Author: Niko Porjo

This is part four of a series on changes that driverless cars may bring. I expose some of the ideas I have, mostly quite practical things. We moved project troglodyte to it’s own website, so the more patent centric recap of the Google driverless car patents can be found from there.

Below I assume that the problem has been solved completely. Driverless cars can access any part of the road network, function even when there are people darting around and can handle any weather including lots of snow and very slippery conditions. Accident levels are same or lower than currently and people are not scared to use autonomous cars.

See also: Rental vs. taxi, Mass transportation, Pirvate cars, Cargo, Parking and driving empty, Zoning Traffic volume and Externalities

Transportation of containers between terminals is an obvious place for automated vehicles. Both the loading and unloading can be automated and the vehicles can create a rolling conveyor belt. Specialized vehicles exactly the length of the standard shipping container will likely be built, these vehicles can form trains on faster roads and thus lower their energy consumption considerably.

For cargo travelling shorter distances and requiring manual unloading upon delivery drivers might still be necessary, although they might not actually drive the vehicle. But even here a driver may not be needed. With some development it might for example be possible to unload a truck using its own truck mounted crane by remote control. The crane operator sits in an office and directs the crane using cameras and a communications link. There might still be problems like how to judge how good the support is for the vehicle when the crane needs to move a heavy load far away from the truck.

Remote operation might also be usable when the environment at the delivery or loading point is not easily standardized. Examples might be a quarry or a landfill. The vehicle would be autonomous on the road network, but remotely controlled when when the environment is difficult. This would make it possible for one driver to control several vehicles. The same operator could also control the loading equipment for example a wheel loader.

For light cargo: delivery of pizzas, groceries, stuff bought from the net etc. automated vehicles can be a real revolution. A suitably equipped vehicle may quite easily open a container when a code is given and the customer can take what was delivered. Significantly, driverless cars may make it cheaper to order a carton of eggs from the store than to drive there and buy them. Products for several customers can be delivered in the same run and the cost divided between the receivers whereas when driving to the store you pay for the whole trip. Currently in many cases the cost of the delivery vehicle driver tips the balance the other way.

It may be a bit futuristic to think that specialized pizza vehicles able to make the product would drive around the suburbs, but it is by no means impossible. Making of a pizza is not that difficult and delivering it fresh instead of 30 minutes old may make all the difference. The pizza would be ordered through the net and the pizza van would start making it so that it is right out of the oven when it arrives at the delivery location.

Acknowledgment:  Thanks to Laston Kirkland for thoughtful evaluation of these ideas.

This is part three of a series on changes that driverless cars may bring. I expose some of the ideas I have, mostly quite practical things. We moved project troglodyte to it’s own website, so the more patent centric recap of the Google driverless car patents can be found from there.

Below I assume that the problem has been solved completely. Driverless cars can access any part of the road network, function even when there are people darting around and can handle any weather including lots of snow and very slippery conditions. Accident levels are same or lower than currently and people are not scared to use autonomous cars.

See also: Rental vs. taxi, Mass transportation, Pirvate cars, Cargo, Parking and driving empty, Zoning Traffic volume and Externalities

While there is a clear reduction on operating cost for taxis and public transportation, private cars will only get an initial premium to purchasing price. Economic benefits will be less direct, but as mentioned in another post renting the car out when it is not needed is clearly a possibility. It is difficult to tell if  this will drive taxi and rental car operators out of business or make more people start using public transportation and rent when traveling outside the coverage area of scheduled public transportation. The optimum solution will likely depend on how population is distributed in a certain area.

Not needing to drive the car is a benefit for many, but not all. According to wikipedia depending on the severity of motion 33 to 66 % of people are susceptible to motion sickness. This limits the number of people who can read or work during a car trip and thus also limits the benefit from a driverless car. Some people also enjoy driving a vehicle and wouldn’t want to give it up.

Not everybody can drive though and these individuals have most to gain from this development, in addition to public transportation they can have the option of owning a personal car. Beside some adults either unable or unwilling to drive, children and elderly are a large group that cannot or should not drive. As an example children under the age of 15 and elderly over the age of 75 make up about 25 % of the population in Finland*.

Adults under the influence of alcohol, medication or recreational substances is a group that will greatly benefit from automated cars for their transportation. There might be adverse health effects as being able to drive might be a sufficient reason to stop drinking after the weekend and this reason will be less powerful when there is no need to worry about driving.

Private cars are needed a couple of times during the day to go to work, get back home etc. These are also times when there is maximum need for transportation, so scaling the taxi fleet to meet that demand is likely not economical, even when the cost of the driver is removed from the equation. Many of the taxis would be idle for the rest of the time and not producing. Although this is probably the situation now for many taxis and certainly is for private cars.

