I am not sure if I am being whooshed but good experienced drivers just know that type of thing through a rather unconscious process. Much of my commute is on interstates with heavy traffic travelling at 75 mph. I don’t need a sign on the back of each car to tell me who is going faster or slower than me anymore than I need such a sign on people’s butts on a crowd. I continually adjust my speed to maintain whatever following distance I want without thinking about it. My foot just moves continually up and down just a little (or a lot when needed) to keep the following distance within a few feet at any speed.
Explaining the whole process might take a Ph.D. dissertation but the basic are:
If the car in front of you is getting bigger and closer then you are going faster than it.
If the car ahead of you is shrinking, then you are going slower.
It even works in your rear-view mirror (how does it know to make them bigger or smaller ).
Not necessarily. If I have this pictured right, the cars pull onto a “siding” and accelerate up to cruising speed. The cars on the main “track” sense to approach of the newcomer and unhook, making a space for him, He merges into position and the cars in front and behind close the gap, rehook and the “train” continues as before. Demerging is the same, though you have to key in your destination well in advance so the computerized system disengages your car and sends it careening onto the “off-ramp” siding where it overturns and crashes into a huge fireball that utterly consumes the driver who never feels it because he’s dozed off.
Tracks aside, better computer communication between cars will be required for automated highways. I wouldn’t mind cruising at a steady 80 mph with two feet or less between me and the other cars. If anything, this helps extend road life since computer controls allow denser traffic patterns and newer construction can take place at a more relaxed pace, using the wealth of information collected to judge exact routes.
I appreciate the OP’s intentions, and there is no question that reliance on the automobile as personal transport causes numerous problems, but frankly, none of the changes he proposes are ones I’d care to get on board with.
Buddy, I happen to like driving, and I haven’t hit anyone else while doing so in close to 15 years. I propose instead that would-be drivers be required to pass an exam a little more strenuous than a couple of low-speed maneuvers and parallel parking. If they can’t hack that, they could then resort to guided transport that already exists: trains and buses .
What I could see, and get on board with, in the near term, is that major roads have circuitry embedded in the pavement so that cars equipped with an automated separation distance control system could roll along in close formation with auto-acceleration, steering and braking, as someone has alluded to elsewhere in this thread. Nevertheless, I insist on having full manual control if I want it, and most of the time I would.
Except there isn’t, yet. Anyway, why throw away a technology that has been in continuous development for at least 100 years and which has not yet reached its technical limits? Compare the relative efficiency of, say, a Honda Insight hybrid to that of a Ford Model T, or a Hummer H2 for that matter.
Personally, rather than worry about finding some replacement for internal combustion engines that doesn’t quite exist yet, I’d go more to the source, and promote incentives to develop more compact and efficient cities, where people don’t have to travel miles in large-engined personal vehicles just to pick up food or wash one’s clothes. I managed to live for nearly a decade in Paris without owning a personal vehicle of any kind, and only rarely missed it.
Sticking with the personal car, however, there is a clear technological trend in transport to using using hybrid and all-electric propulsion systems, at all scales from personal commuting to rail transport of heavy freight. There is a good chance that very soon ganged lithium-ion batteries as used in the upcoming Tesla roadster may finally provide all-electric personal transport with a relatively low operting cost and adequate range and performance.
It most certainly does not make sense to have the propulsion system as part of the road, unless one can do it with a currently impossible technology that would never, ever break down. San Francisco cable cars have a propulsion system that part of the road, and no one seems to want to emulate that model for their urban transport systems.
The statment that leads the above paragraph is, quite simply, as wrong as it could possibly be. Begbert2 pretty thoroughly demolished this one, so I won’t rehash his points, except to ask: which would pretty much have to cost less and have less environmental impact: a simple, inert layer of surfacing material laid down at ground level, or a tube several meters in diameter with numerous connections for linking and power, and requiring that some sort of energy be tranmitted along it at all times? How could this fiendishly complex device be ‘quick to swap out’, and how would it be less destructive than a much lower-profile road?
To conclude, what the OP really seems to find objectionable about current personal transport technology is how much space it take up, how much it has altered the landscape, and its relative cost, not so much the concept itself. I cannot help but agree, but the solution would be simple if anyone would ever agree to it: ban personal motorized road transport and build a public transport system adequate to get everyone anywhere they want to go at low cost and with minimal waiting. Now, given that such a proposition would most likely cause the immediate, violent overthrow of the government by a rampaging mob, I imagine people are still going to demand their relative freedom of mobility regardless of what the long-term impact may be. Even with all the problems of congestion, pollution and cost, being able to jump in the car and drive somewhere is still too much fun for too many people.
OK, I’ll stop rambling and quietly read the posts that may follow.
