Quote:
Originally Posted by milomilo
If we had electric buses of various sizes that had no driver, the marginal cost of increasing capacity would be very low so you could run them at very high frequencies, partially on demand. This would make transit much more useful and attractive, getting more people on public transit and reducing the costs associated with car use, so providing free buses could easily be revenue positive.
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Right now the cost of a driver puts a lower bound on the size of transit vehicles and encourages the adoption of bigger vehicles at scale. Without this effect the economics change a lot. The distinction between transit and ride sharing is going to blur if there are autonomous vehicles. I could see electrics being cheaper than current vehicles in the future too, and in principle the electricity cost can be driven down to near 0.
Traffic throughput on roads could change a lot too. The most important bottleneck today relates to people stopping and starting one after the other and leaving enough time to react and stop. In principle this could be improved dramatically with coordination; a pack of vehicles accelerating and decelerating together. The reaction time problem means that maximum throughput does not scale up at high speeds (i.e. you need N seconds of stopping time so you need more stopping distance at 100 km/h than 50 km/h and so throughput does not necessarily go up much with speed).
I think transportation is going to change a lot during the next 50 years. Contrary to the predictions of others I think flying will also become more important, first for deliveries and then people, and this will change what geography means (e.g. dropping the cost of being on the wrong side of a body of water).