Trams carry a ton more people than buses. People are more likely to ride them too. If American cities hadn't given in to GM and Ford and kept streetcars instead of replacing them with buses (that have lower capacity, use up more fuel, etc.) I think parking in the US, and car ownership in general, would be very different.
Busses use much more of the existing infrastructure, which is one of the main reasons cities struggle to get a tiny segment put in. Busses are also much more adjustable to the city's needs. You can increase and decrease frequency on routs - or change routes by moving stops. Construction? Adjust routes. One bus down? Off the the mechanic and replace it with one of the backups.
And I'm not sure that would have helped parking and car ownership in the US. For some time, part of the dream was to own a car. A car meant freedom and it often still does as the us, as a whole, lacks decent public transportation outside of the larger cities. Sometimes the busses are stopped before the bars close, for example. Traveling from city to city? Good luck or prepare to be majorly inconvenienced. (overnight layovers, for example).
Buses come in short/long/articulated/double-decker sizes and don't need to be on rails or require overhead electrical lines. The only argument I can think of is that you get a smoother ride and no need to burn fuel with a tram.
(I've only ridden the trams in one city, and they were pretty much slower buses on rails that happened to make a lot of dinging noises. Worked fine in the central district, I guess.)
http://dyob.com.au/sites/default/files/u9/96%20North%20Carlt...
It's separated from the traffic so it's fast, doesn't have associated tyre and asphalt maintenance costs, and each tram carries over 200 people maximum. The service is frequent - about every five to seven minutes - and much smoother and more comfortable than a bus.
- Popular buses run ever 5-ish minutes during peak times
- Some buses have extension and cary a crapload of people.
- Problematic spots have bus-only lanes.
What is better than tram:
- Buses that share only a bit of the route can use those lanes too
- Taxis can use bus lanes
- Some of the lanes allow cars with 4+ people to promote carpooling
- If there's an accident or emergency, cars can use the bus lane
- Bus lanes are frequently reused as designated right turn lanes
- Overall maintenance is cheaper when using a single mode of transport. Same backup vehicles can serve all routes - no need for separate backup trams and buses. Same for technicians, spare parts etc.
- No big upfront construction costs. Some bus lanes were snatched from regular traffic, some were built later on. Mostly by making other lanes narrower and widening the road just a little bit. Trams would require much more space and wouldn't even fit in some spaces without banning cars altogether. The'd still have to pave these bits to let emergency services use them.
- In tight spots, buses can easily merge with general traffic. Buses have defacto priority, so no delays during merge.
In my city, introducing trams would have been at least few years of city-wide construction works, lots of possibilities for wasting public money and/or corruption. Bus lanes were super cheap and are added incrementally wherever costs in that specific section can be justified by savings. They can be removed easily if they cause too much trouble or don't speed up buses much. Rails would be there forever.
Comfortwise, good tram and good bus ride equally well. Unmaintained, both trams and buses suck.
TL;DR Buses are much cheaper and more agile stepping stone into good public transit. Trams themselves ain't magic cure. Buses can be
I guess you'd be shocked to learn that here, not only can taxis use bus lanes, but so can electric vehicles to help encourage better choices.
Pros - similar to an express lane (HOV free, single-occupant vehicles pay a toll) it's handy when you're the one who's running late and REALLY need to get somewhere quick.
Cons - Buses deal with taxi congestion, cyclists deal with maniacal taxi drivers.
Bus lanes are relatively empty most of the time. There're not that many taxis to slow down buses. Maybe not win-win, but nobody looses either. To be honest, this is first time I hear somebody complain about this rule. Feels kinda natural over there.
Yes, the buses have handles and everything for standing passengers. Wider aisles and stand-only areas instead of more seats too. The inside of the bus look like a tram/metro rather than long distance bus/train.
Yes, emergency stops are not comfortable. Some old lady falls and breaks her hand every few years. But trams have traffic lights and may have to do emergency stop too. Trams probably have less emergency stops per km travelled. But I never considered this a huge issue.
AFAIK, bus service regularly train drivers to drive "nice-to-passengers". Park close to curb, avoid emergency stops, start smoothly etc. I guess there's a risk for this problem, but it seems to be manageable.
