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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."
Did anyone else read that as "Robocrabs" and imagine some nasty STD of the future?
In Soviet Russia, car drives you!
"You're in a JohnnyCab!"
I think this marks the point where the future is right now. Or will be in three years. If it works. Hopefully. Either way, at least in principle, automated traffic like this could be faster, safer, and more effecient. And if this particular project doesn't work out as hoped, the next one will.
You mean, like trains and subways?
You're welcome. And yes, I am cooperation.
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...
1) Take age old idea.
2) Do the same thing only with added benefit of key words.
3) Sell it as a new idea
4) Get fools to buy it.
5) PROFIT!!
Yeah, that's right, no "?????" step here.
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.
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.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Personal Rapid Transit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transi t
Robots aren't very good drivers yet.
What we need are really cheap taxis that people can rent with a credit or debit card, drive a short distance, and pretty much just jump out and leave them. 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.
You'd probably rent the right to keep one at home over-night. You'd drive it a mile or two on surburban streets to a bus or lightrail terminal, where you'd rack it and get your "taxicard" back. Ride the transit, get off within a mile or two of where you need to be. Grab another taxi-cart, insert your taxicard, drive to your final destination. Rack it up with dozens or hundreds of others in the taxicart stall, and get your taxicard back again.
Reverse that, when going home. Each Taxicart stand would have extra taxicarts, and a computer system would note when a stand runs out completely, so that a couple of extras could quickly be delivered there. In the rare case that you arrive somewhere with an empty taxicart rack, you can punch a button to have one delivered, and get a credit for your inconvenience of having to wait.
The taxicart would be all electric, with maybe a 15 mile range, probably about 25mph maximum speed. It would re-charge while racked up. It'd also have a small tank of water - in the summer that'd be frozen (while on the rack) to provide maybe half an hour's air conditioning. In the winter, it'd be heated, for about the same duration of heat.
It'd be computer tracked with wireless and GPS - so the central computer could track units that get stalled. If you need to go somewhere without a rack, and leave the cart there, you could punch a button and pay to have it picked up - trucks would drive around just for that purpose - and again get your taxicard back. It'd have a plug too, so you could charge it up if necessary.
You could get by with one tenth the number of cars on the road today.
You'd have exactly the same number of cars on the road as you have now.
Unless you increase the number of passengers per vehicle, or decrease the number of powered trips (bicycles/feet), it would be the same number of trips here and there. There might be fewer vehicles in total circulation, but the number in motion at any one time would be the same. There would, of course, be fewer sitting around in driveways and parking lots.
You could reduce te number of cars sold every year by a factor of ten.
Wear and tear. If you and 9 other people in your neighborhood all used one car, how long would it last at 200,000 miles per year?
Who mediates when all 10 of you need to get to work at the same time, in different places?
They could mostly be electric, thus quieter and centralizing the smog makers at power plants.
This has zero to do with power source. Electric could happen with or without robocars.
At the international airport in Kualua Lumpur they have a robot train to pick up passengers and take them to another terminal. Here in Canada I felt like I was in a cattle corral with customs cowboys standing behind two way mirrors with prods ready.
This train of course runs on a set track but it does illustrate the idea.
I think this is a good development. I share the optimism of many experts who suggest we are already at or near peak oil. Currently we produce about 85 million barrels per day and at this point Saudi Aramco has admitted Ghawar is in decline up to 8% and the country as a whole is declining 2%. They join Kuwait which announced last November that Bergan is in decline. The next largest fields are Canatarrel and DaQing and these are in about a 14% decline along with Bergan.
These top four 4 feilds collectivly produce about 12-15% of the worlds conventional oils and they just illustrate the problem. Most countries and most oil fields are presently in decline.
The Jack#2 well announced by Cheveron last week may hearld in a new field potentially with 3-15 billion barrels. If so then this feild may be able to produce 750,000 barrels per day by the 2010-2015 time frame.
By 2015 if we subscribe to the idea that we're going to lose 5% production per year from the current 85 million barrels produced per day, then by 2015 we'll be short well over 15 million barrels of Oil per day (BOPD) of production compared to today. Tar Sands may add 2.2 million BOPD or even more. The Cheveron/Devon discovery may add almost another 1 million. But 85-85*(0.95^10) is a loss of 31 million BOPD and thus with this rough rough calculation I've already factored in everything we are likely going to be able to do and still some.
The bottom line is we need to cut consumption in a big way and the sooner the better. A HUGE percentage of the liquid fuels consummed, especially in the USA, is totally wasted. SUV"s sit six (6) abreast in grid lock traffic with their stereos cranked up and their air conditioners blasting. If we were to factor in the waste of people's lives - spending hours commuting to a job that may amount to little more than beauracratic paper shuffling, this alone might be considered the crime of the century.
But what we are doing to our planet and our future is even worse. All of that fuel wasted while commuting (often 1 person to a truck) is not available for useful purposes like industrial, chemical feedstocks, or by farmers to produce food.
Robocabs, if they are fuel efficient and small and sized for the job are an obvious answer.
Currently the USA burns over 20 million barrels of oil per day. If we get the SUV's off the road and replace them with a "Jonny cab" (from Total Recall - its a RoboCab) then we save lives because we get stupid drivers away from behind the wheel, we cut commuting time because the commute can be organised in a far more efficient manner than just plain old grid lock, and we might save enough fuel to save our precious butts in the process.
The thing is this fuel crisis is likely to be fully recognised as the beginning of a fundamental change to the human condition by 2010. Its still a few months to a few years off. Oil prices in the $70 range are the harbinger of things to come. We're ok for a short while. Next year we might not be so lucky.
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.
So are they gonna pipe in mid-eastern music, garlic smells, and strange bead thingies dangling from the mirrors to give it the real cabbie ambiance?
Table-ized A.I.
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.
m
:P
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.ht
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
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.
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)
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