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Actually having a transit stop fixed in one place is an advantage in many ways. Developers know that unlike a bus route it cannot be changed at any time. This creates a stable market for building up around the station and extra incentive knowing there is one more transportation option. You do need to have a transit oriented development around the station with appropriate zoning that is more intense near the station and gradually going down the further you get away from it.
Well, no. Read the rest of the discussion. Driverless cars will make the problem worse, not better.
That's your opinion. Accept that there are opposing opinions.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Austin97
driverless cars will not reduce system capacity, they will increase it.
Capacity is more a function of driving speed. Once all/most cars are driverless the average speed of roads will increase because you wont have all the lane changing, braking/speeding up etc.
In fact tailgating slows traffic down because it causes people to brake more often which causes a 5mph decrease for each car behind it.
The turnover time for a car is 8 years. So 30-40 years down the road we will have a majority driverless cars. I say expand roads now in anticipation of driverless cars.
Also people will own their own cars which avoids the massive influx of cars going counter traffic that you used as a straw man.
rail does not increase capacity enough to be worthwhile vs the same money spent on roads. Feel free to try to prove that it does/will
I don't think the counter-traffic problem will occur. When I summon a car, it doesn't travel across town to fetch me, it's already nearby and available, same as Uber technology. Also, I think there would be driverless "hives" distributed across town where they go to be serviced and receive any needed maintenance. So in the mornings, the cars will leave the hives for pre-staging and already be near the riders.
I think there would be driverless "hives" distributed across town where they go to be serviced and receive any needed maintenance. So in the mornings, the cars will leave the hives for pre-staging and already be near the riders.
That's your opinion. Accept that there are opposing opinions.
Well, except mine is based on facts and basic laws of physics. But yes, if you want to believe that super sparkly unicorns will somehow bestow magic abilities on driverless cars to be able to violate things like gravity and momentum, then who am I to judge?
Quote:
Originally Posted by austin-steve
I don't think the counter-traffic problem will occur. When I summon a car, it doesn't travel across town to fetch me, it's already nearby and available, same as Uber technology. Also, I think there would be driverless "hives" distributed across town where they go to be serviced and receive any needed maintenance. So in the mornings, the cars will leave the hives for pre-staging and already be near the riders.
Steve
"Hives"? Man, you've been watching too much sci fi.
So, if mass transit is replaced by all of these unicorn magic-powered vehicles, then where are they going to go store themselves? How many square miles of downtown will need to be paved over and turned into a "hive" or parking garage to support the demand that we know is coming (actually, it's already here - 70+ new autos a day coming into Central Texas)?
I'm sorry, but this whole thing is a perfect example of my conservative brethren (yes, believe it or not, I vote Republican) attempting to be "counter culture" or "cool". It's based on a laudable belief - that things get better over time. But small, single occupant driverless cars on I-35 with 20 car lengths to the front, and 20 to the rear, are *not* going to make things better.
"Hives"? Man, you've been watching too much sci fi.
So, if mass transit is replaced by all of these unicorn magic-powered vehicles, then where are they going to go store themselves?
...
Uh, in all of the no-longer-needed parking garages and spaces, since people won't need to drive personal vehicles to work. You get out at the curb and the car leaves. There will be plenty of parking, but that will only be needed in off-peak times.
Try thinking it through instead of being such a skeptic. This doesn't seem far fetched to me at all, and every auto manufacturer is in fact working on autonomous cars, so maybe they haven't received your memo.
Steve
Last edited by austin-steve; 08-23-2014 at 05:55 PM..
Reason: typo
Driverless cars are a panacea to many traffic issues, particularly with regard to safety.
Even if we took the worst case scenario, which is that driverless cars removed no net vehicles from the mix, they will reduce traffic injuries and delays due to accidents. To date, driverless cars have been driven over 1.5 million miles across seven vendors who are authorized to use them on public roads and there have been a total of three accidents involving them. Of those three accidents two were rear ended at red lights, and the third was being manually operated at the time of the accident. This by itself is worth a pretty serious look into looking at widespread implementation of the technology.
