Future Cars: Electric and Autonomous Vehicles

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mulad
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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby mulad » September 4th, 2014, 2:05 pm

I think we're going to have to implement congestion charging to deal with driverless cars. It seems far more likely to me that driverless cars owned for individual use will end up driving off to park for free somewhere. The math is pretty simple -- divide the daily parking cost by the cost to drive a mile, and you've got the distance that a car might travel to find a free parking space for the day.

There will be some practical issues getting in the way of that, though -- imagine the line of cars outside an office building of 1,000 people as they retrieve their owners and the end of a day. Managing pick-ups and drop-offs will require some new thinking about the design of streets and parking lots/structures. (High-density parking has been done before, so presumably some thought has gone into getting that to work alright.)

Hopefully it would be a bit less messy if we go the taxi route for driverless cars -- you can just take the first vehicle that shows up rather than waiting for your own. This makes driverless cars a replacement for PRT, but not LRT.

I tend to think of driverless cars working better toward the suburban ends of transit lines -- you can more acceptably operate along the park-and-ride model, but without requiring a single big lot.

Well, another thought that popped into my head today is the ability of driverless cars to deal with snow -- what would happen if your car randomly parked itself somewhere and it got stuck after a snowfall? Oh well, on days like that, there would probably be more nearby, covered parking spaces available as others telecommute. Worries like that would get some people to pay for nearby parking all of the time, but lots of people would cheap out and have their cars park far away, since it's not going to be a problem for 95% of the year.

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby acs » September 4th, 2014, 2:52 pm

I think we're all overlooking the fact that its far easier to automate a Light-rail train running on its own ROW than a car in traffic. Thus, we should be seeing this long before driver-less cars are the norm. Considering that the operator's salary is the largest single cost of running a transit line, I think cost savings will play a significant part in people's future transportation choices especially if we change to a VMT tax.

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby mulad » October 27th, 2014, 10:17 am

OK Go demonstrates the Honda Uni-Cub in their latest vide:


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Re: Public Transit News and Happenings

Postby Snelbian » April 4th, 2015, 9:46 pm

Driverless this, automated that. I'll believe it when I see it. For now it's the flying car. Nothing we should be making any sort of planning decisions based on.

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Re: Public Transit News and Happenings

Postby acs » April 4th, 2015, 10:04 pm

Says the people who are also pushing for reform in practically ever other facet of land use, transportation and public policy. Adapt or die people. The only constant is change.

grant1simons2
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Re: Public Transit News and Happenings

Postby grant1simons2 » April 4th, 2015, 10:08 pm

Well you obviously didn't see Mercedes testing theirs in San Francisco a couple weeks ago. Or Tesla making an automated driving mode when in cruise control?

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nBode
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Re: Public Transit News and Happenings

Postby nBode » April 4th, 2015, 10:47 pm

I sometimes tend to wonder if we're making all these pushes for transit improvements only for automatic cars to take over in ~15 years and make transit more or less obsolete.

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Re: Public Transit News and Happenings

Postby Silophant » April 5th, 2015, 6:44 am

I tend to wonder why people think that driverless cars will make transit obsolete. 394 is congested because tens of thousands of people decide every day that they need a giant chunk of it as their personal space, and whether there's a person or a computer driving the vehicle doesn't make a whit of difference. This picture is why we need transit, and driverless cars don't do a thing to change that.
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Re: Public Transit News and Happenings

Postby EOst » April 5th, 2015, 10:34 am

Cars, driverless or not, are also dramatically less carbon-efficient than public transit.

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Re: Public Transit News and Happenings

Postby grant1simons2 » April 5th, 2015, 11:03 am

I think the big reason is accident prevention...

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Re: Public Transit News and Happenings

Postby Silophant » April 5th, 2015, 1:55 pm

Big reason for what? For driverless cars? Don't get me wrong, I think driverless cars are awesome, and I hope I'm wrong and Google/Tesla/whoever is right about them becoming a reality sooner rather than later. I just don't agree that they're going to lessen the need for mass transit one iota. If anything, they'll make it mor necessary, as everyone increases congestion by sending their empty vehicles back out to the burbs once they get to work, and have them come back a few hours later.
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Re: Public Transit News and Happenings

Postby talindsay » April 5th, 2015, 3:16 pm

Big reason for what? For driverless cars? Don't get me wrong, I think driverless cars are awesome, and I hope I'm wrong and Google/Tesla/whoever is right about them becoming a reality sooner rather than later. I just don't agree that they're going to lessen the need for mass transit one iota. If anything, they'll make it mor necessary, as everyone increases congestion by sending their empty vehicles back out to the burbs once they get to work, and have them come back a few hours later.
Agree. Cars, no matter who controls them, take up a lot of space per person carried and have to be stored when not in use. Public transit can be driven by a person or automated too, and either way it's cheaper and more efficient for dense areas.

