Recently in Futurism Category

Autoblog tells me about the Toyota i-ROAD :

"According to Toyota, the "i-ROAD takes the company closer to its goal of creating the ultimate range of eco cars." As you're surely aware, that range of eco cars includes the enormously successful Prius family, but this new machine is nothing like the hybrid hatchback. And it's not even a car – Toyota calls the i-ROAD a Personal Mobility Vehicle.

Toyota's i-ROAD Concept, which debuts at this week's Geneva Motor Show, is adorned with just three wheels, meaning it's just as much a motorcycle as it is a car, and the driver and passenger sit in tandem style instead of side-by-side. This arrangement allows for a very thin 850mm width, which is about the same as a large motorcycle. Because the cockpit is enclosed, the occupants don't need helmets, nor are they open to the elements outside.

Also like a traditional two-wheeler, the i-ROAD tilts through the turns and when driving on uneven surfaces. Toyota says its computer-controlled Active Lean technology automatically balances the vehicle with no input from the driver.
"

This is of course cool technology, and we have been awaiting skinny cars for a long time (even before GM's Lean Machine). Even without automation, this could add significant capacity and safety to road networks, as well as providing space conservation and energy reduction. Some videos follow. When will Toyota (or anyone) mass produce this so the costs are below those of passenger cars.

Mary Meeker's annual Internet Trends slideshow: 2012 KPCB Internet Trends Year-End Update

Nice slides on Asset-Heavy vs. Asset-Light dealing with transportation.

WAMU reports @ Transportation Nation: Prediction: D.C. Area Highway and Transit Crowding Will Get Worse : "

The Washington metropolitan region faces worsening traffic congestion and transit crowding as its population and job growth expand over the next three decades, according to a forecast released on Wednesday by a regional planning group."

Another scare forecast from another Metropolitan Planning Organization. In general when reading these studies:

1. Will behavior not change in response to anything?

2. Will technology not change?

3. Will policy not change?

(On the positive side, they do use a 45 cumulative opportunity accessibility measure for transit).

Now @ streets.mn Good Ideas in Transportation – A Streetstorm

Sky Mall is full of useful products, those which we ask "how could we live without?". To wit, from my most recent travels, the following transportation products were on offer:

Carlashes (To bring the automobile anthropomorphic into the real world)

Street Strider (to combine exercise with travel, since we don't have anything which does that already) [This is not so terrible, I suppose for the kinesthetically challenged]

Skate sail (called by Gadling the worst SkyMall product ever)

Orbit wheels

I wrote more about Accessibility Futures : @ | streets.mn.

Recently published, and summarized in CTS Research E-News: Using accessibility to evaluate future planning scenarios:

"Understanding the interdependent relationship between transportation and land use is important for planning the future growth of cities. Recognizing how this relationship affects accessibility—the ability of people to reach the destinations that meet their needs and satisfy their wants—can help policymakers and planners make decisions that optimize a city's efficiency, livability, and economic competitiveness.

In a study funded by the Minnesota Department of Transportation, researchers from the Department of Civil Engineering compared a set of planning scenarios for the Twin Cities metropolitan area using accessibility as a performance measure. Associate Professor David Levinson, undergraduate research assistant Paul Anderson, and graduate student Pavithra Parthasarathi used the scenarios to evaluate the accessibility of various land use and transportation network combinations.

The researchers analyzed the accessibility of 60 different scenarios, including combinations of six land-use scenarios and 10 highway and transit networks. The land-use scenarios included existing 2010 conditions, projected 2030 conditions, and various combinations of centralized and decentralized population and employment conditions.

Highway networks used in the scenarios included 2010 conditions, projected 2030 conditions, an ideal freeflow network with no congestion, and a hypothetical diamond lane network that added high-occupancy toll lanes to all freeways inside the I-494/694 beltway. Transit networks ranged from 2010 conditions to projected 2030 conditions to a 'retro' network that added all 1931 rapid transit streetcar routes to the 2030 network. 

In terms of land use, results show that centralized employment and centralized population had the highest accessibility across all networks, resulting in more access to jobs and labor as well as shorter commute times. The researchers found that fully centralized growth produced about 20 to 25 percent more accessibility than the projected 2030 scenario, depending on the accompanying transportation network.

Of the transportation networks, the researchers found that the freeflow network had the highest accessibility—20 percent more than the projected 2030 network—followed by the diamond lane network.

