For the last two years I worked on autonomous cars. The one thing everyone in our company agreed on, regardless of political persuasion, was that robo-cars were going to thunder fuck the high speed rail. A 2033 deadline makes this all but certain.
High speed rail is:
(a) Vastly more efficient
(b) Much faster (SF -> LA in < 3 hours, versus ~6.5 for a car)
(c) Not subject to traffic (which can greatly increase the latter time)
(d) Much more comfortable (compare Amtrak to a private automobile)
How do autonomous cars overcome these deficiencies?
Electricity is frequently generated by fossil fuels like coal. Electric cars don't reduce pollution, they just move it to wherever the coal is being burned.
You have to get the electricity to the car from the far-away power plant, which means you're going to suffer from transmission loss (e.g. not every watt that is generated is going to make it to your drivetrain).
Finally, we suck at making batteries. They're still big heavy lumps of highly toxic materials that wear out in relatively short amounts of time. What do you do with all the exhausted batteries?
Like everyone, I'm all for making our infrastructure more environmentally-friendly. Sadly, I'm not convinced electric vehicles are anywhere close to where we'd need them to be. I feel like we have a lot of misplaced enthusiasm from people who want to clean up the industrial age a lot sooner than we realistically can.
They most certainly do. Even the latest, most wonderfully advanced gasoline engines are positively filthy compared to a modern coal plant, which is positive filthy compared to a nuclear plant, which is positively filthy compared to a solar/wind/wave plant.
Further, I think you are overestimating the impact of building and deploying wind turbines. They may require a lot of land, but their physical footprint is pretty small, and most of the land around them can be used for other purposes, like agriculture.
I was doing the math, and this document popped up as a search: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:UjtsvTfrOgQJ:...
So they did the math for me - wind turbines require 60 times as many resources as nuclear. The amount of uranium needed is tiny, very very tiny. And all the uranium ever made can be disposed of in one site, it's not really a lot.
They also require far far more land. I don't just mean how much air space, but the actual tower.
Wind turbines are better than coal, and since we are building lots of coal plants I am all for wind. But they are not better than nuclear - not even close.
Oh come on. God forbid you are ever forced to interact with another human. The bubbleization of "society" is a concept that we are better served by fighting, not further embracing. Sure, there are some crazies on public transportation. I also met one of my best friends on a train. On the whole, the balance of public-transportation-riders I've interacted with has yielded far more beneficial interactions than negative ones. This as compared to my fellow car-commuters, whom which interactions generally fell on a spectrum between honks and extended medial digits.
That's the biggest problem I can see with train travel in the US... the country is too spread out so you need some sort of flexible integrated travel to support the trains.
But without occupancy/ridership figures and precise fuel consumption statistics (including the amortized energy expenditure used to build the train), it is not at all obvious that trains beat cars from a fuel-efficiency-per-passenger standpoint. Given the price tag on the train, it is not obvious that it is more efficient from a cost-efficiency-per-passenger standpoint either.
> (b) Much faster (SF -> LA in < 3 hours, versus ~6.5 for a car)
But the door-to-door time is what truly matters. You aren't factoring in travel time to and from the train station, or wait time at the stations.
> (c) Not subject to traffic (which can greatly increase the latter time)
As noted above, the first and last legs (involving getting to the train station) are subject to traffic. The train leg itself is subject to wait times as it won't be running 24/7 with a new train leaving every minute. In addition, there will likely be nontrivial TSA/VIPER security checkpoints that will further slow down travel.
http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/06/tsa-swarms-8000-bus-
stations-public-transit-systems-yearly
Think you could avoid the TSA's body scanners and pat-
downs by taking Amtrak? Think again.
This is highly arguable. You can directly control the cleanliness/comfort/appearance of your own automobile, but you cannot control the cleanliness of public transport.
Moreover, you can leave items overnight in your car, play music without headphones, and have a full volume conversation on a hands-free headset (or with a passenger) without someone else overhearing. You can't do this on a train.
If Amtrak's experience is any indication, this won't be an issue: http://cs.trains.com/TRCCS/forums/t/188504.aspx?PageIndex=1
Then they started it up again. Take a look at this clip from October.
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/10/like-tsa...
"Today's VIPR searches did not come from any particular threat"
"Where is a terrorist more apt to be found? Not these days
on an airplane more likely on the interstate," said
Tennessee Department of Safety & Homeland Security
Commissioner Bill Gibbons.
