Think about it, you need to leave for work at a certain time? Just jump on Google Taxi (I use Google as they're the only company that has working driverless cars that I'm aware of at the moment), log-in using your account (that you either pay per ride, weekly, monthly, yearly, yearly+ etc.), calculate your commute, and reserve a car to show up at your house at that time and place. It takes you to your destination then shoots off to an electric or hydrogen-based fleet of these cars standing by at charging facilities in neighborhoods and cities all over the world. If they became ubiquitous enough you could have as little as a five to fifteen minute wait for a car.

However, I think the auto industry would fight like hell to keep this kind of system off the roads as it would severely dent auto sales. 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?

That's a world I would like to live in. Then once populations reached the 5,000+ ppl/km2 we could start building mag lev rails and get more into that kind of public transportation.

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 highly recommend reading about Braess' Network Paradox for a great illustration of this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox

There is no need to try and dictate the type of fuel, either.

But I'm interested to understand why people think a robotised taxi service would be much cheaper than human-driven taxi service. Is the driver really the highest marginal cost in the system? Does removing a driver really drive costs down that much? I wouldn't have thought so.

Oh, and your desire to ban manual driving is never going to fly. The most you would want is perhaps dedicated driverless roads where you aren't allowed to drive - much like bus lanes are now. That would allow for higher speed possible if computer systems can show they can safely transport occupants (or goods) at speeds higher than human drivers.

The overall cost of the system would be cheaper because you don't need as many cars. A human taxi service has tons of taxis sitting around doing nothing for some amount of time, parked somewhere when not in use, etc. If taxi were just an automated service you would just need enough cars to cover peak usage and you'd have more cheaper options on parking (e.g. parking can be LIFO, no need for each car to have exit access at all times).

>Oh, and your desire to ban manual driving is never going to fly.

I disagree. Once automated cars start gaining traction it will be pretty easy to make commercials of crying mothers talking about how they wish their star football player son had only taken an automated car, coupled with real traffic statistics. In a 100 years people are going to find the fact that we used to manually drive cars insane.

You would need just as many robotic cars as you would current taxis. The demand shape isn't going to change just because you remove the driver. Yes, parking and other things will improve but it's going to be a small improvement, not an order-of-magnitude jump.

They may have been at some point, but that hasn't been the case for some time.

>A total ban on manual driving is just not feasible in a democratic country.

I disagree. Maybe not this generation, but supporting manual driving makes the whole system less stable unless you make a road just for them, which is really expensive.

>You would need just as many robotic cars as you would current taxis.

I don't believe this is the case. I see taxis sitting empty for hours. In that time one taxi could have made several short trips. I'm certain that a computer calculating routes, etc., could manage to get the same work done as is being done now with less resources. That's why we made them, after all.

Absolutely. In Austin, we have car2go, a car sharing program that allows one-way trips. Gas, insurance, maintenance, parking, and any other cost you could think of is included in the price. It costs about six dollars for me to drive downtown from my apartment. A taxi costs $15.

This isn't a perfect comparison since I walk to a car2go, but a self-driving car might need to drive to pick you up. It's pretty close, though.

Another cost the car2go scheme is missing is the taxi licensing scheme, which most local governments use as a cash-cow by restricting supply and charging high recurring fees.

Add the fact that most robotic-trips are not going to be two-way and you're probably getting closer to $10 dollars for that trip, which, undoubtedly is still cheaper than with 'wetware' behind the wheel - but some people seem to be thinking this would be as cheap as mass transit, which to me is just wishful thinking.

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.

Also, re: many smaller cars... who will purchase/maintain all those? We don't have the infrastructure to support that on many levels.

Personally, I think a system like that in /I, Robot/ is much more likely.

And the infrastructure we have now will continue to operate.

How will such an infrastructure be built and be operated. Its a mystery. But its already been done by private enterprise.

As to why only one slow lane could be used, I don't see why that would be. Perhaps you could explain. We have many lanes operating now and robotic vehicles would simply use the same lanes.

Perhaps PRT has these limitations. Robotic vehicles that operate like the vehicles that operate like the vehicles we already have wouldn't.

Of course, we do not yet have robotic vehicles that can be trusted to operate in rain or other extreme conditions and that can discern their environment well enough to be safe.

But once we, there's no reason to follow the PRT pattern. We'll simply follow the patterns we already have. Only with much more sharing (cabs) and much more efficiency.

But many features of today's automobile are there because of human needs for performance. Optimize for efficiency for a moped-like 3 wheeled vehicle and you may get something completely different.

  http://www.niutoday.info/2011/09/14/supermileage-team-proves-nation’s-best-again/

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

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.)

Also, for parking, we can take advantage of LIFO. Today, every single car has to be able to get out independent of the others. With robot cars only the last one of a given type (e.g. van, pickup, sedan).

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>

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 agree that having a car running privately is a lower per-mile cost, but that discounts the number of 'dead' miles that a for-hire car drives - the private car always takes the person where they want to go, while ordering one up via the internet is going to at a minimum double the per-mile cost, because only half the miles (as an average) will be utilised. The car will also not always be in use because demand will never be that smooth, so the in-demand times have to be priced higher to make up for the quiet times. Then there has to be a higher insurance cost, plus a margin to cater for damage to the cab, booking systems, marketing, etc etc.