At first, the researchers say, it would be easy to choose the land use and transportation network combination with the highest accessibility as the future planning goal. However, the scenario of centralized population and employment on a freeflow network—while ideal for accessibility—is not likely to be cost-effective or feasible under current conditions.

Instead, the researchers say, these study results could be used to help prioritize future investments and land-use strategies based on how accessibility-effective they are—how much accessibility they deliver per dollar of investment.

A final report on the project, Using Twin Cities Destinations and Their Accessibility as a Multimodal Planning Tool (MnDOT 2012-05), is available on the CTS website."

I get to talk about Flying Cars and Transportation Technology for about 8 seconds in this 3:40 Greater MSP video: The Future of Greater MSP’s Cultural and Physical Environment

(Just don't call it the Twin Cities anymore)
((The interview was ~ 30 minutes, I talked about lots of other cool things as well, they just survive on the cutting room floor))

Comments on Looking Ahead Fifty Years by Roger W. Babson (revised edition) c. 1942, 1948

Roger W. Babson was an investor, serial college founder, and 1940 Prohibition Party Candidate for President of the United States. I just read (and skimmed) his book "Looking Ahead Fifty Years" from the early 1940s acquired from a second-hand book shop some years ago. Much of it is quite accurate, identifying the competition between communism and capitalism as a defining tension. Much of his commentary on business vs. labor and macroeconomics would still be current today (in short, we have learned very little in 70 years, though he doesn't quite get rational expectations.). His admonitions to "Diversify!" put him right up there with modern personal financial advisors. But there are some really (in retrospect) amusing bits:

p. 22 "Rule Three: Invest in companies which are not dependent on high tariffs and would not suffer from European or Asiatic competition in the years ahead. A thoroughly reorganized traction company in a large city would qualify, while a textile company would not."

[For the kiddies: traction is an old-timey name for streetcar, interurban, and other electric railways. They used to be publicly traded, and profitable.]

Other forecasts are quite good:

p. 29

"Within the next fifty years practically all mail and most of the express will be carried by airplanes. What a standard commercial plane is developed, the depreciation charges can be reduced so that the cost of carrying passengers and light freight will be less by plane than by rail. When this comes at least one third of the railroad mileage will be scrapped."

Some of today's planning complaints are not so new:

p. 56 "Fifty years ago Main Street was made up of local concerns, owned by the best citizens of the community. These concerns have been largely driven out by the "chains." Every Main Street - in all parts of the country - now looks just the same."

The Hive Mind (via the NY Times) predicts the future:Imagining 2076: Connect Your Brain to the Internet:

"2024: PRACTICAL ROBOT CARS “By 2018, freeway car pool lanes will be opened to robot-driven cars.” Larry Smarr, the founding director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. Readers moved this date 646 times.

2060: FLYING CARS “By 2040, more people will use personal air vehicles for their daily commute than cars.”
Sebastian Thrun, developer of Google’s self-driving car. Readers moved this date 1338 times."

IEEE Spectrum: How Google's Self-Driving Car Works -

This is a nice article, read the whole thing and watch the videos (they are low quality, but the fast forwards and golf carts in motion are cool). The second video includes self-driving golf carts on the Google campus. Campus applications are a logical first step in deploying the technology.

Neal Stephenson on Innovation Starvation :

"... Little has been heard in that vein since. We’ve been talking about wind farms, tidal power, and solar power for decades. Some progress has been made in those areas, but energy is still all about oil. In my city, Seattle, a 35-year-old plan to run a light rail line across Lake Washington is now being blocked by a citizen initiative. Thwarted or endlessly delayed in its efforts to build things, the city plods ahead with a project to paint bicycle lanes on the pavement of thoroughfares.

...

Today’s belief in ineluctable certainty is the true innovation-killer of our age. In this environment, the best an audacious manager can do is to develop small improvements to existing systems—climbing the hill, as it were, toward a local maximum, trimming fat, eking out the occasional tiny innovation—like city planners painting bicycle lanes on the streets as a gesture toward solving our energy problems. Any strategy that involves crossing a valley—accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance—will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done. ..."