Now let's assume we actually applied the slightest bit of thought to the application of driverless vehicles, and we get much more efficient ridesharing, reduced storage footprints, lower auto insurance rates across the board, and in increase in air quality while we are still using primary ICE vehicles.
When I got married many moons ago, we had a single car to share between the two of us. This worked out while we had fairly similar schedules and worked in roughly the same area. Eventually we had children, our job locations dovetailed and it became an absolute necessity to obtain a second vehicle. With a driverless vehicle, it becomes far easier to get dropped off, send the car home while the kids are getting ready, have it perform that run, run second adult to work and wait on standby. If one party needed the car before the afternoon, they could summon it, and return it to availability after use, leaving it available. An even neater application would have it pick up the kids and shuttle them to their after school activities or bring them to the worksite.
Coordinating ride-sharing in this limited way is a huge boon with regard to quality of life for all involved, but the ability to summon based on need reduces the need for a separate vehicle. In a very Austin example, four students could all share the same vehicle to get to/from class, work, or social events just by having it available on standby, ready to be summoned based on schedule demands. There are tons of quality of life improvements just due to being able to do something else during the commute, wether improving efficiency by working or handling other errands or tasks that would be unsafe while driving. Another super neat application would be placing an order for something at a local store online, sending the driverless vehicle to pick it up where it is loaded by store employees and return without requiring you to leave the office/home/where-ever.
We also have a huge opportunity to dramatically reduce the storage footprint required for vehicles in general. Rather than having multi-acre parking lots, or many parking structures across each building, driverless cars give us the opportunity to consolidate those structures into areas that might have been too far to walk ordinarily, but trivially distant for driving. Instead of having 20 parking garages in a quarter mile area downtown for example, we can have two massive ones (whether vertical or horizontally massive) every half mile. This is going to make traffic planning a whole lot easier since there's fewer necessary points of entry or slow down due to right turns, but most importantly it will open up more space for green space preferably, or other development. While there likely would need to be some incentive to get away from the multi-acre parking lot menace in non-dense urban areas, if incentivized parking structures would give companies the ability to service more customers while paying less in property taxes, or simply open up high volume businesses in areas where it may not have been feasible before. It's pretty exciting to think about what we could do with all the extra space we would save by consolidating the wasted space we use for storage.
For those who aren't incentivized unless there's a financial benefit, here's where the safety benefit also plays in. By reducing the number of accidents, and especially the number of human related injuries in accidents, insurance companies will face a tremendous amount of market pressure to lower their rates for all drivers in the area, from Mr. 6 DWI to Ms. Never got a ticket. That's not all! Driverless cars will also reduce the incidences of fraud related accidents due to reaction time, situational awareness from all the sensors, and cameras that are constantly recording. Liability is dramatically reduced for insurance companies, safety is dramatically increased for drivers.
Finally, just having these cars driving more efficiently increases fuel efficiency across the board and reduces the emissions caused by that burning fuel. Even if you don't care about the overall environmental impact of driving, with driverless cars you get all the benefits above and cleaner, less smoggy air.
Automation is going to dramatically change our society for the better in the next twenty years in ways that are hard to truly grasp right now. Driverless cars are but one of the many pronged, inevitable changes we are going to see now that our controller hardware and logic software is finally growing out of infancy into toddlerhood.
Last edited by GoddessPapa; 08-23-2014 at 06:30 PM..
Reason: Typos
I notice that you didn't address any of my assertions about driverless cars vis a vis capacity. Care to debate how driverless cars will enhance capacity when there will be an enforced 20 car length distance to the front and rear of any given vehicle at 70 mph? I also answered your question about rail capacity; the least you could do is acknowledge that I seem to know a little about what I'm doing.
