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The Driverless Future: Buses, Not Taxis
jfruh writes Driverless vehicles are coming. The question is: what form will they take? Uber's management has suggested that, rather than owning our own private, autonomous cars, we'll all be glad to pay Uber by the trip for a private ride in one. But an Italian consultant working on experimental driverless vehicles in Europe thinks that the future will lie with automated buses, because driverless cars, "may be able to go and park themselves out of harm's way, they may be able to do more trips per day, but they will still need a 10 ft wide lane to move a flow of 3600 persons per hour ... their advantages completely fade away in an urban street, where the frequent obstacles and interruptions will make robots provide a performance that will be equal, or worse than, that of a human driver, at least in terms of capacity and density."
Uber's management has suggested that, rather than owning our own private carriages, we'll all be glad to pay Uber by the trip for a ride in a rented hackney.
Heading to Dallas, Cotton Bowl, TXJAM III. Bus, back seat, center. Driver came back to look around at a side-of-road stop. I notice the bus was rolling backwards! I said, the bus is rolling back. He said, "What?". I said, "look out the window." He RUNS up front and hits the brakes. I saved the day. Gas pumps, etc. Now would it be better without a driver?
If you go from ten single-occupancy cars to a ten-passenger bus, you've eliminated 90% of the vehicles at the (relatively low) cost of adding one more driver. Eliminating the bus driver gets you from eleven people in the bus to ten, which is probably not as important as other efficiency improvements. Also, buses are awful unless you have quite high population density -- lots of areas don't have enough prospective trip endpoints to justify mass transit.
A bus takes up a lot of room - but the 40 cars that would have to replace the bus take up far more room.
I don't think any more people will take driverless buses than take driven buses now.
The problem with buses is not with drivers/driverless. It's that people don't want to take 45 minute milk-runs, stopping 20 times, to get where they can go in 10 minutes driven directly.
Buses are already better than private cars for human transportation in urban environments. Problem is, humans are extremely selfish and many of them want to feel superiority by driving on their own (and taking all that space on the street, causing congestions). Autoindustry lobby doesn't help either.
This is way out there, unlikely to happen, but just maybe there will be a combination of cars and buses? Maybe if you have a similar starting location and stopping location and time as hundreds of other people you will take mass transit, and if you do not fall into an easy categorisation as everyone else you will have custom options?
I know, that is crazy. No system would ever be built like like.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I guess none of those people actually go to work by car. I'd pay a lot for the luxury of having my car drive itself to work and back every day. It would remove a lot of stress and fatigue from my days.
I don't see the link between autonomous vehicles and fundamentally changing the economies of own versus rent. Whether a bus has a driver or not, it makes the same amount of sense to use it instead of other transportation. It may lower the bus fare some, but in the scheme of operating a bus the driver pay isn't going to change things more drastically than, say, improvements in fuel efficiency. I doubt there are many people for whom the bus fare today was the factor making it unfit for their purposes.
I agree with the assertion that autonomous buses would be more bang for the buck for autonomous operation (not only the space efficiency, but having autonomous software navigate a pre-defined route is easier than navigating arbitrary routes).
Look, driverless rail already exists. Look at Vancouver BC. It's safe, and cheap to operate.
But the urban designer's want at-grade surface light rail in Surrey BC. Light Rail that requires drivers, and safety equipment installed at every grade crossing.
Now think about a driverless bus. If light rail systems can't figure out how to go driverless at grade, what makes Uber or Google so sure they could have a conventional bus that operates on the same route any better?
People (humans) do not respect bigger slower vehicles. The amount of times people die in at-grade collisions per rail system makes light rail more lethal than buses. Why on earth would any city consider building non-automated at-grade light rail, when it's cheaper to just build an unattended driverless metro in the first place?
Reading the article may help: they are talking about small buses which often have a dedicated lane. There is, of course, a desire to use this for regular buses.
As for the difficulties presented by public transportation, I can assure you that there are many problems presented by private vehicles. Even if you ignore the need for high capacity roads to handle an a large number of vehicles, you also have to dedicate a large amount of infrastructure to parking (may that be straight out land use or parkades). Large numbers of vehicles being operated by people with different skill levels and motivations also make roads very unpredictable places, which increases the probability of accidents. A dependence upon vehicles also radically changes the social environment.
I can work in a car. I can't work in a bus. The car is a private space where I can talk and pick my nose.
If busses were the answer for middle class transport we would see a luxury version of the greyhound.
But who is going to supervise the children and stop[ fights and bullying? I can't see a robot being very effective on typical school buses.
Or are we talking about coaches? (The long distance buses run by Greyhound and Jefferson Lines) ?
I thought the whole point of automated cars was to improve safety by taking the distracted amateur out of the drivers seat, and also permit impaired people (whether disabled, intoxicated or just tired) to have personal transportation which is necessary in most non-metropolitan USA towns.
In a future where cars drive themselves, and everyone will eventually own one or enslave themselves into the machine to own one, efficiencies of public transportation will eventually become evident sooner rather than later.
In a perf^H^H^H^Hless corrupt world, imagine the amount of investment it took for everyone to own driverless cars, city roads/highways redesigned to better meet demands of algorhythmic traffic flow, wireless internet infrastructure to support millions of transportees looking for something to do when they no longer have the burden of steering a 2 ton hunk of steel through 5-50 miles of obstacles. Imagine where we'd already be today if that amount of investment was put into a public transport system. Instead, they're a joke.
1. Timetables seem to be set arbitrarily instead of easily matching demand. Why are ratio of rail cars 2:1 for heavy:light traffic times as opposed to 5:1, 10:1 in some cities? They have the extra cars. Buses don't seem to be increased at all.
2. Rates raised to meet some sort of corporate profit model. We don't want to be in the red, because our taxpayers will not see public transportation as an investment to helping our city grow as we increase job opportunity and liquidity. It's just important that everyone doesn't see our public transportation as a burden. So instead, let's run less cars to cut costs, ignoring economies of scale and increase rates because people would be pay $100 a month for a shitty public transport pass when it would cost them $125 otherwise in gas. Some middle management guy took an econ 101 class and he learned about this thing called a supply demand graph and that's how we should model our "business", not as a civil duty we have to growing a city wide utility.