A few weeks ago I discussed when we should leave for the stars. Some recent discussion on related topics (are speeds of travel continuing to increase?):

Kevin Kelly at The Technium: Plateau of Progress: "This slide from a presentation by George Whitesides the CEO of Virgin Galactic, plots the log of the top speed of human vehicle by year. For the past couple of centuries, the top speed was increasing steadily, at a Kurzweilian rate. But in the last few decades, the top speed of a human vehicle (a space probe traveling at 14,000 miles per hour) has plateaued. But, notes Whitesides, if we could resume ten fold increases in speed (like we have in computers!) we could reach the speed of light by 2060 (the vertical red line on the right). That would make interstellar travel feasible (and Virgin Galactic very happy!)"

Reihan Salam writes about Peter Theil and the end of the future: "In his National Review article, Thiel takes this “end of the future” in a number of interesting directions. Early on, he discusses the slowdown in energy innovation":

When tracked against the admittedly lofty hopes of the 1950s and 1960s, technological progress has fallen short in many domains. Consider the most literal instance of non-acceleration: We are no longer moving faster. The centuries-long acceleration of travel speeds — from ever-faster sailing ships in the 16th through 18th centuries, to the advent of ever-faster railroads in the 19th century, and ever-faster cars and airplanes in the 20th century — reversed with the decommissioning of the Concorde in 2003, to say nothing of the nightmarish delays caused by strikingly low-tech post-9/11 airport-security systems. Today’s advocates of space jets, lunar vacations, and the manned exploration of the solar system appear to hail from another planet. A faded 1964 Popular Science cover story — “Who’ll Fly You at 2,000 m.p.h.?” — barely recalls the dreams of a bygone age.

The official explanation for the slowdown in travel centers on the high cost of fuel, which points to the much larger failure in energy innovation. Real oil prices today exceed those of the Carter catastrophe of 1979–80. Nixon’s 1974 call for full energy independence by 1980 has given way to Obama’s 2011 call for one-third oil independence by 2020. Even before Fukushima, the nuclear industry and its 1954 promise of “electrical energy too cheap to meter” had long since been defeated by environmentalism and nuclear-proliferation concerns. One cannot in good conscience encourage an undergraduate in 2011 to study nuclear engineering as a career. “Clean tech” has become a euphemism for “energy too expensive to afford,” and in Silicon Valley it has also become an increasingly toxic term for near-certain ways to lose money. Without dramatic breakthroughs, the alternative to more-expensive oil may turn out to be not cleaner and much-more-expensive wind, algae, or solar, but rather less-expensive and dirtier coal.

Warren Buffett massively capitalized on both of these trends with his $44 billion investment, most made in late 2009, in BNSF Railway — making it the largest non-financial company in the Berkshire Hathaway portfolio. Understandably, the Oracle of Omaha proclaimed “an all-in wager on the economic future of the United States” and downplayed any doubts he might have harbored. For present purposes, it suffices to note that 40 percent of railroad freight involves the transport of coal, and that railroads will do especially well if the travel and energy consumption patterns of the 21st century involve a regression to the past.

In the past decade, the unresolved energy challenges of the 1970s have broadened into a more general commodity shock, which has been greater in magnitude than the price spikes of the two world wars and has undone the price improvements of the previous century. In the case of agriculture, at least, technological famine may lead to real old-fashioned famine. The fading of the true Green Revolution — which increased grain yields by 126 percent from 1950 to 1980, but has improved them by only 47 percent in the years since, barely keeping pace with global population growth — has encouraged another, more highly publicized “green revolution” of a more political and less certain character. We may embellish the 2011 Arab Spring as the hopeful by-product of the information age, but we should not downplay the primary role of runaway food prices and of the many desperate people who became more hungry than scared. [Emphasis added]

I, Cringely The Final Frontier :

"For all but the last century man has functioned strictly in two dimensions, traveling the earth and seas but only marveling at the air. Invention of the airplane changed that a little, yet today less than a quarter of a percent of Americans know how to fly. What if we all could fly? A decade from now we just might.

Technology exists today for people to fly by themselves, quickly, quietly, with little or no pollution, from anywhere to anywhere in any weather, asleep or awake, because the real pilot is a computer. A decade from now, thanks to Mooreʼs Law, this technology will be the price of a car.

What would the world be like if you did not need a road or even a driveway? How would demographics change? Would our crumbling infrastructure still need repair?

