The Driverless Future: Buses, Not Taxis 257
jfruh writes Driverless vehicles are coming. The question is: what form will they take? Uber's management has suggested that, rather than owning our own private, autonomous cars, we'll all be glad to pay Uber by the trip for a private ride in one. But an Italian consultant working on experimental driverless vehicles in Europe thinks that the future will lie with automated buses, because driverless cars, "may be able to go and park themselves out of harm's way, they may be able to do more trips per day, but they will still need a 10 ft wide lane to move a flow of 3600 persons per hour ... their advantages completely fade away in an urban street, where the frequent obstacles and interruptions will make robots provide a performance that will be equal, or worse than, that of a human driver, at least in terms of capacity and density."
Was on a bus once (Score:2, Informative)
Heading to Dallas, Cotton Bowl, TXJAM III. Bus, back seat, center. Driver came back to look around at a side-of-road stop. I notice the bus was rolling backwards! I said, the bus is rolling back. He said, "What?". I said, "look out the window." He RUNS up front and hits the brakes. I saved the day. Gas pumps, etc. Now would it be better without a driver?
Re:Was on a bus once (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, it would be better. A robot driver wouldn't forget to put on the parking brake like this idiot did.
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"Westworld, where nothing can go wrong, go wrong, go wrong, go wrong..."
Sorry, but, I know how this story turns out.
Re:Was on a bus once (Score:5, Interesting)
Similar situation: I was on an older bus, some passengers leave the via the back door, the driver goes to pull away from the stop but can't because the bus thinks the back doors are open (green light on). Bus driver gets up, goes the the back door, pulls the doors closed. The green light goes off, brakes release, and the bus starts rolling down the road. He didn't seem that concerned when people point it out to him. He should have pulled the parking brake before leaving his seat (which I assume is standard procedure). Transit company didn't seem that concerned either when I reported it.
The door-brake interlock on modern busses require that the drive have his foot on the brake when the door closes to release the interlock. Sometimes you'll notice after the door closes they try to drive away, but the engine just revs. They push the brakes, and then are able to go.
In either case these are bad drivers, and hopefully an automated driver would keep to the SOP. There are many cities with driverless subways that function without problem.
Eliminating the bus driver is Pareto-stupid (Score:3)
If you go from ten single-occupancy cars to a ten-passenger bus, you've eliminated 90% of the vehicles at the (relatively low) cost of adding one more driver. Eliminating the bus driver gets you from eleven people in the bus to ten, which is probably not as important as other efficiency improvements. Also, buses are awful unless you have quite high population density -- lots of areas don't have enough prospective trip endpoints to justify mass transit.
Re:Eliminating the bus driver is Pareto-stupid (Score:4, Interesting)
If you go from ten single-occupancy cars to a ten-passenger bus, you've eliminated 90% of the vehicles at the (relatively low) cost of adding one more driver. Eliminating the bus driver gets you from eleven people in the bus to ten, which is probably not as important as other efficiency improvements. Also, buses are awful unless you have quite high population density -- lots of areas don't have enough prospective trip endpoints to justify mass transit.
The reduction from eleven people to ten is very worth while, as the driver is being paid to be there everyone else is paying to be there.
Have you considered that the reason that buses are awful in low density areas is because there is not enough traffic to justify the overhead of a driver? Autonomous buses would have lower overheads and would make some currently un-profitable routes worth while.
Re:Eliminating the bus driver is Pareto-stupid (Score:4, Interesting)
Bus drivers, at least where I live, are pretty well paid + nice benefits. Saving 50-100k a year X 2(presumably the bus is running more than a single shift a day) is worth it. The errors drivers do are worth it. Drivers often don't notice people at stops, nearly drive pass the one that you want so drive erratically to get over to the stop, take a washroom break at the terminal and come back to the bus a few minutes after it was supposed to leave etc. The scheduling headaches of planning around lunch breaks, vacation, calling in sick etc is worth it assuming that the robots have a better uptime than a human (not a hard feat to accomplish).
