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Serious question: how would it be door to door and high density at the same time? So far, all self driving car proposals I saw looked just like cars, or vans at
by f_allwein 8y ago
Serious question: how would it be door to door and high density at the same time? So far, all self driving car proposals I saw looked just like cars, or vans at best. Compare this to a fully loaded double-decker bus in e.g. London. So much more efficient use of road space.
- AtlasBarfed 8y agoLet's look at a traditional bus route in an urban area: Scheduled set of stops between basically two places. Each of those stops rely on people walking a couple blocks or more to a stop for the route. Basically, you deconstruct and make on-demand the route. As people register for a trip, you combine a set of origination and destination points into closely grouped numbers, pick up a set of people in close proximity, and drop off them off. At high density times, there will be opportunities for substantial "rideshare" efficiencies. At less high density times, you save overhead of the busses with a couple riders. If you've ever taken the cheaper alternative airport -> city hotel van that goes to all the hotels in a downtown from an airport, that is basically the idea. It isn't as convenient as 1:1 taxi transport, but it's a lot better than the vagaries of train/bus hopping. It seems strange that with all the graph and NP-complete interview-ready people on this site that this isn't completely obvious. Self-driving vehicles will obviate all but the highest density mass transport. And then if you get self-flying drones going...