Meet George Jetson. He has an electric aerial vehicle that takes him where he needs to go. But he does not fly it; the vehicle flies itself, knowing to the centimeter where it is anywhere on earth, lighting like a dandelion fluff with thirty thousand other such fluffs over a major city, each going its own way yet aware of all the others. This is where transportation is headed."

Working paper:

• Anderson, Paul, David Levinson, and Pavithra Parthasarathi (2011) Accessibility Futures. (working paper)

This study uses accessibility as a performance measure to evaluate a matrix of future land use and network scenarios for planning purposes. Previous research has established the coevolution of transportation and land use, demonstrated the dependence of accessibility on both, and made the case for the use of accessibility measures as a planning tool. This study builds off of these findings by demonstrating the use of accessibility-based performance measures on the Twin Cities Metropolitan Area. This choice of performance measure also allows for transit and highway networks to be compared side-by-side. A zone to zone travel time matrix was computed using SUE assignment with travel time feedback to trip distribution. A database of schedules was used on the transit networks to assign transit routes. This travel time data was joined with the land use data from each scenario to obtain the employment, population, and labor accessibility from each TAZ within specified time ranges. Tables of person- weighed accessibility were computed for 20 minutes with zone population as the weight for employment accessibility and zone employment as the weight for population and labor accessibility. The person-weighted accessibility results were then used to evaluate the planning scenarios. The results show that centralized population and employment produce the highest accessibility across all networks.

Palo Alto Online reports Panel finds flaws in high-speed-rail forecasts:

Panel finds flaws in high-speed-rail forecasts
Peer-review group calls for changes in California rail authority's ridership model

by Gennady Sheyner
Palo Alto Weekly Staff

The California agency charged with building America's first high-speed-rail system has been using a flawed forecasting model to predict ridership for the proposed system, a peer-review panel concluded in a report that largely confirms previous criticism from transportation experts and rail watchdogs.

The five-member panel, which consists of professors and transportation experts, found that the ridership model, while "generally well founded and implemented," suffers from a series of major flaws. These include insufficient consideration of socioeconomic factors; a bias in the survey data used as a basis for the model; and a failure to distinguish between short and long trips when calculating the impact of schedule delays.

The highly technical report, which was released in late July and covers the panel's findings and recommendations during its January to March review period, confirms earlier findings from the UC Berkeley Institute of Transportation Studies and from the Palo Alto-based watchdog group Californians Advocating Responsible Rail Design (CARRD). Both groups had criticized the methodology used by the consulting firm Cambridge Systematics and argued that the California High-Speed Rail Authority's estimates of the number of people who would ride the rail system are too flawed to be used for setting policy.

The panel, which reports to rail authority CEO Roelof Van Ark, is chaired by Frank Koppelman, professor emeritus of civil engineering at Northwestern University. It also includes Kay W. Axhausen, a professor at the Institute for Transport Planning and Systems in Zurich, Switzerland; Billy Charlton from the San Francisco County Transportation Authority; Eric Miller, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Toronto; and Kenneth A. Small, a professor emeritus in economics at University of California, Irvine.

The panel calls Cambridge's ridership model "ambitious" and representing a "significant improvement in practice in several respects." But the report also notes that "there are important technical deficiencies in the model and the documentation thereof." It encourages the rail authority to lower its projections.

"The Panel has significant concerns about the model formulation, primarily with respect to specification that should have been addressed during previous work," the report states. "Pending improvements to the model, we recommend that any use of the model include some steps to make the demand forecasts more conservative, especially in forecasts for financial (investment and risk) analysis."

...

This is the right set of people to review the forecasts. The recommendation to the rail authority lower its projections is the critical one. The forecasts were unfortunately not conducted in a technically objective or neutral way. Lowering the forecasts however might result in a different outcome in an objective B/C analysis. Let's see whether that comes to pass.

Tyler Cowan, an economist at George Mason, writes about driverless cars ..

Regulations Hinder Development of Driverless Cars - NYTimes.com:

"IN the meantime, transportation is one area where progress has been slow for decades. We’re still flying 747s, a plane designed in the 1960s. Many rail and bus networks have contracted. And traffic congestion is worse than ever. As I argued in a previous column, this is probably part of a broader slowdown of technological advances.

But it’s clear that in the early part of the 20th century, the original advent of the motor car was not impeded by anything like the current mélange of regulations, laws and lawsuits. Potentially major innovations need a path forward, through the current thicket of restrictions. That debate on this issue is so quiet shows the urgency of doing something now."

