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Automated driving & Transit

ehlow

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Google is having automated cars that drive themselves. One day, public transit vehicles (that are neither railed nor guided) can drive themselves.

Public transit buses will probably be the absolute last thing on the road which goes driverless.
 
Why anyone would want to buy a car that drives itself is beyond me. When I drive, it's because I enjoy driving.
 
Why anyone would want to buy a car that drives itself is beyond me. When I drive, it's because I enjoy driving.

Safer, faster, more efficient, less stressful etc...

You're in for a huge disappointment in the coming years. Driverless cars will replace humans. They're better than humans in every way. It's only a question of how soon until they enter mass usage.
 
Why anyone would want to buy a car that drives itself is beyond me. When I drive, it's because I enjoy driving.

Just to stir up discussion:
If it does actually work perfectly and all the legal and other issues are resolved (huge IF I know), then it opens up more possibilities in terms of car ownership.

For example, a group of people could share usage of a pool of self-driving cars, like car-shares today, except when you need the car, it would drive itself to your home from wherever. When you're done your trip, that vehicle could drive itself to serve the next person, or to the parking garage somewhere else.

Most people's cars spend most of the day unused and parked, which can be seen as waste.
 
The low density areas can at least go green again instead of that sea of meaningless asphalt with box store islands that you see everywhere in the GTA except for in the old city of Toronto.
 
Safer, faster, more efficient, less stressful etc...

You're in for a huge disappointment in the coming years. Driverless cars will replace humans. They're better than humans in every way. It's only a question of how soon until they enter mass usage.

I won't be happy, until my car makes me breakfast in the morning!
 
Just to stir up discussion:
If it does actually work perfectly and all the legal and other issues are resolved (huge IF I know), then it opens up more possibilities in terms of car ownership.

For example, a group of people could share usage of a pool of self-driving cars, like car-shares today, except when you need the car, it would drive itself to your home from wherever. When you're done your trip, that vehicle could drive itself to serve the next person, or to the parking garage somewhere else.

Most people's cars spend most of the day unused and parked, which can be seen as waste.

But the cars will be parked, albeit somewhere else, with the only "benefit" being you don't have to walk to a car-share lot.

Automated cars will still be parked somewhere.
 
Yes, they'd still have to be parked somewhere. But the great thing is that we'd need far fewer cars in lots because each individual car would be put into use more frequently. I'd imagine that in an automated car share, a car could travel to the pickup point specified by the customer once it's completed it's previous job.
 
Personally I could see streetcars in exclusive ROW or LRTs being easier to automate than anything involving steering, assuming things like collision detection works.

I'm actually really surprised that we haven't seen so much as a demo of driverless Automatic Train Operation (ATO) on LRT in a street ROW. I'd imagine that the biggest challenge with ATO on LRT would be collision avoidance (detecting people, cars on tracks etc...). However it's starting to look like research into driverless cars has nearly perfected collision avoidance. And mind that the collision avoidance on cars would probably need to be more advanced than for light rail, since cars don't have the luxury of operating on predictable, fixed rails. Surely this means that we can't be more than a few years from seeing at least a demo of ATO on an LRT ROW.
 
Yes, they'd still have to be parked somewhere. But the great thing is that we'd need far fewer cars in lots because each individual car would be put into use more frequently. I'd imagine that in an automated car share, a car could travel to the pickup point specified by the customer once it's completed it's previous job.

More cars driving around = more congestion, regardless if it's automated or not. Not everyone is going to want an automated car, or use their car in automatic mode.
There is no benefit to more cars driving around a city, automated, or not.
 
Personally, I don't think that we'll ever see this kind of technology implemented, except perhaps on something like 400-series highways.

I really don't see how these would function in dense urban traffic ... stopping at pedestrian crosswalks, trying to turn on intersections crowded with pedestrians, knowing when to pass a streetcar, etc.

Though if they really do master the crash-avoidance stuff, it would lead to some fascinating trends. For examples, pedestrians would know they can walk right in front of one, and they wouldn't get hit. It could give control of the streets back to pedestrians!
 
More cars driving around = more congestion, regardless if it's automated or not. Not everyone is going to want an automated car, or use their car in automatic mode.
There is no benefit to more cars driving around a city, automated, or not.

Agreed. However this tech could also lead to more public transit vehicles being able to be automated. As TheTigerMaster mentioned, an at-grade LRT in ROW could be easier to automate than a steerable vehicle, if collision detection works as well or better than a human driver.
 
More cars driving around = more congestion, regardless if it's automated or not. Not everyone is going to want an automated car, or use their car in automatic mode.
There is no benefit to more cars driving around a city, automated, or not.

One of the great thing about automated cars is that they should be more road efficient than human drivers. Automated cars can driver closer together than human drivers can and all the cars can talk to each other to determine the best possible route for relieving congestion. If the full potential of the technology is realized, they should be able to talk with traffic lights, transit vehicles, traffic controllers, speed enforcement etc... in such a way that all vehicle movement can be coordinated with just about everything on the roadway. This would be highly efficient if it's done correctly (I have my doubt's that if it will).

Of course automated cars aren't a magic bullet that will solve our congestion woes. I'd imagine that any positive effect they have will be rather small. We'd still be hauling individual people around in big metal boxes that require at least 20 m of spade around them. If we want to reduce congestion we have to get drivers walking and into public transit.
 
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