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."

Comments

Was on a bus once

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Was on a bus once

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it would be better. A robot driver wouldn't forget to put on the parking brake like this idiot did.

Re:I disagree

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:I disagree

[ShanghaiBill]

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

Re:I disagree

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I disagree

[Trepidity]

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.

Re:wrong direction

[serviscope_minor]

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.

That's not true. Busses even when pretty empty are efficient. A modern bus weighs about 8 times that of a small car, is a hybrid (which really does help substantially for city driving) and has a single large engine which is generally a bit more efficient than a collection of smaller ones. As a result a bus only needs a few people on board before it matches a car for efficiency.

Given a maximum capacity of about 90 people, I'd estimate that even at 10% full the bus will win in terms of efficiency. There are other factors which probably help in the busses favour, since busses aren't built for high acceleration and are also driven by more competent professionals than cars on average.

Anyway I found this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-e...

Seems that busses are in the range 5 to 8 MPG roughly. Cars are largely around the 30 mark for decent cars. At that point even the worse busses only need 6 passengers to equal the efficieincy of single occupancy cars.

The average occupancy in the UK is apparently 1.58:

http://www.publications.parlia...

meaning compared to the worse busses you'd need 9 people to match the efficiency of cars, with the least efficient busses. Coincidentally, this is about the same as the average bus occupancy in the UK as well.

People tend to use busses differently from cars. During commuting, occupancy is only 1.2 per car and busses are fuller.

So, I'd say your claim that busses are inefficient are misplaced.