The Future of Transportation
What do you guys think is going to be the landscape of the transportation industry? I mean humans, not stuff.
My personal opinion is that we'll slowly move towards the Singapore style of transportation systems, characterized by the following:
1.) Taxis, loads of automated taxis, on call via app
2.) Intracity transportation systems become increasingly less relevant, because of the efficiency of automated vehicles on the street. Automated mass-transit such as buses may still survive though.
3.) Car ownership will be taxed. Only the rich will be able to afford cars. If car clubs become a thing, the luxury car industry is hurt. Hence car ownership is reduced
4.) Intercity transport via bullet train and/or Hyperloop (if feasible). Intercity via planes will reduce
5.) I'm not big on Musk's rocket ship idea, but supersonic speeds will become a thing soon. We have already crossed that barrier in science, but if today's startups figure out the cost-effectiveness aspect of supersonic flight through a revised business model, I don't see why this won't become the new normal.
6.) Belt and Road fails to become a reality. Too many unstable players along the Silk Road
7.) Parking spaces are omitted altogether
8.) Electric bikes might become a more personal tool for transport for the middle class
Interesting ideas. I'm thinking that the expansion of shareable and self-driving cars will expand purpose built lanes along highways and in cities, in a manner to bus lanes, which would be done at the expense of parking. A lot of these ideas would really take off though if costs were lowered even further, primarily by a much higher supply of drivers/vehicles and making trips more liquid and reducing wait times.
I have a hard time believing cars will replace public transportation altogether. Still a much less efficient form of transportation in terms of the space required.
I don't purport that cars will replace public transport. What I meant was that massive scale infrastructure projects like subways and intracity trains will go away. Buses will survive and may even expand by virtue of being more efficient after automation.
Hmm, you're still going to have to convince me 1000 people on a few subway cars is less efficient than 500 to 1000 autonomous cars from a space perspective.
Can you please explain more about the FAA regulations on sonicbooms? Maybe that played a very big role in Concord going down under.
Great discussion! I'm particularly interested in the impact of autonomous driving on transportation, so here's a few more points on that:
Interesting points. Thanks for pointing these out. I assume a lot of personal expenses such as car insurance, maintenance and other charges will go away, unless taxi companies decide to offload these costs upon customers. Of course, in a perfectly automated world, we wouldn't have any car accidents in the first place.
Also, interesting point about parking structures. Garages become man caves, mass parking gets repurposed into low-income residential?
Fuck off Jeff
I think that as soon as electric planes become viable (airbus tested a small 1 person plane already) and widely commercialized that the price of real estate in close proximity to airports is going to soar - No more noise pollution, best spots for people who have to travel a lot etc.
That said: I think the air travel is going to be mostly international in the future, and (high speed) trains are going to be the next continental travel option.
Interesting theory, but I doubt we'll be able to use feasible battery packs to store energy for a super size jumbo jet. Even if we figured out how to store and contain the energy, it would still be extremely heavy. Unless we figure out how to put mini-reactors (which are effectively engines) inside aircraft. Maybe learn a bit from space travel or something, where we use hydrogen fuel.
Autonomous driving will lead to a reduction in cars in circulation, but the cars that are sold will have significantly more mileage on them... do we see this as a boon (physical depreciation of the asset means shorter replacement cycles) or a bane (less cars per capita) to manufacturers?
Bear in mind the statistic released over summer that cars spend 95% of the year parked at the owners house.
If we do move away from personal car ownership, the implication would have to be that we all move to ridesharing platforms instead... All that data would make Uber/Lyft/Didi etc the new Google's of the world.
Or city controlled taxis. Frankly, with the new London legislation against Uber, I doubt we'll ever see these ride sharing companies have an easy ride in the future.
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