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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."
Yes, it would be better. A robot driver wouldn't forget to put on the parking brake like this idiot did.
A bus takes up a lot of room - but the 40 cars that would have to replace the bus take up far more room.
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.
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.
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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.
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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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.
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?
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
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.
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