Sorry, I started to then got interrupted and forgot.
This is one way to calculate capacity. Capacity clearly has to do with the # of lanes AND the speed of the traffic.
BaseCap = 1,000 + 20FFS; for FFS <= 60 (10)
BaseCap = 2,200; for FFS > 60
he first step in the procedure is to estimate free flow speed (FFS) of the facility. HCM Equation 21-1 is applied directly:
FFS = BFFS - fLW - fLC- fM - fA (6)
Where:
BFFS = base free flow speed
fLW = adjustment factor for lane width
fLC = adjustment factor for lateral clearance
fM = adjustment factor for median type
fA = adjustment factor for access points
Step 3: Determine Peak Capacity (PeakCap)
The HCM 2000 procedure does not make adjustments to the Base Capacity in order to calculate level of service and performance measures. Instead, adjustments are made to the hourly demand volume. However, for HPMS, the capacity of the section, in terms of total vehicles per hour (vph), must be computed for a variety of analytic purposes. Therefore, the same factors used in the HCM 2000 to adjust volume are used to adjust base capacity. Essentially, these adjustments convert the units from passenger cars to vehicles and lower capacity to account for the effect of heavy vehicles. The procedure is based on HCM Equation 21-3:
PeakCap = HPMS Peak Capacity (Data Item 95), vehicles per hour (all lanes, one direction)
PHF = Peak Hour Factor
N = Number of lanes in one direction
= Number of Peak Lanes (Data Item 87)
fHV = Adjustment factor for heavy vehicles
fp = Adjustment factor for driver population
= 1.0 for HPMS
Ill add Ive been sending emails to the head of the google program and disney about once a quarter to get google to sponsor the autopia ride at disney to turn it into a driverless car demo.
It would socialize millions of people a year to the technology and update an old tired ride at disney.
Also instead of busses/trains on fixed routes there could be driverless vans that pick up 3-4 people in the same area going to roughly the same destination.
Trains will end up being reserved for long haul trips as they should be.
Ill add Ive been sending emails to the head of the google program and disney about once a quarter to get google to sponsor the autopia ride at disney to turn it into a driverless car demo.
It would socialize millions of people a year to the technology and update an old tired ride at disney.
Also instead of busses/trains on fixed routes there could be driverless vans that pick up 3-4 people in the same area going to roughly the same destination.
Trains will end up being reserved for long haul trips as they should be.
Agreed on the shared rides. When summoning a car to take me downtown at 8AM let's say, there could be a toggle for "Share=Yes" meaning I'm willing to pair up with one or more riders. This would be incentivized somehow, perhaps with cheaper trip charge.
The Disney idea is brilliant. And I'm sure a lot of the science Disney knows about moving hordes of people would be directly applicable to moving hoards of cars.
Brining it back to Austin, I just think it would be a travesty to spend 1.4 Billion for the starter leg of a dead and ineffective transportation model that doesn't solve the transportation or traffic problems of Austin.
Austin is investing in Blockbuster when it should be preparing for NetFlix.
Uh, in all of the no-longer-needed parking garages and spaces, since people won't need to drive personal vehicles to work. You get out at the curb and the car leaves. There will be plenty of parking, but that will only be needed in off-peak times.
So, where do you propose all the cars go? Do they disappear somehow, both negating the need for them to return to their origin or find actual physical space in which to place themselves? What needs to get knocked down to build the "hives", and how big would they have to be to accommodate the demand we expect by 2035 (remember those 70+ autos a day arriving here)?
Quote:
Originally Posted by austin-steve
Try thinking it through instead of being such a skeptic. This doesn't seem far fetched to me at all, and every auto manufacturer is in fact working on autonomous cars, so maybe they haven't received your memo.
Steve
Auto manufactures don't care about transportation system capacity. They care about selling cars and staying in business, which is the primary reason why you won't see any of them risk huge lawsuits by designing something that has unsafe operation built into it.
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