3 ms·

They are, which is why I'm suggesting that instead of thinking of "transit vs private cars" everything will essentially melt together. IE, if you take a bus wit

They are, which is why I'm suggesting that instead of thinking of "transit vs private cars" everything will essentially melt together. IE, if you take a bus with 30 riders today and replace it with 5 AV-minivans each with 6 occupants driving behind each other, is it any different? What if instead of the city, I own one of these minivans? What if I pay 6 fares and have the minivan take my family to somewhere? What if 6 passengers split a minivan, but pay extra to use a dedicated lane?

didibus 8y ago
Read the authors other article: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/12/what-elon-musk-doesnt-get-about-urban-transit/548843/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/12/what-elon-mus... He makes the argument the reason that doesn't work is geometry and utilisation of limited city space.
hammock 8y ago
>IE, if you take a bus with 30 riders today and replace it with 5 AV-minivans each with 6 occupants driving behind each other, is it any different? Yeah, it is different. You have five engines instead of one, and 20 tires instead of four, meaning maintenance and fuel costs are some multiple higher, and wear-and-tear on the road surface is higher, noise and air pollution are higher. Among other things. >What if instead of the city, I own one of these minivans? Then you have to go through an additional middleman, the city, to find parking for your 1/5-of-a-bus and permission to drive on certain roads, in certain lanes, etc. Among other things.
- jungler 8y ago
  When I last did some armchair thinking about transport modes my conclusion was only a little bit removed from parent's basic hypothesis, just with one critical detail: It's not that one mode will rule them all, it's that the friction of switching modes is likely to go further and further down until we have successfully "containerized" or "packet switched" transit. So, instead of envisioning it as "5 minivans vs 1 bus", it's a system that smoothly transfers you from street to car to bus to train to plane and back. You get the "now" of low latency, and then you transfer up a step to get speed and efficiency. Right now we have very primitive notions of multi-mode: every transfer is time consuming and difficult on the psyche, often involving new fare systems, security checks, navigating transfer points, delays, tolls, parking, and so on. This is a big factor in our tendency to bias towards a single mode and overbuild infrastructure for that mode. Portable electrics are a big step forward in moving up the baseline: they're roughly person-sized without too much additional weight. An imagined standard for docking them in a larger vehicle or running them in a convoy is not too far-fetched, but will probably still take a lifetime to be realized with all the involved political factors.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    But while ganging or docking is nice, you don't really need it to get most of the benefits; low-friction transfers by eliminating the huge parking lots that you half to walk from at the interface of small personal last-mile (or last-few-miles) transport with larger long-distance transport gets you much of the way to the kind of network you seem to want, and only really takes autonomous on-demand vehicles and integrated payment and reservation systems, not ganging/docking. You've got some buffering at transfer points still, but much less friction than in the status quo.
    - hammock 8y ago
      >eliminating the huge parking lots that you half to walk from at the interface of small personal last-mile We don't need autonomous vehicles to do that. Valet parking exists.
      - dragonwriter 8y ago
        > We don't need autonomous vehicles to do that. Yes, we do. > Valet parking exists. Valet parking is labor intensive, doesn't scale on-demand easily, (because it is labor intensive), ands a lot more latency on both ends than autonomous (or chauffered, but that's also labor intensive) drop off/pickup even if the labor is provisioned optimally (and gets worse very fast with slightly underprovisioned labor.) It's decent for providing an up-charged lower-latency option for an elite, higher paying subset of customers, or optimizing parking density with less concern for latency for a larger customer base, but it's not nearly as good as on-demand last-mile transport for reducing endpoint transfer latency.
- martythemaniak 8y ago
  Your objections are actually based on ICE car assumptions. ICE cars are going away soon, they're irrelevant when talking about the future of transportation. There are few, if any efficiency gains in one vs many electric motors. They don't produce noise or air pollution. Wear and tear on road surface is actually much worse for heavy busses than cars, they actually deform the asphalt and can cause accidents: https://www.thestar.com/news/2007/07/05/road_ridges_made_by_buses_huge_hazard_for_motorcyclists.html https://www.thestar.com/news/2007/07/05/road_ridges_made_by_... > Then you have to go through an additional middleman, the city, to find parking for your 1/5-of-a-bus and permission to drive on certain roads, in certain lanes, etc. Among other things. I already have parking for my 1/n-th of a bus. Running an exchange would be a much more valuable use of a city's resources rather than operating bus depots, etc.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > You have five engines instead of one, and 20 tires instead of four, meaning maintenance and fuel costs are some multiple higher, and wear-and-tear on the road surface is higher, noise and air pollution are higher. Road wear and tear per vehicle-mile scales with something like the fourth power of vehicle weight, so many small vehicles actually have less impact that one large vehicle even with the fact that they tend to be heavier per passenger. OTOH, land use impacts are higher since you need more lane capacity for many small vehicles than one large one.

