The Coming Disruption of Transport

[afransen]

What if we just said forget about transit and let AVs be our transit? Financially, it would make a lot of sense. Save ourselves the money and grief of building the Ontario Line.

We don't have the surface road capacity.

 

[MrGoose]

Tesla has shown that LIDAR is unnecessary. lol@ 'expensive software developers'. Go tell Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. that they are doomed: too many devs required.

The problem with transit is that it costs way too damn much. Maybe because everything is bespoke, maybe because of the ossified planning process around developing and building them. When Toronto is building subways that cost $6,000/cm, we should think there is a problem. Even just do the math of amortizing how much a subway line costs over the expected 30 year ridership and think about what the capital cost per ride is. Ontario Line is expected to carry 388k passengers/day x 365 days/year x 30 years = 4.3B rides over 30 years. For a capital cost expected to be around $10B. That's around $2.5 capital cost per ride. Never mind operating cost. Probably around $0.25-$0.30 per km, depending on average trip distance. If we want transit to be viable and withstand competition for AVs, we need to get cost under control.

Devs are expensive, Google, Facebook, Apple, etc print money and they can afford to blow them on devs. Especially specialized devs that are required to maintain server farms and write scalable, low latency networking code. Sure, Lidar is technically unnecessary, however, Lidar makes it way easier.

If we want transit to be viable then we need to invest in grade-separated transit without interference from car traffic. You've calculated the cost of building rail lines, but how about the billions of dollars spent on building roads? And the billions of dollars spent on building urban sprawl, the power lines, the sewers?

And if you want to talk operating costs, how about the operating costs of building gigawatts of new power stations and grid level batteries to power all the AVs? Not to mention the individual costs of operating cars?

What if we just said forget about transit and let AVs be our transit? Financially, it would make a lot of sense. Save ourselves the money and grief of building the Ontario Line.

Metrolinx should get in touch with Elon Musk for Tesla AVs or Google for Waymo. Honestly, to be implementing fixed route transit, especially low speed and low capacity light rail is severely anachronistic.



The train isn't going to he faster. Factor in door-to-door, not station to station. AV wins hands down every time, especially against slow HFR. HFR is $5 billion for nothing, especially when you account for the fact that AVs will be more comfortable than regular cars since they will have less crash safety requirements as road accidents will be reduced by 90-99%

You want soulless mega corporations holding our public transit hostage? How much do you think they could overcharge the government? Fun fact, privatizing public transit doesn't work. Just ask the UK, where they have renationalized the railways. Public Transit is a service to move people around for cheap.

Instead of getting Google or Tesla to create a short distance last-mile shuttle to get commuters to/from public transit, we should be enlisting the thousands of engineering graduates and machine learning professors in our universities to build our own. Instead of cheaping out on salaries in this country, we should retain Canadian talent by paying them their market value. That way, we can create our own system and possibly license it out to other municipalities.

The train + a (publicly owned and operated) AV shuttle would be faster door to door.

A future where AV's have decimated our public transit systems is a return to the 70s and 80s and will destroy our urban landscape again. I don't see why you are so enamored with these mega corporations.

 

[afransen]

Devs are expensive, Google, Facebook, Apple, etc print money and they can afford to blow them on devs. Especially specialized devs that are required to maintain server farms and write scalable, low latency networking code. Sure, Lidar is technically unnecessary, however, Lidar makes it way easier.

You don't need low latency communication. The 'driver' for AVs has to be aboard the vehicle. I don't think you have fathomed how much an AV driver is worth. It's trillions. Development cost is not going to be the barrier.

And if you want to talk operating costs, how about the operating costs of building gigawatts of new power stations and grid level batteries to power all the AVs? Not to mention the individual costs of operating cars?

You are conflating EVs and AVs. They are synergistic, but not the same thing. And all that infrastructure is <$0.02 per km. Tesla model 3 uses ~0.15kwh per km. Electricity in Ontario costs at peak $0.22/kwh. That's $0.03/km at the high end. Of course, transit needs power too.

 

[Rainforest]

In small cities, I can see AV's eventually replacing all public transit. The city can own the fleet and provide call-in rides as a public service, at a reduced price if it wishes so, and still it will be cheaper and more energy-efficient than operating buses that run empty nearly all time.

In the cities of Toronto / Montreal / Ottawa scale, not so much. The road capacity is limited, especially in the most desirable areas such as downtown. Even if AV's can join together and form a train to eliminate the gaps, it is hard to imagine a 300-car or 500-car train made of individual self-driving units.

Many of high-capacity transit lines will still be needed. Maybe, AV's can take over the service currently provided by the Blue Night Bus network, the demand at that time is a lot smaller and the door-to-door service is particularly appealing.

 

[APTA-2048]

Honestly, to be implementing fixed route transit, especially low speed and low capacity light rail is severely anachronistic

Yeah totally. They should just be running autonomous vehicles on Finch. Hmmm they fit about four people. Maybe they should be a bit bigger. There’s going to be a lot of people traveling on Finch. Maybe these vehicles should run in pairs or maybe threes. They definitely should run on electricity. Oh! How about let’s give them their own lane too. Wait a minute.