3. NIMBY assholes have enough clout to stop what should be the most obvious need public transportation has, to go where its citizens need to go. Instead of getting smacked down by eminent domain, they whine enough that an entire city needs to avoid some rich area so their white fear can be assuaged.
Reading the article may help: they are talking about small buses which often have a dedicated lane. There is, of course, a desire to use this for regular buses.
Yes, dedicated bus lanes are basically the worst thing you can possibly have in a city. They have horrible utilization. For 1-2x as much money you could build rail and move up to 10x as many people. But then you have the same problem as buses, which is getting people to use them. And as long as you have "haves" and "have nots" then you will have people who have to ride the bus, and people who don't want to ride the bus with them. Hence, you will still have buses and cars unless you actually outlaw cars.
This is why I'm always banging on the PRT drum. It has actual benefits, not imaginary ones like dedicated bus lanes. It is an ideal solution to city traffic problems because it is more like a taxicab than a bus. Buses are actually horribly shitty things to have in your city whether they are self-driven or not because they completely shit on traffic patterns. You can zoom right through SF even most of the time when it's crowded except for the goddamned buses, and all the perturbations from everyone else going around them. They only make sense for places without a lot of traffic. But then, who needs massive mass transit in places like those? Those lines often lose money because they're useless anyway, they run once an hour or once every two hours and you can't actually use them to get anywhere in a timely fashion. I know, I grew up without a car.
Anyway, Buses basically never deliver their promised per-passenger efficiency, unless they are so stuffed full that you don't want to be on them. They're a half-assed solution and are utterly unsuited for our social models.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
A bus can only be in one spot. 40 cars can be in 40 different spots.
The problem with busses is that anybody of means doesn't like taking them. Too many other people's stops and what not.
You are not going to convert car drivers to bus takers just because it's driverless.
A car goes on your schedule, not the other way around. Which is why driverless cars will win.
I'm not too worried about traffic. I think personal driverless quadrocopters will be possible around the mid-Century mark.
A bus takes up a lot of room - but the 40 cars that would have to replace the bus take up far more room.
Buses rarely run at full capacity, and when they do, you don't want to be on them. In San Francisco, I've just given up and walked because I know what the inside of certain buses will smell like, and I'd rather be in the rain. And I am not exactly a richie-rich motherfucker. I just take showers and wash my clothes, and I don't like to be surrounded by people who don't.
Also, 40 cars all manage to be in their lane and move more or less with the flow of traffic, buses fail both tests. They also pull out without looking, as if they had a right to do so. And in many cities they do, they had to give the buses the legal right to cut you off or they could never get back into traffic. All that pulling halfway over and fucking the traffic behind them while picking up slow passengers and perhaps wheelchairs is far more disruptive than 40 cars which are all taking the most efficient route to their destination, especially now that people can use internet-enabled routing (i.e. Google maps) to route them around traffic automatically.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
in many cities it is now an offence to impede a bus from getting back into traffic. when they've pulled out, that is. the other case is the extended curb so the bus never leaves the traffic lane but blocks it while stopped. the official line in metro vancouver is that a bus stopped in the traffic lane is NOT an obstructin to normal traffic.
.A car goes on your schedule, not the other way around.
I'm not too worried about traffic.
Contradiction.
I think personal driverless quadrocopters will be possible around the mid-Century mark.
"But soon flying cars" fallacy. Argument failure complete.
Brilliant! We need a large vehicle that slithers through traffic. It could be based on those robotic snakes from a few years ago. I could see it crawling along on a tread lined belly, making clean corners, gobbling up riders, pooping their nutrient drained husks out. Perhaps it could squeeze buildings for passengers or tankers for fuel.
That would be efficient. It could crawl over traffic jams, park in unusual places, maybe there are military applications!
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
A bus takes up a lot of room - but the 40 cars that would have to replace the bus take up far more room.
On average, a bus has 9 passengers, not 40. 40 is the number of seats. Cars average 1.3 passengers. So a bus roughly replaces 7 cars.
Citation:Energy efficiency in transportation
No one ever considers riding horses! Horses take up quite a bit of room though. Perhaps if we rode pigs instead...
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Perhaps in very dense cities, but nowhere else.
Now that I can believe.
Driverless cars won't be allowed on the road unless they are incredibly safe in cities.
The number of red flags that will cause the driverless car to stop will be huge.
1) Child walking along the curb
2) Child jogging along the curb
3) Child sprinting along the curb
4) Child sprinting along the curb, with their head turned slightly, looking into the road
5) Child sprinting, head turned, looking at a small piece of paper or card being blown across the road
Driverless car has to hit the brakes by scenario number 3).
I can slow down slightly, veer closer to the middle of the road and await further events for 3,4 and 5, because I don't have to plan for 1/1,000,000,000 chances, where the driverless car is forced to. Result: Until driverless cars reach critical mass, they will slow down city traffic on average.
Lets say cost of automation is actually less than cost of hired driver. In a taxi that cost saving divides between 1-4 passangers. In a bus same cost saving divides between 50 passangers. Clearly you win more in a taxi. However its easier to automate a bus, because it only needs to drive one predefined route. It makes more economic sense to automate a taxi than it does to automate a bus. It is however somewhat easier to automate a bus. Buses and taxis serve a slightly different functions, so it might never come to the point where one replaces the other. But if it does then it will be taxi. A bus will always be cheaper than a taxi, but automation can make both so cheap that cost saving becomes moot and taxi is preferable for convenience. For example, most westerners visiting poor countries will discover that taxis are so cheap that buses are simply not worth the hassle. Thats because the drivers don't earn all that much, robots don't need wages eighter.
the official line in metro vancouver is that a bus stopped in the traffic lane is NOT an obstructin to normal traffic.
You can't make a turd into a rose no matter what name you give it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Without bus drivers there could be more smaller buses with shorter stops, better able to match demand.
Doesn't quite match reality does it, just about every city in the world has buses and they cope fine.
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Why does the answer have to be either 'taxi' or 'bus' when it's possible to combine the two and have a sensible multi-drop scheme? This would need a decent number of users (Higher than that needed to sustain a local bus company, I'd guess), but would manage to combine the two nicely, and with computerised routing of vehicles should be practical.
