Canberra, Australia’s capital, is considering spending close to $1 billion building a light-rail line. But a new study by computer programmer Kent Fitch finds that shared, self-driving cars make a lot more sense.
Where light rail would lose money, a fleet of shared, self-driving cars could earn a profit. Where light rail would serve just one corridor, self-driving cars would serve the entire urban area. Where light rail would require a massive expenditure on new infrastructure, self-driving cars would use existing infrastructure. While light-rail would require people to walk to stations and wait for a railcar, more than 96 percent of self-driving car patrons would have to wait less than a minute for a car to meet them at their door.
Fitch observes that Canberra, being entirely a twentieth-century city, is simply not designed for public transit, which is why ridership on the city’s stagnant or declining. When a city is too decentralized for “medium-box” transit like buses, the solution is not to go to “big-box” transit, which only works if a lot of people want to go from point A to point B at the same time. Instead, the solution is smaller-box transit, such as shared cars.
Nitric oxide is essential for an cheapest levitra check out over here erection. This helps to viagra 50 mg improve circulation and overall health. Once this happens, there is generic viagra cheapest almost no way to tell whether or not it can cause for erectile dysfunction. PDE5 Inhibitors as Medications for Erectile Dysfunction: Medication http://amerikabulteni.com/tag/pope/ levitra 60 mg Developer / Distributor Unique Selling Proposition Duration Common Side Effects Sildenafil . As summarized in the Canberra Times, Fitch estimated that a fleet of 23,000 shared self-driving cars would provide 750,000 trips per day at a cost of $3.80 per trip. In contrast, the bus system carries just 45,000 trips per day at a cost of well over $10 per trip. Not only would self-driving cars be less expensive than buses, Fitch estimates that shared, self-driving cars would save auto owners money, especially if they currently pay to park at one end of their trip.
Fitch’s numbers don’t appear to be overly optimistic. He assumes each car will cost $40,000 and must be replaced every three years. This cost seems high for petroleum-powered cars, but he assumes the use of electric vehicles. While $40,000 may be a low price for electric cars, gasoline or Diesel cars could be substituted with little effect on the outcome of the model.
Fitch estimates that a fleet of just 2,100 cars could carry as many trips per day as Canberra’s bus system. While the program would lose money at that level of usage, the losses would be only 10 percent as much as the bus system. The real question is whether enough non-bus riders could be attracted to use shared, self-driving cars to make the system profitable, which Fitch estimates would require 300,000 patrons per day. If so, then there would be no need for public funding of transit other than, perhaps, the funding of vouchers for low-income people.
Fitch’s model is simple enough that it could be applied to any urban area in the United States. Considering that it takes more than five years to plan and build a light-rail line, while fleets of self-driving cars are likely to be growing in our cities within that time period, any city planning more light rail today will look extremely foolish in a few years.
“computer programmer Kent Fitch”
The polymath is alive and well, it seems. Why study to be a dentist when Kent Fitch, computer programmer with a pair of pliers, will do? Why study to be a transport planner, when Kent Fitch, computer programmer in a automotive fantasy bubble, will do?
I don’t want to have journey number 750,000. I want to go NOW. That’s why people buy their own cars. Self-driving cars are a fantasy. They cost too much to be of use. Now we discover that someone with a laser can freak out the electronics. In practice, new ideas like lane keeping and distance keeping will filter down the range of cars, into the cars that you will buy in the future.
As a more intelligent approach – car parking spaces can be provided in residential locations, rather than at the offices and other places of employment. People drive to the car park in their cars. A shuttle bus, perhaps driven by an employee, drives the staff to work. This reduces the vehicle miles travelled, eliminates congestion, and provides an efficient door-to-door service.
Or we can spend time in the daily traffic jam, applying makeup, having a shave, and dreaming of self-driving cars, trams and electric sheep.
FrancisKing said:
Self-driving cars are a fantasy. They cost too much to be of use. Now we discover that someone with a laser can freak out the electronics. In practice, new ideas like lane keeping and distance keeping will filter down the range of cars, into the cars that you will buy in the future.
So a $25 laser pointer can stop a $40,000 robocar in its tracks? Sweet. I’m glad to see that monkey-wrenching something the “next big thing” that the neomaniacs want to foist on society is so blatantly simple, without having to know the techie details of hacking robocar code. And safer than relying on the robocars stopping when you stop in front of them. And yes, I’m sure the robocar fantasy would work nicely, except for all those pesky humans on foot and on bicycles.
The grumpy old men are out in force today. They cannot deal with the coming realities. The real fantasy is that rail transit is not obsolete. People once thought that human air travel and space travel were fantasies. Thankfully those people are dead.
Flobbledifree!
The ordinary “horseless carriage” is at present a luxury for the wealthy; and although its price will probably fall in the future, it will never, of course, come into as common use as the bicycle.
Literary Digest, 1899
The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty, a fad.
The president of the Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford’s lawyer not to invest in the Ford Motor Co., 1903
CapitalistRoader, nice one! Clearly some people are suffering from EOG.