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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."
A bus takes up a lot of room - but the 40 cars that would have to replace the bus take up far more room.
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 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.
th reason for eliminating everyone's job is to be able to have the current infrastructure and high quality of life with fewer people (since people are the source of pretty much all our problems these days. look at isaac asimov's spacer worlds; many robots, few people, high standard of living for everyone but with 90% unemployment. still not a problem as most don't want to work anyway.
why is it the mission of everybody in the world to eliminate absolutely everybody's job?
Because wealth is created by the production of goods and services, not by "keeping people busy". Improved productivity is the only way to improve living standards. You don't accomplish that with stupid make-work jobs.
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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I'm commuting to work using public transport for 5 years now.
Believe me, you can't do anything useful when you stand in tightly packed crowd, and this is how public transport in rush hours usually looks like.
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 I had to bet, I'd bet on the trucking companies replacing their drivers with robots first before the bus or taxi companies do.
Buses are too messy - dealing with too many unpredictable people and vehicles in complex scenarios. Taxis would be even worse (buses have bus routes, taxis don't).
In contrast imagine being able to run trucks nonstop using robot drivers that don't need sleep, robot drivers that are safe and reliable enough to make the insurance companies to charge lower premiums. Maybe every Xth truck on the route has a human (who doesn't drive) just in case a truck encounters a problem that needs a human around. The trucking companies can pick routes that are more robot-truck friendly. Can't do that for taxis, and maybe hard for buses too.
When a robo-truck crushes a kid on a "no pedestrian" highway, that's a lot less bad PR than a robo-bus crushing a kid in a city or residential area.
And what do you propose we do with the low-skilled people when robots take over their jobs?
Move them to something productive. Automation is nothing new. The automation of agriculture eliminated 90% of the jobs. The automation of factory work eliminated most of what was left. Yet we are approaching full employment with many times the population. If you seriously believe that productivity improvements cause poverty, you need to take another look at the history of the last few centuries, when what happened was the exact opposite.
How is the automation of menial labor today any different than the automation of agriculture and manufacturing a century ago?