 

[crs1026]

Many of high-capacity transit lines will still be needed. Maybe, AV's can take over the service currently provided by the Blue Night Bus network, the demand at that time is a lot smaller and the door-to-door service is particularly appealing.

The pricing will be interesting. If priced at transit fare levels, this would not only replace night service transit but kill taxi/Uber also. If priced higher there would be demands to run the bus anyways, as a social service. If the bus is automated, maybe it‘s no big expense to retain.

- Paul

 

[afransen]

The pricing will be interesting. If priced at transit fare levels, this would not only replace night service transit but kill taxi/Uber also. If priced higher there would be demands to run the bus anyways, as a social service. If the bus is automated, maybe it‘s no big expense to retain.

- Paul

Probably best to just subsidize rides, like Innisfil is doing. Running night buses with few passengers is very expensive per passenger. Using pooled minibus service has the potential to at least recover its operating cost, and it can be more demand responsive without compromising service too much.

 

[afransen]

Yeah totally. They should just be running autonomous vehicles on Finch. Hmmm they fit about four people. Maybe they should be a bit bigger. There’s going to be a lot of people traveling on Finch. Maybe these vehicles should run in pairs or maybe threes. They definitely should run on electricity. Oh! How about let’s give them their own lane too. Wait a minute.

Failure of imagination. You can mock any innovation this way.

 

[APTA-2048]

Failure of imagination. You can mock any innovation this way.

Sorry which part of abandoning public transit for self driving vehicles was innovative? Calling light rail low capacity when calling for a technology that thus far given us vehicles of about six metres long and a capacity of five or so is ridiculous.

 

[afransen]

Sorry which part of abandoning public transit for self driving vehicles was innovative? Calling light rail low capacity when calling for a technology that thus far given us vehicles of about six metres long and a capacity of five or so is ridiculous.

As a vehicle, LRT is high capacity. As a transportation system, it leaves a lot to be desired. It's too costly to form a network, except in exceptionally dense areas like Old Toronto.

 

[APTA-2048]

As a vehicle, LRT is high capacity. As a transportation system, it leaves a lot to be desired. It's too costly to form a network, except in exceptionally dense areas like Old Toronto.

Could you breakdown the cost of an LRT network vs. a fleet or self driving vehicles?

And then what happens when parts of, say, Finch start becoming really dense?

 

[afransen]

That's easy. LRT costs $250m/km, per recent GTA projects like HuLRT or $6B. It is projected to carry 32M passengers per year. About $6.25/passenger over 30 years. AVs will be privately owned fleet vehicles and funded by users using existing ROW (essentially displacing privately owned vehicles personal vehicles).

 

[Rainforest]

The pricing will be interesting. If priced at transit fare levels, this would not only replace night service transit but kill taxi/Uber also. If priced higher there would be demands to run the bus anyways, as a social service. If the bus is automated, maybe it‘s no big expense to retain.

- Paul

AV's, once sufficiently licensed, will kill taxi/Uber anyway. A private agency that runs a fleet of driverless taxis, will beat any agency that tries to employ human drivers. And the price for taxi rides will go way down.

So, it could be cheap private taxis, that cost say $3-5 for short rides and no more than $10 for crosstown rides, vs the city's "transit" taxis that cost even less but may take a bit longer to arrive and in some cases expect you to share the ride.

An automated bus is cheaper to maintain than a driven bus, but it will be energy-inefficient if it only carries 5 or 10 passengers vs the capacity of 40 or 60.

But all of the above will work either for small cities, or for big cities during very low-demand periods such as nightime. I don't see high-capacity transit lines going away. Small individual vehicles, even if they are self-driving and electirc, will have a hard time coping with a 10k/20k/30k per hour demand range.

 

[lenaitch]

Hyperloop and AVs are unrelated, let's not conflate.

Yes, I did conflate and that they are separate issues. The point was a proponent on here feels that they are proven, 'here-and-now', and ready for mass roll-out and that money and effort on any else is a waste.

Even in China, capital of autonomous experimentation, they are thinking about equipping the roads with sensors to facilitate autonomous driving.

And this is a point that confuses me (although I admittedly don't breathlessly follow it). Some articles speak of Level 5 - true autonomy - as been self contained, while others speak of constant inter-connectivity between vehicles; 'talking to each other'.

 

[APTA-2048]

That's easy. LRT costs $250m/km, per recent GTA projects like HuLRT or $6B. It is projected to carry 32M passengers per year. About $6.25/passenger over 30 years. AVs will be privately owned fleet vehicles and funded by users using existing ROW (essentially displacing privately owned vehicles personal vehicles).

That didn’t really answer the question. What are the numbers for a private fleet of vehicles? It’s 100% funded by users? What are maintenance costs like?

And what’s with this eagerness of taking a public utility and privatising it? I notice this seems to be a trend with these “innovations”.