Timetable rules may be a big factor too. I heard more bus drivers loose bonuses for driving faster than schedule than for being (unreasonably) late..
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardier_CR4000 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variobahn#Variobahn_trams_for_... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M5000 [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyne_and_Wear_Metro_rolling_st... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Routemaster
It's really not. Even long/double decker buses carry a fraction of the people a streetcar can.
Streetcars are still faster given other things being equal (dedicated lanes).
The maintenance of streetcars is much better. You have no tyers, fully electric engines, high torque and lower energy consumption.
Buses are good for short term routes, but long term a rail network will always win out in capacity and energy efficiency.
If you're going to put up catenary wires why not just make it a tram?
Source: me, who's riding the tram to work and back most of the times.
Also, to be blunt, black people. I live in a pretty white area. If I didn't ride the bus, I could probably not see a single black person for a week or two at a time. Riding the bus, it's every day. And I'm quite sure a lot more people prefer the former scenario than will admit it (not that they necessarily have any particular animosity, but a lot of people are "just not comfortable" inhabiting the same space as black people).
Solely because they're new. If they're heated or air conditioned they'll fill with smelly homeless just like a bus, unless they're more expensive.
Likewise the rails are convenient enough because most social media holiness spiral destinations are permanent. So you can brag about how you're going to the progressive art museum, or a book signing at the library, or the performing arts center, or the hyper trendy college hipster bars (although the tram service stops at sundown to avoid actual drunks), but you can't use the tram to do prole stuff like go to work or school or the food store or doctors office because there's no tracks there, proles go away keep out. Trams are only for special rich people doing special rich people things, the kind that pat themselves on their backs for their egalitarianism on a regular basis, if you have to ask you don't belong there on the tram. Ideally there would be no icky poor people anywhere along the tram rails, nothing but rich white faces as far as the eye can see. Maybe they could build a fence around the whole neighborhood, or just have the police keep the riff raff out of our special area for special people.
They also usually run much more frequently than buses, and don't suffer from delays due to traffic or traffic lights (or not as much).
People want to do the same things at more or less the same time: Having time off while your social circle is at work is not as fun. Many jobs require customers, and others require entire groups of people to be there together. This means the minimum capacity needed to handle peaks is not going to be very far off from where we are right now.
Think of your typical morning traffic: One side of the highway is in gridlock, while the other is doing well. In the evenings, the directions reverse. A lot of people want to be at the office at 8:00, so you need capacity for that. And what do the cars do now that it's 8:05 and they are downtown? Probably nothing, as there is no demand for that much capacity for most of the day.
Same thing with a sporting event: People will get to the stadium to watch the 49ers, but Santa Clara doesn't have any use for 40K+ cars for 3 hours on sunday morning. The most you can do is have the cars do some otherwise useless miles to park in a cheaper area further away from the stadium.
I'd love to be wrong on this, but this phenomenon would make it surprising if we got a double digit decrease in traffic with shared self driving cars.
1. Much higher occupancy per car. Based on my personal observations, at rush hour the average occupancy of a car is something like 1.3. I don't see any reason that can't increase to 2.6 or more without significantly slowing anyone down -- 2x
2. Yes, a lot of people need to get to work at 8, but normal working hours start at different times for different people, anywhere from 6:30-9:30 is fairly typical in a U.S. city. If the average person has a 30-40 minute commute, and there is a reasonable amount of reverse commute demand, a car should be able to make 2-3 round trips per day at least -- 2.5x
3. Cars driving more efficiently with quicker reaction time and less mistakes will speed up commutes a lot. Hard to say how much but I'd say at least 30%. This directly increases capacity, since shorter commutes mean each car moves more people in the 6:30-9:30 window -- 1.3x
4. If self driving cars can communicate with each other to park, they can pack themselves very closely, and make room for a car to get in and out, removing the need for oversized parking spots, space between cars for doors to open, and aisles between cars. This should improve parking density by at least 3x.