(Via David King.)

See also: Marginal Revolution

Ground-effect robot could be key to future high-speed trains:

"Source: IEEE Spectrum — May 10, 2011

Japanese prototype of a train that levitates on cushions of air (credit: Tohoku University)

A robotic prototype of a free flying ground-effect vehicle has been developed by a Japanese research group at Tohoku University.

The ground-effect vehicle takes advantage of fast-moving air and uses stubby little wings to fly just above the ground, like a maglev train. The vehicle is controlled more like an airplane than a train; the operator has to deal with pitch, roll, and yaw as well as a throttle.

The researchers are looking to use this robot to generate a dynamic model of how vehicles like these operate, which they hope to apply to a manned experimental prototype train that can travel at 200 kilometers per hour in a U-shaped concrete channel that keeps it from careening out of control."

(Via Kurzweil.)

Speaking of Aerotropolis, Paleofuture links to Urban Airport of the Future (1926): ""

The fine people at Popular Mechanics recently published a book that deserves a prominent place on every retrofuturist's bookshelf. The Wonderful Future That Never Was by Gregory Benford looks at technological predictions that appeared in the pages of Popular Mechanics from 1903 until 1969. The prediction below was an attempt to address what was seen as an inevitable problem; how to land personal aircraft in busy cities. The solution here was to erect a gigantic landing port supported atop four skyscrapers.

I have not read the book yet, but it looks great.

Beyond the Beyond (Bruce Sterling) reports on Architecture Fiction: Pixel City - Procedurally generated city. I want to live here.

Some literature on procedurally generated networks (this city seems to be on a grid):

• Guoning Chen, Gregory Esch, Peter Wonka, Pascal Mu ̈ller, Eugene Zhang (2008) "Interactive Procedural Street Modeling"

  This paper addresses the problem of interactively modeling large street networks. We introduce an intuitive and flexible modeling framework in which a user can create a street network from scratch or modify an existing street network. This is achieved through designing an underlying tensor field and editing the graph representing the street network. The framework is intuitive because it uses tensor fields to guide the generation of a street network. The framework is flexible because it allows the user to combine var- ious global and local modeling operations such as brush strokes, smoothing, constraints, noise and rotation fields. Our results will show street networks and three-dimensional urban geometry of high visual quality.

• Carlos A. Vanegas, Daniel G. Aliaga, Bedrich Benes and Paul Waddell (2009) "Visualization of Simulated Urban Spaces: Inferring Parameterized Generation of Streets, Parcels, and Aerial Imagery". IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VISUALIZATION AND COMPUTER GRAPHICS, VOL. 15, NO. 3, MAY/JUNE 2009.

  Urban simulation models and their visualization are used to help regional planning agencies evaluate alternative transportation investments, land use regulations, and environmental protection policies. Typical urban simulations provide spatially distributed data about a number of inhabitants, land prices, traffic, and other variables. In this article, we build on a synergy of urban simulation, urban visualization, and computer graphics to automatically infer an urban layout for any time step of the simulation sequence. In addition to standard visualization tools, our method gathers data of the original street network, parcels, and aerial imagery and uses the available simulation results to infer changes to the original urban layout. Our method produces a new and plausible layout for the simulation results. In contrast with previous work, our approach automatically updates the layout based on changes in the simulation data and, thus, can scale to a large simulation over many years. The method in this article offers a substantial step forward in building integrated visualization and behavioral simulation systems for use in community visioning, planning, and policy analysis. We demonstrate our method on several real cases using a 200-Gbyte database for a 16,300-km2 area surrounding Seattle.

• Chao Yang, Peng Zeng and Yi Wang (2010) "Modeling the Evolution of Urban Road Networks: A case study on Pudong New Area in Shanghai" 2010 International Conference on Intelligent Computation Technology and Automation.
  

  Based on complex network theory, this paper proposes a topological evolution model for urban road network. The model also considers the external factors that affect network growth such as population density and economic index, which makes it flexible to adjust the influencing factors while for different types of networks. Furthermore, it’s feasible
  to visualize the differences with the real data in ArcGIS. Then, a case study of road network in Shanghai Pudong New Area is given, several common indicators are calculated. The results show good agreement between real data and model to verify the model is correct and valid.

