Quote:
Originally Posted by logan5
The Toronto/Ottawa route is another that driverless cars are perfectly suited for, and your door to door time would beat both plane and train.
Of course you would need autonomous only segregated lanes, but that would be relatively inexpensive to build, but once you have those lanes, autonomous vehicles would be able to travel at high speed.
These high speeds are possible because human error will be eliminated, and because of optimal battery placement, the vehicle is very stable. What the top speed of these vehicles would be is hard to say. 160 km/h is easily achievable. Higher speeds than even that are likely though.
A trip between Ottawa and Toronto in an autonomous vehicle could be done in under 3 hours, door to door.
|
At this point, though, this is wishful thinking. It's looking at how great the future can be through rose colored glasses, without considering possible drawbacks or roadblocks.
It reminds me of the 50's. When the future world was going to be an amazing utopia, all brought to you by the automobile and the interstate. What could go wrong? People didn't really consider the negative impact of suburban sprawl, or urban decline. And they for sure didn't predict impediments like the fuel crisis.
I'm not against car ownership or car travel. I just think you need a measured approach and can't put all your eggs in one basket like the Americans did.
They built cities completely around the car. Car ownership was required to participate in the economy. More and more space is needed to accommodate all the cars, and more and more income is needed to support it. If you can't support driving, then you can't keep your job, and you become homeless because there is no alternative.
While in Europe, where they did build roads too, it didn't come at the expense of other modes of travel. Even European suburban sprawl still focuses suburban centers/hamlets on nodes like train and transit stations. This allows a huge percentage or the population to be able to survive while not having to participate in car ownership.
What will happen is with enhanced roads for automated vehicles and fewer and fewer alternatives, many in the upper and even middle class will simply opt to buy a car still. The average cost will be lower than constantly renting one, and it removes any kind of uncertainty about obtaining one when you want it and you can keep it as clean as you want. This will shrink the market for the share fleets, and create a cycle of increasing car owners, more land and resources being consumed decrease congestion and to maintain supply, and lower income people being disenfranchised out of the market place because of their inability to afford mobility.
I know 80's nostalgia is all the rage right now, but come on!
One big problems facing the fleet car sharing model is cleanliness.
Have you ever sat in the back of a taxi and thought, yeah, I totally want to sit here for 3 hours? Even Uber drivers complain a lot about how messy some of their riders are, and the owner of the car is right there. Imagine what it would be like if no one was there.
I also think we are a long way out from fully automated cars. So far, they have been incredibly dangerous. Last year, for human driven cars, there were 1.1 deaths per 100 million miles driven in the US. Uber has clocked about 1 million miles of automated travel, and has 1 death. Not a great ratio, and a long way to go before they've driven enough miles to demonstrate it's safe. It could take decades for them to rack up the miles under testing conditions.
Quote:
Originally Posted by splashflash
Citation please. Rush-hour Toronto subways may be, but feeder routes are not, especially on off-hours. I have seen claims that when car-pooling occurs, especially with electric motors, such transportation out-performs light rail.
|
Automated cars will still create congestion. Even with efficient movement, they still take up more space per occupant, meaning fewer people per hour pass a point. Even with automated cars, you still need just as many actual cars to carry the same number of people as are in rush hour today.
Audi did a study, and they predicted a 33% decrease in commute times in Ingolstadt (a city of only 140,000 people) if all cars were automated and networked (with a 12% increase in total people). They theorized that there would actually be a detrimental affect until about 40% of cars on the road were automated. And this is coming from a manufacturer, so there is probably some bias.
That's a lot of things that need to go right for this model to succeed.
Back to trains though. Along "The Corridor" the trains already hit speeds of 165km/h, and it wouldn't take much to get an improvement. I think it would be much more cost effective to improve railways on busy corridors, and provide autonomous vehicles at stations for last mile trips.
You would need hundreds, if not thousands of cars to provide door to door intercity fleet service by automated car, and they would be tied up for potentially long periods of time (low turn over). They would get dirty and need to constantly return to cleaning/maintenance stations and be out of service. It's going to be an expensive business. Then the government needs to provide the road space.
Prev
Linear Mode
