The Future of Ground-Based Transportation Systems

I love this future because it completely routes around the public transportation dilemma we have in the US. The fact is that automated electric vehicles on paved roads would work perfectly here, could completely replace personal cars, would provide huge cost savings, not to mention saving thousands of lives a year from traffic deaths alone.

And this is something we could actually do. The government could take $X billion, get a cost-effective robotic car platform off the ground, start replacing vehicles on a 1-to-1 basis, and outlaw manual driving on public roads inside of 20 years. It would make existing electric vehicle technology perfectly suitable for trips of any length, since you can simply change cars at the charging station and be on your way inside of a minute. Completely feasible.

But alas... Inertia.

I think a lot of that will happen.

But what technologies power the vehicles or enable the roads are secondary. The efficiencies gained by reducing vehicle size will slash costs.

A great many people will commute in a single seat vehicle with 50 horsepower if its a quarter of the cost per mile. Especially if they aren't stuck with it the rest of the time. As long as they can just as easily get larger vehicles for other occasions.

As far as alternatives to conventional roads, we already have them in major cities. Some are elevated and some are underground. Today only mass transit uses them, but I fully expect robotic cabs to destroy mass transit. Even people who don't value convenience will ultimately go for them. So subways and elevated railways, once abandoned by trains, will be converted so they can be used by individual vehicles.

Absolutely. And your comment doesn't even mention the tens of thousands of lives that could be saved yearly, nor the millions of acres of paved wasteland that could be re-claimed for use by humans and real human communities.

I hope someday an america jammed to the gills with empty, idle hunks of steel looks as bizarre and wasteful as it actual is.

Once you switch over to autonomous taxis, so many possibilities open up:

Imagine eliminating most visible parking. A small fraction of the world's vehicle fleet is in use at any given time; the rest of the time it's taking up a parking spot. Remove that and we can have wide sidewalks and bike lanes, parks and new development. Suburbanites get an extra room in their house and a bigger yard.

Buses and light rail become obsolete, but heavy rail transit becomes much more practical, because the door-to-door problem is solved. A virtuous cycle of improved convenience, leading to greater ridership, leading to more trains and shorter headways could result. It makes a lot more sense to ring the bay with a 150 mph train when getting to and from the train is easy. (Then again, it might be easier just to run the taxis at 150 mph on dedicated roads.)

I love hunky-doodle blue-sky plans too - they don't have to deal with reality.

In reality, most people leave for work at the same time. So they all need a car at the same time. So we need the same number of cars as we have now.

Carpool? Did I hear somebody say carpool? With robotic drivers that works ... exactly as badly as it works now. My three nearest neighbors work in different TOWNS, not only different buildings or neighborhoods.

So I jump on Google Taxi, log in, reserve a car to show up and ... it says "next available taxi arrival, 2 hours before or after desired time". So I either get up at ass-oclock in the morning, or am chronically late for work. </rant>

You can do all of this right now either using a shared vehicle service (you drive) or getting a car + driver (whether limo or taxi). I'm curious as to why people think that robotising a car would lower the cost of hiring dramatically to the point where you were using it to get to work?

It's my understanding that a taxi driver isn't the major cost in a taxi fare, and that fuel, capital cost + licence costs are the principal component in a taxi fare.

I doubt this sort of thing would make much of a dent in car sales, at least that wasn't offset by sales of the automated cars.

The biggest category for sales of cars is for people who regularly feature a combination of long & short drives in their life. This is typically not your average city-dweller, despite having larger numbers of people within cities. The average mum+2 kids isn't going to trade the family car in any time soon for this type of service, not when the cost of keeping and running an average family car isn't really that burdensome.

> I mean hell, I know I wouldn't want a car if I could just have a subscription to a car. Especially if it wasn't just like Sedans. Imagine being able to rent a truck immediately at a moment's notice, then ride back home in a Sedan, all without having to worry about driving anywhere?

It's called Zipcar or your local equivalent.

And Google could probably provide the service for dirt cheap or even free by charging commercial venues per person delivered (at least if your business wants to be at the top of the list for "sushi.")

Car-as-a-service. Nice.

To clarify, there is an urban density limit on this conclusion: "Time to get to a station (walking, or drive plus park) kills the effectiveness of most personal rapid transit and light-rail systems until you have a population density of 5000+ ppl/km2."

So for population densities of 5,000+ ppl/km2 this might work (emphasis on might).

Interestingly, urban areas of the developing world might qualify:

http://www.citymayors.com/statistics/largest-cities-density-...

The problem is that many of these cities might not maintain their high densities as their economies grow. My guess is that a lot of the high density is due to extended families living together. But maybe not, there are quite a few developed world cities on the list (e.g. London, Madrid, Seoul, Tokyo).