I recently saw the film Transatlantic Tunnel (from 1935) (apparently also called The Tunnel) on Netflix. It was terrible in the sense that almost every movie from before 1936 was terrible since people didn't really know how to make decent films (except It Happened One Night), but it is also interesting as a period piece.

All sorts of cool technologies are displayed, including Transatlantic Aviation (in single person aircraft), wireless video communication, as well as various plot devices (Allanite Steel, some new drilling technologies etc.). Apparently, after the war (some more prescience here), there is some alliance of the English Speaking Peoples, and Parliament and Congress are connected via Video technology.

The plot (and I am not giving anything away here) is that an engineer-entrepreneur who recently completed the Channel Tunnel (in the 1950s, only off by 40 years or so, this is science fiction), wants to build a tunnel from England to America. He must obtain financing.

His career takes all his time and destroys his marriage. There is an "unforeseen volcano" in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, requiring a detour, which costs money. The evil financiers want a greater stake in the tunnel in exchange for money (i.e. all of it). It is not terribly unreasonable in the financial side of things, engineers naive about the ways of finance, yet each side needing the other to build infrastructure.

But for the "Unforeseen Volcano", it isn't too unreasonable either as a bit of near future science fiction. Yet, surely if they had those other technologies, they should have been able to detect a Volcano. You know, perhaps they took a submarine to survey the route before digging?

The bigger question is: Why has not something seemingly so obvious (a Transatlantic Tunnel) yet to be built, or even seriously contemplated by serious people? I know, it would have very high fixed costs unless we can somehow reduce tunnelling costs, but this is where R&D might be quite valuable, since there are lots of potential tunnels which are unbuilt due to high initial construction costs. If we could get robots to due the difficult (laborious) bits, drilling might be much, much cheaper.

The Star Tribune reports on a recent local "scare forecast" (notice the "scare quotes") that local agencies have put out about how traffic will get remorselessly worse. Rush hour traffic: Get ready to crawl. I get quoted saying it won't be so bad.

Clearly MnDOT won't be spending as much on new construction, but there is no evidence individuals will travel as much, in the peak, in 20 years, as they do now, (peak travel , etc.) The claim is the region is growing, which might be true, but I suspect optimism here (as we approach a fifth full month with snow on the ground).

If congestion gets worse, you would expect people to adapt. Cars will be better (and hopefully autonomous), increasing capacity (both in terms of closer spacing and narrower lanes). Roads will be priced, decreasing peak demand. Telecommunications technology will get better, finally enabling travel-substitution for a large share of the population.

If we do nothing different, things will be worse. Knowing that, why would we do nothing different?

J Walter Thomson ad agency has trend spotters (sounds like a fun job), who have put together a slide-show: 100 Things to Watch in 2011

Key transportation items:

5. Auto Apps

39. Green luxury cars

57. The New Mobility Industry

70. P-to-P Car Sharing

84. Space Travel Goes Private

96. Urban Industrial Parks

An interesting list, a bit-obsessed about London, Celebrities, and Brazil otherwise.

Masdar opens its first PRT, as shown in this CNN report hosted on the prtconsulting.com website. Alas the report says the system is being "scaled down". (I would have been curious to see this thing scaled up, and whether cars that work in isolation still work in a more complex environment).

Nevertheless, it is interesting how PRT and autonomous vehicles are now almost the same thing. It looks like we have transportation convergence between cars and transit.

Why robot cars (autonomous vehicles), as demonstrated by Google this week (and randomly captured by Robert Scoble in the video above), matter.

1. Safety - cars would be safe if only there weren't drivers behind the wheel. Driverless cars seldom get distracted or tired, have really fast perception-reaction times, know exactly how hard to break, and can communicate (potentially) with vehicles around them with Mobile Ad Hoc Networks. But this improves not only vehicle safety, it improves the safety and environment for pedestrians and bicyclists.

2. Capacity - 'bots can follow other driverless cars at a significantly reduced distance, and can stay within much narrower lanes with greater accuracy. Capacity at bottlenecks should improve, both in throughput per lane and the number of lanes per unit roadwidth. These cars still need to go somewhere, so we need capacity on city streets as well as freeways, but we save space on parking (see below), and lane width everywhere. If we can reduce lane width, and have adequate capacity, we can reduce paved area and still see higher throughput. Most roadspace is not used most of the time now.