It's not that hard to see where a cost goes from the 50c/mile to the ~$4/mile which isn't far under the taxi cost.

Taxi drivers make just over minimum wage in most places. While the taxi (plate) owner does make a decent return if run well, it's not like there are a pile of taxi billionaires around. I'm just not convinced removing the driver is going to change the cost by an order of magnitude.

And the dead miles problem is not a big factor in places like Manhattan where utilization of taxis is high. If this system were pervasive, you could simply maintain a car or two per block.

The biggest issue would be dealing with the peak demand. Fortunately, heavy rail is complementary here, and it's only marginally less convenient when you have quick on-demand service to and from the train station. Demand-based taxi pricing would sort things out.

If you're sharing a car, you're paying a smaller share of the capital costs. Most people don't do that today because it's inconvenient. If cars drove themselves, it'd be convenient.

It's called Zipcar or your local equivalent.

Neither will any robotaxi or robocar system initially. I suppose some will view being run by nerds as an improvement over being run by hipsters.

The fact is that in a modern economy many things are shipped from business to business and from business to individuals. Laziness has nothing to do with it. Everything thats available in local businesses also has to come from somewhere.

Many things must go through many hands before they become available across the street. There's no reason a human being has to chauffeur things from place to place.

http://www.ultraglobalprt.com/ http://www.2getthere.eu/ http://www.vectusprt.com/

There is currently a system operating at Heathrow Airport; another at a campus in Abu Dahbi; and a third under construction at a national park in South Korea. Additional small systems are in the planning stages for a few more cities / institutions around the world.

Skimming the article (unfortunately I don't have time to read it in depth), it appears that the author has basically reinvented http://www.skytran.net/ -- a conceptual PRT system which has been kicking around for at least a decade and a half. Real-world PRT systems tend to be considerably more modest in their ambitions, following the "find a tiny niche" strategy of classic disruptive technologies (in the Christensen sense of the term), rather than trying to immediately become the be-all end-all of urban transport infrastructure.

Also, skimming the article, it appears that the author makes a number of quite silly mistakes -- curiously, the exact same mistakes that the Skytran people do -- concerning the dynamics and requirements of urban transport. For example, assuming a mean speed of 45 mph for existing transport is grossly wrong: it ranges from about 35 mph to well under 20 mph for more congested cities. (Here in London, it's 16mph -- a number which hasn't changed for over a century). This has some profound implications for how fast you need to go to provide a highly effective alternative, and correspondingly what your grid sizes, turning radii, etc. should be. It looks like the author gets all of this wrong, starting from a few bad assumptions.

Disclaimer: I used to work for Ultra PRT, and currently work for a large transport/planning consultancy, advising on PRT installations around the world.

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.

But, also, in the detailed part of the proposal, he points out that with high densities (e.g. NY city) you need so many maglev cars to meet peak demand, that parking them off-peak is a significant problem.

Because the customer doesn't require a specific car, these parking lots can be FIFO queues or FILO stacks and won't require maneuvering space.

Also, the cars could transition to a much cheaper, non-maglev parking system. This might even be done using a robot to lift and store the car into a slot in an otherwise "dead" grid. One expensive robot that can move in 2 dimensions and a lot of simple steel rails is a lot cheaper than heaps of maglev track.

Finally, the 333k car estimate was based on a subway where there is only one place that people are leaving from. There was an assumption that EVERY car must return EMPTY to the source of the trip afterwards to pick up the next passenger. This is not true, the percentage of returning cars is probably much lower (30%?) And even those cars could be useful for part of this trip.

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.

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.

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

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

Wheel diameter doesn't matter for climbing, though. Bigger wheels are more efficient on a flat surface by way of less rolling resistance; the bigger wheel creates a smoother tangent with the road surface, and contains more air so deforms less under its weight load. But when you're climbing, rolling resistance means almost nothing compared to the energy you need to supply to climb the well of gravitation potential.

The problem with climbing on a folding bike is frame rigidity. The geometry required by most folders (long single tubes connected by joints with necessary slop for folding) means that a fair bit of the energy you supply goes into stressing and flexing the frame rather than transmitting into the drive system. The traditional brazed diamond frame doesn't have that problem. To make an extreme metaphor, climbing on a folder is a bit like pushing a string, where the energy goes into deforming the nonrigid body instead of moving it.

If wheel diameter mattered for climbing, then either skateboards couldn't climb hills or they'd have bigger wheels for doing so.

This is causing a doubling of his costs which wrecks the business model.

However even a 50 km/h speed ( remember no stopping at lights or for jams ) is going to be good-enough for many urban areas ( perhaps amining higher between suburbs ) so he can bring his cost back down.

The ULTra system ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ULTra_%28rapid_transit%29 ) currently has a maximum speed of just 40km/h although they are working on faster speeds and reduced spacing between cars.