Unfortunately, I cannot vouch for the reliability of the statistics presented here, there just a result of a very quick google search. I've got to stop spending so much time on HN.

Yes, I noticed that assumption too, and a few others(for example the assumption of "car parked outside home" - now you have to value either the cost of car ownership and parking, or the time cost for an on-demand fleet to reach the passenger) With a lower speed target the system may still offer benefits over roads and mass transit in terms of reliability/availability. The number of existing PRT companies continuing with this approach suggests it has some merit.

Maglev PRT still seems worth researching for intercity traffic though - the requirements for routing get a lot easier, and you still have benefits of speed and lightness.

I believe NYC is implementing a bike-share program like the ones in Montreal, London, and other cities. Basically, you pay a subscription fee (or you can just pay as you go, of course) to get a bike from a docking station, ride it to another docking station closest to your destination, and push it into the station and forget about it.

The biggest problem, which does not at all make the system impractical, seems to be the availability of working bikes and open docks at the stations you choose. The city (Montreal) seems to have trucks that go around and redistribute bikes fairly often based off of the real-time data the stations give them. Still, there have been several situations where during peak hours there are favorite "pick-up" and "drop-off" points, meaning there are no bikes for you to pick up, and if you do get a bike, there is no space at the station where you want to drop it off. There is usually a bike or two that's broken down at each station, so it's important to put every bike through a few tests to avoid frustration.

For me, the times that it was the most useful was either to commute, supposing a bike was actually available, or to get home after a late night out after the metro has closed. I hate taxis and will only take one at last resort, it was awesome to just take a bike back home.

I overall liked it but it's difficult for me to justify the added cost, since I'm not about to get rid of my metro pass. I would probably end up saving money if I replaced my pass with bikes and packs of metro tickets if I really wanted to, but that would not work during the winter when the stations go away.

The lack of dedicated lanes was mentioned already. But this alone, while significant, is not the biggest problem with the bike.

Let's take Toronto. I could probably bike to work 9 km in an hour (half an hour if I had a dedicated lane - but I don't). However, in summer I sweat a lot and there are no showers at work. In other seasons - it is rain and snow that are the obstacle.

Brisbane has implemented a lot of bikeways, plus a shared-bike hire scheme and has a central parking facility, which includes secure parking, ironing and laundry service, locker rooms and showwers. So you can ride in, park your bike, get showered and changed and walk the rest of the way to work. It is quite popular and the overall scheme is working well.

http://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/facilities-recreation/sports-...

I bought a Brompton folding bicycle in NYC. It's great. Very easy to bring on the subway, ferry or even a taxi.

The only downside is the small diameter of the wheels makes climbing a bit comedic.

I guess you didn't read the article:

""We live in a world designed around cars. Because world population has grown five-fold during the age of cars, we will be stuck with their legacy in roads and low-density metro configurations for at least the next century. This realization is a difficult one. I set out to start a company that could radically transform transportation. But neither the physics nor economics work out, and in fact will not work out until population density is much higher.

It is the ubiquity of roads, more than the greatness of cars that is difficult to defeat. And so, the future of transportation is, perhaps disappointingly, simply better cars. Our abstract criterion for the perfect transportation system is one that is fast, ubiquitous, has on-demand departure, and is quiet, private, and safe. The solution to all of these is a self-driving car.

It is clear that a maglev based personal rapid transit elevated track system should not be pursued as a business.""

> The problem with a system like this is that it requires us to throw out the existing system and replace it.

Right, because all horses were put down when trains were invented. And all rails were pulled up when cars were invented. And all roads were removed when, um, helicopters were invented, or something. Clearly any any new technology which isn't interoperable with the old requires the total abandonment of its predecessor. To ensure this, PRT stations will need to have some kind of access control mechanism which ensures that anybody who uses roads or cars is excluded from the system, and vice versa...

Sorry for the sarcasm, but this is an argument that I encounter far too frequently, and it's completely fallacious. Nowhere does it say that building new infrastructure requires the abandonment of the old.

Your second fallacy is the assumption that roads are necessarily "existing" or are in any way cheap.

First, in the next 40 years, the world's urban population will increase by 2-3 billion people. For the most part, the transport infrastructure they will use does not exist yet. Decisions on what that transport infrastructure should be can be based on current best practice rather than what is "existing".

Second, even in existing cities, roads wear out relatively quickly and are potentially more expensive to maintain / replace than PRT infrastructure. The balance of which is more cost-effective to (re-)implement is something that has to be looked at on a case-by-case basis, but is not nearly as straightforward as you suggest.

