Still, important information for anyone who commutes from one side of an ice rink to the other.

Well this guy makes me feel inadequate.

A while ago I tried fixing up an old power router from the 70s. Cleaned the commutator, installed replacement brushes, changed the power cord and it worked great! At shooting sparks into your face whenever you turned it on.

This sounds like a place you'd either have to be retired to live at (i.e. Palm Springs), or otherwise have access to one of the nearby airfields/military bases.
If people can't commute into a city center for growing industries, ... Well, from that perspective this is just a pre-Detroit.

It's scenic, but the constant Orc attacks are a pain in the arse.

On the plus side, commuting by eagle really cuts down on the carbon footprint...

This video is a bit misleading. Very few kids here in Japan travel completely alone to school unless they live in very rural areas (and even then, they probably go with older siblings). As you see later in the clip, most kids go to school together with friends in small groups, at a minimum a pair but sometimes in huge groups. In my neighborhood, at around 8:45 in the morning, you can see virtually the entire local elementary school walking together towards the public school. They might not be under direct adult supervision, but they are rarely alone and there is always an adult nearby because people are usually commuting to work on the same roads/trains that the kids are using to get to school.

And like they said, the reason this can happen is that violent crimes against children such as kidnapping are almost non-existent here. Adults are far more likely to end up missing/dead here. Contrast that with Western countries like the U.S. or Australia and it quickly becomes apparent why people are escorting or bussing their kids to school in those countries.

I will say that there is a negative side to the "independence" they are touting in this video, which is that these same children often run completely free after school with zero adult supervision. Some of them can get a little wild (throwing rocks at passing cars and stuff or making way too much noise in a crowded residential area) but the cultural attitude here is that it's just "kids being kids," although I sometimes suspect that's code for "we don't want to actually have to parent our kids unless someone forces us to."

How to brick up a door of a... commuter train:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2RGeqjHeCU

Phillip has taken to smoking crack with his commuting pals from work during his automated segments.

Did a few of miss the part where you can select the parts that are automated and manual?

You're asking for situations where you can choose and the video shows that almost as the first feature. It's there people

Personally for me, it makes sense to have it be 100% automated by default, place your hands on those bits for 3seconds to enter manual. Release both hands, reverts back to automatic.

The 3 seconds is more of a human thing, I'm sure the the car never actually stops any of its automatic calculations, it simply turns on/off if you can control steering and acceleration.

Presto, enjoy driving however you want and not driving whenever you want.

I'm still a firm of advocate of 100% forced automation, sorry, humans are just far too incapable to be driving death machines. I'm sorry if you enjoy it, we'll just create little "driving vacation spots" and we can all move on? After all, you're probably not getting nostalgic about your commutes to work.

But it'll take a while yet for the automation to be able to handle 100% of driving. In the mean time, this sort of dual mode looks pretty great to me.

I suppose it depends on how/where you drive. My driving is split between commuting to work (~30-40mins) and long journeys (2-5 hours).

My main use case for a self-driving car is bringing me home from the pub. Not because I'm wasted, I simply don't drive after more than 1 or 2 beers.

When I'm going on a long trip, it's usually around the south island and I love driving those trips.

Great, so now I'm expected to work on my commute? Screw that.

Plus, as soon as any portion of the drive is manual, it may as well all be.

I think that at best this would be applicable only to the very lightest of electric vehicles (something in the "motorcycle" weight class, even half a ton is probably too heavy), and I have my doubts about even those, even when completely disregarding the sideways forces.

With a system like this you do not want more than a few cm (about an inch, at a guess) of suspension travel from when the car is lifted in air to the car at rest (= 1G vertical load), just from the weight of the car compressing the springs. If you have more the springs (which the loops naturally are) have to compress a lot with each revolution, which strains them, heats them, isn't good for rolling resistance, etc.

If we assume a 1000 kg car with a 50/50 weight distribution, to get about 2 cm of suspension travel the spring stiffness would be about comparable to a high level GT racing car. Comparing to high level sports cars, the street going Porsche 911 GT3 RS car, which is regarded as a pretty stiff, racy and track oriented vehicle has something in the region of three times that much travel, a normal commuter car can have way over 10 cm due to soft, comfort oriented springs.

So you can't spring a proper car with just these because it'd require it to be too stiff (also I can foresee shock absorption issues). Another problem is the 360 degree springy nature of it. You really don't want car tyres to move much aside from up and down. These have the problem that when you brake, the forces will try to push the axle forwards in relation to the wheel (i.e. the wheel moves backwards while braking), and the reverse when accelerating. You'd be (possibly) drastically changing the wheelbase of the car during acceleration and braking, which could have catastrophic results for handling in extreme situations. Many if not most cars these days are capable of braking at over 1 G, as long as they have decent tyres, so the front-back movement could be bigger than the up-down movement.

So yeah, doesn't really sound like a workable solution as the ONLY spring system on a car. Having some springiness in the tyres (either in the wheel itself of just having larger profile tyres, like we used to back in the day) can be helpful for comfort and even handling in some cases, but springing the car only via the wheels isn't a good idea, you really want to be able to control the wheels better than that.

Portland is way more progressive than Seattle. Really fierce on greenbelts and walking/biking trails that are actually usable for commuters.

And yeah. Seattle has coolness.

You're welcome!

I had a greater impression of "commuting" or maybe "escaping".

On my morning commute, I got to listen on the radio how it's that little girls right to fire an Uzi and how it was the instructors fault for not teaching her properly. So unfortunately, gun nuts will even defend this.