4 ms·

My reading was different, in that the article uses "elite" for the kinds of decision-makers in positions of power whose exceptional attainment and status makes

My reading was different, in that the article uses "elite" for the kinds of decision-makers in positions of power whose exceptional attainment and status makes them some of the least likely to be consumers of the transit anyway. I think both you and the author would agree that in the absence of a reliable, versatile mass transit network, many people with access to cars will use cars instead. But you and the author appear to disagree on the viability and transformative power of self-driving cars and whether they serve as a meaningful instrument of mobility for all with the kind and amount of transport infrastructure available to us now. I believe that the form factor of a 2-to-7 person car common today isn't sufficiently dense to provide appropriate amounts of throughput to high traffic routes to completely replace something like a subway, commuter rail, or the like. Although the experience of the (figurative) first and last mile would be superior, the sheer number of such vehicles would clog the arterial roads and freeways where the point-to-point routing converges, the same way this happens with cars today.

nostrademons 8y ago
But the form factor of the 2-to-7 person car changes significantly with the shift to autonomous electric vehicles. With computer control, you eliminate the gap needed between cars - just hook it directly to the car in front, let them draft for better aerodynamics, and detach when you need to make a turn, saving 70-100 feet of road space. With electric motors, you eliminate the hood, engine, and transmission, saving another 5 feet or so - independent electric motors can go directly onto the wheels. In an urban environment, electrify the streets (as with trolleys) and eliminate the battery pack - that's another 4 feet and 1200 pounds or so. Once everything moves to car services and people don't own their own cars, you can eliminate the trunk, saving another 4-5 feet - in the majority of trips you aren't carrying anything big, and you can hail a different model pod for those road trips or grocery runs where you need the cargo space (or just summon the groceries and forget about driving it yourself). For trips without the kids, eliminate the other seats as well - you can just summon a different vehicle when you need to take a family trip. Pretty soon the vehicle is just a thin shell around its occupant, taking up no more room than the personal space they would've taken up on a bus.
- abeyer 8y ago
  That may be true if you can eliminate human drivers from the picture. I'd be shocked, though, to see numbers that support this being feasible at that kind of scale on public access roads. And that just brings you back to needing some sort of separate right of way for transit -- sure it's potentially interesting and useful, but it's just another alternative form factor for transit as it exists today.
- williamsmj 8y ago
  This analysis ignores the fact that the two modes (bus and AVs) load and discharge passengers very differently. The problem is not only the physical space AVs take when in motion on the road. See, e.g. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/bus-best-public-transit-cities/574399/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/bus-b... “How many people’s doors can a driver get to in an hour, including the minute or two that the customer spends grabbing their things and boarding? The intuitively obvious answer is the right one: not very many. An Eno Foundation report promoting microtransit could not cite a case study doing better than four boardings an hour of service. John Urgo, the planner of demand-responsive service for AC Transit in Oakland, California, has said that seven boardings an hour is “the best we hope to achieve.” Few fixed-route buses perform that poorly. Across sprawling Silicon Valley, for example, fixed-route buses carried 12 to 45 people an hour in 2015. In a dense city such as Philadelphia, the number can exceed 80” Door-to-door transit simply cannot achieve the throughput of buses! Which is not to say door-to-door would not be profitable or even have a role in a mass system. It's probably an improvement over the current dominant mode (although my suspicion is that it's simply a slightly less bad local minimum). But the point of the original article is to argue that certain groups of people (decision makers in cities, mostly), should not extrapolate from their own needs and preferences when designing a system designed for mass use, because they're by definition unusual and they're each N=1
  - nostrademons 8y ago
    That whole Atlantic article is predicated on the main cost of a ride being the driver's time. Get rid of the driver and you get rid of that cost. Get rid of the internal combustion engine (which has large economies of scale - one big engine works more efficiently than many small ones) and you lose the fuel advantage - many small electric engines are just as efficient as one big one. The boarding issue in the article is mostly in reference to the driver's time, but there's a simple solution for the rider: docking, not board. Board a pod once, at your door, and travel inside it until you reach your destination. If you need to switch modalities - like latching a number of pods together into a train for long road trips, or putting them on an aircraft - you load the pods onto the plane, you don't transfer the people between pods. It's like intermodal containers for passengers, with the nice benefit that you can continue working on your laptop or watching a movie or sleeping throughout modality switches.

