Unacceptability of Current Alternatives to Passenger-Owned Cars

Larger vehicles are more economic and energy efficient than smaller ones.  At highway speeds, most of the energy expended by a car is in the form of air friction.  A bus has less air friction than enough cars to carry all the passengers in it, and the air friction a train encounters is negligible compared with that encountered by enough cars to carry its load.  Also, larger vehicles need fewer drivers per rider carried.  The technology for large transit vehicles exists and is well-developed.


It would be nice to be able to get everybody in large efficient vehicles to get efficiently to their destination, but these large vehicles can't stop at each rider's start and destination.  Getting everybody that "last mile" to and from their thinly spread-out homes is key -- if we can solve that problem, we can then get people within reach of trunk lines of efficient, large-scale transportation that we know how to do well.  Solving the "last mile problem" is key.

In the United States, "jitneys", also known as shared taxis, that is cabs carrying several independent passengers, were quite popular in the early 20th century, but were mostly banned due to pressure from public transportation monopolies.  In many places, particularly the third world, shared cabs are today quite popular.  Due to low wages in the third world, the cost of the driver is low, and due to the vehicles being small, the routes are close together and vehicles come frequently, providing very good service at a low price.  More on Share Taxis


Computer navigation systems are now quite common in cars, the technology is very well-developed.  It should be possible for a rider to call a dispatching service that knows the location of all of a fleet of jitneys, which would issue orders to one of the jitneys that is near the rider and has a spare seat to deviate from its route to pick up the rider and take them toward their destination.  The jitneys would follow no fixed routes, but roam about the suburb following orders from the dispatching service.  The jitneys could go directly to addresses rather than riders having to congregate at stops.  The driver would not know the details of where the jitney is going to go, he would just follow short-term instructions from the navigation system which is being driven by the dispatching computer.

Requesting a ride will be particularly easy because so much of the population already has cell phones, and most cell phones have GPS receivers in them, which could be incorporated into the system, so a rider would call the dispatcher and the dispatcher could instantly see from the GPS where the rider was, then needing to find out only where the rider wanted to go.  More advanced phones such as iPhones and Blackberries could have efficient interfaces for requesting rides to favorite destinations, simplifying the process and cutting down on the expense of operators.  Riders could also request rides from computers at home or at work.


There is no reason one would have to spend an entire trip in a single vehicle.  You could be picked up near your home by a jitney, dropped off at a train station or bus stop, then ride the train or bus express 40 miles at high speed with few stops, then take a jitney the last 2 miles to your destination.  So most of your trip is done efficiently, at high speed, with fewer stops.

If you're not in a hurry, you could get a cheaper cost ride for short distances by taking multiple jitneys.  For an oversimplified example, if you were going about 6 miles northwest and most of the traffic in your neighborhood was east-west and north-south, you could catch one jitney 4 miles west, be dropped at a corner, and picked up by another jitney headed north which will take you to your destination.

If a large amount of the traffic were to eventually shift from driving their own cars to riding this public transit system, we could find ourselves in a situation where most of the freeway traffic is people riding in buses and jitneys, resulting in far fewer vehicles on the freeway for less congestion.


Because a jitney carries many more passengers than a taxicab but many fewer than a bus, the cost of the driver is less problematic than for a taxi driver, but still much more problematic than for a bus or a train driver.  If the jitney drivers are paid as poorly as NYC cab drivers, who I am told work 72 hour weeks, cheat on their taxes, and then take home only $20,000 a year, well, that's just gross.  If they are paid as well as NYC subway drivers, who are paid $55,000 a year and retire with half-pay at 55 years old, the cost of the jitney service would be prohibitive.

The technology for computer-driven vehicles is getting fairly mature.  In 2007, DARPA held an event called the Urban Challenge where university teams built unmanned, robot-driven autonomous vehicles driving a through streets in a neighborhood (actually an abandoned military base) with other traffic and traffic signals.  Six vehicles successfully completed the course.  Computer-driven jitneys could be an extremely cheap way to get riders around.  When traffic is limited, jitneys could just park somewhere, turn off the engine, and wait for someone to want a ride.  It could still take a few years before computer drivers are good enough that we will want to trust them driving around suburban neighborhoods with children and pedestrians in the streets.

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Generally it is vastly preferable, with any new idea, to start small, prove the concept, learn from experience, and grow, rather than make a sudden change.  It is unnecessary to plan a scenario where everyone junks their cars and starts riding jitneys overnight.  Some people will really like their cars and want to continue using them.  Also, raising initial funding a system capable of assuming the entire load of a suburb would be a huge problem.