Like a taxi you book from where you are, and it'll come to collect you there and drop you off at your requested destination. Unlike a taxi though there could be others riding already, and the vehicle may divert to make pick ups/drop offs on the way within reason.
The result is something which is similar to a less direct taxi, but will be a a lot cheaper as it's multi-occupant and will have passengers almost continually, similar to a bus. It also means that there are less vehicles on the road as each one is carrying more people, and this reduction would actually improve as the service became more popular- it's easier to have efficient routes when there are more options available. Vehicles would likely range from large cars to small buses, things small enough to get through residential areas (I'm in the UK where getting something the size of a full bus down a side street would be impressive) but large enough to carry a few small groups of people.
If you want to keep the 'bus' mentality too then have scheduled pick-ups over the most-used routes, so 'There will be a vehicle arriving at Easterly School every ten minutes traveling to the city center, and arriving forty minutes later'. This may also do other pickups and drop-offs on the way but will arrive more or less when it says unless there are problems.
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Surely there the money is in private automobiles, but before we start jumping ecstatically about this thing, shouldn't there first be a proof of concept in a streetcar system or something? This would be ideal environment for beta testing this, because unlike undergrounds that are essentially closed systems, streetcars are not, but the system wouldn't need to care about actually steering just yet, only stay in schedule and not hitting anything.
My family rode the bus for years, and it was ridiculous: being around drunks, disgustingly smelly people, once sitting in someone's piss, bus drivers talking on their cell phones while driving, bus drivers not watching the road while driving, idiots bumping into you, people getting on the bus smelling like shit, being late for work because drivers can't show up on time, etc.
Also, as someone else here alluded to, what once took me about an hour and a half each way is now a 15 minute drive.
A large proportion of people will not willingly share their commute space with others. Since people who "vote with their feet" seem to prefer to drive their own cars in privacy to sharing a vehicle, route and schedule with other people the rider may not like, it will take more than engineering to get the intended result. It will mean, eventually, either outlawing ownership of private cars in certain places or making permissions prohibitively expensive.
I see a big, expensive failure in this. Nevertheless, it will get funded by groups who are obviously against union labor: the Koch brothers, government planners, et al. Retailers like Wal-Mart, on the other hand, will be against, as they have few stores within cities, and it's hard to lug their stuff home on a minibus. Amazon and other internet sellers will see the same cost-without-benefit scenario.
The winners? Media outlets who will see an increase in revenues of "for-and-against" political ads.
An interesting thing for "drinkypoo" to say :)
you need a lot of unused capacity during off hours to provide the peak capacity you need.
So, it is correct when measuring energy efficiency to look at total energy expenditure averages using the statistic you cite. But when looking at capacity of a system as for example the case of rush hours, that's just the wrong number to use. And in fact, the numbers are even worse for you, buses fill up with people at peak times, cars actually don't.
Could we robotize the baggage handling system first? Driverless luggage carriers and robots won't need background checks, won't pilfer, and don't interact with third parties out in the tarmac (less likely to encounter ambulance chasing lawyers out to sue Google for fender bending).
Gently reply
I may be taking public transport, or share a car with people, but NEVER using a service provided by that company.
It would be determined by price. The price of an automated bus ride (which would go along a common route) would be significantly less than the price of an automated car ride that goes wherever you want. Busses ain't going away. Neither are taxis. Paid-for-hire drivers however, will be gone soon. Then over probably another couple of decades, most people will stop driving cars themselves as the prices of auto-drive cars get nearly as low as human-drive cars and automated taxis become cheaper and more common.
Of course, this might be slowed in some places by regulations to protect taxi drivers, and that would be mostly a bad thing. Instead, automated taxi services will hopefully be forced to buy out human drivers.
If you think a bus disrupts traffic more or less than 40 cars do, you haven't thought it through.
Also, if I take the bus to work, it takes an hour. If I drive, it takes fifteen minutes. So bus passengers may be on the road far longer than motorists.
I can't think of anywhere I've lived where the bus took less than twice as long as driving.
Which means the optimum size for a bus is smaller than most current buses. In the automated future, buses will be smaller and more of them will run the same route. Possibly, during off-peak hours some of them will function as taxis.
In the US driverless cars will win, generally because the US infrastructure and cities are built for car ownership; generally speaking US cities have a lower population density than other countries. In larger, higher density cities such as in China and some parts of South America, buses will be the way to go as they're decently clean and having too many cars in those high density cities is a huge negative. In many European cities it'll be a mixed bag; I see small driverless cars being useful in the tight streets of Paris, but some other European cities buses are more convenient. In places like North Africa and Europe, long bus rides are one of the primary methods of inexpensive commute between cities (a cheaper alternative to trains and they more easily connect places without train tracks), so buses will be much more cost efficient than cars for >1 hour trips.
It depends a lot less on the type of the technology and much more on the infrastructure in a given city as well as the type of commute/infrastructure.
If we do not own our own cars and no drivers are needed, would cars even look like they do today? I don't think so.
The problem today is that cars are expensive. If I am going to own one, it does not makes sense to drop that kind of cash for a tiny little car. The incentive is to buy something bigger than can be useful in other situations (e.g., picking up a relative at the airport). At the end, all the extra space we buy is for the most part wasted. We do not use that extra space most of the time.
Rather than moving toward buses, I find it more likely that the shape of cars would change. For the daily commute, perhaps you would get something that would be just about half as thin as a regular car and you would pay a lower rate. If you need a trunk (e.g., buying groceries), you would pay a little more for a bigger ride. etc
Which means that minibuses make sense. 20-30 seats will seat those 9 comfortably, but still handle the other side of the bell curve nicely (don't forget, if 9 is the average, that doesn't mean that they only have 9 at peak times). The driver is a big part of the cost and the reason that they're less common. Add some more intelligent routing and the ability to just specify where you want to get on and off, and have the system readjust the routs to accommodate you.
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If you think a bus disrupts traffic more or less than 40 cars do, you haven't thought it through.
On the contrary, if you think a bus doesn't disrupt traffic more or less than 40 cars do, you haven't thought it through. When the vehicle is parked, it's not part of traffic. It's just an obstruction to it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
They can be a lot faster if you live somewhere with dedicated bus lanes. The bus is starting and stopping a lot, but in between stops it can actually move, whereas the cars are stuck in traffic jams...
