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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."
In Soviet Russia, car drives you!
"You're in a JohnnyCab!"
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.
I agree with you, and have been hoping that some day they start doing this in denser areas. Being able to use advanced routing methods to move people from A to B in place of the inefficient and unaware cars and buses of today would be very useful. There are a few problems I can think of that need to be sorted out to get this to work properly though:
- Efficient routing around disasters, with breakdown detection to prevent a single system failure from breaking the entire network.
- Some sort of weight detection system to ensure that people do not leave anything on the vehicles (bags, bombs, etc). Normally a driver would point these things out but automated systems lack that ability.
- Some sort of 'digital nose' type device to detect the vehicles which have stink bombs, vomit, and whatever other lovely smells that can be accrued by frequent usage in a densely populated area, and allow the vehicles to be removed from service and cleaned instantly.
- Decent integration with pedestrians. They need to be able to go as fast as possible so that fewer vehicles are needed, but must not clog up roads for traffic and pedestrians. Ideally some sort of sunken road could be used where appropriate perhaps, allowing large boulevards at ground level, and enabling their usage in pedestrianised areas.
- Easy to use for disabled people.
- Free or cheaper than driving a car or taking a bus.
- Must run at all hours, not be limited like public transport is, as this encourages people to either stumble around cities drunk after clubs close, or sometimes risk driving home.
That is all that I can think of right now, anyone got any others? A private public-transport would be very welcome.
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