I agree a bus has diminishing returns but I think you missed the most important thing: the time of the passengers. People that drive are basically doing no valuable task for the whole time they are driving other than getting themselves from A-B. Replacing each car with a robot at least saves that for each driver freeing them up to read, do paperwork, etc other potentially paid work. It turns valueless time to (potentially) valued time for at least 1/5 people (assuming people are driving fully occupied sedans which we know is usually not the case). That is the entire reason I commute with public transit rather than drive. I'd rather spend 3hr a day commuting and being able to read and watch shows on my tablet during that time than 2hrs a day doing nothing but driving, that and the cost savings makes it a no brainer for me.
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I'm commuting to work using public transport for 5 years now.
Believe me, you can't do anything useful when you stand in tightly packed crowd, and this is how public transport in rush hours usually looks like.
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I have a suspicion that if you remove the driver labour costs, running small (10-12 seats?) passenger buses in areas of lower population densities becomes quite feasible, particularly if you can combine it with a certain amount of smart route/demand planning.
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And I don't see why it has to be one-or-the-other. There can still be automated buses that services main routes, and smaller automated buses/taxis that work on a reservation system to drive people to and from the main bus system.
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Eliminating the bus driver gets you from eleven people in the bus to ten, which is probably not as important as other efficiency improvements.
Not true. The driver is the single biggest cost of operating a bus. More than gas, maintenance, and capital costs combined. Once you eliminate the driver, then you can use small vans instead of big buses, run them much more frequently, and further out into the suburbs ... which means they will be more convenient and used by more people. Getting rid of the driver changes everything.
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Yes, and you have effectively described Uber's concept for driverless transport. It won't look anything like today's buses, and the only real similarity is that strangers share road vehicles.
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The way we run them, they're awful even with high population density, because we charge the same price if you take a bus to the next stop or to the end of the line. In other words, we overcharge for short trips and undercharge for long ones. This keeps the financing perpetually in the red, and encourages long commutes (particularly for those whose time is worth the least), which adds to traffic congestion.
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The last time I frequently used a US bus system -- about 15 years ago, in Pittsburgh -- they used a zone system, with the fare based on your origin and destination zones, and most bus routes crossing at least one zone boundary. The last time I used a public bus -- about 5 years ago, in Japan (Yamanouchi, Nagano Prefecture) -- riders took a numbered ticket when they boarded, and their exact fare to the next stop was displayed on an LCD panel. I would guess that US cities avoid exact metering in order to s
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Subways are easy to automate, it's been done in countless cities, but there you have an average of 100-200 passengers per driver which really does make it pretty pointless to eliminate the driver.
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th reason for eliminating everyone's job is to be able to have the current infrastructure and high quality of life with fewer people (since people are the source of pretty much all our problems these days. look at isaac asimov's spacer worlds; many robots, few people, high standard of living for everyone but with 90% unemployment. still not a problem as most don't want to work anyway.
Re:Eliminating the bus driver is Pareto-stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
why is it the mission of everybody in the world to eliminate absolutely everybody's job?
Because wealth is created by the production of goods and services, not by "keeping people busy". Improved productivity is the only way to improve living standards. You don't accomplish that with stupid make-work jobs.
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Then why do some states not allow you to pump your own gas? And what do you propose we do with the low-skilled people when robots take over their jobs? Bus drivers, grocery store cashier/stocker, waitresses, etc, all jobs taken over by robots.
Re:Eliminating the bus driver is Pareto-stupid (Score:4, Insightful)
And what do you propose we do with the low-skilled people when robots take over their jobs?
Move them to something productive. Automation is nothing new. The automation of agriculture eliminated 90% of the jobs. The automation of factory work eliminated most of what was left. Yet we are approaching full employment with many times the population. If you seriously believe that productivity improvements cause poverty, you need to take another look at the history of the last few centuries, when what happened was the exact opposite.
How is the automation of menial labor today any different than the automation of agriculture and manufacturing a century ago?
