I think, if we had fenced-in and dedicated roads for self-driving cars, we could have had them yesterday.
But that ain't gonna happen anytime soon.
And we definitely won't be getting flying cars (for the general public), until we have full-self-driving.
We could put them on rails and have overhead cables providing electricity efficiently, and make them go up to 300kph too, damn the future looks bright !
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/07/28/self-driving-tech-compan...
It’s very difficult to add train capacity.
So, let’s not derail the conversation with your better idea that’s never gonna work
More importantly, however, climate change means that we can’t continue to ignore externalities. Redirecting road expansion projects into rail construction would be necessary even if it wasn’t cheaper.
I've always been a fan of trains. I seem to be in a minority, in the US, though...
I've been on a train twice in the last ten years.
On the one ride, it was hot so it expected to arrive about 45 minutes late. You can't go full speed on hot tracks.
On the same ride, there was construction, so we sat and waited for about 45 minutes in the middle of no where, in the dark. It was long enough they told us to just let our kids run around and brought the snack cart around for free.
That's a lot of delay for a 3.5h ride.
Ontario, Canada.
My in-laws use trains to travel between cities a fair amount. More delayed trips than not.
If you’re not talking about long distances, don’t get me started on the LRT in Ottawa and the months of downtime it has had.
Tokyo is like Type A++, so the trains are constant.
Other areas, probably not so much.
But you can get pretty much anywhere in Japan, via train (and maybe a short-haul flight in a 747).
Cf. The London underground.
The Tokyo rail system is an official Wonder of the World.
I never looked at schedules, and the trains were reliable and cheap.
Crazy good.
Longest. trip. to. Japan. evar.
Apps like CityMapper revolutionised that in making me resort to Uber/cabs far less, but there's some really obvious improvements in terms of leveraging journey data to both offer "virtual" bus services where you can offer higher frequency than you have buses to service by filling in with on demand minibuses and cars from car hire companies, and in using the end-to-end journey data to adjust schedules more dynamically.
There are plenty of on-demand shared services (e.g. London's Dial-A-Ride) but most seems to be operated in isolation and/or targets people with limited mobility for end-to-end transport rather than to fill in smaller gaps in other services.
I suspect the cost structure isn’t that great compared to a full size 60 passenger bus, though. The drivers per passenger ratio is pretty low, which probably more than counterbalances the lower operational cost of the vehicle.
> Autonomous trucks [1]
> We run more than 130 autonomous trucks, part of our Autonomous Haulage System, across our Iron Ore operations. The trucks are operated by a supervisory system and a central controller, rather than a driver. The system uses pre-defined GPS courses to automatically navigate haul roads and intersections and knows actual locations, speeds and directions of all vehicles at all times.
> In 2018, each truck was estimated to have operated on average 700 hours more than conventional haul trucks, with 15% lower costs – delivering clear productivity benefits. They also take truck operators out of harm’s way, reducing the risks associated with working around heavy machinery.
In Australia though .. starting from sheep shearing robots in the early 1980s
The irony here is that "flying cars" (which really means eVTOL planes) is in many ways an easier problem to solve in terms of navigation, because the notion of strict air corridors and tracking of every vehicle coupled with fewer annoying pedestrians wandering around makes it far easier to make those accommodations (e.g. virtual "fenced-in and dedicated roads")
So in the sense that they'll likely never replace "ground cars", you're right. But that does not mean there won't be some space for them.
The far greater problem for eVTOL companies than energy use is noise and safety which for the medium term at least will exclude them from the most attractive end-to-end options and prevent them from being a real car-replacement option.
E.g. Lilium originally touted themselves as a sort of "flying Uber" on the basis that it could in theory land almost anywhere. But they dialled it back on the basis that being able to is very different from being allowed to e.g. land in a residential area without a dedicated, secured platform and following all kinds of regulations on both noise and safety. Now, they're instead focusing on partnerships (e.g. with Ferrovial for Florida[1] and Saudia for Saudi Arabia [2]) willing to operate networks of what they call "vertiports", so more of a replacement of a segment of helicopter services than cars.