5. Cars that are on-demand and self-driving can be smaller than typical cars we drive today. Since you can order any sized vehicle based on what's needed for an individual trip, there will be many fewer empty seats. Without the need for a steering wheel and controls, interiors can make much greater use of available interior space. This should reduce the exterior size of the average car at least 1.5x.
6. Cars can find parking in more remote areas. If parking is not available within a block of the office, the car can drop you off and park a few blocks away. This increases utilitzation, say 1.2x.
So, multiply it all together, and you get 35x better parking efficiency. It's going to be a huge win for dense cities.
I say "could" instead of "will" because all this is more a question of cultural development than a technological/economic one. If individual car usage does not go out of fashion, robotic driving will only continue the trend towards ever bigger commuter castles.
What does that mean? Like someone from the victorian age? I think they are all dead.
Also with more people using it, the less meandering it does. If everyone uses the "uberpool" system, it will probably pick up everyone in about 5 minutes in a 2 block radius and drop you off at one spot 1 block from your work. The more dense it is, the more efficient it gets.
And if 1 occupant per 2-ton-vehicle becomes the norm, dense cities will implement congestion pricing or surtaxes to force multiple occupancy or public transport usage - if 1 million driverless taxis try to deliver people into the square mile of the City of London, everyone will have a bad time. (Ditto for Manhattan, SF, downtown Boston, Hong Kong Midtown etc.)
The other factor is school. While I can show up at work, more less, whenever I want, my daughter has be at school by 8.10 at the latest, as does everybody else's kids. If we don't add flexibility to school starting times times then, to many people, it won't matter what sort of flexibility they have with work.
Not all Americans are atomized urbanites. Many are in families.
My MiL, wife, myself, and my two kids could easily share one self driving car although the number of miles traveled would likely be staggering.
If my kids destroy "dads car" they are in big trouble, and "dads car" has "car alexa" and she will yell at them for awhile if they misbehave and god help them if "car alexa" has to resort to facetime dad at work to mediate a child argument. "Wait until your father gets home" worked on gen-xers when they were kids, but now we have facetime and dozens of equivalent systems.
The mileage used and CO2 footprint will likely be much higher than individually owned cars because every trip everyone takes will be twice as long upfront, plus my kids will be car mobile which means much less sitting at home (Hey, you want your allowance, have the car drive you 10 miles to grandma's house and rake her leaves while mom and dad at work and behave yourself because Car Alexa has her eye on you and I will ask her). Also my senior citizen MiL would never road trip at her age and driving ability but a self driving car would result in a lot of visiting rural relatives and doing stuff in the hypercongested and terrifying to drive in downtown. Heck if I had the car at my beck and call why would I ever eat lunch at my desk when I could hang out at a nice park instead and never care about parking or driving. Hey why drive the whole family to the library when you can just send all four separately at their convenience, each of which takes twice as many miles because its pick up and drop off service unless no one else needs it, for 8 times the number of miles driven. I need a head of lettuce for dinner tomorrow, normally I'd get it on the way home from work for "free" ecologically speaking, but my son is just doing homework on his ipad so I'll send him out shopping on a special trip because he can do his math homework for 90% of the time while the car is driving him.
I would realistically estimate we're doing about 25000 miles per year across three cars and if we replaced it with one extended family self driver, I think it quite reasonable we'd knock out 60000 miles per year. Given that the self driver is likely to be staggeringly more expensive than any of our three cars, it probably cheaper and better for the environment to have separate cars, at least until self driving is so cheap its "free".
I ask as someone who doesn't own and doesn't want to own a car. Where I live, public transport is good, and even taking a Taxi everyday is cheaper than car ownership if you only use it for your commute (not by much, but it's competitive). Still people love to own and use their cars. I would love to see people share them, but I fail to see how self-driving would be an incentive for that.
I agree. Years ago in a certain Asian city when chauffeurs were still common for well off families, traffic around luxury department stores was bad even during day time.
A chauffeur would drop off the housewife for a shopping trip, and than he would drive around and around until her shopping was done (because parking is hard to find).
I expect same thing to happen with self-driving cars.