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 would assume that a more realistic system would to drastically expand our existing light rail, subway etc systems and fix the last mile issue with automated taxi cabs.

Automated cars have the advantage of using our existing road system without the existing issues of storage and accidents.

Combining them with an efficient mass transit "core" we could achieve all the above goals with minimal changes to our existing infrastructure.

""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.""

Most of the worlds largest cities were designed and laid out long before a car was ever even dreamed of.

Roads, laneways and streets are a feature of every single ancient civilization. Mass transit is good at being mass transit, but personalised transportation (whether foot, bicycle, animal or vehicle) is always going to be with us.

Of course the future is cars for the majority of people, because the majority want personalised transport where mass transit is incapable of bridging the gap.

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.

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)

After a couple of years in Netherlands I strongly believe that to make the bike a success you obviously need a bike-suitable commute in terms of distance, but also, it needs to be safe. And that boils down to

- infrastructure that is designed for bikes and cars a like. Not some stupid painted lane as an after thought.

- Stringent traffic laws that protect the weaker traffic participant. In Holland for example, the burden of proof is for the more dangerous vehicle in a collision.

For this reason I am not a fan of bike-rental programs. I feel they are easy to implement (dump 20 bikes at train station) and get some political brownie points (see, we do bikes) yet change very little. Redesigning an intersection for safer passage is a whole different matter.

Inspiration? Have a look: http://vimeo.com/29401217

Yes, that is government promo, so here is a random busy intersection in a major city. Note, no helmets, no high vis gear, and all ages are represented. Also, no cars, no door-zone...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-AbPav5E5M

~20 min bike commutes shouldn't get you too sweaty unless it's above 85 outside and humid. If it does, lower the pace and catch more of the breeze! For those that need to wear business attire, you'd have to stash your wardrobe at work. But I wouldn't think a shower is a requirement for most, just a bathroom to switch clothes.

As to the no need for showers, it seems a lot more people who think they don't need to shower actually do. I had a cube two rows down from a biker that believed that, but it wasn't so.

The road to better health is paved with sweaty armpits. I for one would not mind a little workplace B.O. if it meant for happier, safer commutes and fewer billions spent treating the pandemic of heart disease and diabetes. But that's just me.

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

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.

“The real problem with PRT in dense urban areas is parking. During non-rush hour periods, what do you do with 333k vehicles?”

What a huge face-palm.

This refers to his statement about NY where he naively assumed the most sensible analysis was one that replaced the existing subway completely with PRT. - Then, magically, every person would go buy a car ( why? ) - All those people would need parking spots at the PRT stations that are within minutes walking distance - He designed a one-size-fits-all solution instead of recognizing that a combination of several specialized solutions is even possible.

You're not going to replace the ultimate freedom cars give you, nor the huge capacity the subway provides. PRT does something else - it provides a supplemental point-to-point transportation.

Also, the peak demand measurement is flawed because it is based on existing infrastructure. X cars go on a freeway / hour. Y people go on a subway / hour. But you are forced to use the 10 freeway because its the only infrastructure that provides for MANY routes [ santa monica - downtown ], [ culver city - hollywood ] and so on. Considering the "mesh" feature of PRT requires an analysis instead of starting and ending destinations - not the infrastructure those trips used!

I used to be enamored with PRT. It seems so logical.

And it might win if you designing a city from scratch and could layout everything to minimize the inconveniences inherent to a fixed track system.

But has it even been implemented in such a new community? No, usually people in even a new community have a strange need to go to other places. There's a system that already works for that. So they simply extend that system a little further and gain access to all of its advantages.

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

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? :)

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.

By reading the comments on swiftprt.com I also found the interesting project of electric airplane takeoff http://electrictakeoff.com/

Is there an online community that discusses such questions more frequently?

Also, why choose below-the-rail? Requires stronger towers, can't turn as fast as existing rail, etc. This was a silly decision IMO. I think these guys need to work with roller coaster engineers if they can only do /10kmph/ around curves.

Yet another still-born mass transit idea. Can we please just get the Cali high-speed rail done already to prove to the rest of USA something that other countries know already? High speed rail works great and can indeed "work" economically.

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 (!!).

The big problem with all of these though is they are all unpleasant in inclement weather and cold temperatures.

The other problem with conventional bicycles is that it's hard to go very far without getting sweaty -- depending on the weather, of course, and one's patience for riding slowly. It's nice to have power assist.

Folding bicycles can be compact enough to carry on any mass transit conveyance. The Metroboard is certainly quite compact and portable. Not sure about the Trikke.

You're right that weather can be a problem.

I ride a bike here in northern England. For two short rides of about 15-20 minutes each way, the chances of being rained on are pretty small; maybe ten times in a year? If you had a folding bike, then ten taxi rides on wet days might be a worthwhile yearly penalty.

Non-existing problem. Walk. For two miles, use a cheap bike. Done.

And then a self-driving model :)

Reminds me of the Gyro-X, a gyroscopic car someone built in 1967. I still remember reading about how the car could be made to stay perfectly vertical in turns, or even lean outward.

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