General Road and Highway Discussion

[ijmorlan]

It's called non-mechanical coupling. The MATRA/Aramis project proved the concept with a rubber tired peoplemover system in France in the 70's.

I would counter-pose the question: why do people automatically assume automation is less safe, when quite the opposite is true? I suppose you've never riden in an elevator or airport peoplemover?

I’m not assuming automation is less safe. Clearly, it can be under the right circumstances. My understanding is that elevators are actually safer than staircases — while elevators have lots of scary failure modes that excite the imagination, these failure modes essentially never happen, whereas tripping on a staircase can be and actually is fatal with noticeable frequency.

But railways have occasional collisions, even with sophisticated signalling systems. These systems, however, are enormously simpler than a distributed control system involving thousands of vehicles working together. It may be possible eventually to make such a concept work, but it’s an enormously difficult problem. Don’t forget the vehicles are usually proposed to have diverse ownership, and, at least at first, to operate in mixed traffic with ordinary human-driven vehicles. The idea that autonomous vehicles are a quick win for increasing road capacity is not in accordance with the state of the art: It might help eventually but not in the next few years. A quick win would be running lots more buses. A busy road has enough traffic in single-occupant vehicles to justify a bus every minute or two. What kind of ridership would be attracted by bus service that frequent?