Third, roads are "cheap" only if you ignore the cost of the "rolling stock" (ie the cars people have to buy to use them), and also assume that the underlying land has no value. Note that this is a tremendous amount of land: between 45% - 55% of the surface area in most cities. PRT costs are generally given as inclusive of the rolling stock, and PRT infrastructure uses about 95% less land area per unit of capacity. In medium- to high-density areas, a full-cost accounting of this typically comes out wildly favourable to PRT.

Its two main drawbacks are that it does not handle crush loading caused by large demand fluxes (just like cars, but unlike trains), and that it is not cost-effective in low-density areas (just like trains, but unlike cars). Its natural niche is as an extension to light rail and subway systems (which can handle crush loads during peaks), serving medium-density areas which the mass transport systems could not economically serve on their own.

You make a good point here. Future transport system will have to leverage existing infrastructure to be successful. Multi-modal transport, like you are proposing, has are not easily solved. The time required to switch from one system of transportation to another requires hubs and introduces bottle necks and very advanced planning, perhaps even magical foresight, in regards to developing areas. A unified, personal transport system can scale more easily and has the benefits of privacy. That's why cars are relatively successful and haven't been replaced yet.

I'm unconvinced that collective transportation is the real solution to the problem, but it is the best intermediate solution we have right now. Downsizing cars, removing manual control, unifying speed, and adding distributed routing capabilities seems much more promising to me.

>and fix the last mile issue with automated taxi cabs

Why not bikes and walking? Consequently, this solution also fixes the following which automated taxis can't:

-pollution(bikes have much less total in mfg than cars) -maintenance(many bike shops exist and fixing bikes is comparatively easy) -parking(take it with you on the train, store in house/apartment) -cost(nice reliable used bike is under $1000) -familiarity/public acceptance(people are used to bikes) -security (take your bike with you and bikes have no software to break/get hacked) -human fitness (heart disease really sucks) -infrastructure (no batteries, gas, chargers, parking really required)

http://www.swedetrack.com/ is an older example of a similar idea, but I always think of JPODS http://www.intelligenttransportation.com/ when these ideas are suggested.

So this new idea is nothing new, just has a fancier site behind it. There are many examples available at http://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/itrans2.htm

Given the upwards cost, and this sounds dumb, but I was kinda hoping for a revolution in bricks for roads. The brick laying machine out of Europe combine with some embedded RFID chip in each brick (perhaps with a different code for the road edge and turning lane bricks) might make for an interesting experiment.

They tried (and failed) in Masdar - UAE: http://singularityhub.com/2011/03/01/masdar-city-abandons-pu...

And I think you didn't read the article. It gets to exactly the same conclusion you did - or are you just trying to be witty? :)

> The next revolution in transportation will take advantage of this existing network.

There is a simple concept that takes this assumption and adds some personal transit logic to this: busses with routes adjusted dynamically that just pick you up wherever you registered.

I first read about this idea in the famous Pattern book by Christopher Alexander written in 1977. It looks like existence of smartphones and availability of real-time traffic data and cheap computing power add some feasibility to this idea.

Unless there are tracks, I find it hard building an automatic PRT on current network (roads).

Since I sometimes commute by Caltrain, I have been very interested in this "last mile or two" transportation problem.

A remarkable number of engineer/entrepreneurs have sprung up attempting to offer devices that solve it. Here are some highlights of what I've found:

Segway: easy to ride and reasonably fast, but expensive, and worse, much too heavy (100 lb) to pick up and take on a train.

YikeBike folding electric bicycle: looks not too hard to ride; a little slow, perhaps, at 15 mph. A technological marvel (anti-lock brakes!) but correspondingly expensive ($2000 for the 31 lb model, $3800 for the 24 lb carbon fiber model).

Conscious Commuter folding electric bicycle: this is a very nice-looking design whose development was recently funded on Kickstarter (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1585753369/folding-elect...). No specs yet, but looks extremely promising.

Trikke EV: a very creative design. Looks fun to ride, but a little heavy for this purpose (38 - 46 lb depending on model) and not particularly fast (13 - 16 mph).

Metroboard electric skateboard: reasonably fast (20 mph) and extremely light (~20 lbs depending on model). I have one of these and it's an impressive piece of engineering and fun to ride, but it does require substantial athleticism and, uh, a certain risk tolerance. Not a mass market product.

If those aren't exotic enough for you, a number of people are working on self-balancing electric unicycles (!!).

I think that problem is better solved socially than through engineering. Walking two times ten minutes every day will not harm anybody who is fit enough to travel by public transport. On the contrary, it would be a contribution to the fight against obesity. So, we should strife to promote this as a _free_ way to work on one's health.

Yes, the climate may be harsh at times, but that Segway will have trouble in a foot of snow or in a monsoon, too.