"As we move to higher robocar density"
There's a chasm that seems to keep getting jumped without looking at the distance between the edges.
A lot of your replies are very pie-in-the-sky: "half-width 1-2 person vehicles" providing "15x more capacity,""a 500lb car that doesn’t need to worry about being crushed" that's also "really cheap," that "it’s not hard to compete with a regular [transit] fare,""the private trips are so cheap, and the roads not that loaded,""small robotaxis,""Lined up on the [train] platform are 22 12’ long robocars. Or possibly 44 on both sides, or if you do this right, 88 because they are 4’ wide and you get two abreast,""special robocar platforms one level below...packed densely with cars."
So, here I am talking about realistic considerations over a timeframe of the next 5-10 years when robocars should conceivably become a reality, and you're replying with "solutions" that are maybe 15-30 years out (and that's being optimistic). There's a 10 to 20 year sliding window gap or chasm, here. Now it's fun to be speculative that far out, but I don't think it serves the promotion and advancement of self-driving cars in the near-term too well.
As for dedicated ROW only being used "every 15 to 30 minutes," again that may be the case in suburbia, but many stretches of dedicated ROW in an urban area are used by a vehicle (usually a train) about every 5 minutes. e.g. both BART and the Muni Metro under Market St. in SF, and most of the central section of the London Underground. At even only 75 to 100 passengers in each vehicle (at the LOW end of capacity), that's 900 to 1200 passengers per hour, per system, in each direction. So in SF since two systems are stacked that's actually 1800 to 2400 pasengers per hour, or 3600 to 4800 when both directions are combined. Handling that on the above surface road with robocars, plus the existing trafic that's also a lot of transit vehicles, is not something that looks feasible. It's also not credible to suggest re-purposing that undergound ROW for robocars, since there's nowhere to put all the ramps that would be needed to transition them to and from surface streets.
Outside of the Market St. corridor the Muni Metro shares most of its right of way with vehicular traffic. I can easily imagine a near future where the lanes that the Metro runs in, as well as the lanes that BRT will be using on Geary St. and Van Ness Ave, will become dedicated to self-driving vehicles as well as those transit systems. The self-driving vehicles will be able to coordinate with the transit systems, and both will achieve better levels of service without manually driven vehicles interfering in their non-coordinated way in the corridor. This is already somewhat in place on the surface level of Market St. and in the downtown section of the Geary St. corridor where lanes are dedicated to transit and (human driven) taxis. I could even imagine the Sunset tunnel between the Lower Haight and Cole Valley getting paved and allowing self-driving vehicles to share it with the current Metro system, which could reduce a lot of trip times for the self-driving vehicles.
This is once again a place where I see potential synergy between transit and robocars, whereas you more often seem to see opposition between them.
And I hope what you're "writing up in more detail elsewhere" doesn't end up being "Here are MORE reasons robocars are going to mean the end of mass transit," as I think that kind of thing only serves to antagonize, where I see many places where bridges can be built between proponents of both mass transit and robocars.
"As we move to higher robocar density"
There's a chasm that seems to keep getting jumped without looking at the distance between the edges.
A lot of your replies are very pie-in-the-sky: "half-width 1-2 person vehicles" providing "15x more capacity,""a 500lb car that doesn’t need to worry about being crushed" that's also "really cheap," that "it’s not hard to compete with a regular [transit] fare,""the private trips are so cheap, and the roads not that loaded,""small robotaxis,""Lined up on the [train] platform are 22 12’ long robocars. Or possibly 44 on both sides, or if you do this right, 88 because they are 4’ wide and you get two abreast,""special robocar platforms one level below...packed densely with cars."
So, here I am talking about realistic considerations over a timeframe of the next 5-10 years when robocars should conceivably become a reality, and you're replying with "solutions" that are maybe 15-30 years out (and that's being optimistic). There's a 10 to 20 year sliding window gap or chasm, here. Now it's fun to be speculative that far out, but I don't think it serves the promotion and advancement of self-driving cars in the near-term too well.
As for dedicated ROW only being used "every 15 to 30 minutes," again that may be the case in suburbia, but many stretches of dedicated ROW in an urban area are used by a vehicle (usually a train) about every 5 minutes. e.g. both BART and the Muni Metro under Market St. in SF, and most of the central section of the London Underground. At even only 75 to 100 passengers in each vehicle (at the LOW end of capacity), that's 900 to 1200 passengers per hour, per system, in each direction. So in SF since two systems are stacked that's actually 1800 to 2400 pasengers per hour, or 3600 to 4800 when both directions are combined. Handling that on the above surface road with robocars, plus the existing trafic that's also a lot of transit vehicles, is not something that looks feasible. It's also not credible to suggest re-purposing that undergound ROW for robocars, since there's nowhere to put all the ramps that would be needed to transition them to and from surface streets.
Outside of the Market St. corridor the Muni Metro shares most of its right of way with vehicular traffic. I can easily imagine a near future where the lanes that the Metro runs in, as well as the lanes that BRT will be using on Geary St. and Van Ness Ave, will become dedicated to self-driving vehicles as well as those transit systems. The self-driving vehicles will be able to coordinate with the transit systems, and both will achieve better levels of service without manually driven vehicles interfering in their non-coordinated way in the corridor. This is already somewhat in place on the surface level of Market St. and in the downtown section of the Geary St. corridor where lanes are dedicated to transit and (human driven) taxis. I could even imagine the Sunset tunnel between the Lower Haight and Cole Valley getting paved and allowing self-driving vehicles to share it with the current Metro system, which could reduce a lot of trip times for the self-driving vehicles.
This is once again a place where I see potential synergy between transit and robocars, whereas you more often seem to see opposition between them.
And I hope what you're "writing up in more detail elsewhere" doesn't end up being "Here are MORE reasons robocars are going to mean the end of mass transit," as I think that kind of thing only serves to antagonize, where I see many places where bridges can be built between proponents of both mass transit and robocars.