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I agree that you won't convert car drivers to bus riders.
We have busses now and fro. The point if view of the rider whether a computer or a human is the driver makes little difference.
Driverless electric cars that don't go faster than 20 mph don't need to be very aerodynamic. Parts of people's routes are often shared, or park-n-rides wouldn't work. Driverless cars could slowly go to assembly spots where they link up into trains, and then the trains go fast on predetermined routes to other spots where they disassemble back into cars that slowly travel the last 1/8 mile to individual destinations. It'll enact the functionality of public transport for people wealthy enough to own personal pods. The big problem is the space consumed protecting against impact from human driven vehicles.
And the "driverless" part is entirely optional. Cities with good public transportation already demonstrate how it is done.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The best is not to focus on only one solution.
I could see both as a great addition to what is already there at a different price. Also different depending on where it is. Rome, Italy will have different requirements compared to Bettles, Alaska so I do not see how only one solution will fit all.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
A bus in the UK has 9 passengers, averaged across the entire UK. One major reason for that: the UK subsidizes bus routes to small towns that are probably lucky to have 2-3 people on average taking them most of the day.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
you need a lot of unused capacity during off hours to provide the peak capacity you need.
Sure. But empty seats on big buses is an inefficient way of achieving that. Better to use small driverless vans, and increase the number of vans on the road during peak times.
You don't necessarily have to outlaw cars, just not actively provide parking for them everywhere. Many U.S. cities have minimum-parking-spot laws requiring a certain number of parking spots for various kinds of developments, regardless of whether the property owner actually wants to put them in. And the cities themselves frequently provide a bunch of free or cheap parking themselves, by allowing street parking (instead of using that lane for transportation), building lots, etc. In cities that don't require the private sector to provide parking, and don't provide much parking themselves, cars end up discouraged if the land is valuable enough that other uses crowd out parking lots. That has happened in Copenhagen, for example: it's very expensive to park in the city. It's legal to drive into downtown, but most people either bike or transit, because it's more practical.
(Another thing that helps: don't bulldoze giant freeways through city centers.)
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The only time this matters is during peak times - who cares how much space a vehicle takes up when you've got plenty of extra road capacity?
if Driverless tech ever becomes viable, it will be used on long haul trucks. I could see long haul truck depots with Easy on/off to the highways. The computer system drives the truck to another depot when the owner picks up the truck for the final short distance. The bulk of the time of hauling goods is done on highways. Truck companies could replace dozens of drivers with just one driver, that remains local and just pick ups and drops off trucks at the depot. A Human operator would be needed to navigate the truck to its final destination and park the truck at the loading dock.
This would make economical since it would save them the bulk of labor expense driving the load over the long distances. Highways are generally easier to navigate than local roads, although it may not be practical for urban regions where congestion and complex intersections would make it difficult for a computer system. However there are lots of highways that are straight for hundreds of miles and need minimal though to navigate (ie West and Mid West).
It is a claim by an MP in UK Parliament, made back in 2005.
They got their number by essentially guessing. Cause there is no such number as "passengers per vehicle".
Fuel consumption estimates for buses are based on National Atmospheric Emissions Inventory (NAEI) estimates combined with road passenger kilometres taken from the 2002 Transport Statistics for Great Britain.
Except there is no such value as "passenger kilometres" for buses in the source as you can't use that for buses - cause they operate by "zones" and not by destinations.
Same price for one stop as it is for three or five and passengers keep getting on and off along the way.
A ticket price is not related to the of distance that a passenger WILL BE traveling but to the MAXIMUM distance ALLOWED to travel.
So, they rounded it down to the lowest common denominator.
"9 passengers average" might be stretched as technically not a "wrong" number - just factually completely inaccurate as an average, minimum or maximum number of passengers.
It's actually the minimum number of passengers a bus must be able to carry in order to NOT BE CONSIDERED a "not-a-bus".
If it talks like a bus, drives like a bus... then it is not a taxi, which CAN be used as a bus but it is NOT a bus.
So what is a bus? Anything from 9 seats and up.
Transport Statistics Great Britain, 2002, 5 Public Transport: Notes and Definitions
Taxi industry: 5.9
A taxi, or hackney carriage, is a vehicle with
fewer than 9 passenger seats which is licensed to
âoeply for hireâ (i.e. it may stand at ranks or be
hailed in the street by members of the public).
This distinguishes taxis from Private Hire
Vehicles (PHVs), which must be booked in
advance through an operator and may not ply for
hire (taxis may also be pre-booked). Taxis must
normally be hired as a whole (i.e. separate fares
are not charged to each passenger). However,
taxis may charge separate fares when a sharing
scheme is in operation, when they are run as a
bus under a special PSV operators' licence or
when pre-booked (PHV operators may also
charge passengers separately if they share a
journey).
5.2 Bus and coach services: vehicle stock:1 1990/91-2000/01
1990/91 1991/92 1992/93 1993/94 1994/95 1995/96 1996/97 1997/98 1998/99 1999/00 2000/01
Single deckers:
Thousands
up to 16 seats 8.1 7.9 8.7 9.4 9.3 8.8 10.0 10.5 10.9 11.6 10.9
17-35 seats 11.5 12.4 13.5 14.5 15.9 16.5 16.6 13.6 14.4 13.9 15.0
36 plus seats 30.2 29.8 29.5 30.8 30.4 30.8 30.5 34.9 36.4 37.8 38.0
All single deckers 49.8 50.1 51.7 54.7 55.6 56.1 57.1 59.0 61.7 63.2 63.8
All double deckers 22.2 21.3 20.9 20.1 19.7 19.6 18.6 17.1 17.0 16.8 15.9
All vehicles 71.9 71.4 72.7 74.8 75.3 75.7 75.7 76.1 78.7 80.0 79.7
That "9 passengers average" is like saying that average number of seats for motor vehicles is 1 - because motorcycles.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
albuquerque wants to do that but its going to kill even more small businesses if they do, the city sent out representatives to canvas the route and they basically said they were going to do it regardless, its not going to fix any current problems, pedestrians are still killed all the time
albuquerque will try anything that is popular somewhere else, it is also not business friendly compared to california
They are faster if you have dedicated bus lanes and everywhere you go is on a bus lane. As soon as you need to transfer, it's automatically faster with the car even during rush-hour. As for being stuck in traffic jams, I cannot tell you the number of times I've been stuck in a traffic jam with a bus. Even so, I still make it home a good 20 minutes before the same bus makes it there. But I don't think it's either buses or cars. If you scale a bus size down and use smart routes going where people go, not where the routes are you could get the speed that is needed to make public transit acceptable and reduce congestion.
in Europe they have free health care so if you lose your job you are ok but in the usa the union will fight like hell to keep the jobs.