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Then why do some states not allow you to pump your own gas? And what do you propose we do with the low-skilled people when robots take over their jobs? Bus drivers, grocery store cashier/stocker, waitresses, etc, all jobs taken over by robots.
Stupidity, mostly. There are a lot of jobs that benefit society that are not more difficult than pumping gas. And most people in the low-skilled jobs you listed would have no problem moving to a job that is slightly more skilled if given the opportunity.
Hiring people just to give them a paycheck is the ditch diggers fallacy. Spending money to dig ditches and fill them in moves money around, but doesn't actually produce anything of value - at the end you've spent money but have nothing to show for it. It
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Hiring people just to give them a paycheck is the ditch diggers fallacy. Spending money to dig ditches and fill them in moves money around, but doesn't actually produce anything of value - at the end you've spent money but have nothing to show for it. It would be better to use use that same money to produce something (anything) of value, so society benefits. http://theclassicalliberalblog... [blogspot.com]
The fallacy of that analysis is the economic multiplier of paying someone to work. http://www.economicsonline.co.... [economicsonline.co.uk] I've seen estimated multipliers of 1.6 to 2.0 every dollar spent on unemployment payouts http://www.dol.gov/opa/media/p... [dol.gov]
As the above article points out, paying unemployment saves other people's jobs by virtue of the fact that the unemployment dollars are spent. This interesting secondary factor which is unemployment once people find jobs roughly equivalent to what they had before. If peo
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Universal Basic Income would be needed when the machines replace us. Even Lawyers and med techs are going to be replaced by AI's.
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All well and good, if everyone was afforded a small parcel of land where they could erect a shelter and maintain a farm.
If not then people have to work to earn the money to buy the foods and shelter they need to survive.
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people have to work to earn the money
No they don't. The bottom quintile in America already gets 40% of their income from redistribution. Performing silly make-work jobs that generate no value, is not "earning" money.
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Or Just Maybe... (Score:2)
I know, that is crazy. No system would ever be built like like.
Robot bus (Score:2)
But who is going to supervise the children and stop[ fights and bullying? I can't see a robot being very effective on typical school buses.
Or are we talking about coaches? (The long distance buses run by Greyhound and Jefferson Lines) ?
I thought the whole point of automated cars was to improve safety by taking the distracted amateur out of the drivers seat, and also permit impaired people (whether disabled, intoxicated or just tired) to have personal transportation which is necessary in most non-metropolita
Why either/or? (Score:2)
Why does the answer have to be either 'taxi' or 'bus' when it's possible to combine the two and have a sensible multi-drop scheme? This would need a decent number of users (Higher than that needed to sustain a local bus company, I'd guess), but would manage to combine the two nicely, and with computerised routing of vehicles should be practical.
Like a taxi you book from where you are, and it'll come to collect you there and drop you off at your requested destination. Unlike a taxi though there could be ot
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I'm sure this will be disputed, but I think there's a segment of transit advocates that's almost ideologically opposed to transportation in single user vehicles, and the closer those vehicles are to private cars the more opposed they are.
The Only Hope (Score:2)
A large proportion of people will not willingly share their commute space with others. Since people who "vote with their feet" seem to prefer to drive their own cars in privacy to sharing a vehicle, route and schedule with other people the rider may not like, it will take more than engineering to get the intended result. It will mean, eventually, either outlawing ownership of private cars in certain places or making permissions prohibitively expensive.
I see a big, expensive failure in this. Nevertheless,
Airline Luggage (Score:2)
Not Uber (Score:2)
Truth is somewhere in between (Score:2, Insightful)
In the US driverless cars will win, generally because the US infrastructure and cities are built for car ownership; generally speaking US cities have a lower population density than other countries. In larger, higher density cities such as in China and some parts of South America, buses will be the way to go as they're decently clean and having too many cars in those high density cities is a huge negative. In many European cities it'll be a mixed bag; I see small driverless cars being useful in the tight
Trains (Score:3)
Accurate (Score:2)
And the "driverless" part is entirely optional. Cities with good public transportation already demonstrate how it is done.
