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Public transport is going to be largely built on self-driving cars if/when they enter the market. It's the perfect fit: a) Personnel costs dominate human-drive
by zurn 11y ago
Public transport is going to be largely built on self-driving cars if/when they enter the market. It's the perfect fit:
a) Personnel costs dominate human-driven PT cars
b) huge vehicles because of a)
c) vechicles are on average mostly empty because of b)
d) the average co2 emissions per passenger-km are terrible because of c)
e) routes and schedules are fixed because of b)
f) big vehicles waste much more time on stops
(50 passengers -> worst case 100 stops)
The self-driving PT sevice may look like
ride sharing airport shuttles with more or less dynamic routing and pricing.
Someone should set up a remotely operated offering based on this, to get a head start before the AI gets good enough. You can tell the investors you'll gamify it to make it more sexy :)
Here's a clever large scale pilot project that comes very close, though with human drivers: http://www.zdnet.com/article/death-of-the-car-the-tech-behind-helsinkis-ambitious-plan-to-kill-off-private-vehicles/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/death-of-the-car-the-tech-behin...
- pakled_engineer 11y agoWe have electric/trolley buses here for most routes, and a computer run train system without any operators, and some buses have their own lanes on busy routes but it still sucks. Largely this is due to the buffoons who are consistently appointed to transit boards who tender everything to fellow political cronies that drain the budget and accomplish nothing. Transit like traffic is a political problem but running it is considered a patronage position where the CEO and board make over $300k/yr for never showing up to work and get a car allowance so they never have to experience the terrible service they run.