3. Vehicle diversity - Narrow and specialized cars are now more feasible with computers driving and increased overall safety. Especially if we move to cloud commuting (as below), we can have greater variety, and more precision in the fleet, with the right size car for the job.

4. Travel behavior - if the cost of traveling per trip declines (drivers need to exert less effort, and lose less effective time, since they can do something else), we would expect more trips (my taxi can take me wherever) and longer trips and more trips by robocar.

5. Land use - if acceptable trip distances increases, we would expect a greater spread of origins and destinations, (pejoratively, sprawl), just as commuter trains enable exurban living or living in a different city.

6. Parking - my car can drop me off at the front door, and go fairly remotely to park, so we don't need to devote valuable space to parking ramps (garages) (we still need space, it is just far away), searching for parking is also less critical. On street parking can be abolished.

7. Transportation disadvantaged - children, the physically challenged, and others who cannot or should not drive, are now enabled. Parents, friends, and siblings need not shuttle children around, the vehicle can do that by itself. The differences between transit and private vehicles begin to collapse. We can serious consider giving passes to driverless taxis for the poor, since costs should drop with lower labor costs, and if the point below holds, paratransit services become much less expensive as well.

8. Reduced auto ownership - cloud commuting becomes possible.People no longer need to own a car, they can instead subscribe to a car sharing service.

From NY Times Smarter Than You Think - Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic : ""

In the comments, Yonah Freemark says

"But I don't think the evidence is there right now to portray CAHSR's estimates as "unreasonable.""

Now I don't know what truly constitutes unreasonable, it depends on how you reason. By my reasoning, the forecasts are high compared to reference-class lines. Of course we do not know for certain what the actual ridership will be in 30 years, just as we don't really know anything 'for certain' about the future. I would however lay money they miss their claimed forecast. This is something that is missing in travel demand forecasting, accountability.

To that end, I will bet $1000 that in 2030 CA HSR doesn't meet current ridership projections as posted currently on their website: "88 - 117 million passengers annually by 2030 for the entire 800-mile high-speed train network". Any takers? Maybe on http://www.longbets.org/ ...
Contingent only on their completion of the project.

(I suppose we could have another bet on whether the line actually gets completed by 2030. I would bet no, but am less certain about this folly being avoided.)

My friend PB asked "can you think of some way to bet [as in to make money, not claim "I told you so"] the CA High Speed Rail (if built) will be a fiasco? Fiasco in the sense of waste of money/albatross on the state due to operational costs, cost overruns, level of subsidy per usage unit etc ... so again not fiasco as in safety, operational downtime etc."

Aside from one-on-one bets, about which PB notes " I dont like making multi-year bets because of the mental overhead and some other weird asymmetries", one would have to set up a betting pool on various operational characteristics, e.g. Policy Analysis Markets.

I have never done that, but am seriously considering setting something up for travel demand forecasts.

Unfortunately there is no obvious company to short (except maybe CAHSR bonds when they come out depending on whether the state is guarantor) (I assume you can short bonds like stocks, but I don't know if the market exists for 20 years out). The consultants and contractors will all make out like bandits. If someone is fool enough to build it privately, short them.

My sense is forecasters should be required to post bonds about the accuracy of their forecast. Either that, or they should have to be paid in stock for the facility they are forecasting. This would greatly reward honesty and punish optimism bias and strategic misrepresentation.

On The Path To Pike's Peak: New Video of Stanford's Robot Car

It will be one of the more daring feats of robotic driving ever attempted: Stanford's autonomous car, an Audi named Shelley, will race up Pike's Peak at breakneck speeds. T

The Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS) is also working with Volkswagen to produce a self-parking car.

Tom Vanderbilt has curated the Nimble Cities project at Slate.

There are some good ideas (nothing I haven't seen before, unfortunately, though lots that has yet to be implemented). Clearly the voting was gamed by at least some of the participants. ("Humanity's Highway to a Sustainable Society Submitted by George Schrader"). I am pleased to see the Land Value Tax ("eliminate the property tax") getting some love (if not some gamesmanship), as well as ultra-narrow cars. Lots of attention for bicycles (3 of top 10), especially given their current mode share in US cities.

Reallocating roadspace (modally, directionally, by vehicle type, dynamically, etc.) needs far more attention than it gets.