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This.
We already have automated buses, single cars, and long-haul trucks that arrive automatically, on-demand. Every large city already has a network of them.
It just so happens there's a person in the driver's seat today. In the near future there may be a computer in that seat. Nothing else changes, from a transportation angle.
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in Europe they have free health care so if you los (Score:2)
in Europe they have free health care so if you lose your job you are ok but in the usa the union will fight like hell to keep the jobs.
wrong direction (Score:2)
Driverless allows high efficiency very small people movers. Buses are per person mile very inefficient in energy use, pollution and especially convenience. They are only efficient in the first two when full to capacity which they are only during major commute rushes. The future of self-driving vehicles is highly flexible, electric powered, on demand minimal vehicles for the job. Anything else is nonsense.
Re:wrong direction (Score:4, Informative)
Buses are per person mile very inefficient in energy use, pollution and especially convenience. They are only efficient in the first two when full to capacity which they are only during major commute rushes.
That's not true. Busses even when pretty empty are efficient. A modern bus weighs about 8 times that of a small car, is a hybrid (which really does help substantially for city driving) and has a single large engine which is generally a bit more efficient than a collection of smaller ones. As a result a bus only needs a few people on board before it matches a car for efficiency.
Given a maximum capacity of about 90 people, I'd estimate that even at 10% full the bus will win in terms of efficiency. There are other factors which probably help in the busses favour, since busses aren't built for high acceleration and are also driven by more competent professionals than cars on average.
Anyway I found this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-e... [bbc.co.uk]
Seems that busses are in the range 5 to 8 MPG roughly. Cars are largely around the 30 mark for decent cars. At that point even the worse busses only need 6 passengers to equal the efficieincy of single occupancy cars.
The average occupancy in the UK is apparently 1.58:
http://www.publications.parlia... [parliament.uk]
meaning compared to the worse busses you'd need 9 people to match the efficiency of cars, with the least efficient busses. Coincidentally, this is about the same as the average bus occupancy in the UK as well.
People tend to use busses differently from cars. During commuting, occupancy is only 1.2 per car and busses are fuller.
So, I'd say your claim that busses are inefficient are misplaced.
A blurred line will come into being (Score:3)
But for me one of the most important groups of drivers are commuters. They are a huge bunch who all pile onto the roads twice a day at roughly the same two times. Then their cars sit and do nothing for most of the remainder of their existence. When people talk about driverless cars reducing the need for ownership they are forgetting that the benefit of shared ownership is that the asset is kept busy for the maximum amount of time. But if every commuter switched to a cab then either there wouldn't be enough cabs or then a huge number cabs would end up only run twice a day and the fee for supporting such a large number of assets would be roughly in line with personal ownership.
Thus any solution that economically deals with consumers will be one of the dominant uses of driverless vehicles. I suspect that it will be through the use of mini-buses doing a carpool like car share. People will arrange for a pickup and a destination and then will allow the service to figure out the optimal grouping of passengers to minimise time and distance while servicing the maximum number of passengers. These same mini-buses could be of all kinds of sizes depending upon the areas being serviced and their use during the remainder of the day.
The above does not preclude normal transit services or normal taxi services but what it does do is to potentially service a huge percentage of drivers with a service that meets their critical needs of point to point service that is very reliable for the least amount of cost.
This last bit is critical as many people forgo public transit because most transit services are notoriously unreliable or not conveniently structured and this could cost many people their jobs. So they grab their expensive chunk of metal and drive it alone to work.
Years ago I took a bus to work and it was a nightmare. It was only that my work was judged on productivity not arriving at a set time that I could do this. Quite simply the bus would often strand me with a 40 minute walk after taking 30 minutes to get me to that point. Yet in my general area there were about 6 of us going to that one company alone. This was a business park and I suspect that within a 5 minute drive of my place that there were hundreds all going to the business park. Not enough for a regular hourly bus run but ideal for some sort of car pooling system. It was only that we were incompetent boobs that we could never quite structure an effective car pool. Also the lack of a fixed start time made it even harder. But a computer run system should be able to work just fine.
