One thing that always seems to come into play when traveling by train or plane is the need of the car at the destination. To a more minor extent the need to get to the station or airport and return. Yes there are shuttle services, some places offer some form of reasonable public transit and there is usually some sort of parking, usually paid in overcrowded lots. And yes there are car rentals too.
This tends to have driving your own car looking more attractive, since you have a car when you get there. (not saying it tips the scale in favor of taking your own car, but just this is a factor to push it that direction)
So if we get self driving cars, I can see instead of buying a mode of transit from station or airport ‘A’ to station or airport ‘B’, you would buy that direct from (your home address) to (your destination address), with the use of self driving cars to get you from/to the stations or airports (not necessarily the one you started with), for the rest of the trip till one picks you up for the return. If the standby self driver is not going to work for the trip, the destination address could be a car rental agency.
Could something like this seriously compete with drive your own car? And in particular could it help spur US LD train travel (well medium distance) to the point that it is looked at as a attractive (or at least a reasonable alternative) and environmentally consciousness option.
While not self driving, multimodial seemed to work well for freight, wondering if it could also work for people, with difference emphases on how it is implemented.
No. I can’t see any combination of technology replacing (human-driven) taxis or shuttles for this need, at least, not within any reasonable economic framework.
Autonomous driving cars are coming, no question about it. Mercedes will have a car by 2030 that won’t technically need a steering wheel or pedals. I could see those kinds of cars performing a taxi service from hotel to airport, for example. In fact, I’d be surprised if such a service *didn’t *exist in the next, say, 30 years. You land in Vegas, get in line for the taxis, get in and it asks where you’re going. “Caesar’s Palace.” Swipe your credit card and you’re on your way. Then that car picks up the next person at Caesar’s Palace and takes them to the Venetian. Or back to the airport. Or whatever.
I don’t know, but if I could step into my driveway at about, say 11:00 pm, lie down in a comfortable bed inside my car, go to sleep, and wake up at 7:00 am in front of my friend’s house in San Francisco–all for the price of only the gas–then that would obviously be much better than plane or any train, if you ask me.
I take the bus to work, so that’s taken care of. Local driving for other purposes I’d rather take care of myself. And long distance driving? That’s my joy. No way I let someone take that away.
Of course this will happen and will be a key factor in the continuing advances in self-driving cars. The gridwork is already partly in place (the Interstate highways). Up to about 600 miles, auto travel will be as quick or even faster than airplane travel, once the system is mature.
It continues to astonish me that people insist on disavowing this technology when it is happening right the fuck now. What you personally like or don’t like won’t matter.
This is a chicken and egg, not to say cart first, horse second kind of proposition. We’ve had a thread on autonomous cars; while lots of participants are all goggle-eyed and gosh-wowed, there are huge engineering, social and economic hurdles to overcome, some of which have no obvious solution. (In this it reminds me a lot of the space-nut crowd of the 1970s-00s or so, before serious private ventures found a way… that is, found more than nickels and dimes to throw at the problem, and got NASA to go along with the competition.) That a luxury maker says it will have a driverless car in over 15 years is mildly interesting, but some of us have long since burned out on “in 20 years…” goshwoggle. Such things are more usually between twice that, indefinitely postponed, or never.
So yes, 15-20 years from now autonomous vehicles will be some part of the landscape, almost certainly a small and niche one, found mostly in wealthier tech-junky cities that can afford to do massive rebuilding of the infrastructure to accommodate them in city centers and selected outlying areas.
That is not going to lead to any real change in “last mile” travel. Only a fraction of possible users will live within an area with convenient/affordable AV taxi service; only another fraction will be wealthy enough for any more general AV alternative. As nothing more than an alternative to human-driven cars and shuttles, the OP’s proposition is way, way down on the economic and general usefulness sensibility scale.
Fifty years out… maybe a different picture. But that would be five decades of not only perfecting the tech in Google Mercedes’ back yard and test villages, but rebuilding significant parts of the road and travel infrastructure to make the tech and economics viable.
While I do believe self-driving cars are coming, it is not to address this specific need. This need is met very well by what you already mentioned: a combination of public transit and rental cars, plus the occasional taxi. On every trip I’ve been on, I have no trouble getting from the airport to my destination using one of those three methods.