Even if the rush hour peak in transportation need would be flattened this might not produce efficient use of the available cars in a case where private cars would be rented when not used by their owners. If housing and places of employment are at separate areas it takes some time for the vehicles to travel back to pick up the next passenger. Thus it looks like densely built areas with mixing of commercial and residential districts may benefit from a change to driverless vehicles. That however requires that the peak is wide enough to allow a vehicle to transport several consecutive passengers during one rush hour.

While vehicle size for public transportation is driven partly by the cost of the driver there is no such link for private cars. People usually want a car large enough that they can pack the whole family, including the dog and a canoe in to it. One reason for large vehicle size is safety, a large car with big mass experiences statistically smaller accelerations in accidents and can be safer than a smaller one. A big car likely also feels safer even if it might have inferior technology and actually be less safe. If automated cars live up to their promise and accident rates become lower there is the possibility that consumers may accept smaller cars.

Energy efficiency and operating cost are currently factors that drive private car size towards smaller vehicles. When the car can also drive by itself it is possible that the yearly distance travelled by the car will increase, this would also put emphasis on the  operating cost and make smaller cars more desirable.

It is also possible that a super mini, i.e. just one person, class emerges to enable sending the car on an errand by itself. The car could for example collect food from several places and bring it back home. But to be viable a car this small would likely also require some more traditional use to be economical.

Parking is a problem in many areas. It is infact an important reason for the use of public transportation. Here driverless cars will have a considerable effect. Currently parking space needs to be within a walkable distance from the place where the driver is heading. With driverless cars it is possible to drive to the closest point accessible with the car and the car can then find a parking space on its own.

While this will eliminate driving around to find a parking space, it can increase traffic close to points of interest and increase the overall distance driven as the cars may travel fairly far when optimizing between price of driving and the price of the parking space. This may lead to situations where for a short visit the vehicle is left to drive around so that it is almost immediately available for the owner. This in turn creates a need to put a price for the use of the road network, otherwise it might be cheaper to use a holding pattern than to park.

It might still be the case that every now and then an unseen situation is found which the car can not handle on its own. Remote operation may be used in these cases if the vehicle either does not have controls or the occupants are unqualified to operate it. For control only in rare circumstances basic controls may be enough, similar to game consoles or just an application using a touch screen. This off course requires upgrades in communications infrastructure as the road network currently covers some areas that have bad or no affordable ways to transmit for example video streams.

Acknowledgment:  Thanks to Laston Kirkland for thoughtful evaluation of these ideas.

This is part two of a series on changes that driverless cars may bring. I expose some of the ideas I have, mostly quite practical things. We moved project troglodyte to it’s own website, so the more patent centric recap of the Google driverless car patents can be found from there.

Below I assume that the problem has been solved completely. Driverless cars can access any part of the road network, function even when there are people darting around and can handle any weather including lots of snow and very slippery conditions. Accident levels are same or lower than currently and people are not scared to use autonomous cars.

See also: Rental vs. taxi, Mass transportation, Pirvate cars, Cargo, Parking and driving empty, Zoning Traffic volume and Externalities

Just like the difference between rental cars and taxis will dissolve, mass transportation will also overlap more with taxis. This is because currently cost of drivers pushes public transportation towards larger vehicles and less frequent service. The larger the vehicle is, the smaller the change in cost structure as personnel costs become less important in trams and trains due to their larger passenger capacity. Smaller busses and more frequent operation will become a practical proposition.

While taxi traffic probably also scales nonlinearly this is certainly true for public transportation. More people travelling leads to more frequent operation, it will be easier to change between lines, journey times will be shorter and prices will be lower. This would seem to indicate that busses would benefit greatly from being able to operate autonomously. The optimum transition point between operating a bus or a tram/light rail would also likely be different. With current arrangements it is difficult to operate busses with very short intervals, as this leads to busses travelling right behind each other with some full and others empty. With smaller busses it would be possible to operate slightly different parallel routes if the geography of the area allows it. In many cases this is not possible and it would still be necessary to use a higher capacity transport mode.

Currently there seems to be a psychological limit for the minimum size of public transport, people don’t want to get into a small vehicle with strangers. There are some fully automated rail systems in operation and in many trains the operator is not able to intervene to assist if there is some trouble, so this doesn’t seem to be a big problem for large vehicles, but it can be a limiting factor for smaller ones.

Passenger density is larger for big vehicles and the possibility of some passengers standing during rush hour gives some flexibility in exchange to some discomfort. A large vehicle can also have large doors enabling fast boarding, this is an important factor for high throughput mass transportation with many stops. For very small vehicles the same road or rail network would still be able to handle less passengers despite the smaller headway enabled by the automation of the vehicles.

Vehicle costs also differ between small and large vehicles, small ones can be mass produced with fairly low cost, while larger ones likely have lower maintenance costs per capacity. Small vehicles can idle when not needed, but large ones need to run half empty during off peak hours. Most likely different solutions will be used in different environments to optimized between the comfort of small, even one person vehicles and the higher capacity of larger ones.

Acknowledgment:  Thanks to Laston Kirkland for thoughtful evaluation of these ideas.