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A city bus carrying 20 people has 5% the drivers-per-person that an individual vehicle has. The driverless system only would save 5% the human effort that it wo
by jtolmar 5y ago
A city bus carrying 20 people has 5% the drivers-per-person that an individual vehicle has. The driverless system only would save 5% the human effort that it would for a solo vehicle, so it needs to be 20x as good before it's worthwhile. Put another way, the bus with 20 riders is already equivalent to automating 19 cars.
Roughly the same idea with freight - a single truck driver serves the needs of many people.
- azinman2 5y agoHuman drivers still do meaningfully cost money to employ, and they do annoying things like needing to sleep or take rest room breaks. Autonomous trucking would completely revolutionize the industry.
- danielheath 5y agoAutonomous trucks for urban trucking are a pipe dream, but maybe for long-haul routes. That said, it's not at all clear to me that developing autonomous trucks for long interstate routes would be meaningfully cheaper than laying rail on literally every high-traffic route on the planet, which uses perfectly-understood technology and has entirely predictable returns.
- azinman2 5y agoWe already have a lot of rail in the world, but still have lots and lots of trucks. Is it just not enough rail? Roads are also useful for people in a really dynamic way that rail isn’t (especially for big countries like the US).
- orbifold 5y agoThere is some path dependency here, trains came earlier than cars and early industrialised nations build rail networks that were far more extensive than they are now. There were also freight trams in cities like Berlin, which delivered cargo to smaller industrial sites in the city.
- eloisant 5y agoYou can have a driver in the truck for the city portions (at the beginning and the end of the trip), but sleeping on the highway rather than having to stop the truck for a full night.
- hawaiianbrah 5y agoPresumably you would be able to leverage a lot of that effort and expand into autonomous driving for other scenarios, right?
- danielheath 5y agoThat's what's being attempted, essentially. Autonomous driving in good conditions on highways is already working quite well, but once it's wet/foggy and there are animals wandering onto the roads and other cars are behaving unpredictably... those are not straightforward problems to solve.
- XorNot 5y agoSure, but when you load 20 people onto a vehicle, if you don't have a driver you still need a security guard.
- gpm 5y agoSubways the world over do without just fine.
- tsimionescu 5y agoSubways in my country at least definitely do have guards (but they also have human drivers, so I don't think the two are really related).
- leoedin 5y agoEvery train in London, even the fully automated ones, have at least one person onboard. Maybe at some point that will change, but there's a lot of pressure against it.
- XorNot 5y agoThe train system in Sydney, Australia has a guard cabin which it's recommended to ride near at night when there aren't many people about.
- jpmoral 5y agoI don't know if it's because I've only been here four years, or because I'm from a city/country with a lot more crime, or it's my train line, but I've never felt unsafe on the late trains or the night buses. Also, for the unfamiliar, 'guard' here does not mean an armed guard.