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ULTra Robo-Taxi
irksome writes: "Found a link on msnbc about a driver-less taxi pod. According to the article, the vehicle has begun road tests in the city of Cardiff, Wales. The pod, known as ULTra (Urban Light Transport) could make driver-free transport a reality and not just the stuff of futuristic fantasy."
It seems like something like this comes up every few months and seems to be vaporware. What happened to the self-driving cars that are just your old car with a new chip in it that was supposed to correct traffic flow.
Also, how is this going to be cost effective, I.E., what is the benefit to this? I can guarantee that buying and maintaining the robot costs more than getting a driver and paying him $8/hour for 8 hours a day. Will this be a novelty item or just something useful?
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Take comfort in your ignorance.
Grandmaster Plague
Wow, they plant to make thirty pods in two years for a price of $65 million. Great, and they're battery operated. Plus, they move at a whopping 25 miles per hour. I feel like this could easily become the sweeping revolution in mass transit.
"Passengers will 'hail' the pod from a designated stop, where they select the required destination along a set route." Sort of like a bus. Except buses don't cost $2 million to build, and they seat more than four passengers... additionally, they expect a trip to cost as much as a bus, except buses are cheaper, higher capacity, don't require a renovation of an infrastructure, already available, and in many cases faster than these pods.
Seriously, though, what if someone swipes the battery, smashes the windshield, or perhaps "disables" the potentially raised rail? Who would get sued? Or would they make you sign a disclaimer (the "you can't touch us if you get killed" variety)?
Basically, what I'm seeing is that we'd be better off *not* investing in these things: too expensive for too small of a gain.
I guess it takes a while for MSN to get old news from the BBC.
- The Sigless Wonder
I have been afraid a lot of when there will be cars on the roads but nobodey inside of them driving becouse what happens when there is an accedent involveing one of these running into your car and you are injured. no matter how good these can drive in a strate line or what ever, there will be somthing situation that it will not handel correct and peopel will possebly get hurt or killed. and once that happens once then it will be hard for the companey to stay in bisness.
This looks like another take on the Ultra-Light Rail Vehicle concept that's been around for a long time now. Basically replacing the "light" rails and trollies we're used to from a lot of cities with really light vehicles running on even lighter rails. Removing something the size and mass of a locomotive and replacing it with something the size of a Honda Civic with even lower mass.
From a pure engineering standpoint, these things are a great idea and are a much better solution to the "public" transit (as opposed to "Mass" transit as we're saddled with now) problem. The rails are relatively inexpensive to fabricate. They're much less intrusive. They can be switched easily to give better coverage. And the vehicles are light, quiet, and cheap.
The vandalism problem is probably the hardest to solve. And the obvious problem of pulling "unusable" vehicles out of service. Still, it's nice to see a city willing to try a project like this.
Never attribute to malice what can as easily be the result of incompetence...
Think about it. Either:
1) The "object" threshold is high, which means the first time this kills a toddler, there will be a massive lawsuit
or
2) The "object" threshold is low, which means these will be out of commision the moment a piece of trash crosses their path
Neither setting is workable in a city.
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
Actually, it could be... especially if you don't own a car, and/or those roads are traffic-jammed. No parking fees to pay, either. Assuming there are enough pods to go around, it's almost like having your own chauffeur...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Actually, 25MPH is pretty good during rush hour. No parking problems either.
I wonder how it would compare with light rail or subways. Probably less capacity, but more convenient for people. Might be a viable option for growing cities that would need some sort of mass transit system anyways. Cities that already have subways, buses, and half a billion taxis (NYC, Boston, etc) wouldn't be very interested in this.
Private automobiles can travel at perhaps 80-90mph. Whee! Except that in congested cities, cars don't go nearly as fast as their design max speed, or even the legal max speed of 30-35MPH.
Remember, this kind of system is not aimed at your small, suburban college town; if you can fly down streets today at 30-40MPH in your private car pretty much any old time, there is little reason for ANY form of public transporation, period. If you work or travel on the streets of a major city, 15 MPH average speed would sound pretty good. In fact, I suspect there is a minimum average speed that people need to travel at before they give up working in the city, and that is probably fairly low. This drives the need to adopt new technologies and to make major infrastructure changes in a city. If you can't guarantee 10MPH with horse-and-buggies, you have to build roads and parking for autos.
If you do nothing, then transportation becomes a limiting factor in growth, and you may actually contract the size of your city. The question is, if you want to add a 10,000 commuters, what is the best way to accomodate them? There is no general answer to this, it must be answered on a case by case basis.
If you currently have uncongested roads (where cars travel on average close to the legal maximum speed), the cheapest thing would be to just have people come in their private cars. However, if you have congested roads, then adding 10,000 private automobiles would have a large marginal effect on the average travel speed. In other words you get more congested.
In that case, the next step would be to move to busses. If you can get high utilization, then the impact on your existing traffic jams is almost eliminated.
Except that getting high utilization is tough. Travel time on the bus is not so good. The bus moves at the same slow speed as the rest of traffic, but it has to stop to load and unload passengers. This factor is so important in utilization that LA has designed busses for fast load/unload, and given them the ability to change traffic lights as they are approaching intersections.
IIRC there are several significant design features of the system described which combine to allow cars to travel on average much closer to their design maximum than a bus or even a subway. First, end-to-end travel. You don't have to get off to change lines, which saves time. Second, personal travel. The cars are small and serve just you, so you don't have to wait for the cars to load and unload passengers taking different journeys than you. Third, exclusive track/lane. This means that you are not impeded by other vehicles.
Ideally, you could build a "real time" travel system, by which I mean a system which could, barring mechanical break down, deliver a passenger from one point to another in completely predictable time. This in itself would have great value, provided that the average speed was over something like 10 MPH. If you know that you can make a meeting across town in fifteen or twenty minutes, guaranteed, this would eliminate slack time that you would normally plan for the various kinds of unexpected delays. If you could deliver somebody across town at 20MPH average speed guaranteed, for around the cost of a taxi ride, then this would be a popular service.
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