Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.