. That has happened in Copenhagen, for example: it's very expensive to park in the city. It's legal to drive into downtown, but most people either bike or transit, because it's more practical.
(Another thing that helps: don't bulldoze giant freeways through city centers.)
I think you have a misstep in logic. You said that in Copenhagen it's expensive the park so people take transit because it's more practical. Try people take transit because it costs less. Cost being equal, people would drive because it's more efficient use of their time and personal (mental/physical) energy. Don't underestimate how draining public transit is. You have to be on guard for pickpockets, backpack/messenger bag theft, intrusion your physical space, body odor, contagion of flu and cold. Being on alert for that for hours every day is exhausting.
Depends how you implement them, buses don't have to have fixed schedules and routes. In a large city like NYC you can just put kiosks at the bus stop requesting people to state their destination. Good algorithms can then route to the people to the same location via the same bus, and then the bus can skip all other stops. This is already being done with elevators, instead of selecting your direction you select your destination, and the screen tells you what elevator to get, which will skip straight to your floor (and tells the others to take a different elevator). The bus doesn't have to function as a bus does today, it can become a 40 person taxi, with almost all the benefits of a taxi but at a much higher volume.
So by elimination, if I did think it through, the only conclusion would be "by precisely the same amount as".
Now I don't know as much about it as Bennet Haselton, but isn't that rather unlikely?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Don't underestimate how draining public transit is.
I take public transit every day (I live in Copenhagen) and I don't find it draining at all. It's clean, safe, and efficient.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
So buses are better when nanny-state stalino-feminist government infringes people's inherent constitutional right to drive wherever they goddam like?
I'll take freedom, thank you milord. And nobody tells my country how many somalian terrorists, albanian gangsters and gypsy beggars who we have to let in.
--
roman_mir
Kiosks at bus stops is a 21st century solution? Maybe you have some idea to improve my buggy whip as well?
It really depends on the mode of public transport. Here in Chicago, we have three main modes - diesel passenger trains, electric rail and diesel buses. Here, the diesel passenger trains are by far the best - clean (unless you end up at Union Station), comfortable, fast, reliable. It's suburb-to-urban center transport, though - great for that transit pattern, terrible for anything else. Riding the diesels is a relaxing trip.
Electric rail (the 'El') is next down the list. Mostly connects various city neighborhoods to the downtown (and to each other via transfers). It's not as clean, not as comfortable, not as reliable, not as fast as the diesel lines, but it's more flexible. On a crowded line, it's a moderately stressful trip.
Finally, you have the diesel buses. They suck unless you're taking a trip on off hours - an empty bus driving on empty roads is fine. Any other combination sucks - dirty, crowded, slow, unreliable transport.
Yeah I agree it varies. They're all pretty good here though; I take the metro usually, but sometimes take the bus, and I don't find the bus to be too much of a problem. Slow-ish, but they have free wifi if you're going a long enough distance for it to be worth working on your laptop, and the ride is fairly smooth due to the way the stops are engineered to not usually require really pulling over.
What do you find stressful about the "El"? I've found metros stressful in Asia, but only because they're so crowded that it's just physically difficult to get on, and then difficult to get off again, and you're packed like sardines. But I've never encountered that level of crowding in Europe. Even when the metro is crowded here I don't usually find it stressful; I mostly just stand in a corner somewhere and read RSS feeds on my phone. It's better if it's less crowded, but it's still, though imperfect, better than driving. I used to commute daily by car when I lived in the U.S., and I found that very stressful, basically 30 minutes of watching for idiots so they don't hit you.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
+1, accurate impersonation of Roman mir
The problem with bus routes is that you need to know them and they're relatively static. The internet, search engines and cellphones all made it possible to look up the schedules from a bus stop. What we never tried was adapting the bus schedules to current demand. What if the bus schedule could change on-demand based on who is at which bus stop? What if you didn't have to ride for 30+ stops to get where you're going. Computers are capable of solving these routing problems much faster than we can, and usually optimally. ...and then I realize these things are going to be written by hordes of underpaid interns. I foresee lots of bodies piled up in the interstate.
Why vans? Why busses? Why cars?
Single-occupancy vehicles such as a moped would take up even less space and can be more efficiently distributed to meet current demand in multiple high-demand areas at peak times. And at low-demand times/areas, having the option to combine single-seaters together for, say, families or sport team away games, is a lot easier than filling unused space in a bus or van. Added benefit: no one else on the ride to get all up in your personal space.
Driverless allows high efficiency very small people movers. Buses are per person mile very inefficient in energy use, pollution and especially convenience. They are only efficient in the first two when full to capacity which they are only during major commute rushes. The future of self-driving vehicles is highly flexible, electric powered, on demand minimal vehicles for the job. Anything else is nonsense.
The Italian consultant is designing for maximum transport capacity, instead utility to the passengers. Private cars give you your own personal space, and provide convenient storage of items that you are transporting. A system that provides for both privately owned and rented cars gives better service to its users. Such a system could include small buses for people who are transporting only themselves. The reason most buses today are large is due to the cost of the driver. When the bus is automated, you can afford to make it smaller.
It really depends on which branch of the El you're on and what time of day. The north, northwest and southwest branches (Purple, Brown and Orange lines) are reasonably clean and moderately quick (they have fewer stops) but get ridiculously, Asia-level crowded during the rush. If you are at the edge of one of them (and can thus get a seat), it's not bad.
The north/south (Red) and cross-town lines (Blue and Green) are dirtier, slower and less safe. Part of that is just the realities of the neighborhoods they go through, but they also have a lot more stops, so there's a lot of jostling, bumping and standing.
