This jumped out in a Newsweek article:
Uber reports that in some cities, one-third of its trips begin or end at a public-transit station.
This stuck me as relevant, having been at a conference where the Motordom types were suggesting that automated vehicles will do away with the need for transit – even rapid transit. Because their world, in defense of more cars and bigger roads, looks like this:
In this version of the future, self-driving cars could smash through the Marchetti Wall*. They would unlock what’s known as “induced demand”—prompting commutes of such lengths that they’d have been previously unfathomable. Or we might find people deciding they never need to park their cars because, hey, cars can circle on their own.
McDonald imagines a commuter going to work in his self-driving car: “Let’s say he gets to the office, he gets dropped off at the front door. And he tells the car to go find its cheapest parking.” Maybe it drives out to the far suburbs, to park for free on a side street. “He says, ‘Okay, just go have fun today! Go drive around! Come back and get me at 5. Why not? It’s cheaper!'” The problem of cruising could morph into a Monty Pythonesque parody of modern life: a street clogged with traffic, but all the cars are empty. In economic terms, this is called a “rebound effect”: If you make something suddenly more efficient to do, people will do more of it.
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Nothing, as the article notes, a little congestion/road pricing wouldn’t solve.
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* The Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti observed that throughout history—going back to ancient Rome—the majority of people disliked commuting more than one hour to work. If you’re faced with a longer commute, you hit the Wall and rearrange your life, finding a new, more local job or moving closer to the office.
This might also solve the complaint that people can’t rely on car2go’s (or similar) for end of trip service because there isn’t a guarantee one will be there when you get to your remote station.
A holistic system would allow a driverless car to shuttle around the suburbs, but ‘know’ approx when you’ll be needing the car by the fact you’re going ‘home’. And just like the destination dispatch systems on modern elevators, could tell you to get off at stop X vs Y because its more efficient to get the driverless car to X today … sometimes its Y.
Incidentally, Car2go just decreased its radius to eliminate some of the dead-end-cars which were ‘stuck’ in Richmond or parts of the North Shore for most of the day, and not used for multiple trips. Automated cars would address this also, adding the ability to recycle them back into the system.
I think I was at this same conference, listening to the same speaker, eating the same salmon and peach cobbler lunch.
This automated car thing is a real fetish with some folks. It might actually happen, but even in traffic modelers wildest fantasies, automation of the existing vehicle fleet offers up about 15% efficiency in road capacity. This is a big deal, and the resulting ‘reduction’ in driving penalty/cost (faster commutes) will incentivize more private vehicle use. But that said, the resulting capacity created by more efficient vehicle operation won’t come within several light years of what is required to move the same number of people that transit does now in larger cities.
In smaller cities, if everyone turned over their car to an autonomous operations system (“AOS” – coining it) and entirely abandoned transit to do so, traffic would be about the same as it is now. No benefits for the same maintenance costs.
Where are you getting “wildest fantasy = 15% increase in road capacity? When vehicles can run in platoons, road capacity will increase dramatically. Unless platooning is considered even beyond the scope of wildest fantasy.
Vehicles already do run in platoons, just not as efficiently as they could.
Even the tightest cartoon — er platoon — will never achieve the spatial and energy efficiencies of public transit vehicles.
Public transit is not for everyone. Assume individually owned, or individually driven vehicles will be with us forever. An e-scooter, or an e-bike, or a small e-car, self driven, is also energetically very efficient !
Combine Uber, Lyft and self-driving vehicles and you get the idea that a large network of small cars will be here to stay ! Perhaps mass transit on longer routes. Think airplanes. Hardly anyone owns a private airplane, due to cost, but some do, and many use a plane for longer distances as shared costs are very low per km-seat flown. That makes sense. Or trains. Or Skytrain/LRT. For short distances, say sub 10km, mass public transit is very inefficient. That is were the private vehicle or shared vehicle comes in.
How about this vision: Translink runs only large buses or SkyTrain/LRTs. No commuter buses at all. People will walk, bike, e-scooter, e-bike or Uber the last 2-4 km. Very efficient and very good on the over-taxed public purse !
Street parking could disappear. This by itself would yield way more than 15% increase in road capacity.
Surely TransLink could eliminate most if not all poorly used routes, especially in the off hours. The transit driver union, of course, will not like it, but it could make TransLink or agencies like it far more efficient to focus on mass rapid transit where it truly shines, as opposed to suburban Langely routes 2x/hour at 10 pm with 0 – 2 passengers each.
Indeed road pricing and far higher parking fees are critical to prevent problems like you describe ie folks sending the car to a cheap far away place.
In fact the solution TODAY to fund transit and motivate folks to drive less is road pricing and far higher parking fees. Where are the bold politicians implementing it ?