Same with commuting or going to mass events. I keep some drinking water (fuck stadium/concerts pricing) in my car. I keep some gloves in case weather is colder than expected and to make sure I didn't accidentally forget them at home. Ditto on umbrella. I always got some reusable shopping bags in my trunk. Fuck paying for shitty plastic bags at grocery shop.
My mom's trunk is literally full of random crap that she uses maybe twice a year. But she loves having it there.
Using random cars (wether self-driving or not, e.g. regular taxi) would have to be much better to payoff for loosing this advantage.
As for everything else, I totally get that not being able to keep stuff in your car is inconvenient. But there are billions of people out there who don't own cars who already deal with these issues every day, and they can be overcome. For instance, I live in NYC and I don't own a car. When I'm out of the apartment for longer periods of time I bring a backpack with me, packed with water, a Kindle (for amusing myself on subway rides), additional clothing suitable for the day's weather, an Anker battery pack to recharge my phone, and other stuff.
The big advantage is that you are no longer paying the substantial costs of car ownership, which should more than make up for the slight decrease in convenience. If it doesn't for you, you could always buy your own self-driving car.
Some people seem to be very hyped up by autonomous driving and think that most people would jump on that bandwagon. I'm giving perspective that a big chunk of population have reasons to buy their own cars. It'll definitely boil down to price of the service. Would I drop convenience of having my own car for 80% car budget saving? Yep. 10%? Meh.. 50%? Maybe.
The "substantial costs of car ownership" depend on car. If you want to have (almost) new car, then yes, that's expensive. But after the car is paid off (or you just buy used with cash), car ownership isn't that expensive. Car sharing seems cheap compared to new(ish) car only. It's worth to own new(ish) car if you drive a lot and/or car must be available immediately 24/7. But car sharing service won't cut it for you then. Or if car is more than a mean of transportation. Car sharing won't fit the bill either. Unless autonomous car sharing would be few times cheaper than current car sharing. Even including all the junk miles.
You don't have much problem with Saturday shopping traffic .
That being said, while some cars would need to be stationary, there are plenty of people moving around all day long.
On the other hand, the cost of car ownership could be reduced with self driving cars.
I have seen office buildings create gigantic parking lots just to “occupy” all their land so that the land cannot be taken away later. If land is completely undeveloped then it can be reclaimed in some situations, e.g. someone decides they want to build a railway.
The examples I can think of were in Texas and I’m sure the rules vary by region.
The dystopian world of the future looks like life on board a nuclear attack submarine, where no one owns a car, everyone works at home, two people have to share a bed (involuntarily, mostly), no one is allowed to cook their own food, only a tiny percentage of the population have the intelligence and social skills to survive it but everyone is united that everyone should be forced at the point of a gun to live exactly this way, all your time and your entire life is planned out by big brother with little to no care about your own personal concerns, living density is extremely high, no one can have kids, the whole lifestyle is financed by hand waving and ridiculous unsustainable and unscalable financial scams, constant uncontrollable interruptions, energy all comes from green (ish) sources which are ecologically harmless unless some pipe springs a leak and then an entire village dies horribly, apparently people do nothing when off duty and have no personal hobbies other than getting drunk in cheap dive bars as often as possible, your life depends on a minimum of 500 CPUs all programmed by the lowest bidder with a literal army of people trying to crack security which would result fairly inevitably in your rapid and painful death. But other than that, its pretty awesome.
No city would be building more capacity without the pain that is the rush hour traffic.
It is cheaper therefore, to only admit into the parking lot the cars that belong to the customers of the property owner, because there will be less people who could press claims against the owner. When the owner's business is closed, it behooves the owner to enclose the parking lot to keep out people who aren't customers.
I suggest that non-free parking that belongs to a parking company would be preferable, on the above reasoning. Plus fewer spaces would be needed since the company would have no reason to make you move your car if you wanted to patronize a second business.
I patronize a bar where I have to find on-street parking most nights. It is across the street from a supermarket that has a mostly-empty parking lot. I understand why the bar patrons are not permitted to use the supermarket parking lot, and I believe it were best that that parking lot was instead a paid lot open to all drivers. I think about this as I walk to my car.
I'd be totally fine with this. As is, the space just sits empty and wasteful.