So the key is to not look at this from a moving people around point of view but by asking what are people's priorities. For most I suspect that on time all the time is critical for a transit system and that the cost merely has to stay below operating a personal vehicle. But for ever little bit of unreliability in the system there will be a massive exodus as the cost of being fired will wildly outweigh the cost of a personal vehicle.
That is a microeconomic consideration but there is also a macroeconomic consideration; this is how a highly functional low cost public transit system can vastly reduce many costs and improve the economics of a city. If people aren't having to buy cars and are spending less time in traffic or on an inefficient transit system there will be more money available for local economics and higher local productivity. Plus fewer cars on the road can translate to a smaller roads budget which ideally either means more public spending on good things (parks etc) or lower taxes. Also many businesses require timely delivery of goods and thus many bu
Re:I disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
A bus takes up a lot of room - but the 40 cars that would have to replace the bus take up far more room.
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A bus can only be in one spot. 40 cars can be in 40 different spots.
The problem with busses is that anybody of means doesn't like taking them. Too many other people's stops and what not.
You are not going to convert car drivers to bus takers just because it's driverless.
A car goes on your schedule, not the other way around. Which is why driverless cars will win.
I'm not too worried about traffic. I think personal driverless quadrocopters will be possible around the mid-Century mark.
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.A car goes on your schedule, not the other way around.
I'm not too worried about traffic.
Contradiction.
I think personal driverless quadrocopters will be possible around the mid-Century mark.
"But soon flying cars" fallacy. Argument failure complete.
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It would be determined by price. The price of an automated bus ride (which would go along a common route) would be significantly less than the price of an automated car ride that goes wherever you want. Busses ain't going away. Neither are taxis. Paid-for-hire drivers however, will be gone soon. Then over probably another couple of decades, most people will stop driving cars themselves as the prices of auto-drive cars get nearly as low as human-drive cars and automated taxis become cheaper and more com
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Depends how you implement them, buses don't have to have fixed schedules and routes. In a large city like NYC you can just put kiosks at the bus stop requesting people to state their destination. Good algorithms can then route to the people to the same location via the same bus, and then the bus can skip all other stops. This is already being done with elevators, instead of selecting your direction you select your destination, and the screen tells you what elevator to get, which will skip straight to your f
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A bus can only be in one spot.
A car goes on your schedule, not the other way around. Which is why driverless cars will win.
I'm not too worried about traffic.
Now there's a contradiction. A car certainly starts on your schedule, but after that your schedule is determined by traffic. And places with heavy traffic would probably see driverless buses long before places with nice suburban 5mph over the speed limit the whole way commutes. Then there are costs:
The problem with busses is that anybody of means doesn't like taking them. Too many other people's stops and what not.
Look around you: That's actually not that big a problem, since it describes a small and shrinking percentage of the population (in the US, at least). Most people won't be able to afford a driverless car until qui
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It's unclear why you think the two aren't complimentary. A car near your home picks you up at your door and takes you to a bus stop. A bus comes 3 minutes later and takes you near your office. Another car meets you there and takes you to the door of your office. You had to make 2 transfers, but didn't have to wait or walk, and no single-passenger cars had to transit the congested roads to get you where you wanted to be. You had to leave at the right time to catch the bus, but you didn't have to figure out w
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Crime in transit - When we have automated buses there will be nobody to radio for assistance when a crime is in progress on the bus. If buses get automated, please add a button near each seat that can be pushed discretely to bring police in on a live video feed and display location. That said, I doubt in the law suit happy U.S. that we'll see driver-less buses in the next 20 years outside a few limited test cases. When they way the cost of a high tech automated bus vs. a standard bus and low paid driver, I
Re:I disagree (Score:5, Informative)
A bus takes up a lot of room - but the 40 cars that would have to replace the bus take up far more room.