[1] https://lilium.com/newsroom-detail/ferrovial-and-lilium-deve...
Once you put a large number of vehicles in play, the entire dynamics of the system would become unmanageable.
You would require multiple hot redundancies at every level with human monitoring to at least minimise the things that could go wrong. It would only take one coding error for the entire system to fail and that coding error might only ever be found after some disaster has occurred.
It might be nice to have self-driving vehicles but the cost may be so prohibitive to make it infeasible.
But it’s the Unions. World wide one of the major things train worker unions have pushed back hardest on is smaller train crews for both passenger and freight… and it should be obvious why. It means companies that move to smaller crews would lay off union workers.
Plenty of this is actually justified by good arguments put forth by the unions, particularly in places like America where railroads have basically refused to spend money in capital expenses and try to run with the oldest railroad hardware possible in order to maximise their profits per ton per mile shipped, regardless of environmental impact, crew fatigue, or the long term degradation of the entire strategic value of a national rail network that can move the heaviest military goods efficiently in times of war.
You could not physically do automatic freight rail in America without getting people killed. The hardware and infrastructure are literally not capable of it. For all the automatic signalling systems in place, it’s all duct taped together around having a human in the loop that can be made responsible for decision making in the train driver cab.
In more modern environments like say Switzerland, they probably could get much closer, but they also have a well regulated railway system with incentives that ensure the companies don’t need to be so brutally effective to make enough money to meet corporate profits. Then there’s places like the trans Siberia railroad… good luck keeping an automated network of that size operating within safe automatic bounds over winter, or the parts of the UK where there are still physical mechanical based rock fall “sensors” in place to alert drivers to their being rocks on the track ahead that may have only landed there minutes ago… and they don’t run enough trains on the tracks to make maintenance of network of cameras and motion sensors worth it.
Railways are, when run well, very automation friendly environments. But that breaks down the further you get from a tidy metro area and surrounding country/farmland, further out into long stretches between cities or states where you would need to maintain thousands of kilometres of fences to avoid accidents, loss of property (stray farm animals) and the larger the network gets the harder it is to have it all owned and operated by a single company that could even begin such a project… sometimes you have a nationalised owner/operator but then it’s government budgets deciding if the actual rails and signals need the upgrades vs the potentially private companies that may own the trains and haul freight on the government’s rails…
The real world is messy. So the union does kinda have a solid point. But that doesn’t eliminate the fundamental fact that at the “big moving objects on continuously welded rails” level of controls theory, railways are very automation friendly and are in theory able to be nearly fully automated.
Airspace is an highly controlled area. We have many years of actual autopilots. We have many years of guided take-offs and landings. But still we relay on the skilled human.
The same applies to railroads. Here in Nuremberg we have an highly automated train running on a railroad track that is even partly shared with trains operated by a driver. But the costs of running the automated trains seems not to benefit so that further development has been stopped, because of costs reasons. Even has we have a huge shortage in drivers, which would suggests that automation would be the solution. AFAIK there are only isolated airport shuttles that run fully automated.
That means, if can't run automated systems in highly controlled areas. Then why would it work with cars in highly uncontrolled areas?
There are several fully-automated rail systems worldwide. Paris M14 and the Copenhagen Metro among others are fully automated; things like the DLR in London are level 3 (driverless with a staff member on board).
Driving is high stakes too of course but two orders of magnitude less so.
That said, we are seeing massive amounts of money being made in ADAS systems (Tesla FSD, MobilEye) while robotaxi plays are losing billions. Self driving cars will grow out of increasingly capable ADAS systems rather than robotaxis because they are already profitable and there's a gradual path to full autonomy. In the coming recession I expect most robotaxi companies to go under (Argo being the first yesterday), with Waymo being perhaps the only player left. Even Waymo may have to reduce spending quite a bit if Google is facing headwinds.
Seems I'm going to have to downgrade my New Year disappointment about "still no flying cars" to "still no self driving cars" (for the general public).