The El also can have some fairly aggressive panhandling and muggings. The CTA, in general, is much more laissez faire about such things - partly because they got rid of the conductors that used to patrol the trains, partly because it's politically toxic to roust "undesirables" from public transit. The Metra (diesel trains) still has conductors who police the train (the Metra uses an on-train ticketing system, so someone has to be onboard), so the ride is a lot safer and civil. The Metra even has "quiet cars" where talking on cell phones (or other passengers) is prohibited. That's a nice ride.
I rode the El daily for 10 years and the Metra for 12, so I've seen the best and worst of both. I've specifically chosen where I've lived based on convenience to public transit - in my adult life, I've never lived more than three blocks from a train station. Due to a serious injury, I've recently had to switch to driving and while I've gotten used to it (there are a few upsides to being alone in a vehicle), I'll never get used to the boredom and waste of driving a vehicle into the city on a regular basis.
You need to understand that Italy, being of of the cradles of our civilization, changed little since antiquity, gothic or the renaissance. Cities are densely packed and streets are narrow. It is not possible to make way for wider streets or more parking spaces, because over 50% of buildings are protected historic inheritance. The italo-maniac anglo-americans would be worst offended if anyone proposed to tear down a church or palazzo here and there or fill in an early christian grotto with rubbish to support the construction of a new intersection.
This situation may be alien to many of US readership, where any village or town is happy if able to showcase a single building over 90 years old, but will not refrain from ousting it in case some profitable business needs the sport. After all, most historic US construction is made in wood, thus will not last the same way as Italy's burnt bricks or stone masonry do. Essentially, unless some earthquake happens, those old buildings are not going to go away. E.g. in Venice, some 15th century palazzos still have bricks in their walls that came from ancient roman villas on the mainland, which were razed by Attila the Hun, circa 450 AD. In Tuscany, there are 50-99 meter tall brick living towers, surviving from the 12-13th century. (One must wonder about their habitability, as there was no elevator tech back then.)
In some European movies of the 1950-60s, various mini-micro cars, like the Fiat 500, the Citroen CV2, the Mini Morris or the weirdness called "Messerschmitt Kabinenroller" are quite recognizable. This trend still exists in Japan (where only "keicar" size class minicars can be purchased without owning a garage lot or having paid 3 years' rent in advance for a spot). In Europe, the new FIAT 500 is back in the making, as well as the Smart. Suzuki sells many borderline micro sized mini-cars in Europe and the Opel Corsa / Adam isn't an V8 Elvis Cruiser either.
The problem is, a car does not occupy its lenght, but more like 1,5-2x of that. When cars are travelling on the road or idling in a traffic jam, there is significant distance fender-to-fender. With automation, this could be reduced to papaer-thin, but if automation fails, cars would need much better crash resistance, thereby needing to make them longer, with beefier crush zones at the front and the back.
Whomever wrote this is a fool.
When you need a car, truck or whatever, you need that mode of transport. If all you need is to move your ass down the street a short way, a bus is helpful. Walking works too. And In so many cases, walking is faster than a bus -- why don't you walk fool?
They are not the same, not even remotely.
what driverless cars can replace is commuter vehicles, especially outside city cores. They will be more convenient than zip cars (in the current state) or the like, after all they come to your door. A bus doesn't, unless your door is where the bus is. Owning a car may seem ridiculous if you order up one, step outside and its there for you - drops you off at your destination and goes off to help another traveller or 2.
By the way, who says it has to fit more than 1 person? or more than 2 peopel?
How often do you travel with more than 1 person? I know my answer. 1%
What's your time worth? I know my answer.
You mean the object isn't safety? And maybe labor costs? How close are we supposed to pack everybody? Let's not make this like the airlines. We need legroom!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Cars go exactly where you want them to, when you want to go. Buses don't. This rules against robo buses for general transportation except in the situation that you live on a bus route.
A bus can only be in one spot.
A car goes on your schedule, not the other way around. Which is why driverless cars will win.
I'm not too worried about traffic.
Now there's a contradiction. A car certainly starts on your schedule, but after that your schedule is determined by traffic. And places with heavy traffic would probably see driverless buses long before places with nice suburban 5mph over the speed limit the whole way commutes. Then there are costs:
The problem with busses is that anybody of means doesn't like taking them. Too many other people's stops and what not.
Look around you: That's actually not that big a problem, since it describes a small and shrinking percentage of the population (in the US, at least). Most people won't be able to afford a driverless car until quite a while after they are introduced. Ditto for driverless-Uber single passenger type services: too expensive for the daily commute. Most people will be choosing between sitting in traffic playing games on their smart device in a public or private multi-passenger vehicle, or driving their own car and not playing games on their smart device. Really the big problem with buses (driverless or no) is that it's hard for local movers and shakers to get rich off of them. They are purchased from another state/country, there aren't many big construction projects involved, and most of the money goes to labor and admin. I.e., city employees that probably won't even vote for the movers'/shakers' pet politicians, let alone give them kickbacks. Compare that to a subway or light rail: HUGE sums of cash going to local consultants/real estate interests, HUGE sums of cash going to the construction companies that "win" the bid, HUGE sums of cash going to the investment bankers that write and sell the bonds, etc. Rich people using them is pretty much irrelevant at that point.
The transition I see happening first is fewer families having multiple cars. Partial conversions, if you will.
you need a lot of unused capacity during off hours to provide the peak capacity you need.
Sure. But empty seats on big buses is an inefficient way of achieving that. Better to use small driverless vans, and increase the number of vans on the road during peak times.
Um, what do you do with the excess capacity of the driverless vans outside of rush hour? PotaYto, potaHto.
Now if you are advocating for buses that stretch out to 3x their length in rush hour, let's hear it, but the current market tells us a bus is cheaper to buy than 4 vans (assuming those vans each had the same regulations attached - wheelchair ramps, fie exits, etc).
TCO, purchase cost, energy efficiency, parking spots taken, excess capacity figures, etc all optimize differently, so you need to factor in everything. Otherwise it becomes verbal sleight of hand with things like "my civic gets better gas mileage than your F150" and "my F350 has better towing power than your F150".