According to TSA Administrator John Pistole's testimony
before the Senate last June, 'TSA conducted more than
8,000 VIPR operations in the [previous] 12 months,
including more than 3,700 operations in mass-transit and
passenger-railroad venues.' He wants a 50% budget increase
for VIPR for 2012. Imagine what TSA would do with the
extra funding."
Any train that costs $XX billion dollars is going to be deemed a terrorist target, so you can expect insane TSA/VIPR searches. This will further erode any purported time/convenience advantages.
>Any train that costs $XX billion dollars is going to be deemed a terrorist target, so you can expect insane TSA/VIPR searches.
If that was true, we'd have insane VIPR searches right now on the Northeast Corridor, not to mention we would be seeing terrorists targeting HSR in Europe and Asia.
http://blogs.sacbee.com/crime/archives/2011/11/tsa-conducts-...
November 4, 2011
TSA agents search Amtrak trains in Sacramento
Transportation Security Administration agents boarded
Amtrak trains in Sacramento today to conduct one of their
periodic VIPR operations, officials said.
But opinions may differ, so I'll leave it at that.
For the same reasons they can increase practical carrying capacity, they can also increase practical fuel efficiency, because the vehicles can be kept moving at a near constant speed with minimal breaking.
- it's a hard problem, in my mind comparable to general AI, which has been "10 years away" since the 1950's. It seems to me to be one of of those "hard 10%" problems where you get what you think is 90% there, but the last 10% takes a lot longer than the first 90%.
- I believe that a generational change will be required to get over the strange attachment most Americans have to conventional cars
- American litigiousness will put manufacturers out of business. They might be safer than normal cars, but at some point they're going to kill or seriously injure somebody, and then they're going to come in for huge damage awards.
It's not going to be just robo-cars, but efficient electrically powered robo-cars that make the difference. Even though they won't be quite as efficient as rail on a per-kilometer basis they will be able to take you point-to-point rather than having to transfer to a bus or rental car once you reach LA.
The other factor — which many of you seem to ignore — is that train travel kind of sucks with small children. You have to drive to the train station, then drag kids, strollers, diaper bags, etc onto the train, then repeat the process at your destination. Obviously it's doable to take the train but I would still prefer to have my own personal vehicle even if it costs a little more and takes a little longer.
The future of transportation is personalized and distributed. Not some huge, inflexible, government-controlled monolith that's incapable of adapting to changes in travel patterns.
Depending on your trip, one method may be more desirable than another. In October, I made two trips from Western MA to NYC. The first time I drove - my schedule was unknown, I had a lot of baggage with me and I wasn't staying in Manhattan so it made sense to drive. The second trip was for a day meeting in mid-town, so taking the train made more sense.
There is single perfect mode, diversity in transportation matters.
In 30 years, the trains can be swapped out for 400 mph Maglevs.
It's more than likely that track designed for 200mph HSR will be completely incompatible with 400mph maglevs. Unless you want to cap the maglevs at 200mph. The maglev will easily fly off the rails trying to take a 200mph curve at 300mph.
Again, it's completely different infrastructure, so yes, it's completely incompatible in the sense that a bicycle trail is incompatible with motor boats. If you have an HSR ROW that you want to change over to maglev, you have to rip up the tracks, rip up the catenary, rip up the power-substations, and build a completely new guideway.
But it's extremely unlikely that the right of way acquired for HSR will ever be recyclable to a faster system, even if we ignore the problems of tearing down a system and rebuilding it in-place with no service to mitigate the downtime.
China, on the other hand, built the world's largest HSR system in a decade (about 5000 miles), as opposed to 400 miles that will take 20-30 years between LA and SF.
Of course people in the US have branded it a failure after the first accident. The fact remains they have built infrastructure that will pay dividends for centuries.
But that still doesn't address the problem facing most large cities: gridlock. Whether the cars are automated or not won't drastically change that (although it may well reduce arterial traffic clogs due to accidents and rubbernecking) because there are still more cars than the roads can handle.
I really don't know why California is pursuing this. Planes are entirely valid solution to the problem of travelling between LA and SF. Why spend billions on an alternative that's going to take twenty years?
If anything, spend the money on public transport to reduce reliance on cars. The situation is decent in SF, poor in the Valley (Caltrain covers a limited area and runs quite infrequently) and woeful in LA. The 101 out of SF tends to be a car park at certain times (although not as bad as LA).
