Dubai Creek flooded.

Oh, yeah.

We'll we'll get to that in the next episode.

Yeah, sure.

We'll see we'll see if Dubai is like fully destroyed before we talk about that.

You know, I mean, yeah, you should you live in a desert.

Every once in a while, you get a five million-inch rainfall event.

Especially if you're doing cloud seeding.

Yeah.

I would love to know more about that.

I was told explicitly not to work after it rained in the event I fell in so I wouldn't drown in muddy crick water.

That was the only safety briefing I received, so I hopped in and got to it without questions.

Fortunately, I was working on a lovely sunny day, and the water was only a foot or so deep.

As I was clearing shrubs and singing All-Star by Smash Mouth,

I made the fateful decision to turn around and add to the pile.

Unfortunately, I was too busy singing, well, the years start coming and they don't start coming.

Turn my head around.

Those existentials,

the years start coming and they don't start coming.

Yeah.

To turn my head around and see that the back of the skid skid the skid steer, the bobcat, was mere inches from the creek's edge.

Oh, but I mean, the thing is, if you die like this, you go to like skid steer Valhalla.

Yeah, and then they, then, then, then St.

Peter asks you, is it called a skid steer or a bobcat?

What happens if you answer

your hand on the lever to the trapdoor?

Yeah.

As I backed up, I suddenly got this sinking feeling.

When I realized realized what was happening, I started screaming bloody murder as I tumbled 12 feet in the skid steer down into the creek, bouncing around like a pinball on my way down.

When I came to an agonizing pain, I realized the entire skid steer was upside down.

See attachment one.

Yep.

Yep.

And I was sitting on the ceiling.

As I gazed up in the seat, I realized that one, the lap bar immediately spat me out.

And two, there was, in fact, a seat belt that I didn't know existed since it was buried in the seat cover.

It would have been nice to know

either by being told in a safety briefing or having the common sense to expect one to exist.

I crawled out, climbed over the treads to the edge of the water, slowly made my way up the 12-foot embankment while groaning in pain.

When I collected myself, I realized I had a scrape on my forehead, my arms and shoulders were in throbbing pain, and my back was royally fucked.

I laid on the ground to catch my breath, then made the painful trek across the field and back to the barn to tell my boss I had just fallen into the creek.

I was sent home where I had downed some gummies to ease the pain while my boss and other farmhands spent all day digging a ramp out of the embankment and dragging the skid steer out with three tractors chained up together in tandem.

She's a sea.

That's what's going on.

Fantastic.

It was a sight to behold and a feat of redneck engineering.

See attachment too.

I'm saluting.

Yeah.

The next day, my boss showed up to check on me and gave me a bottle of jack, which was empty by the following day.

They were the real heroes that day, even if they were probably bitching the whole time.

I think you should, like, not to be a lib about this, but I...

As cool as this is, I prefer the, like, Osher Workman's comp situation to, like, here is a bottle of the least good bourbon.

Ah, well, it is the least good.

It's Tennessee whiskey.

They're made exactly the same

besides the Lincoln County process.

It's basically bourbon.

Fuck you.

Well,

the charcoal may not do anything.

I know that it's bourbon because I don't like it.

Good enough.

All right, we're going to have to have a talk.

Yeah, honestly.

Am I fired?

No.

As of writing this, it has been about a week since the accident.

I'm still sore as all get out.

I've learned some valuable lessons, so let me share them with the rest of you.

Always be aware of your surroundings.

Look behind you as you reverse, even if you think you're far away enough from the edge of a cliff.

Always wear your seat belt.

Never, under any circumstance, operate heavy machinery while under the influence of Smash Mouth.

I don't know that Smash Mouth is the issue here.

There's

there are probably some lax safety procedures here.

Yeah.

It's a farm.

They probably won't do anything.

Yeah, yeah.

There's a lot of exemptions there, unfortunately.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you for your time.

I hope you all learned some valuable lessons from a simple farm boy.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go eat a pound of brisket and sing deep in the heart of Texas on repeat.

Hopefully there won't be another music-related disaster this time.

Keep up the great work, and the podcast is wonderful.

I hope you all keep it up for years to come.

You're gonna have to, no one's gonna make us company directors, you know.

Yeah, yeah, well, this is true.

Exactly.

We're not gonna, we're not gonna be able to introduce autonomous pods to,

I don't know,

Tamaqua, Pennsylvania.

I don't know.

I mean, AI voice technology is coming on to the point where pretty soon we can all just retire.

You know, you keep getting the podcast, and we just like it's done by our awful phantasms.

Now, I need

something to do, no member.

Yeah, me too.

I,

yeah, no, I don't want to do that.

Yeah, I'm just saying that we probably could do.

And if we all sound like the tick-tock voice next time you hear this, don't investigate that too closely.

Welcome to.

Well, there's your problem.

Yeah.

Um, all right, that was

fuck's sake.

Need a bigger drop board

I'm literally typing this out right now because it's a fucking Welcome to Well There's Your Problem a podcast about engineering disasters with slides.

I don't like a cadence on it.

It's a no, we have to keep doing this ourselves.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's unfortunate.

Okay.

Well

that was

safety third.

Shake hands with danger.

Our next episode will be on Chernobyl.

Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

We have a store?

You can buy shirts?

Yeah, you can.

You can buy shirts.

Marcus, if they want more, Marcus, where can they find you?

Yeah,

I'm on Twitter.

I'm not calling it that other thing.

It's

at Marcus, the letter C, because that's my middle initial, and then Nelson.

So hit me up, I guess, if you want to become more deranged with me.

I also have Blue Sky, but I'm sorry.

I just don't use it.

Yeah, I don't use it that much either.

Yeah.

But I mean, it's been a pleasure.

Thank you for having me.

Oh, yeah.

This has definitely made me more deranged.

I guess two things.

I mentioned on the previous episode, there will be an event involving disaster film sometime in

Philadelphia that I will be a part of.

And the other thing, of course, it is the month of Playpril.

So if you want a podcast from Australia, go listen to Bunta Vista Podcast.

That's all I have to say.

Perfect.

Well, done.

We recorded the podcast.

All right.

Good night, everyone.

Marcus, just let just keep the video.

Ross, you got to stop the podcast, my guy.

I am stopping the podcast.

I just have to do several things.

Is it a podcast that couldn't?

It's giving podcast, like and subscribe.