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Re: Public Transit News and Happenings

Postby nBode » April 5th, 2015, 11:30 pm

Good points. I guess I am envisioning a much more efficient future for cars—much smaller sizes (like a smartcar) instead of 1 person in a sedan, and much more efficient movement which would (ideally) almost eliminate congestion, provided they moved through the system fast enough. I've never thought about empty cars moving about, though. The only reason for that would be for multiple people sharing one car (which isn't really a bad thing, right?).

Don't get me wrong—I am 100% for public transit over personal vehicles. I am just constantly wary that things change, and we (humans) always seem to think we are right at the time, only to discover, later, the opposite.

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Nick
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Re: Public Transit News and Happenings

Postby Nick » April 5th, 2015, 11:38 pm

Image
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Re: Public Transit News and Happenings

Postby FISHMANPET » April 5th, 2015, 11:41 pm

Well if the cars aren't going home you're still stuck storing them in dense areas.

Driverless cars could in theory solve the problems of cars being dangerous to other users of the road, but changing who drives the car doesn't change the fundamental flaw of just how much damn space they take up. There's no huge prevalence of tiny (Smart and smaller) cars right now, and again changing who drives the car won't really change how big of a car someone wants.

Unless people stop owning cars and everyone just calls a robot car on their smart phone, but then you've still got the problems of parking them and them taking up space on the road. They still wouldn't be as space efficient as a bus (which isn't as space efficient as light rail, which isn't as space efficient as subway, etc etc).

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Re: Public Transit News and Happenings

Postby Snelbian » April 6th, 2015, 12:05 am

I don't see how sticking an AI in a car changes purchasing patterns. Automate the entire 2016 Ford lineup and you'll still have people who want a jacked up pickup to drive from a cul-de-sac to an office job downtown. It's just going to be a robotic jacked up pickup. Automation has NOTHING to do with fuel efficiency or carpooling or anything at all other than (hypothetically) accident rates. The reason people like me want reform in " land use, transportation and public policy" is because these are things that need lots of improvement. And there are ways to do it that affect many aspects of life. Automated cars are emphatically not one of those ways. Envisioning a robotic chauffeur is just sexier than tweaking zoning codes and lobbying for arcane sources of transportation funding.

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Re: Public Transit News and Happenings

Postby mulad » April 6th, 2015, 4:42 am

A typical cubicle is around half the size of a parking stall, so it's kind of amazing we don't always end up with office buildings that are dwarfed by their parking lots and structures -- it's still pretty common to get a 1:1 ratio between building area and parking area, though all bets are off once you get a building that's more than one story tall.

One of the first things that people will try to do when they get automated cars will be to send them off to try and get cheaper parking in any place where they currently have to pay. From an individual perspective, it makes sense to allow a car to drive miles away in order to avoid a $10 parking charge. But this has the adverse effect of increasing traffic in already congested areas.

The theory of self-driving cars reducing congestion comes from the idea that they could communicate with each other to avoid traveling at peak times, divert around points where there are backups, and optimize their speed and spacing on the highway. However, calling a remote car to come and pick you up could end up dropping the ratio between passengers and cars from an already low 1.1:1 or 1.2:1 today to less than 1:1 -- this could easily negate any benefit from those cars.

Smaller cars could help to some extent, but only when they are parked or in really congested conditions. The amount of space used by a Smart car traveling at 60 mph is barely any different than a Hummer traveling at the same speed. (There has been research into "trains" of cars tailgating each other down the highway, but I think that's fundamentally unsafe. Each vehicle should always maintain sufficient stopping distance from the vehicle in front of it, partly since that also reduces problems from flying road debris.)

I'm also not sure that people would be willing to let their cars tell them when they should leave to go to work, or when they should leave work to go home. There's also the problem of pickups and dropoffs -- I keep imagining the craziness of the loading/unloading zones at MSP airport. Downtown streets could easily end up looking the same.

