A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
Highway spending increased by 90% in 2021. This is one of many reasons why car traffic is growing faster than population growth.
Yeah that would need to be planned together with the city planning and redesign to make mostly walkable cities / suburbs.
Someone mentioned statistics that average passenger number is 1.2. And with an autonomous taxi you wouldn't need to drive your kid somewhere and then pick it up, you'd throw it in the single seat podcar and get notified once it arrived. So for rides where you can't take public transport or a bicycle / velomobile, the passenger number would be closer to 1. Then you'd have double seater podbikes which would also be good for shopping if you have bags of stuff you can put on the seat in front of you.
Then you'd still need 4 passenger vehicles but they would be incredibly rare. Plus delivery trucks for grocery stores etc.
As for embedded energy for a "podcar", it only weighs like 50kg compared to the 2000kg of a car (ok probably more like 150kg). Presuming that autonomous vehicles are vastly more safe than normal cars and almost never crash, you save on infrastructure too. You don't need a heavy windscreen out of glass because you don't need high visibility (glass is required for wipers and because plastic gets dull over time). You only need much smaller motors, batteries, simple bicycle style wheels, lightweight breaks, and no steering wheel and no cockpit. At least for speeds lower than say ~60 kmh (40 mph) you could literally use bicycle hardware.
If what you say is true, and they can fit all the necessary tech into 50kg, or anything under the weight of an average human, then I agree, in efficiency, that (50%+) beats even the best bus scenario (35% at full capacity) according to my calculations. By efficiency, I mean what percentage of carried weight is useful.
Hmm, weight of the podbike is 90kg, so it's probably closer to 200kg as an autonomous vehicle. It would be awesome if it could beat a bus but that is unlikely.
You could make it lighter but it becomes a question of manufacturing cost (lightweight is costly, like composite) and battery size and how often it drives itself to charging and how many solar / wind you need at the charging station.