Buses rarely run at full capacity, and when they do, you don't want to be on them. In San Francisco, I've just given up and walked because I know what the inside of certain buses will smell like, and I'd rather be in the rain. And I am not exactly a richie-rich motherfucker. I just take showers and wash my clothes, and I don't like to be surrounded by people who don't.
Also, 40 cars all manage to be in their lane and move more or less with the flow of traffic, buses fail both tests. They also pull out without looking, as if they had a right to do so. And in many cities they do, they had to give the buses the legal right to cut you off or they could never get back into traffic. All that pulling halfway over and fucking the traffic behind them while picking up slow passengers and perhaps wheelchairs is far more disruptive than 40 cars which are all taking the most efficient route to their destination, especially now that people can use internet-enabled routing (i.e. Google maps) to route them around traffic automatically.
Re:I disagree (Score:4, Funny)
An interesting thing for "drinkypoo" to say :)
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If you think a bus disrupts traffic more or less than 40 cars do, you haven't thought it through.
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If you think a bus disrupts traffic more or less than 40 cars do, you haven't thought it through.
On the contrary, if you think a bus doesn't disrupt traffic more or less than 40 cars do, you haven't thought it through. When the vehicle is parked, it's not part of traffic. It's just an obstruction to it.
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So by elimination, if I did think it through, the only conclusion would be "by precisely the same amount as".
Now I don't know as much about it as Bennet Haselton, but isn't that rather unlikely?
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the official line in metro vancouver is that a bus stopped in the traffic lane is NOT an obstructin to normal traffic.
You can't make a turd into a rose no matter what name you give it.
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A bus takes up a lot of room - but the 40 cars that would have to replace the bus take up far more room.
On average, a bus has 9 passengers, not 40. 40 is the number of seats. Cars average 1.3 passengers. So a bus roughly replaces 7 cars.
Citation:Energy efficiency in transportation [wikipedia.org]
Re:I disagree (Score:5, Informative)
you need a lot of unused capacity during off hours to provide the peak capacity you need.
So, it is correct when measuring energy efficiency to look at total energy expenditure averages using the statistic you cite. But when looking at capacity of a system as for example the case of rush hours, that's just the wrong number to use. And in fact, the numbers are even worse for you, buses fill up with people at peak times, cars actually don't.
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you need a lot of unused capacity during off hours to provide the peak capacity you need.
Sure. But empty seats on big buses is an inefficient way of achieving that. Better to use small driverless vans, and increase the number of vans on the road during peak times.
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Also, if I take the bus to work, it takes an hour. If I drive, it takes fifteen minutes. So bus passengers may be on the road far longer than motorists.
I can't think of anywhere I've lived where the bus took less than twice as long as driving.
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Which means the optimum size for a bus is smaller than most current buses. In the automated future, buses will be smaller and more of them will run the same route. Possibly, during off-peak hours some of them will function as taxis.
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Re:I disagree (Score:4, Informative)
A bus in the UK has 9 passengers, averaged across the entire UK. One major reason for that: the UK subsidizes bus routes to small towns that are probably lucky to have 2-3 people on average taking them most of the day.
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The only time this matters is during peak times - who cares how much space a vehicle takes up when you've got plenty of extra road capacity?
Check your source. It's wrong. (Score:2)
It is a claim by an MP in UK Parliament, made back in 2005. [parliament.uk]
They got their number by essentially guessing. Cause there is no such number as "passengers per vehicle".
Fuel consumption estimates for buses are based on National Atmospheric Emissions Inventory (NAEI) estimates combined with road passenger kilometres taken from the 2002 Transport Statistics for Great Britain.
Except there is no such value as "passenger kilometres" for buses in the source as you can't use that for buses - cause they operate by "zones" and not by destinations.
Same price for one stop as it is for three or five and passengers keep getting on and off along the way.
