3 ms·
But nature seems to just not abhor the "vacuum" left in cars filled with just a single rider hard enough to fill that. This is about finding a lower bound for t
by usrusr 10y ago
But nature seems to just not abhor the "vacuum" left in cars filled with just a single rider hard enough to fill that. This is about finding a lower bound for the vehicles needed to fulfill demand with multi-occupancy.
What I would find even more interesting is if they used the same simulation to determine the number of cars required to fulfill that demand without multi-occupancy, but with the same level of dispatch smarts and similarly strict optimization for the lowest number of cars possible.
Why would this be interesting? There are not 13000 cabs because less would not be able to meet the existing demand, there are 13000 cabs because the market is big enough to support them (and decisions regarding the volume of the medallion system are surely not done with the optimization vigor as researchers looking for an impressive lower bound in a simulation). Hailable transportation is a very special market where more supply only increases instant hailability, but does not have the conventional effect of decreasing prices. And because more supply means more congestion, it can even increase prices (when rates have a time component on top of a distance component) and demand (when permanent congestion makes it unattractive to have a personal vehicle).
- madgar 10y ago> But nature seems to just not abhor the "vacuum" left in cars filled with just a single rider hard enough to fill that. I'm not sure exactly what this sentence is supposed to mean, but I assure you as an NYC outer-borough resident, if you created a traffic vacuum in manhattan I would be driving there filling the vacuum by the end of the day.
- chillingeffect 10y agoI believe what they're saying refers to the empty 3 seats you might find in a singly-occupied 4 passenger car, as is often seen commuting. And I basically agree. There is still space in many passenger vehicles. And the vacuum is not strong to get those filled, because it is not infinite or even powerful enough, but there are people trying to fill those spaces to some extent. That was some of the original pitch of the "sharing economy..." That if you had "extra space in your car or house," you could fill it with a rider or a roomer. It's just that managing the complexities of the extra space in a vehicle is very difficult, particularly in comparison to the simplicity of filling any empty Manhattan streets with new instances of vehicles.