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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

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.

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.