From: tpalm@nada.kth.se (Thomas Palm)
Subject: Re: Is car pooling for real? (was Re: Are bikes really less polluting?)
Organization: Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
Date: Tue, 21 Jul 1992 17:08:58 GMT

In article <1992Jul21.133521.23168@ke4zv.uucp>, gary@ke4zv.uucp (Gary Coffman) writes:
|> In article <1992Jul20.163426.25940@kth.se> tpalm@nada.kth.se (Thomas Palm) writes:
|> >The first one is better electronic communications. With video telephones
|> >electronic mail etc. in many cases people won't have to move as much as
|> >today. One may e.g. work at home or in a small, local office. 
|> 
|> Good solution for office workers. A better solution is to eliminate 
|> much of the useless paper shuffling, most of it government inspired. 
|> Then there are automatically fewer commuting office workers. Then the 
|> workers who produce real wealth by manufacturing real products can keep 
|> using their cars to get back and forth to work. The unemployable office 
|> workers can be shipped off to a rural commune to plant rice. 
|> (Worked for Pol Pot.) 1/2 :-)

Well more and more people today are involved in information business,
an important reason for this is that todays automatic factories just 
don't require so many people. Just like agriculture industry too will
be reduced to a rather minor employer. (i.e. actually working an the
factory floor. Designing, selling etc. will still take humans.)

|> >The advantages over automatic cars are several:
|> >
|> >* Vehicles travel on their own, preferably elevated, track. This makes it
|> >  much easier to control the movement. No kids on the street etc.
|> 
|> This is actually the same *dis* advantage shared with mass transit. The
|> relatively few fixed routes limit flexibility.

Depends on the price of the tracks etc. It needs not be more expensive than
building roads. The point is that the schedules are not fixed, but everyone
may decide their own route.
 
|> >Disadvantages:
|> >
|> >* Requires a new infrastrucure. Advocates of the systems have on the other 
|> >  hand calculated that just the saved land area could pay for the investment.
|> 
|> But the land area for traditional roads is already in use. You can't
|> economically convert it to other uses because of it's unfortunate 
|> configuration. So you don't save any land area until you tear down all
|> the buildings, redraw all property boundaries, and redevelop all the land.
|> Major bummer.

I agree that it is sort of hypothetical, and a better argument for using the
system in new areas. On the other hand parking-lots, gas stations etc can 
be easily rebuilt, and narrower roads can give room for more trees, which
supposedly has some value as we have parks in cities. You could also have
outdoor cafes, playgrounds etc. This would of course raise little cash.

|> 
|> >* It would be impractical to have tracks to every home, which would 
|> >  necessitate a short walk to the closest stop. 
|> 
|> Define short. In America it's not unusual for the next *house* to be
|> two miles away. The majority of the population lives *outside* city
|> boundaries. Increasingly, the *jobs* are also outside city boundaries.
|> That's the same dilemma facing mass transit. The density of living areas
|> is too low while the work destinations are in multiple high density
|> clusters scattered over the countryside. The traditional downtown is
|> a thing of the past in most urban areas. That's why fixed rail transit
|> has been an economic failure in most areas. 

OK, you do build differently in the US. I'm talking about fairly densely 
populated areas,European style. In rural areas this system is not practical.
As to downtowns beeing a thing of the past, it depends on where you live. Our
cities has lived for many hundred years and are still going strong.


|> Robocabs that can use the existing streets more effectively would be helpful.
|> However, the commute pattern still exists with very high peak flows followed
|> by lower flows. This means that effectively there needs to be a robocab
|> for each commuter since they all need to travel at roughly the same time,
|> though not necessarily to the same destinations. That negates most of the 
|> advantages of the public conveyance. Privately owned robocars distribute 
|> the costs better in this case while keeping the advantages of higher density 
|> and higher speed highway usage.

I don't think it will be possible in the foreseable future to run "robocabs"
in normal streets, although the specially designed highays discussed earlier
could work. But unless you plan to prohibit pedestrians, bikes etc. from every
road it's just too hard to keep a decent security without really good
artificial vision, which is a long time away. And if you need special roads, why
not tracks instead? 

One should also remember that transportation is flexible. One day you may 
want to travel alone to work, the next take your family to a theater and on the 
weekend go into the wilderness. With cars this is possible by using a large,
clumsy vehicle that can do everything, with this system you just order the kind 
of vehicle you need for the moment, or for the country trip perhaps rent a car.

|> One thing many posters have overlooked in touting mass transit schemes
|> is the value of time. Most people on the net would value their time in
|> excess of $20 an hour. Adding an hour to the daily commute puts the
|> relative cost of individual transport versus mass transit in a different
|> light. For paper shufflers, some of the time lost in using mass transit
|> can be recouped by doing work on the train, though few employers are willing
|> to count the worker as being on the clock while in transit. But for productive 
|> workers, that option is difficult because most trains don't have a lathe, or
|> other tooling, available for use.

You insist that only manual labour is productive. Seems sort of old fashioned
to me. Something that an extreme "environmentalist" (or Pol-Pot) might say. Do you
consider computer programming, designing with a CAD system etc a waste of time.
With technology to build your cabs, surely most industries will be 
completely automatic?

This system may be somewhat slower than your "robocab" scenario, it is, however,
faster in cities than todays cars, and even your "productive" workers might 
enjoy beeing able to watch TV, phone, read a newspaper etc while traveling.

-- 
"Goood planets are hard to find."    Thomas Palm
				     Department of Microwave Engineering
				     Royal Institute of Technology
				     S-100 44 Stockholm, Sweden
				     tpalm@mvt.kth.se
Newsgroups: sci.environment