A ticket price is not related to the of distance that a passenger WILL BE tr
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No one ever considers riding horses! Horses take up quite a bit of room though. Perhaps if we rode pigs instead...
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Reading the article may help: they are talking about small buses which often have a dedicated lane. There is, of course, a desire to use this for regular buses.
As for the difficulties presented by public transportation, I can assure you that there are many problems presented by private vehicles. Even if you ignore the need for high capacity roads to handle an a large number of vehicles, you also have to dedicate a large amount of infrastructure to parking (may that be straight out land use or parkades).
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Reading the article may help: they are talking about small buses which often have a dedicated lane. There is, of course, a desire to use this for regular buses.
Yes, dedicated bus lanes are basically the worst thing you can possibly have in a city. They have horrible utilization. For 1-2x as much money you could build rail and move up to 10x as many people. But then you have the same problem as buses, which is getting people to use them. And as long as you have "haves" and "have nots" then you will have people who have to ride the bus, and people who don't want to ride the bus with them. Hence, you will still have buses and cars unless you actually outlaw cars.
This
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You don't necessarily have to outlaw cars, just not actively provide parking for them everywhere. Many U.S. cities have minimum-parking-spot laws requiring a certain number of parking spots for various kinds of developments, regardless of whether the property owner actually wants to put them in. And the cities themselves frequently provide a bunch of free or cheap parking themselves, by allowing street parking (instead of using that lane for transportation), building lots, etc. In cities that don't require
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Don't underestimate how draining public transit is.
I take public transit every day (I live in Copenhagen) and I don't find it draining at all. It's clean, safe, and efficient.
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It really depends on the mode of public transport. Here in Chicago, we have three main modes - diesel passenger trains, electric rail and diesel buses. Here, the diesel passenger trains are by far the best - clean (unless you end up at Union Station), comfortable, fast, reliable. It's suburb-to-urban center transport, though - great for that transit pattern, terrible for anything else. Riding the diesels is a relaxing trip.
Electric rail (the 'El') is next down the list. Mostly connects various city neighbor
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Yeah I agree it varies. They're all pretty good here though; I take the metro usually, but sometimes take the bus, and I don't find the bus to be too much of a problem. Slow-ish, but they have free wifi if you're going a long enough distance for it to be worth working on your laptop, and the ride is fairly smooth due to the way the stops are engineered to not usually require really pulling over.
What do you find stressful about the "El"? I've found metros stressful in Asia, but only because they're so crowde
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Brilliant! We need a large vehicle that slithers through traffic. It could be based on those robotic snakes from a few years ago. I could see it crawling along on a tread lined belly, making clean corners, gobbling up riders, pooping their nutrient drained husks out. Perhaps it could squeeze buildings for passengers or tankers for fuel.
That would be efficient. It could crawl over traffic jams, park in unusual places, maybe there are military applications!
Re:I disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
Without bus drivers there could be more smaller buses with shorter stops, better able to match demand.
Doesn't quite match reality does it, just about every city in the world has buses and they cope fine.
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Whether a bus has a driver or not... may lower the bus fare some, but in the scheme of operating a bus the driver pay isn't going to change things more drastically than, say, improvements in fuel efficiency.
Not so. Inflated driver wages account for significant fraction (fifth or quarter) of the price of public transportation.
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BART has had automatic controls since it opened in the 70's. However they still have a driver on every train, except when some guy gets off and doesn't make it back on before the train leaves. Making the trains fully automated is estimated to save 10-20% of the operating costs.
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Insert clever remark about driverless vehicles on "the road to nowhere", compare and contrast, automats, vending machines, pay toilets and marital aids.
End with analogy dealing with electric underwear, Prince Alberts button fly and Apple computers. Recap and close.
Re:Uber, uber, uber, uber (Score:5, Insightful)
If I had to bet, I'd bet on the trucking companies replacing their drivers with robots first before the bus or taxi companies do.
Buses are too messy - dealing with too many unpredictable people and vehicles in complex scenarios. Taxis would be even worse (buses have bus routes, taxis don't).
