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Will Robot Cabs Unjam the Streets?
An anonymous reader writes: The Atlantic has a story with some video of a traffic simulator showing just how the roads can be jammed up by people looking for a place to park. (You can play with the simulator too.) This has been suspected for a long time by many traffic researchers and city planners, but the simulator shows just how quickly the roads jam up after just a few of the blocks fill up with parked cars. The good news is that autonomous cars don't need to park-- they just go give someone else a ride. They could change city life forever.
"The good news is that autonomous cars don't need to park-- they just go give someone else a ride. They could change city life forever."
This will not change with autonomous cars. If people didn't want to own cars, the above situation could exist _now_ -- they are or were called taxis/taxi cabs/cabs/hansom cabs/licensed hackney carriages.
The reality is that people -- especially Americans, I suspect -- want to own cars. Only banning private vehicles from the streets or levying huge congestion charges on them is going to take them off the streets.
Why is it that authorities are so ignorant that they allow projects to be built when a traffic and parking issue is obvious. For example an apartment house might have to meet a basic legal requirement of having four parking spaces per rental unit if they are one or two bedroom units and six spaces for three bedroom units. A theater that seats 1,000 should be required to provide parking for 1,500 cars. I am astounded that building and zoning commissions fail to demand adequate parking for every enterprise. Those parking spaces should also have a standard size for each car and none of the super tight parking allowed at all.
Put the parking underground, far from anywhere. You can just signal your car when you want a ride. And put the roads underground in the cities too. The price of the real estate you free up for better use makes this worth the money. And you want a private car? Have the passenger cabin a detachable module. You get your "own" car without the expense of all the frame/suspension/tires/motors/batteries. And for long road trips you can put your cabin onto a gas car. You could probably work out some sort of turbo-lift system, so you step into your pod like it was an elevator, then it goes where you want.
They don't want their car to drive off, pick up someone who has sex in it or their kid vomits or a pet shits, etc. Efficiency is all well and good but reality is people are disgusting and we generally want to keep to ourselves because of it.
I would have thought this would be a huge problem, but after using car2go for about a year, there is only one time where I've had a mess on the interior - some weird sticky stuff spilt on the passenger seat (which, luckily, I saw before I sat in it) - I suspect it was some takeout sauce spilled out from a container or something.
In many other rides though the cars have been spotless. Generally (anecdotally obviously) the system of simply saying whether the car is clean or not from the previous driver seems to work to keep out bad actors in the system. Having to have your credit card details on file probably helps too.
Overall though car2go is great; we don't own a car here so we use it all the time now.
These "autonomous car" flacks are really relentless. These stories always show up from an "anonymous reader" always in US prime time, always during the week (never on weekends) and always telling us how "autonomous cars" are going herald in the New Utopia.
There's not even an attempt to include any news in the story, just pure PR.
Even half-drunk and not paying attention I can see the pattern. Look for yourselves.
You are welcome on my lawn.
"The good news is that autonomous cars don't need to park-- they just go give someone else a ride."
They will only give another person a ride during peak hours, say morning rush hours and evening hours. Mid-day traffic will be lighter, and middle of the night traffic will be downright dead. At those time these Johny Cabs still have to go somewhere. The Schisters trying make a buck will want them programmed to waste the least gas possible. So unlike human cabs that often troll around looking for a fare, these Johny Cabs are likely to park immediately at the closest free spot and wait for someone to call for a ride with their smart phone.
Without enough regulation, these cabs may make parking matters worse, as they won't necessarily go back to home base every night if a few pennies can be saved on gas by parking near where they will be needed in the morning.