Robocabs Coming to Europe 176
Roland Piquepaille writes "Almost all of us can recall both good and poor memories of taxi rides when we arrived in a city we didn't know. This is why a short article from Spiegel Online, 'Bringing Robot Transportation to Europe,' caught my eye this morning. It briefly describes the European 'CityMobil' project which involves 28 partners in 10 countries at a cost of €40 million. This project plans to eliminate city drivers and three trial sites have already been selected. For example, in 2008, Terminal 5 in London's Heathrow airport will be connected to the car park by driverless electric cars along a 4-kilometer track. Read more for additional pictures and references about this project to make the roads in Europe's cities more efficient."
The future is here (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:another Piquepaille adwhore submission (Score:1, Interesting)
We don't need robots - we need shopping-cart taxis (Score:5, Interesting)
What we need are really cheap taxis that people can rent with a credit or debit card, drive a short distance, and pretty much just jump out and leave them. They need to be about as cheap as shopping carts - and even designed to fold up like shopping carts, so they can be racked conveniently in a compact space.
You'd probably rent the right to keep one at home over-night. You'd drive it a mile or two on surburban streets to a bus or lightrail terminal, where you'd rack it and get your "taxicard" back. Ride the transit, get off within a mile or two of where you need to be. Grab another taxi-cart, insert your taxicard, drive to your final destination. Rack it up with dozens or hundreds of others in the taxicart stall, and get your taxicard back again.
Reverse that, when going home. Each Taxicart stand would have extra taxicarts, and a computer system would note when a stand runs out completely, so that a couple of extras could quickly be delivered there. In the rare case that you arrive somewhere with an empty taxicart rack, you can punch a button to have one delivered, and get a credit for your inconvenience of having to wait.
The taxicart would be all electric, with maybe a 15 mile range, probably about 25mph maximum speed. It would re-charge while racked up. It'd also have a small tank of water - in the summer that'd be frozen (while on the rack) to provide maybe half an hour's air conditioning. In the winter, it'd be heated, for about the same duration of heat.
It'd be computer tracked with wireless and GPS - so the central computer could track units that get stalled. If you need to go somewhere without a rack, and leave the cart there, you could punch a button and pay to have it picked up - trucks would drive around just for that purpose - and again get your taxicard back. It'd have a plug too, so you could charge it up if necessary.
Re:Already done (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't know where you live
For the rest this topic is IMHO pretty much crap, because a taxi brings you from anyware to anyware and even more from door to door. Don't think that these pilot projects are getting anyware close to that. What most airports need is a railway connection with the downtown they belong to. But because all around the world the taxi operators (not the drivers but the license holders) are one big mafia with good connections into local politics, that hardly happens anywhere.
Yes, I know the many exceptions (Amsterdam, Tokio, Heathrow), but I know 10x more cities (Singapore, Toronto, La Guardia, Denver, Vancouver, Mexico City, etc.) where you can absolutely forget it to have decent public transport from the airport to city center. In many of those cities a subway/metro/lightrail system comes even close to the airport, but just doesn't bridge the gap of "the last mile".
Already done in Malaysia (Score:4, Interesting)
This train of course runs on a set track but it does illustrate the idea.
I think this is a good development. I share the optimism of many experts who suggest we are already at or near peak oil. Currently we produce about 85 million barrels per day and at this point Saudi Aramco has admitted Ghawar is in decline up to 8% and the country as a whole is declining 2%. They join Kuwait which announced last November that Bergan is in decline. The next largest fields are Canatarrel and DaQing and these are in about a 14% decline along with Bergan.
These top four 4 feilds collectivly produce about 12-15% of the worlds conventional oils and they just illustrate the problem. Most countries and most oil fields are presently in decline.
The Jack#2 well announced by Cheveron last week may hearld in a new field potentially with 3-15 billion barrels. If so then this feild may be able to produce 750,000 barrels per day by the 2010-2015 time frame.
By 2015 if we subscribe to the idea that we're going to lose 5% production per year from the current 85 million barrels produced per day, then by 2015 we'll be short well over 15 million barrels of Oil per day (BOPD) of production compared to today. Tar Sands may add 2.2 million BOPD or even more. The Cheveron/Devon discovery may add almost another 1 million. But 85-85*(0.95^10) is a loss of 31 million BOPD and thus with this rough rough calculation I've already factored in everything we are likely going to be able to do and still some.
The bottom line is we need to cut consumption in a big way and the sooner the better. A HUGE percentage of the liquid fuels consummed, especially in the USA, is totally wasted. SUV"s sit six (6) abreast in grid lock traffic with their stereos cranked up and their air conditioners blasting. If we were to factor in the waste of people's lives - spending hours commuting to a job that may amount to little more than beauracratic paper shuffling, this alone might be considered the crime of the century.
But what we are doing to our planet and our future is even worse. All of that fuel wasted while commuting (often 1 person to a truck) is not available for useful purposes like industrial, chemical feedstocks, or by farmers to produce food.
Robocabs, if they are fuel efficient and small and sized for the job are an obvious answer.
Currently the USA burns over 20 million barrels of oil per day. If we get the SUV's off the road and replace them with a "Jonny cab" (from Total Recall - its a RoboCab) then we save lives because we get stupid drivers away from behind the wheel, we cut commuting time because the commute can be organised in a far more efficient manner than just plain old grid lock, and we might save enough fuel to save our precious butts in the process.
The thing is this fuel crisis is likely to be fully recognised as the beginning of a fundamental change to the human condition by 2010. Its still a few months to a few years off. Oil prices in the $70 range are the harbinger of things to come. We're ok for a short while. Next year we might not be so lucky.