Problem now mainly is costs. Electric vehicles that can get to highway speeds and have a reasonable range cost big bucks right now. That Tesla roadster is $100K. This somewhat less fancy EV is still going to be priced at $45K and is only expected to bring the company a profit because of a huge zero emission credit in California. Zap Electrics plans on offering a similarly powered vehicle with room for three for $49K but also offers an EV that seats four for under $10K but that one maxes out at 40mph. Good enough for most of my needs but I do need to go on the highway sometimes. Do I need to have an extra car just for those days? Or spend $45K plus to get the functionality of a car that costs half that? And for a few, a range of 40 or even 240 miles isn’t enough. That’s why plug-in hybrids have such an attraction.
Me, I ride my bike when I can. My hybrid when it isn’t easy enough for me and my schedule. And I fantasize about owning this Aerorider or this Go-one … both enclosed human powered vehicles with electric assists.
Agreed that city design needs to change, and for several reasons. Parking needs to be less easy and public transportation better. Forcing people to walk a few blocks if they drive not only decreases the attraction of driving everywhere but will help decrease that obesity epidemic too!
Flatcars? Why not just take the train? Why do you need the car once you are in the city? The advantage was in not having to be tied to the train’s schedule. Seems like you’ve got the worst of all worlds.
Guidance? It’s been worked on,and maybe the day is getting closer. Previous attempts concentrated on having strips built into the roadways. Seems to me that a few generations of cars from now could utilize gps technology. You get on a highway and enter in your destination. Once you’ve entered that you may join in the guidance controlled express lane at a set speed and from there the computer takes over allowing an even and reasonable speed for all participating vehicles with a greater than otherwise safely possible vehicle density with systems not too far off from current cruise controls. El-Kabong prefers to drive in bumper to bumper at a slower speed, fine. He can go ahead and still do that. I can read or watch a movie. Need to make that system way secure though.
My ideas tend to be linked to living in a rural area twenty miles outside the city. It wouldn’t be profitable to build train stations within walking distance of everyone nor their destinaation. I’d need to at least drive to a station for a commuter train, and I wish there was one. Flatcars is a respose to the OP.
Begbert makes some good points about roads, but my fear is that the real advantages he cites seduce us into thinking that roads are the optimal technology for our transportation. I see four major problems with roads as currently constituted:
Weather: Snow and ice in the roads ranges from being a major problem to a nonproblem, depending on where you live. Plus weather degrades roads. The freeze-thaw cycle and frost-heaving cost us dearly.
Fatal Encounters: The structure of our roads does nothing to keep non-cars (pedestrians, deer) out, with results that are fatal to a certain number of people, and untold multitudes of possums, every year.
Utilities: In many parts of the country, the utilities are, of necessity, buried under the roads. So anytime you need to work on the water, sewers, gas, or fiber optics, you’re cutting up the roads. The subsequent repairs to the road generate next year’s potholes.
Heat: Black macadam roads are a major heat sink. This is not a problem in Idaho, but it’s a significant problem in the Bosnywash. If Manhattan is X degrees hotter than it has to be because of all the black tar, the financial and environmental costs of removing that heat are not to be ignored.
My idea in proposing a tube was to isolate the travel way and address those problems above. I’m not married to the idea of a tube, but I do think some modestly elevated trackway, made out of factory-made, modular components, is the way to go.
And whether propulsion should be part of the trackway is an open question. Certainly there’s plenty of precedent for an integrated electrical rail to power propulsion, even over a relatively large network. One thing people overlook is that having the propulsion as part of the car – no matter what the technology – dramatically increases the weight of the car. So much of the energy expended by the car is spent simply to schlep the weight of its own engine around.
Huh? That’s not quite what I said. Actually, what I want to do is be able to drive at at the posted speed or above everywhere, and if all you people would get the hell off the road, I could .
The gyrocar idea looks interesting on the face of it, but the same conservation of momentum that keeps it upright is going bite you on the arse, hard, if you have cause to legitimately tilt the whole system (such as might be necessary to drive it up a hill) - tilting one end up or down will cause a severe sideways force.
BrainGlutton, I have no objection to trains – the more the merrier, I say – but what Americans want is something to convey them from point A to point B, where they get to define what point A and point B are. Trains will never come to your driveway, and they often only get you sort of close to where you want to go. Plus taking your groceries and your toddler on the train is sort of a drag. The basic idea of the car as a personal transportation device will never go away. It’s too firmly embedded in our mindset, as well as our landscape. What we need to think about is to make the basic idea better – less dangerous, more sure, less polluting.
As it is many people drive to the station, park, and take the train into the city which has stops near enough to most downtown locations.
