Comments on: The future of personal transport

By: Administrator

Administrator — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 21:38:23 +0000

Kevin, it will scale ok, if you don’t let the density get too high and if you have the technology to fully manage the road space. Obviously, motorized personal transport isn’t the solution in the densest areas. However, improved management of road space would still make a big difference to congestion levels.

One of the problems with the current technology is that most of the road space is wasted.

Imagine if the distance between vehicles could be better managed to maximise use of junctions. You could immediately fit far greater numbers of vehicles through the same junctions.

By: Kevin Cannon

Kevin Cannon — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 14:05:13 +0000

There are massive problems with the whole Concept of Personal Transport Systems. The main thing is that they fundamentally don’t scale well. When you have everyone in a separate vehicle, you get congestion. This is a fundamental problem that you can bend, but never truly solve. Public Mass Transport, will always scale much much better.

There’s a really interesting book called ‘Suburban to Super Rural’ that was published by a collection of Irish Architects which you might be interested in.

By: antoin

antoin — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 04:20:55 +0000

And there’s a project in California to autosteer a second bus to run in convoy behind a first, steered bus. And there’s another crowd who have a self-steering minibus in the Netherlands. But so what? Who really cares? None of this technology will produce any end result worth talking about unless it is stacked together with a lot of other technologies to manage journeys and congesion, and is also put in a business context – the way our infrastructure is owned will not work for an autodrive personal transport system -. None of this work has even been thought of.

By: vmarks

vmarks — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 14:15:43 +0000

I think it’s incorrect to say there’s not a lot of practical research going on.

DARPA does the automated desert drive contest annually.

Nissan has done research in the past year on cruise control that is aware of cars in front, behind and to the sides and can adjust speed or steer to avoid other vehicles.

Is it as ready to implement as Shai Agassi’s Better Place stuff? No.

But then, neither are all of his grand plans ready to go – he’s going to start by a network of charging posts, but his later schemes involve a robotic car-wash type battery changing station, similar to a petrol station – drive through, robots remove old battery, install fresh. Difficulties? Battery standardization, or robots that recognize the different models properly, simple things such as torque calibration so that you don’t break a battery terminal out of the side of the thing by overtightening…

There’s a lot of work to be sorted out.