Places without parking requirement laws develop very differently, and if parking is provided at all, it's usually in far smaller quantities and it's not free.
Compare, say, third tier Japanese cities that lack subway systems to American equivalents. Parking exists, but it's not universally free, and there's less of it.
You should read up on parking minimum laws.
Suburbs look like they do not because of preference but because it is not legal for them to look otherwise.
The idea in the 50s was:
A) Require cars to live and you will not have to live next to poor people or minorities since cars and maintenance of them are expensive, how great; Jim Crow without the legal challenges and we can co-opt non racist people B) Cars are the future and no one needs to walk, except maybe in parks C) Since this glorious future has yet to arrive naturally despite decades of mass produced automobiles, we'll need to legislate it into existence and massively fund highways D) Cities are the source of all ills
Other than the racist motivations, it's really just poor planning that is copy and pasted from one place to another.
A lot of cities are realizing it's stupid and removing or relaxing these laws.
http://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/dpz/zoningordinance/articles/ar...
Example quote (in the context of commercial shopping centers and parking minimums that apply):
> 1,000,000 square feet of gross floor area or more: Four (4) spaces per 1000 square feet of gross floor area
EDIT: Note also that you get absurd scenarios like pools requiring a space per 4 people that can use the pool, or vets having to have at least 10 spaces, and so on and so forth. Absurd regulations
1) Large initial capital outlay; back in 1950 this might be $1500 but your earnings might be $3300 a year. You'd either need to get a loan, save up a significant portion of your salary, or get a used car (which were less plentiful as car ownership was much lower and earlier cars were less reliable)
2) You need to pay for ongoing maintenance. Oil changes, tires, etc. all add up. In the 50s the cars were more mechanically simple, so probably the labor costs were much lower (you'd probably do at least a portion of it) but there was more work to be done. Oil changes were more frequent, things like points had to be adjusted, etc.
3) Gas is not free. In the 50s this was in the $2.00 per gallon range in 2016 dollars. Cheap, but again not free
4) Parking costs money, then and now
Compare that to the previous costs:
1) Buy bus / train / subway / streetcar ticket
2) Shoes
It's much easier to afford a single trip as there is no capital outlay involved.
You're thinking like a well off software engineer. Think like a poor person.
Several of my family members have trouble getting to work because of unreliable and expensive car based transportation. They work just above minimum wage.
Their town has no real public transit to speak of, except in one or two unreliable bus lines, so getting to work is an actual hurdle.
In the past couple of years in the US the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the FTC have started working to help these types of car buyers and protect them against deceptive practices in advertising and unruly markups, much to the chagrin of the so-called "Buy Here-Pay Here" dealerships. The recent election and the deregulation culture surrounding it, however, does may not bode well for the consumers. I wouldn't be surprised if the CFPB is dissolved entirely.
"Need to", because, god forbid if people:
(a) take the public transit (or build a decent public transit in the first place),
(b) park a little further down (e.g. half a mile or so), and walk to the place you want to go.
Places which (b) happen already have (a) and vice-versa.
God forbid people didn't create environmentally disastrous and socially ho-hum suburban sprawls...
Will cars offer an "orbiting" mode where they keep driving in a circle until you are ready to be picked up.
Will stores offer a driving ring where cars can drive around in circles off the main street in the case where no parking slots are available?
Will cars be able to drop you off, and park themselves when a space becomes available? Will the cars notify you where they parked, or will they always come to your location? (And what if you are standing in an area that is impossible to drive to...where does the car go?)
I can't wait for self-driving cars. This will be a lot of fun to see how the world changes in both the large and small.
Admittedly, there is a lot of planning that needs to happen for even a prototype of this to happen, as well as some major cultural shifts, but when it does happen, I think it will run pretty smoothly. The biggest issue in my mind isn't the logistics as much as the cultural attitude that will need to happen - right now everyone seems to assume ownership of driverless cars, but the more reasonable approach seems to be summoned fleets instead. I can envision something like the city owning the control infrastructure and leasing slots to competing companies, or even just competing companies and leaving the city controller out of the picture.
There is also the possibility of having your car work for hire to help you afford to buy a new one sooner :D
In some cases perhaps it will rejoin the pool of available cars and you will picked up by a different car.
