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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."
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.
The reduction from eleven people to ten is very worth while, as the driver is being paid to be there everyone else is paying to be there.
Have you considered that the reason that buses are awful in low density areas is because there is not enough traffic to justify the overhead of a driver? Autonomous buses would have lower overheads and would make some currently un-profitable routes worth while.
Insert clever remark about driverless vehicles on "the road to nowhere", compare and contrast, automats, vending machines, pay toilets and marital aids.
End with analogy dealing with electric underwear, Prince Alberts button fly and Apple computers. Recap and close.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Bus drivers, at least where I live, are pretty well paid + nice benefits. Saving 50-100k a year X 2(presumably the bus is running more than a single shift a day) is worth it. The errors drivers do are worth it. Drivers often don't notice people at stops, nearly drive pass the one that you want so drive erratically to get over to the stop, take a washroom break at the terminal and come back to the bus a few minutes after it was supposed to leave etc. The scheduling headaches of planning around lunch breaks, vacation, calling in sick etc is worth it assuming that the robots have a better uptime than a human (not a hard feat to accomplish).
I agree a bus has diminishing returns but I think you missed the most important thing: the time of the passengers. People that drive are basically doing no valuable task for the whole time they are driving other than getting themselves from A-B. Replacing each car with a robot at least saves that for each driver freeing them up to read, do paperwork, etc other potentially paid work. It turns valueless time to (potentially) valued time for at least 1/5 people (assuming people are driving fully occupied sedans which we know is usually not the case). That is the entire reason I commute with public transit rather than drive. I'd rather spend 3hr a day commuting and being able to read and watch shows on my tablet during that time than 2hrs a day doing nothing but driving, that and the cost savings makes it a no brainer for me.
Similar situation: I was on an older bus, some passengers leave the via the back door, the driver goes to pull away from the stop but can't because the bus thinks the back doors are open (green light on). Bus driver gets up, goes the the back door, pulls the doors closed. The green light goes off, brakes release, and the bus starts rolling down the road. He didn't seem that concerned when people point it out to him. He should have pulled the parking brake before leaving his seat (which I assume is standard procedure). Transit company didn't seem that concerned either when I reported it.
The door-brake interlock on modern busses require that the drive have his foot on the brake when the door closes to release the interlock. Sometimes you'll notice after the door closes they try to drive away, but the engine just revs. They push the brakes, and then are able to go.
In either case these are bad drivers, and hopefully an automated driver would keep to the SOP. There are many cities with driverless subways that function without problem.
Then why do some states not allow you to pump your own gas? And what do you propose we do with the low-skilled people when robots take over their jobs? Bus drivers, grocery store cashier/stocker, waitresses, etc, all jobs taken over by robots.
Stupidity, mostly. There are a lot of jobs that benefit society that are not more difficult than pumping gas. And most people in the low-skilled jobs you listed would have no problem moving to a job that is slightly more skilled if given the opportunity.
Hiring people just to give them a paycheck is the ditch diggers fallacy. Spending money to dig ditches and fill them in moves money around, but doesn't actually produce anything of value - at the end you've spent money but have nothing to show for it. It would be better to use use that same money to produce something (anything) of value, so society benefits.
http://theclassicalliberalblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/ditch-diggers-fallacy.html
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.