The big problem is that LA isn't really space-constrained. It has the ocean on the west but has sprawled far north, south and east. People like their big homes and that's a recipe for disaster when it comes to public transport. The only places public transport seems to work at all are those areas densely population or that have existing infrastructure (eg the commuter belt around NYC). But Dallas? Atlanta? LA? Chicago? Very limited public transport.
So, smaller vehicles almost always moving and not parking will take up a lot less room per person-mile.
(i.e. one passenger, and one driver weigh exactly the same.)
When I buy a (non-autonomous) car, I size it for the maximum load I might want to carry. For the autonomous taxi, I can just rent the minimally-sized car for the trip that I'm currently on. If I'm by myself, the autonomous cab could even be a one-seater. Plus, I don't have to park it.
Autonomous sounds great - but not because of car or engine size.
And cabs make up a small percentage of the overall market. And most of the cost of a cab ride is labor.
But if automated cabs become the norm, the cost of a cab ride will be governed by the size of the vehicle. And if a car costs 25 cents a mile to operate, a cab ride from my house to San Francisco will still cost me $11.
If a 1-seater with barely an engine and no trunk can do it for 10 cents a mile or $4.50, there will be demand. That's the commuter, the guy making 40 trips a month, who'd save $260 a month for giving up empty space.
Of course, we really don't know how this will all play out. But it will be fun to find out.
Right now, the costs of finding items at the best price, going to get them and the manual paperwork involved, often make owning them easier.
But once all that is automated and you can rent the exact drill you need for a dollar an hour and it can be there in 15 minutes, why would you buy it?
And, yes, it will be delivered by a robotic vehicle, probably no bigger than a breadbox.
A robotic cab doesn't need a driver. Or a front seat for him. Or a powerful engine to suit his lead foot.
A personal robotic car will be the same size. But a lot fewer people will need them when they can call cabs for less money per mile. Especially in urban areas where storing cars is a big expense.
Frankly, I don't see how public transportation will be able to compete. Its too slow and inconvenient and completely unavailable after certain times.
In other words, the bullet train is doubling down on old technology that is highly inflexible and a big time waster.
But, hey, maybe people like going to Bakersfield.
The problem is that LA and SF-area airports are almost at capacity and increasing that capacity through adding runways or building new airports would be a significant undertaking (several 10s of $billions) that would face a number of hurdles. Air travel is also affected by weather issues that don't affect HSR.
Proper urban planning can go a long way.
Automated taxi cabs + existing public transit would solve gridlock... go outside to your auto-cab, take it to the rail, get off the rail into a different auto-cab, arrive at work.
Humans are going to be a lot less efficient than computers in driving cars. With proper networking, you could have cars doing 60mph while only a few car lengths from each other, vastly increasing the capacity of any segment of road.
For example, the presence of an unexpected crash or obstruction down the road can be relayed back at the speed of light via networked cars, and the entire wave of cars behind the crash can slow down and reroute.
There have been some simulation papers on this, comparing humans vs. automatic driving algorithms. It's similar to automatic control in other areas.
That works if 100% of the cars are autonmous. I'm betting that even if automous cars were available tomorrow, it would take longer than 20 years for that to be true.
What that threshold percentage is and how the transition will be accomplished in practical terms, I don't know. But I do believe the pressures will manifest themselves mightily.
Economics are still going to be the driving factor (no pun intended) for the poor and working class. As long as beater non-automated cars are going to cost less than the (used but still newer) automated cars, and as long as cars are still going to be necessary in much of the USA, there are still going to be normal cars around.
At some point (say in 40-50 years, and if "classic" driver cars are outlawed) I think we'll reach that point, but then that weakens the argument of autonomous cars (and its benefits) getting here before the CA HSR project.
I'm not totally up on autonomous car tech, but while very promising, it still seems to be proof of concept stage. To me that means ~10 years from commercializarion, and then at least 10 years before it has penetrated enough of the fleet that you can even start to consider making it mandatory. Automotive engineering is conservative because of the scale and age of the industry, the cost of the goods sold, and the risks inherent in their failure. Automobile owners are conservative because cars are big purchases.
The thing about timeframes like that is that there are enough unknowns that estimates can easily be 2x too optimistic.
I tend to agree that rail (whether urban light rail, or region high speed rail) may not be the most cost effective way to move a lot of people from point a to point b given existing patterns of development, I know that part of the reason planners favor it is that its cost comes comes as part of a permanence that can shape the way communities develop around it over the long term.
Although I'm sure the present-day 'business case' agrees with you, I don't think this means it is necessarily the right thing to do.
I'd be surprised if an autonomous car could compete with the high-speed rail speeds, though.