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."
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.
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.
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.'"
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
.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.
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
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.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
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.
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.
Sounds pretty bad, but I don't think this necessarily applies to the experience in general.
I get the bus and cycle to work on alternate days (in Dundee, Scotland). I've never driven to work; I'd either have to pay through the nose for a parking permit and still have to find a free space or park on one of the nearby streets which would require getting there around 08:00 to get a spot, neither of which are worth the time, money or effort. And the time difference is in practice negligable. I have to leave 10 minutes earlier, big deal. In winter I'd be wasting that time defrosting and warming up the car. The busses are generally kept quite clean and tidy, and I've get to see any bad behaviour; the one time only I thought someone had bad personal hygiene it was a patient going to the hospital who was obviously using some skin medication, which allowances can obviously be made for. Rather than drive, I get 30 minutes to relax, read a book, read a newspaper, whatever, in relative warmth and comfort, which I just wouldn't get in a car. And there are usually no problems with overcrowding or the punctuality of the services, it's run pretty efficiently (I use Stagecoach and National Express routes). Honestly, I find it way more civilised and convenient than driving myself around.
Maybe there's a difference between countries here? There's no sort of social stigma in using a bus here, it's just one of the options available here, and a good one.
Regards,
Roger
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Your problem is San Francisco, not buses. In Los Angeles, even in midsummer crowded buses don't smell bad.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
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
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.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
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.