A car goes on your schedule, not the other way around. Which is why driverless cars will win.
You say:
Really the big problem with buses (driverless or no) is that it's hard for local movers and shakers to get rich off of them.
pepty wins. How can you ignore clear public preference for cars and claim it's all about construction contracts? As it turns out, it's pretty easy to get rich off of public transportation too (light rail and other massive infrastructure projects) which I might add has a higher get rich density than highways (say as cost per unit length), but that doesn't make these modes of transportation popular or usable.
You can already pay a lot for the luxury of having your car drive you to work everyday: It's called a chauffeur. What you probably meant is that you'd only pay a moderate amount for that kind of luxury, which will be possible once automated driving makes it affordable enough.
Your problem is San Francisco, not buses. In Los Angeles, even in midsummer crowded buses don't smell bad.
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Since driverless cars can be within an inch of each-other with no deleterious effect you can fit 3 lanes of driverless cars in 1 12' traffic lane, therefore moving three times as many people as the other lanes and still leaving lanes for drivered cars.
And driverless cars don't need side-view mirrors so you could probably stick a bike lane in there too.
DougM
I suspect that the line between buses and taxis will simply blur. Generally we define a bus as something that follows a fixed route and a taxi as something that will take you from point to point. Right now you can get some airport shuttles that will pick you up at your house and most taxis will allow you to share a ride with someone who has a slightly different destination.
But for me one of the most important groups of drivers are commuters. They are a huge bunch who all pile onto the roads twice a day at roughly the same two times. Then their cars sit and do nothing for most of the remainder of their existence. When people talk about driverless cars reducing the need for ownership they are forgetting that the benefit of shared ownership is that the asset is kept busy for the maximum amount of time. But if every commuter switched to a cab then either there wouldn't be enough cabs or then a huge number cabs would end up only run twice a day and the fee for supporting such a large number of assets would be roughly in line with personal ownership.
Thus any solution that economically deals with consumers will be one of the dominant uses of driverless vehicles. I suspect that it will be through the use of mini-buses doing a carpool like car share. People will arrange for a pickup and a destination and then will allow the service to figure out the optimal grouping of passengers to minimise time and distance while servicing the maximum number of passengers. These same mini-buses could be of all kinds of sizes depending upon the areas being serviced and their use during the remainder of the day.
The above does not preclude normal transit services or normal taxi services but what it does do is to potentially service a huge percentage of drivers with a service that meets their critical needs of point to point service that is very reliable for the least amount of cost.
This last bit is critical as many people forgo public transit because most transit services are notoriously unreliable or not conveniently structured and this could cost many people their jobs. So they grab their expensive chunk of metal and drive it alone to work.
Years ago I took a bus to work and it was a nightmare. It was only that my work was judged on productivity not arriving at a set time that I could do this. Quite simply the bus would often strand me with a 40 minute walk after taking 30 minutes to get me to that point. Yet in my general area there were about 6 of us going to that one company alone. This was a business park and I suspect that within a 5 minute drive of my place that there were hundreds all going to the business park. Not enough for a regular hourly bus run but ideal for some sort of car pooling system. It was only that we were incompetent boobs that we could never quite structure an effective car pool. Also the lack of a fixed start time made it even harder. But a computer run system should be able to work just fine.
So the key is to not look at this from a moving people around point of view but by asking what are people's priorities. For most I suspect that on time all the time is critical for a transit system and that the cost merely has to stay below operating a personal vehicle. But for ever little bit of unreliability in the system there will be a massive exodus as the cost of being fired will wildly outweigh the cost of a personal vehicle.
That is a microeconomic consideration but there is also a macroeconomic consideration; this is how a highly functional low cost public transit system can vastly reduce many costs and improve the economics of a city. If people aren't having to buy cars and are spending less time in traffic or on an inefficient transit system there will be more money available for local economics and higher local productivity. Plus fewer cars on the road can translate to a smaller roads budget which ideally either means more public spending on good things (parks etc) or lower taxes. Also many businesses require timely delivery of goods and thus many bu
The problem with busses is that anybody of means doesn't like taking them. Too many other people's stops and what not.
But with a bus you could enter your destination (as would everyone else on the bus) and it would pick a few key optimal stops. Have the phone buzz when it is your turn to exit.
Have a large party? It wouldn't cost a ton to just schedule a pick up and a bus comes over 1 block, picks you up and then continues down town or wherever else it was head.
You could optimize bus routes on the fly. Big sporting event get out? You could easily re-route a ton of busses and then put them back on normal routes.
You can easily make busses full electric, NG-hybrid, diesel-hybrid, etc which makes it more efficient. If it works I can see cities like London and NYC going completely driverless. Rail into the city. Automated busses and subway in the city.
Where I live buses have right of way when pulling out of bus stops. Look, I know we all relate things to our own experience, but the experience of car-centric cities in the USA is not universal, and your characterisation of the average bus passenger is far from universal either. Plenty of people in nice suits and dresses on the buses around here (and the trains and the light rail).
Um, what do you do with the excess capacity of the driverless vans outside of rush hour?
Use them for package deliveries, or other services.
I agree with all except the quadcopter part.
As someone who is 6'4", trying to squeeze on any of the seats on a bus is a hard task.
I assume driverless buses aren't going to give me more leg room any time soon either.
This reads like someone who never rides buses.
No, it's determined by route and time. Buses where I live are far cheaper than owning a car. But they turn a 10 minute drive into 80 minutes at specific times and mainly only operate during business hours. Schedules after 6pm are once an hour or less and there's nothing after midnight. Driver-less buses won't change that. There's also getting to/from the bus station. Buses don't take you exactly where you want to do. Automation won't change that.
Bus/car taxi/hybrid. Doesn't matter much. That's just an argument about degree.
The real landscape-changer will be the disappearance of public-transport trains and their associated hugely expensive tracks, bridges, tunnels and stations.
...Silicon Valley just aint gonna come up with feasible solutions to urban and suburban transport problems. I don't know why the press are asking them about everything outside their domains of expertise. Why not ask some experts on the subject instead? You know, people who actually know what they're talking about.
Cars are not mass transit; they take too much space and are individualized. Even if they are shared they are still a waste. If you can spend the $ then I can see why so many people prefer them.