nostrademons 8y ago

But the form factor of the 2-to-7 person car changes significantly with the shift to autonomous electric vehicles. With computer control, you eliminate the gap needed between cars - just hook it directly to the car in front, let them draft for better aerodynamics, and detach when you need to make a turn, saving 70-100 feet of road space. With electric motors, you eliminate the hood, engine, and transmission, saving another 5 feet or so - independent electric motors can go directly onto the wheels. In an urban environment, electrify the streets (as with trolleys) and eliminate the battery pack - that's another 4 feet and 1200 pounds or so. Once everything moves to car services and people don't own their own cars, you can eliminate the trunk, saving another 4-5 feet - in the majority of trips you aren't carrying anything big, and you can hail a different model pod for those road trips or grocery runs where you need the cargo space (or just summon the groceries and forget about driving it yourself). For trips without the kids, eliminate the other seats as well - you can just summon a different vehicle when you need to take a family trip. Pretty soon the vehicle is just a thin shell around its occupant, taking up no more room than the personal space they would've taken up on a bus.

abeyer 8y ago
That may be true if you can eliminate human drivers from the picture. I'd be shocked, though, to see numbers that support this being feasible at that kind of scale on public access roads. And that just brings you back to needing some sort of separate right of way for transit -- sure it's potentially interesting and useful, but it's just another alternative form factor for transit as it exists today.
williamsmj 8y ago
This analysis ignores the fact that the two modes (bus and AVs) load and discharge passengers very differently. The problem is not only the physical space AVs take when in motion on the road. See, e.g. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/bus-best-public-transit-cities/574399/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/bus-b... “How many people’s doors can a driver get to in an hour, including the minute or two that the customer spends grabbing their things and boarding? The intuitively obvious answer is the right one: not very many. An Eno Foundation report promoting microtransit could not cite a case study doing better than four boardings an hour of service. John Urgo, the planner of demand-responsive service for AC Transit in Oakland, California, has said that seven boardings an hour is “the best we hope to achieve.” Few fixed-route buses perform that poorly. Across sprawling Silicon Valley, for example, fixed-route buses carried 12 to 45 people an hour in 2015. In a dense city such as Philadelphia, the number can exceed 80” Door-to-door transit simply cannot achieve the throughput of buses! Which is not to say door-to-door would not be profitable or even have a role in a mass system. It's probably an improvement over the current dominant mode (although my suspicion is that it's simply a slightly less bad local minimum). But the point of the original article is to argue that certain groups of people (decision makers in cities, mostly), should not extrapolate from their own needs and preferences when designing a system designed for mass use, because they're by definition unusual and they're each N=1
- nostrademons 8y ago
  That whole Atlantic article is predicated on the main cost of a ride being the driver's time. Get rid of the driver and you get rid of that cost. Get rid of the internal combustion engine (which has large economies of scale - one big engine works more efficiently than many small ones) and you lose the fuel advantage - many small electric engines are just as efficient as one big one. The boarding issue in the article is mostly in reference to the driver's time, but there's a simple solution for the rider: docking, not board. Board a pod once, at your door, and travel inside it until you reach your destination. If you need to switch modalities - like latching a number of pods together into a train for long road trips, or putting them on an aircraft - you load the pods onto the plane, you don't transfer the people between pods. It's like intermodal containers for passengers, with the nice benefit that you can continue working on your laptop or watching a movie or sleeping throughout modality switches.