In contrast imagine being able to run trucks nonstop using robot drivers that don't need sleep, robot drivers that are safe and reliable enough to make the insurance companies to charge lower premiums. Maybe every Xth truck on the route has a human (who doesn't drive) just in case a truck encounters a problem that needs a human around. The trucking companies can pick routes that are more robot-truck friendly. Can't do that for taxis, and maybe hard for buses too.
When a robo-truck crushes a kid on a "no pedestrian" highway, that's a lot less bad PR than a robo-bus crushing a kid in a city or residential area.
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My town (pop. 50K) has buses on 6 local routes that go around and around the town all day nearly empty. It is a serious money loser, but the town keeps voting to subsidize it because it symbolizes "green".
Only a small percentage of the population will have pickup and destination points close enough to these fixed routes to make it worthwhile for them to use, not to mention having to fit their schedules into the once-per-hour bus stops. So hardly anyone uses it.
What I have wondered about is whether the
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Yes, you're right. In my experience, the middle-class left love pushing the working class onto buses through high car and fuel prices so they can feel superior every time they drive past a bus.
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If you owned a van would you go only shopping three times a year?
If I bought a month's groceries in one trip I'd either throw half of it away or fast the last two weeks to lose the weight I'd put on by pigging out in the first two.
Do you eat anything that's, you know, fresh?
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Because outside of cities public transport is a joke.
You still need a car to get to the station, often with insufficient parking.
Timing is poor as in your a couple minutes late and now have to wait 15 30 60 minutes till the next train, often it is the same train come back for the next pass.
Trains overall time to destination is worse then driving. Stopping in every town, slower than highway max speed (real speed not posted). Look at where public transport works, it's faster than driving via high speed rail.
Re: i don't think so (Score:2)
or maybe his city, like mine, doesn't have 24/7 traffic jams as yours must for this to be a valid argument.
I used to walk 1.5 hours to get to work because the bus took 1hr 20mins AND i had to wait an average of 20 mins for it in the first place (45-mins between busses). Then I bought a car and turned it into a 12-minute drive.
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A 12 minute drive with a BIG price tag attached to it.
Saving 2.5 hours a day (assuming that he was doing this twice a day) would be worth a big price tag to me.
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Probably a lot if it's a brand new car. Probably not a lot if it's a cheap used car. If you do not drive a lot then the fuel efficiency of a newer car does not compensate the much higher initial price, so a cheap used car is a very good option.
Re: i don't think so (Score:2)
I think my monthly costs, when amortized out daily, comes to about 20 minutes...
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In my city, by my house, it takes 15 minutes to drive a route to downtown that takes the bus 30 minutes. That's on a relatively direct route, on a Saturday, with no traffic. Plus figure that you need to be at the stop 5 minutes before, and you're wasting more time. If your route requires a transfer onto another route, it's very easy to end up having to go to a terminal that's not exactly on a direct route, and then wait another 10-20 minutes. If you need a second transfer your day is basically shot. I know
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If busses were the answer for middle class transport we would see a luxury version of the greyhound.
You mean like the ones Google Uses? [wikipedia.org]
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I'm not sure why that post was modded down. Clearly anyone who suggests that we should all move close to where we work is a retard.
No-one wants to pay the huge transaction costs of moving every time they change jobs, and most of us have wives or girlfriends who WORK IN DIFFERENT PLACES, so there's no way we can both move close to where we work and still live in the same house.
It's the most common, and most retarded, suggestion that always comes up in discussions about transport. It's made by retards who thi
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Sounds pretty bad, but I don't think this necessarily applies to the experience in general.
I get the bus and cycle to work on alternate days (in Dundee, Scotland). I've never driven to work; I'd either have to pay through the nose for a parking permit and still have to find a free space or park on one of the nearby streets which would require getting there around 08:00 to get a spot, neither of which are worth the time, money or effort. And the time difference is in practice negligable. I have to leave 1