Robocabs Coming to Europe

Roland Piquepaille writes "Almost all of us can recall both good and poor memories of taxi rides when we arrived in a city we didn't know. This is why a short article from Spiegel Online, 'Bringing Robot Transportation to Europe,' caught my eye this morning. It briefly describes the European 'CityMobil' project which involves 28 partners in 10 countries at a cost of €40 million. This project plans to eliminate city drivers and three trial sites have already been selected. For example, in 2008, Terminal 5 in London's Heathrow airport will be connected to the car park by driverless electric cars along a 4-kilometer track. Read more for additional pictures and references about this project to make the roads in Europe's cities more efficient."

Comments

A more insightful article..

[rufusdufus]

I found a more insightful article that explains the advantage of this system over existing airport shuttle systems:
The difference for passengers will be not so much the journey time - which will be about four minutes - but how long they have to wait. Instead of huddling under a shelter for as long as 20 minutes as they currently do waiting for a bus, the pod will be at most a minute away.

Re:Already done

[evil agent]

So you mean by 2008 we'll have reverted back to trollies and cable-cars? Perhaps people will even ride in electric vehicles that carry 30 or more people! Then everyone can get there for a tenth of the price! Oh wait, no that's a bus...

For God's sake, you didn't have to even have to RTFA. All you had to do was read the summary:

This project plans to eliminate city drivers

I don't know where you live, but I haven't seen many trollies, cable-cars, buses, cabs, trains, or really any vehicles that are driver-less.

Rapid Urban Flexible (RUF) is better

[Russ Nelson]

The RUF is a better system than this. First, because it's dual-mode: you can drive (compatible) cars up onto the guideway. Second, because cars are privately owned (in addition to cars owned by the system operator and run as taxis within the system), the system operator will not have to come up with all the capital needed to run the line .... just the guideway and whatever number of taxis they want to run.

Re:Rapid Urban Flexible (RUF) is better

[Ian Bicking]

From an engineering perspective RUF takes on all the engineering burdens of each form, and combines them. The rail system has to carry cars that are engineered for the road, and typically much larger. Or, even worse, rails engineered for buses which are much larger than anything PRT would carry. A RUF rail system has to take into account a larger variance in vehicles and maintenance; while you can require regular inspections, with private vehicles it's not possible to get anywhere near the quality control that you can get with a controlled system with strict and automated maintenance schedules.

Cars, in turn, have to have all the same complexity they already have, and add the control systems for the tracks as well as seperate track wheels. Each car must still have a licensed and insured driver. Each car is going to have to park somewhere, which is not free. Capital costs of the RUF system are carried in part by private users, but only one of the smallest portions -- the largest portion of capital cost goes into creating the rail infrastructure.

PRT's advantages have to do with its scope. The rail required for PRT vehicles is substantially easier to build, install, and maintain than typical rail, because the load is so much less. Elevated rails carrying tens of tons of weight must be large and bulky, and are very expensive to construct. But because the vehicles on a PRT are required in numbers relative to the number of riders, and wear out relative to how many passenger-miles they go, the cost is directly related to the fare income, so that cost is one of the smallest hurdles for the system compared to the rail infrastructure. PRT is optimized for decreasing the cost of that infrastructure.

It's Called PRT

[dreadlord76]

Personal Rapid Transit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transi t

Re:We don't need robots - we need shopping-cart ta

[Anonymous Coward]

"They need to be about as cheap as shopping carts - and even designed to fold up like shopping carts, so they can be racked conveniently in a compact space."

Dude, if you have to be unrealistic in your ideas, go all the way to personal transporters: "Beam me to work Scotty!"

If you want to see a realistic implementation of your idea (minus the folding cars -- forget rentals, if those were possible, they'd be in every household in Japan), look at http://flexcar.com/ -- the weakness is that you have to return to your origin, so that it is not appropriate for commuting or going to the airport.

Anyway, robots are fine drivers if you take the variability out of the system. Presumably, that's why these are on rails, to simplify the system to the point where they can navigate without too much risk of disturbance.

The past is here, only more intimate.

[IANAAC]

Most major urban areas have public transportation which covers 95 or so percent of the land area. This is just a more intimate version of good old public transportation.

Show me a robo version that can take me from any point in the city to any address in a forth-ring suburb and I'll be impressed. A 4 Km track is no different than two subway stops in any city.

Personal Rapid Transit systems

[rwa2]

These have typically gone by the name of PRT - "Personal Rapid Transit" systems. Google it for a lot more information on what these systems can ultimately achieve.

Back in the 70s, the big systems companies (later to be consumed by Raytheon, Boeing, etc.) was working on these mass transit systems to improve on some of the deficiencies of existing busses, subways, light rail, cars, taxicabs, etc. Ultimately they got out of the business by the 80s... I suppose municipalities aren't very visionary about such things, and it's probably much easier to just pour money into building more roads and federally-funded highways and pass/hide the vehicle costs to people to buy and maintain cars and not bother worrying about traffic congestion or pollution.

Anyway, there are a handful of PRT companies today (Ultra, Skytran, Taxi2000) still trying to push these systems out. Unfortunately, they seem responsible for lots of astroturf propaganda sites that all look and sound exactly the same. But ultimately, the decision to fund and build such broad advanced and integrated municipal systems are highly political. Yuck, politics.

So the only systems that seem to have a chance of being deployed are targetted towards campuses and airports. The only PRT-like thing in existence is a little 3-station tram system built by Boeing for WVU http://faculty.washington.edu/~jbs/itrans/morg.htm

But looks like Ultra is finally succeeding in putting more modern systems in Dubai and Heathrow. It's kinda ironic that these campus transit systems are primarily designed to shuttle people to and from a car parking lot :P

Oh well, one of these days we might have something that look and function a bit more like the PRT as shown in films like Minority Report. But it will take some visionary public officials to make it a priority, as well as some visionary systems engineering to define interface standards so the system can be smoothly maintained and upgraded over the decades. At least high fuel prices and increasing concern with environmentalism and sustainability may actually raise the public consciousness about this soon.

Re:Arnold

[Barryke]

Not exactly a cab, but also an interesting automated transport system:

Phileas is the name of a new public transport system which is developed and built in Eindhoven (the Netherlands) by APTS. It is an electrically driven road vehicle with properties of a bus, tram or metro system. It allows several driving modes found in these vehicles:

• Manual control with the use of gas pedal, brake and steering wheel as in a normal bus.
• Semi-automatic control with computer controlled lateral tracking as in a tram or metro. The Phileas' electronic navigation system is guided here by a chain of magnetic bars hidden in the road surface.
• Fully automatic control which additionally controls speed and smooth 'landing' and departing at bus stops. In this mode the drivers' main task is the supervision of the system and to take over control when necessary. (i actualy did see one read the newspaper while driving..)

The Phileas has an electronic lane assistance and precision docking system, which can be used on routes specifically prepared for this purpose. In these routes, a trail of magnetic reference markers will be laid in the road surface.

http://www.apts-phileas.com/
(checkout Concept and Infrastructure)

http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phileas_(OV) (dutch)