How is this for a concept? An extensive and efficient public transportation grid (including, of course, trains) connecting towns, burbs and cities and intracity locations. On each side, at each station, are rental personal transport vehicles, lower speed and small but of a variety enough that a parent can travel with two or three kids too small to use their own, and any shopping done. Bicycles, HPVs of other sorts, Segways, Electric scooters, golf carts, Xebra sedans, etc … a mix. All rentable with a card and paid for in some combination of time and (moreso) recharge cost and type of vehicle chosen. Returnable at any station and the trains can redistribute to where they are needed most if they tend to accumulate anywhere in particular. Within city limits (or at least downtown) travel is resticted to use of these small extremely low and/or zero emmission vehicles or public transport. Streets are divided into lanes to segregate traffic according to vehicle size for safety’s sake. Private ownership of such vehicles is of course allowed and some may skip the train entirely some or most of the time. That Xebra sedan (under $10K) is ample enough for the grocery shopping, the soccer games, and most work commuting (40 mph without traffic congestion is better than how I actually average in my car capable of much faster most days. Even the sparse 40 plus mile range will get you into the city and back to your rural home. Add-in a place to recharge at work for a modest fee, and you can even live 40 miles out of the city.) Ownership of internal combustion is of course allowed but their use is restricted to outside of the city proper.
Ya know, I’m beginning to sell myself on that Xebra sedan! We have two cars, those highway days I can use the family suburban assault vehicle and let my wife schlepp with the EV. Maybe next car, when the current teen-ager inherits mine for college. Freshman year no car, so I’ve got three and a half years for the technology to improve and prove itself a bit.
Even just affordable EVs capable of 60 mph plus with battery exchange stops and/or rapid recharge stations that can be used over meal and rest stops on the highways (for a small fee that makes running them profitable enough) that can be added onto the existing highway gas station infrastructure as we transition over a decade or so.
Okay, there are two distinct situations to deal with here: city driving and country driving. Presumably you want cars to work in both situations; if not, the word you’re looking for is train. So, that’s one thing to keep in mind. (Note that the cars need not function in exactly the same way in both systems, but they do have to work and hopefully transition between rather well.)
As mentioned, modular is no good. It ties you to the manufacturing centers, and harshly punishes every hundred miles away from them that you get. With the exception of insignificant parts (like mass-produced little reflective bumps to stick in the road) everything’s going to have to be able to be created on-site. Anything else sends manufacturing and maintenence costs spiralling out of control. (Modular also has the downside that you have to anticipate every crazy situation that you come across, like those five-way intersections at odd angles and whatnot.)
Another thing to keep in mind is that any replacement system has to fit pretty much in the same place as any existing system, without significantly changing the rules of access. People are going to reject your system if the city must be bulldozed to the ground before implementing it. Also any system that prevents pretty much random access from the sides is going to be inappropriate for city driving, as people like being able to get onto the road from parking lots and driveways and such.
So, city driving: You pretty much have to retain the flat roats at ground level, to allow people to get on and off of them from existing structures. Centralized power would be feasable in a city like New York; probably not so much in Podunk. So cars will have to retain the ability to power themselves (which will also satisfy the off-roaders) but in theory they could toggle to using city electric in town. Of course, the modifications to require this would mean they were electric cars anyway, and at that point you might as well just swap out the gas stations with electric stations and avoid the problematic issue of socialized power (which would favor visitors at the expense of taxpaying locals).
Now, to the listed problems:
Weather: First, keep in mind that any exposed system will be subject to damage from weather; it’s not really avoidable. Ice on the roads is problematic, but could be addressed by somehow heating the roads, via elements or hot water pipes in them. This would be very, very expensive though, and prone to failure; this is why we use snowtires, chains, and salt. It’s cheaper to deal with the increased pace of road wear than to make the road snow-proof.
Oh, and roofing the roads isn’t really a feasable solution; the accumulating snow either collapses the roof or piles off the sides and buries the pedestrian lane.
Fatal encounters: I don’t think deer and possoms are a problem here; it’s people. We could put up guardrails and fences at the sides of the road, but the populace would hate them and try to hop them; they’d reduce access to things. It’s cheaper and more efficient to teach your kids not to play in the street.
Utilities: not an avoidable problem. The pipes have to be under something, and it’s cheaper to rip out and repair the roads than the buildings alongside. In theory the subsequent road repair could be done more carefully to avoid potholes, but that’s a local issue. Around where I am, it’s not a problem at all.
Heat: If you’re that concerned about it, pave in concrete, like on the highways. It costs more and wears faster, but is a lighter color and provides a better ride. If the city paves in asphalt it’s because nobody’s convinced the road authority that the problems are such a problem.
Now, rural driving: Freeways, baby! They avoid most of the problems you list. They’re also a fertile ground for computer-assisted driving, resulting in cars driving themselves at 90 with 2 feet between them, etc. You could even stick an intert guide stripe down the center of each and have the cars steer themselves. Centralized power is pretty infeasable, though; the problem of who pays for it is escalated by the large amount of cross-country shipment that takes place on roads. (Those big trucks are a good argument against tubes, too.) Also running power on a road from Las Vegas to the Utah state line through a few hundred miles of nothin’ for the service of a handful of cars and trucks would be a pointless waste.
For the rural roads that aren’t freeways…upgrade them to freeways. It’d be cheaper and simpler than any experimental (and probably more fragile) solution.
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