Computer managed systems will make smart hybrid solutions possible in ways people apparently are not thinking about. I bet simulations can show their benefits already.
Quite simple: high traffic areas and locations will use bus and cars will handle low volume. Beyond that you have extremely high volume areas that are predictable where subways and trains make the most sense and the TRANSFER between methods. You don't need a local station anymore - bus stops can be figured by how many people need to meet up with the taxis and seamlessly TRANSFER. As long as you combine all 3 methods of transportation and automate the group you can save a lot by shifting the whole system to meet demand at the minimum cost. Everybody putting in their destinations into a smart phone with wireless pay/transfer means you just follow directions when to get on/off the auto along with any GPS you may need when outside the system... could even tie it into walking and bikes so the bus adjusts it's route to make it easier to catch you rather than you missing your stop.
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The problem with busses is that anybody of means doesn't like taking them. Too many other people's stops and what not.
I guess all those bankers on the number 48 from London Bridge into the city are a complete hallucination then?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Better to use small driverless vans, and increase the number of vans on the road during peak times.
I disagree. At peak times, the capacity is limited by the capacity of the roads. Adding more vehicles will make things worse not better. You really want a bunch of 90 passenger busses. I looked up the numbers. In the UK at rush hour, cars have an occupancy of 1.2. On certain routes the busses are packed, which is about 90 people. They replace around 300m of lane space with about 12m of lane space in the most crowded areas.
One might be better off from an efficiency point of view switching to smaller vehicles at non peak hours but at peak times you really want the high capacity vehicles.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Your generalisation is incorrect. You'd know this if you visited a city with working public transportation. If you haven't visited somewhere like London which has a very useful working bus system then you have no idea what you're talking about when it comes to busses.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
With an automate, you'd have an alarm/emergency stop button. Push it to brake and get a radio to a human. Peer pressure avoids abuse.
Right after everyone has a flying car in their garage.
If you think the EU workers unions are going to let you put a single bus driver out of work you are drunk and on drugs. And if all you were going to do anyway was a net change of zero in the number of vehicles on the road PLUS eliminate the travel on demand aspects then you might be functionally retarded.
It's unclear why you think the two aren't complimentary. A car near your home picks you up at your door and takes you to a bus stop. A bus comes 3 minutes later and takes you near your office. Another car meets you there and takes you to the door of your office. You had to make 2 transfers, but didn't have to wait or walk, and no single-passenger cars had to transit the congested roads to get you where you wanted to be. You had to leave at the right time to catch the bus, but you didn't have to figure out when that was or wait someplace other than your home.
For some people that still will be too much work, or they'll still be put off by the "public" part of public transit, or they'll just be insensitive to price and willing to pay more for private transportation. But a system like that would certainly make me more likely to take the bus, and I doubt I'm alone.
Bus service is bad for small business? You wanna walk us through that one?
"Bus route" ceases to be a useful concept if you allow passengers to "book" travel. You could tell the bus where you are, where you are going and it would reply with a time and place for pickup and drop off. During heavy travel times it's easy enough to bundle people with similar sources and destinations -- it doesn't have to be perfect, just good enough to keep the bus fairly full and total trip times reasonable -- and during low-volume times efficiency is not very important as there are lots of vehicles available. You could even allow people to pay more if they want priority routing (to eliminate waiting/transfers) or service to a specific address (to eliminate walking) or pay less if they are more flexible, all on the same physical vehicles.
.. , I've just given up and walked because I know what the inside of certain buses will smell like, and I'd rather be in the rain.
Certainly, you would not be able to work for Steve Jobs. Urban areas need public transportation, no matter what is it, subways, trolleys or buses. Personal cars (with or without the driver) can not help to solve transportation and pollution problems. Think in other way -- how much fuel (gasoline, gas, electricity, coal,...) is needed in order to move 1 pound of mass by 1 mile? Good example here in US is New York city where many already gave up driving cars in favor of public transportation.
Crime in transit - When we have automated buses there will be nobody to radio for assistance when a crime is in progress on the bus. If buses get automated, please add a button near each seat that can be pushed discretely to bring police in on a live video feed and display location. That said, I doubt in the law suit happy U.S. that we'll see driver-less buses in the next 20 years outside a few limited test cases. When they way the cost of a high tech automated bus vs. a standard bus and low paid driver, I doubt the automated vehicle will win. Private industry IMO will be likely to offer a bus that targets only the middle class, which might just be successful and it's a niche municipalities are unlikely to fill.
Um, what do you do with the excess capacity of the driverless vans outside of rush hour?
Use them for package deliveries, or other services.
C'mon Bill, you know better than that, even if you have some wacky ideas yourself... How the hell does the automated passenger van load and unload cargo at people's homes? Is there a vault inside that prevents package theft or is a open topped file sorter design? Where does the vault go when passengers want to get on? Besides all that, that's not what excess capacity means.
The excess capacity is when a vehicle that can carry 10 carries 1. It's not like you can just shut down all the cross town vans for fedex and tell people to just stick to N-S migration outside of rush hour.
Shame Bill, Shame. And not just because of the Jackie Chan Owen Wilson movie.
40 cars are not equal to one bus, because not everyone are going from single point A to single point B. 40 cars go from points A1,A2..A40 to points B1,B2..B40, but those unfortunate bus riders have to use several buses and wait for each bus to reach their Bs and get back to their As. And if you have to serve people at least 80% good as cars you much more than one bus. And of couse nobody does that and that's why public transportation sucks. Just an example: Moscow, Russia. Heavy public transportation, a lot of buses, trolleybuses and a huge subway system, often advertised as "transportation solution". Yet I had to buy a car 14 years ago, because commuting from my parent's home to work took about 15 minutes in car and an hour and a half on public transportation -- a bus to subway, subway, change line, subway, bus. A lot of time wasted in hot weather or freezing snow, waiting, waiting, waiting...
Your problem is San Francisco, not buses. In Los Angeles, even in midsummer crowded buses don't smell bad.
I don't believe you. It's hotter there, so people will be sweating more. And there's plenty of homeless down there, I've seen them. I haven't smelled them though, because it was from a distance.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Unless a homeless that triggers instant vomit at 20 feet decides to take the bus. And they do.