There will be some level of rationality to the whole mess. Someone will set up organized pickup and dropoff zones with numbered spots to make them less chaotic. Congestion pricing will be added in some areas to restrain the flow of empty cars.

That's all assuming a large fleet of individually-owned vehicles, of course. Car sharing and carpooling should get easier. Car sharing reduces the parking problem, but doesn't necessarily do anything to reduce traffic. Carpooling combined with car sharing would be the best since it would reduce parking and move more people with fewer vehicles.

But if you think about it, mass transit is large-scale carpooling. Gaming this all out, public transportation systems are still going to be important.

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Re: Public Transit News and Happenings

Postby go4guy » April 6th, 2015, 9:20 am

I don't see how sticking an AI in a car changes purchasing patterns. Automate the entire 2016 Ford lineup and you'll still have people who want a jacked up pickup to drive from a cul-de-sac to an office job downtown. It's just going to be a robotic jacked up pickup. Automation has NOTHING to do with fuel efficiency or carpooling or anything at all other than (hypothetically) accident rates. The reason people like me want reform in " land use, transportation and public policy" is because these are things that need lots of improvement. And there are ways to do it that affect many aspects of life. Automated cars are emphatically not one of those ways. Envisioning a robotic chauffeur is just sexier than tweaking zoning codes and lobbying for arcane sources of transportation funding.
Just bought a pickup (not jacked up) to drive from my suburban house to my office in Minneapolis, and I couldnt be happier. No amount of technology will get me to downsize. A pickup makes my life a lot easier. A small car would be a nightmare. You need to remember that everyone has different needs.

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby EOst » April 6th, 2015, 10:30 am

"needs"

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Re: Public Transit News and Happenings

Postby xandrex » April 6th, 2015, 11:12 am

I don't see how sticking an AI in a car changes purchasing patterns. Automate the entire 2016 Ford lineup and you'll still have people who want a jacked up pickup to drive from a cul-de-sac to an office job downtown. It's just going to be a robotic jacked up pickup. Automation has NOTHING to do with fuel efficiency or carpooling or anything at all other than (hypothetically) accident rates. The reason people like me want reform in " land use, transportation and public policy" is because these are things that need lots of improvement. And there are ways to do it that affect many aspects of life. Automated cars are emphatically not one of those ways. Envisioning a robotic chauffeur is just sexier than tweaking zoning codes and lobbying for arcane sources of transportation funding.
I think we're thinking about this a little too narrowly.

No, a car that you own driving you to work is probably going to do very little to change patterns of behavior. But if there are fully-automated vehicles (of the SOV and many others), I think it could create many changes.

For SOV: As more people switch over to automated vehicles, you'll likely see fewer crashes, which definitely slow down traffic, making commutes for everyone more efficient. Most people probably don't build in time to get around that pileup because it's unpredictable.

It also might have some other effects - families willing to have fewer cars because one person can have the car drop them off at work and the same car could strategically return home if their spouse needs it to run some errands. This in turn could influence more people to live closer to the core because they can rely on getting around on foot or transit often, but still have a full-sized vehicle for trips around town. Car2Go provides the occasional car use for one-way trips and ZipCar/HourCar for longer-term stuff, but I imagine there are many families that might think it's a hassle if they have small children and need to go grocery shopping or whatever. It's essentially the flexibility of two cars with one payment.

For taxis: I mean, this is the direction we're going, right? Car-sharing services like Uber would have to own vehicles (so we'll see how that goes, given their current employment model), but it seems like a win for everyone (except for the taxi driver without a job): A smooth/safe ride, taxi companies don't have to worry about a driver being held at gunpoint or with a knife, riders don't have to be concerned about sexual assault from their driver (as sadly has been the case more than once with some Uber/Lyft-type services), and you don't need to constantly remind your driver to turn here and here and here—something that seems to happen to me regardless of the type of driver.

For mass transit: Something we rarely mention. Driverless mass transit (or assisted mass transit) means lower operating costs, potentially smoother rides (maybe my morning bus ride wouldn't involve the jerkiness of the driver moving three feet before slamming their brakes as they inch in traffic), etc.


Essentially, I'm seeing a lot of ways to get people to own fewer cars and make it much easier to live in urban spaces. Yeah, driverless cars alone aren't going to change the world, but with some of the other factors I think they could really make cities like Minneapolis much more livable.


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