Good point about efficiency gains becoming a more direct incentive; I look forward to it. However, I doubt that optimization would trend solely toward high capacity vehicles - think of taxis airport taxis as two classes of hireable fare, divided into single user single destination and multiple user single destination. What we need is a multiple user multiple destination system.
Taxis are for in-city travel and occasionally nearby inter-city travel, and the regular car has ended up being fine. They do have a few larger vehicles for big groups, but those are special case vehicles. On average, they tend to get 1-2 people at a time wanting to go places.
Airport taxis tend to be closer to a commute-oriented vehicle. Several people are going from here to somewhere else, so they tend toward 5-6 person vehicles which operate through the night on >1hour long trips.
Corporate transit systems like Microsoft's Connect system are essentially multi-user multi-destination. Those make buses make sense, but there are a relatively small number of buses making set route transfers while a hive of taxis provides last-mile service.
The "Future of Transportation" article from a few days ago [1] suggests that the average vehicle has 1.2 people in it, and that apparently takes commuters into account. Now we must consider: will behaviour change to increase carpooling?
Specifically, what is presently preventing people more people from taking buses to work? (lots do take buses and trains already, but many people drive 10 to 100 minutes)
It could be that a bus doesn't get you /right/ to work. It could be that you would never think to contact everyone in your neighbourhood and figure out that you could buy a bus and run it just for you guys. It could be that the cost of owning and using a car is just low enough that it doesn't really save you anything. It could be an aesthetic sense of independence.
My bet is that this will work out like Microsoft's system. Major transit routes can scale passenger levels up and move efficiently between well placed bus-station/pickup hubs, and armies of taxis will shuttle you to your final destination. Google's bikes are nice, but last-mile service will have to deal with a broader sprawl. Most of them will be focused on getting from hub to delivery and vice versa during morning and evening, but then, what happens during the day? Even weirder: what happens at night?
Taxis are for in-city travel and occasionally nearby inter-city travel, and the regular car has ended up being fine. They do have a few larger vehicles for big groups, but those are special case vehicles. On average, they tend to get 1-2 people at a time wanting to go places.
Airport taxis tend to be closer to a commute-oriented vehicle. Several people are going from here to somewhere else, so they tend toward 5-6 person vehicles which operate through the night on >1hour long trips.
Corporate transit systems like Microsoft's Connect system are essentially multi-user multi-destination. Those make buses make sense, but there are a relatively small number of buses making set route transfers while a hive of taxis provides last-mile service.
The "Future of Transportation" article from a few days ago [1] suggests that the average vehicle has 1.2 people in it, and that apparently takes commuters into account. Now we must consider: will behaviour change to increase carpooling?
Specifically, what is presently preventing people more people from taking buses to work? (lots do take buses and trains already, but many people drive 10 to 100 minutes)
It could be that a bus doesn't get you /right/ to work. It could be that you would never think to contact everyone in your neighbourhood and figure out that you could buy a bus and run it just for you guys. It could be that the cost of owning and using a car is just low enough that it doesn't really save you anything. It could be an aesthetic sense of independence.
My bet is that this will work out like Microsoft's system. Major transit routes can scale passenger levels up and move efficiently between well placed bus-station/pickup hubs, and armies of taxis will shuttle you to your final destination. Google's bikes are nice, but last-mile service will have to deal with a broader sprawl. Most of them will be focused on getting from hub to delivery and vice versa during morning and evening, but then, what happens during the day? Even weirder: what happens at night?
1. http://swiftprt.com/blog/2011/12/the-future-of-ground-based-...