You are wrong. I will tell you why you are wrong: drunk drivers, sleep-deprived drivers, angry drivers, inexperienced drivers, just plain lousy drivers. Driverless cars will not have these problems. Driverless cars are going to make travel a LOT safer. And cheaper. And more fun. This is one technology everyone is going to love, except for the few who enjoy a monotonous chore for its own sake. And their enjoyment will NOT counterbalance the increased safety driverless cars will bring.
Except that not everyone will have a driverless car. There will still be plenty of old beat up Chevys and Toyotas with plenty of drunk drivers, sleep-deprived drivers, angry drivers, inexperienced drivers, just plain lousy drivers screwing up the driving lanes and smashing into you and generally fucking up your driverless driving experience. Unless, of course, these miracle cars come with force fields that keep you from physically having mechanical intercourse with the hoi polloi.
The passenger car is not the answer to any long-distance travel, self-driven or manually driven.
Trains are much more efficient - we used to have many inter-urban rail lines (they were destroyed by a company run by GM, Goodyear, and Standard Oil - they bought the companies, scrapped the rolling stock and sold the right-of-ways). We now are re-creating these.
If you come up with a car which takes up no more space than the passenger compartment, and which can attach and detach from a train (think of driving onto a flatbed car, turning off you engine, and then restarting when near destination and driving off at your destination), you might have a solution to long-distance travel while using a “car”.
Right now train travel in the US combines the expense of air travel with the slowness of car travel. Having self-driving cars isn’t going to change that. The main advantage is you wouldn’t have to bum a ride to the airport from a friend and put up with coercive sales tactics at the rental counter. If self driving cars revolutionize long distance travel, it’s going to be falling asleep in Minneapolis and waking up when you get to Chicago, not a new way to get the airport or train station.
I’ve always thought loading cars onto a train was a good idea, but unlike the Amtrak Autotrain they need to get it to the point more than the 1% can afford it.
I hope I am not around when this car come out , b/c there is no way I want to be in a self driving car with all the recalls that been going with cars today. I don’t have much faith in any companies today.
Slowness of a car? When I lived on the East Coast, I often took trains for day trips to DC or Baltimore. And standard Amtrak back then. Way faster and better than driving, which I also did at times.
For flights of an hour or so self-driving cars might be better. But not for any real distance. Air travel is always going to be faster than long car trips, even if you can sleep. And trains, even today, are a lot more comfortable than sitting in a car. Not to mention not having to wake up every so often to get gas or a recharge, or eat.
I don’t think I’ve seen any in at least two decades, but that option used to exist. Trains with an attached flatbed, you (or a train company operator) drove your car up, then drove it down at the destination. During the actual travel, people would be in the regular wagons.
OK, this is lovely. I ran a search for that function (in Spanish) and the page that turned up? Amtrak.
Air travel sucks, though. I’ll pay an extra couple of hours every time if I get to be in my own car instead of an airplane. Airplanes:
fly on their schedule, not yours
are cramped
are noisy
require getting a rental car at the endpoint
require a humiliating and annoying trip through the TSA checkpoints
frequently don’t have amenities like laptop/phone charge ports
charge for bringing a reasonable amount of baggage
charge and arm and a leg for internet access
give me some disease about a third of the time
Sure, for cross-country trips, planes are still worth it. But for Silicon Valley to LA there’s zero question (maybe in 2050 we can compare against a train). I just jump in my car whenever I want, with whatever snacks and drinks I want, and then dick around on my laptop the whole time and the radio cranked up. Maybe one day I’ll be allowed to crack open a beer, too (eh, who am I kidding).
I speculate that once cars become self-driving, people will stop owning cars, will instead own travel pods, comfortable environments to travel in. When you are ready to go somewhere, you just call for a “car” which would just be an engine, transmission and wheels, which will automatically hook up with a car. That way people could customize their travel pods and they’d be MUCH less expensive than owning a car, meanwhile, driverless cars would be much cheaper to operate because they would not have to carry around the weight of the passenger compartment and the passengers when they didn’t have to.
Such a scheme could work very well with train travel … at rail stations, travel pods are loaded on and off the flatbeds, not entire cars, meaning, much lighter and also more compact. Passengers would probably still find it more convenient to get out of the pods during the train trip if it’s a long one, though they might choose to sleep in their pods. Could make for a fairly seamless trip, as far as passengers are concerned.