Perhaps retailers will be yet more likely to offer to ship selected large or awkward items directly to your home after you have picked them out.
Yes they'll be happy to pay a premium for delivery trucks that require no drivers. Time-of-day flexibility will enable serving more customers with the same size fleet. Many customers will be more willing to use delivery when they can plan around working hours and don't have to worry about tipping. Service levels won't be subject to mistakes in shift planning.
Sort of what we do with airplanes. You never really think of until you need them to be all grounded:
The random self-driving car is pretty much the same as public transport. Individual cars seem to be still a thing, even though we have buses, taxis etc. Having random car pick you up is not some totally new idea that wasn't tried ever before.
For the record, I drive a stock car. I like few extra comfort bits I got, but many cars got that these days. I'm fine with people having fun in a way I don't get though.
The point about storage and kids is definitely interesting. Seems like potential for business opportunities if we ever find ourselves in this world.
I guess bottom line would end up ~ the same as current car sharing services. Cheaper if you want occasional use, but more expensive as daily driver. And availability issues at peak times.
Current car sharing service (e.g. zipcar) is virtually the same as autonomous car sharing. You're not removing any large costs. Fleet balance is arguably the only cost removed. But it seems to be more or less solved problem even without autonomous cars. At least in my city, they no longer require to return (most) cars to the same lot. Wether car is autonomous or not, you still have to purchase the vehicle, pay insurance, gas, maintenance... Same price. The only change would be paying for idle car, it could drive back by itself. But user would have to pay for those junk miles. Which may be the same as paying for idling in the long run.
If car sharing service would want to have good availability at any time, they'd have a lot of overhead cars. Which would increase the cost. Otherwise they'd have to have reservations. And we get into a whole can of worms..
I would think that applied to any shared cars, including taxis and ride-hailing services. Why would the self-driving feature reduce parking demand beyond that?
So if the cost of running your car is say $5000 a year and you can get an subscription robocar service for $100 a week then a large number of people will switch.
At the moment it's only cheaper to go car free if it's possible for you to walk/ride/catch public transport to work Mon-Fri and catch the occasional taxi when needed.
[1] http://exchange.aaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Your-Driv...
There're already services that cater to those people. Full-service car leases, regular car sharing etc. People who want that already use them. But they don't seem to get that wide adoption. If shared autonomous cars would be adopted as widely, they wouldn't change traffic flow much.
It becomes even easier with a bigger pool.
Also, it breaks the driver/car connection since you are no longer a driver.
Finally, the real reason. Without a cab driver to pay and tip, cabs are actually cheaper than ownership. This is Uber's end game.
Car ownership requires at worst 1 car per person.
Carpooling requires a lot of planning and only works for with individuals with similar scheduled routes and requires the humans to include the time to drop off additional passengers or pass control of the vehicle to another for additional legs of the trip. Totally aside from the logistical nightmare it requires people to trust others with an asset worth thousands or 10s of thousands of dollars.
Imagine you pick 10 people. Getting them all to and from work shopping etc requires 10 cars at worst in the ownership strategy.
Imagine that carpooling might reduce it to 8 or 9. Its extremely likely that a route could be plotted for 3-5 cars to take all to their desired destinations both by moving back and forth for trips that don't coincide and by making slightly longer trips that move multiple parties.
Now imagine that you have the entire population and can match all the rides that coincide and include an entire range of vehicles including buses to get everyone from A to B maybe you can reduce this to 1-2 per commuter.
A fleet of taxis or cars from similar services could do the same. I don't see how the self-driving aspect changes the situation, other than possibly reducing cost by eliminating the driver.
Self driving cars by displacing the driver may eventually be cheap and flexible enough to compete with ownership.
At first that seems crazy, but it makes sense if you think about the fact that all the places you go in a day need to have enough parking to meet their peak demand all year, so places like malls have huge empty lots most of the year until Christmas rolls around. And then there is the spot your car is in at work that's empty at night and the spot you park in at home that's empty during the day.
Another nice benefit of self driving cars that are shared is the major reduction in the need to all this excess parking.