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Driverless Technology Can Bring A Golden Age Of Mass Transit

Read More: https://www.theurbanist.org/2016/07/...-mass-transit/

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Today frequency is expensive and usually becomes available only for lines that already have high ridership.

- If labor is no longer part of the operating cost of a bus, one can scale that cost within a much greater range. One can make a decision that frequency will be constant at a vehicle every 5 minutes all day long and to keep the cost per rider constant, run ever smaller vehicles as demand goes down in off-peak times. Every 5 minutes in rush hour? Yes, still a 115-person 60-foot bus. Every 5 minutes at midnight? Probably an 8-person van or a minibus. At 3am? The same minibus waiting in a layover bay for the first passenger on the line to request it.

- As cities become denser, the demand for people moved per hour per street increases proportionally to the population increase. Street space, however, does not. As established in the supply and demand of street space, while a general purpose lane can move 1,440 people per hour, a bus lane can move more than 4 times as much at 6,000 people per hour! This is a capacity benefit equivalent to building 3 more lanes of road at the cost of not much more than paint. Since other road expansion options are cost-prohibitive at scale it is safe to assume that we will see more space dedicated for high-occupancy vehicles.

- And while bus lanes certainly enable moving more people on the same stretch of road, on many corridors it may make sense to utilize less constrained HOV lanes with a demand-based minimum number of people per vehicle. This would open the gates for mass transit with smaller vehicles – vans, minibuses or even just full cars–and also both public and private use. It’s likely that a significant portion of future mass transit will look like this.

- In conclusion, if mass transit remains cheaper than personal cars, is frequent enough to compete with its level of freedom and travels faster during rush hour, will it still be killed by driverless cars? Not by a longshot. It is more likely to experience a new renaissance with service better than ever before and will help us derive new returns even on pre-existing infrastructure investments, so we should keep funding them.

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