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How do you solve the issue of extreme demand M-F at 8am and 5pm and low demand any other time?

• Ajedi32 10y ago
  Same way any other business that has brief periods of high demand (electric companies, ISPs, restaurants, etc) does; you anticipate the demand and make sure you have enough capacity available at those times to meet it. With a self-driving car fleet there are probably lots of other little tricks you can do too, like offer discounts for sharing a vehicle with another passenger, or use machine learning to predict what locations will have the highest demand during particular parts of the day and move portions of the fleet to cover those areas.
  • vkou 10y ago
    My non-ML prediction of which locations will have the biggest demand in Seattle: People on the West Side who want to get to the East Side, and people on the East Side who want to get to the West Side. (You'd figure that maybe optimizing this would bring more value to society then making a car drive itself...) 8am-9am, 4pm-6pm. You don't need ML to figure this out - just look at a Google Maps traffic heatmap in rush hour. Carpools, vanpools, already exist. For some reason, though, the vast majority of the cars parked on the freeway are single-occupant vehicles. I can't imagine why people aren't keen on sharing their vehicle with a stranger, or pay triple surge pricing to get home when it starts raining. This community is highly opposed to relying on web services that they don't control... Yet it is perfectly OK with ditching their car, and instead relying on a car-on-demand service to get to and from work?
• MarkMc 10y ago
  Same as Uber does now - surge pricing and car pooling.