If cars on the road use computers to actually drive then there will be no more traffic jams. Jams occur because people are irrational (think they can go faster by speeding up with traffic in front of them) and have slow response time (need many yards of braking distance for response time).
With connected computer controlled cars, you can drive almost bumper to bumper at speed so the capacity of existing roads is an order of magnitude (!) higher, meaning that each lane can transport the same amount of people as a multi-lane road today. In addition - *if* the roads goes over its capacity, cars will not stop-and-go which deteriorates capacity excessively, but there will be a graceful degradation that allows cars to either seek alternative routes in real time or simply accept a few minutes of slower (but constant) speed to adjust to the capacity reduction. The automatic self-driving cars will optimize their utilization, just like a phone network optimizes the amount of circuits for the maximum simultaneous amount of calls. That means that there can be an "oversubscription" rate typically in the 5 to 10 times, meaning that only 10 to 20% of cars are needed to transport the same amount of people as currently with private car ownership. To the people who bring up cornercases like "my wife is pregnant and I need to have a car sitting ready in my garage to jump into and race to the hospital", I would like to say that there are always cases where a solution needs to be tailored. I can see a business case for a differentiation in autonomous car subscription, where you can get cheaper contract and faires if you are OK with ordering longer in advance and potentially waiting longer to be picked up and a premium subscription or a temporary high-urgency add-on service that will make sure that there will always be a car within 1 minute from your home to bring you to the hospital with urgency. Lots of opportunity to make great business cases once there are automated vehicles on the road. Of course there will always be cases where it does not work as intended and where it makes sense to keep a private vehicle available for an emergency, but I suspect that those cases will become more rare over time. Similar to the evolution of EVs that we see these days. Cor van de Water Chief Scientist Proxim Wireless office +1 408 383 7626 Skype: cor_van_de_water XoIP +31 87 784 1130 private: cvandewater.info www.proxim.com This email message (including any attachments) contains confidential and proprietary information of Proxim Wireless Corporation. If you received this message in error, please delete it and notify the sender. Any unauthorized use, disclosure, distribution, or copying of any part of this message is prohibited. -----Original Message----- From: EV [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ed Blackmond via EV Sent: Tuesday, June 09, 2015 4:30 PM To: Electric Vehicle Discussion List Subject: Re: [EVDL] How Uber's Auton-EVs will reshape the economy > On Jun 9, 2015, at 2:51 PM, Ben Goren via EV <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Jun 9, 2015, at 6:02 AM, brucedp5 via EV <[email protected]> wrote: > >> How Uber's Autonomous Cars Will Reshape The Economy By 2025 By >> SeekingAlpha, May 31, 2015 By Zack Kanter For anybody skeptical about this, I have two questions. How many people had smart phones in 2005? How many people do you know today who don't have a smart phone? > > Couple more thoughts on this.... > > First, I think there's still a logistical challenge to be faced with > replacing the commuter car fleet with autonomous Johnny Cab taxies -- namely, > that there's a reason why rush hour is a clusterfuck of single-occupancy > vehicles. To a first approximation, we'll still need roughly the same number > of self-driving public / private cars as we do today, because we'll still > have roughly the same number of people going to work at roughly the same > time. And those people will be as interested in sharing a ride with other > people in the future as they are today. That is, it seems to me like the > estimates in the article are naïvely assuming a fleet sized for the average > demand will suffice, whereas the fleet still needs to be sized for peak > demand. Electric grid operators could offer some insights to these analysts. Around here (Silicon Valley), the commute congestion period lasts about four hours in the evening from 3pm to 7pm. It seems to be a little more spread out in the morning. A vehicle that takes someone home from work between 3pm and 4pm could take somebody else home from work from 5pm to 6pm and pick up somebody else at 7pm and take them home. This indicates that peak size could be on the order of 1/3 of todays commuter fleet. Would a driverless car be allowed to use the HOV lane? Ed _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA) _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