The biggest reason that people have resistance to this whole idea is that they think I am proposing that everyone will abandon their cars and rely 100% on computer-routed jitneys overnight, and that if that doesn't happen, the entire idea is a failure.  This idea is a success if one can make a computer-routed jitney company profitable, and my assertion is that such a company could be profitable anywhere a taxi company is profitable, which, right now, is basically everywhere.  If one has a company with 30 jitneys operating in a suburb sprawl of a million people, it can move 0.001% of the people there more cheaply than a taxi company with 30 cabs, and make a profit.  It will, at that point, be able to sustain itself and grow to carrying an increasing proportion of the area's total transit load.


There is no reason the jitney service has to be given a monopoly,  We have benefited from allowing UPS and FedEx to compete with the post office, we have multiple cellphone companies operating in the same areas, we have multiple cable TV and internet companies serving the same neighborhoods, we have multiple long-distance bus lines in this country.  Competition will serve the customer better than imposing a monopoly.  Some services might specialize in providing the cheapest service, while others might provide a higher-quality of service, perhaps ensuring faster delivery by taking fewer riders per vehicle, or providing more comfortable seating.

Customers could also negotiate different price schedules -- for a higher price, the computer will place a higher priority on assigning a jitney to deviate to pick you up, and put fewer co-travelers on that jitney since stopping to pick them up / drop them off will slow you down on your way.  People could thus gauge how much of a hurry they're in and decide whether to save time or money on a given trip.


Government is mostly an obstacle to this change.  It was government that killed the jitneys in the early 20th century, many public transport systems have legal monopolies, and to implement this idea nationwide will cost billions of dollars of legal fees.  The main strategy should be to prove the concept in areas where regulation is lax to nonexistent, and then other localities will want the benefit of the service and that will drive the necessary political and legal change.

We have lots of large suburban areas in this country.  To prove the concept of the computer-dispatch jitney, it would be best to find an area that does not have a public transportation monopoly that is going to provide legal barriers to entry.  New York City is out of the question.

One ideal way to get a foothold is doing "para transit".  In many cities the government provides para transit, a subsidized taxi service for people who are medically unable to drive, such as blind people or epileptics.  Computerized jitneys could enormously enhance the quality of service provided by these services, while providing developers a chance to get the bugs out of the system before they have to achieved the efficiency necessary for profit-making competition.  In New York, an eligible rider can get a para transit ride for $2 each way, but they have to reserve a day or two in advance.  Computer routing could greatly reduce the lead time between making a reservation and being picked up.

Once the technology is fully developed and the concept has been proven, I anticipate it will spread to other markets.  For example, in NYC, taxis have a legal monopoly while, for stupid political reasons, the number of permits for cabs is kept so low that only Manhattan and the airports are serviced, leaving Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx virtually without cabs.  I think once the effectiveness of computerized jitneys has been established in other cities in the country, there will be no way to prevent the voters of the outer burroughs from voting to allow this sort of service in their neighborhoods.


One argument I hear against this idea is that people like their cars.  They aren't going to give them up easily.  The answer to that is simple -- 150 years ago, people really liked their horses, and many people preferred animals to machines.  But in the end, nearly everyone gave up their horses, not all at once, but slowly they did.

I feel that while many people absolutely love their cars, for many people owning a car is a big hassle.  Many people, especially women, feel helpless taking their car to a mechanic because they fear being taken advantage of. And it's not a groundless fear.  The median income in the US is about $43,000, with 20% of the population earning less than $18,000.  Brand new, the cheapest cars sell for about $12,000 plus sales tax.  Many people are afraid to buy used cars because they are not competent to deal with problems a used car may have, so buying and insuring a car is an enormous expense for a lot of people.  If a cheap public transport alternative were available, many people will jump at the chance to use it.

Other than the poor, there are people who want to go out drinking sometimes yet are responsible enough not to want to drive home drunk.  People medically unfit for driving, the blind, the elderly, epileptics, would all benefit greatly from this service, as would people too young to drive.


There are a lot of people who drive vehicles for a living, and many of them are in unions, meaning they can organize themselves politically very easily.  They will fight the introduction of computer driven vehicles to our roadways with everything they have.  Another problem is that while computers won't make some mistakes human drivers will (for example, they will never drive drunk), they will have accidents of a sort that human drivers generally won't have.  Lives will be lost, and it will be difficult to sell that to the public as an acceptable sacrifice.  For example, the BART subway system in California originally had robot drivers in the '70's, until a robot malfunctioned, speeding a train up when it should have been slowing it down so that it crashed through the barriers at the end of the line.  Ever since, BART trains all have drivers.