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It seems like a valuable proposition if we threw out the existing paradigms of road transport. If we throw out concepts such as ownership of vehicles and fuel
by willis936 7y ago
It seems like a valuable proposition if we threw out the existing paradigms of road transport.
If we throw out concepts such as ownership of vehicles and fuel and treat all road vehicles as one system of controlled individual elements, you could envision is a more efficient solution. Traffic jams would be lessened, trip times would be shortened, total fuel usage would go down, etc. On road-fueling would be one element in a world like this: road based freight delivery could run without stopping by using vehicles expected to have short journies to refuel the trucks along the way.
This is all to define a hypothetical new paradigm in road transport and to quantify its potential consequences (good and bad). I had not thought about on-road refueling before and I think there is good value in pointing it out. We're not at the point where we're seriously charting a course to world like this, but we need to know what the world looks like before we can start to do that.
- bdamm 7y agoMany things are valuable if we throw out the constraints of dealing with existing reality. Even then I'm not sure it is valuable; roads suffer from lack of maintenance already. If anything we should be looking at how to make roads less expensive. Having autonomous vehicles disperse their weight to reduce prevalence of potholes, for example.
- willis936 7y agoRight, and that is one thing to weight for when choosing the behavior of the system. While the article in question doesn't explicitly say this, I think these seemingly impractical solutions add to the theoretical toolkit that we can use to shape a road utopia, if society ever agrees on what that would look like. If society does ever agree on a road utopia and then consider it worthwhile to pursue, it will be valuable to have these ideas laid out. Perhaps they are useless today, but they motivate this idea. If they weren't proposed then the possibility of a future road utopia is entirely impossible.
- lmilcin 7y agoIf we are "throwing out the existing paradigms of road transport” then why not throw out roads completely. Rails are way more efficient.
- loa_in_ 7y agoThat's true only if they reach all destinations
- jakecopp 7y agoYep, they do already! The future is here, just not evenly distributed (to the US :P) https://www.openrailwaymap.org/?lang=null&lat=48.21003212234042&lon=8.28369140625&zoom=5&style=standard https://www.openrailwaymap.org/?lang=null&lat=48.21003212234...
- rdrock 7y agoAn old-new paradigm of road transport, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll makes for a good read.