didibus 8y ago

Read the authors other article: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/12/what-elon-musk-doesnt-get-about-urban-transit/548843/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/12/what-elon-mus... He makes the argument the reason that doesn't work is geometry and utilisation of limited city space.

hammock 8y ago

>IE, if you take a bus with 30 riders today and replace it with 5 AV-minivans each with 6 occupants driving behind each other, is it any different? Yeah, it is different. You have five engines instead of one, and 20 tires instead of four, meaning maintenance and fuel costs are some multiple higher, and wear-and-tear on the road surface is higher, noise and air pollution are higher. Among other things. >What if instead of the city, I own one of these minivans? Then you have to go through an additional middleman, the city, to find parking for your 1/5-of-a-bus and permission to drive on certain roads, in certain lanes, etc. Among other things.

jungler 8y ago
When I last did some armchair thinking about transport modes my conclusion was only a little bit removed from parent's basic hypothesis, just with one critical detail: It's not that one mode will rule them all, it's that the friction of switching modes is likely to go further and further down until we have successfully "containerized" or "packet switched" transit. So, instead of envisioning it as "5 minivans vs 1 bus", it's a system that smoothly transfers you from street to car to bus to train to plane and back. You get the "now" of low latency, and then you transfer up a step to get speed and efficiency. Right now we have very primitive notions of multi-mode: every transfer is time consuming and difficult on the psyche, often involving new fare systems, security checks, navigating transfer points, delays, tolls, parking, and so on. This is a big factor in our tendency to bias towards a single mode and overbuild infrastructure for that mode. Portable electrics are a big step forward in moving up the baseline: they're roughly person-sized without too much additional weight. An imagined standard for docking them in a larger vehicle or running them in a convoy is not too far-fetched, but will probably still take a lifetime to be realized with all the involved political factors.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  But while ganging or docking is nice, you don't really need it to get most of the benefits; low-friction transfers by eliminating the huge parking lots that you half to walk from at the interface of small personal last-mile (or last-few-miles) transport with larger long-distance transport gets you much of the way to the kind of network you seem to want, and only really takes autonomous on-demand vehicles and integrated payment and reservation systems, not ganging/docking. You've got some buffering at transfer points still, but much less friction than in the status quo.
  - hammock 8y ago
    >eliminating the huge parking lots that you half to walk from at the interface of small personal last-mile We don't need autonomous vehicles to do that. Valet parking exists.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > We don't need autonomous vehicles to do that. Yes, we do. > Valet parking exists. Valet parking is labor intensive, doesn't scale on-demand easily, (because it is labor intensive), ands a lot more latency on both ends than autonomous (or chauffered, but that's also labor intensive) drop off/pickup even if the labor is provisioned optimally (and gets worse very fast with slightly underprovisioned labor.) It's decent for providing an up-charged lower-latency option for an elite, higher paying subset of customers, or optimizing parking density with less concern for latency for a larger customer base, but it's not nearly as good as on-demand last-mile transport for reducing endpoint transfer latency.
martythemaniak 8y ago
Your objections are actually based on ICE car assumptions. ICE cars are going away soon, they're irrelevant when talking about the future of transportation. There are few, if any efficiency gains in one vs many electric motors. They don't produce noise or air pollution. Wear and tear on road surface is actually much worse for heavy busses than cars, they actually deform the asphalt and can cause accidents: https://www.thestar.com/news/2007/07/05/road_ridges_made_by_buses_huge_hazard_for_motorcyclists.html https://www.thestar.com/news/2007/07/05/road_ridges_made_by_... > Then you have to go through an additional middleman, the city, to find parking for your 1/5-of-a-bus and permission to drive on certain roads, in certain lanes, etc. Among other things. I already have parking for my 1/n-th of a bus. Running an exchange would be a much more valuable use of a city's resources rather than operating bus depots, etc.
dragonwriter 8y ago
> You have five engines instead of one, and 20 tires instead of four, meaning maintenance and fuel costs are some multiple higher, and wear-and-tear on the road surface is higher, noise and air pollution are higher. Road wear and tear per vehicle-mile scales with something like the fourth power of vehicle weight, so many small vehicles actually have less impact that one large vehicle even with the fact that they tend to be heavier per passenger. OTOH, land use impacts are higher since you need more lane capacity for many small vehicles than one large one.