A Better Way of Hailing a Taxi

'Smart cities' can implement mechanisms for much more efficient use of taxis by ride sharing which reduces costs for everyone and has multiple advantages.  (Science Daily: An algorithm for taxi sharing)

Research was done in Uruguay to discover a way to optimize hired transport and they developed an algorithm for taxi sharing so glean what you may from the article on how they plan to implement such a thing.  The end user can invoke the algorithm although the actual mechanics of it aren't so clear.

The team reports that, smart cities use information and communications technologies to improve the quality and performance of urban services. "In this way, it is possible to reduce costs, increase efficiency in the use of resources, and allow a more active participation of citizens," they say. Carpooling has come to the fore as an alternative to public transport and conventional taxi use.

- Science Daily

We're not entirely clear on what constitutes a 'smart city' but America doesn't have any since few places do a worse job of efficient, low-cost mass transit.

Taxis are only one stratum of mass transit and not likely the largest one.  That makes the study interesting but not necessarily relevant in the context of an intelligent city because there isn't so much review of 'what problem are we trying to solve?'

It appears highway and traffic planners generally approach things with the thinking, well, we have a lot of cars so how do we deal with them.  There seems to be little or no thinking toward, well, how would we solve this problem if we did not have to contend with all the cars.

How about going with the sci-fi this time that the taxis become the mass transit and POVs (i.e. Privately Operated Vehicles) are no longer permitted in a 'smart city.'  Even the richies take taxis, they just get bigger ones with their limousines and whatnot.  The reason for banning POVs is obvious when you can see miles of cars every day going into the city with only a single person in them.  There's usually an HOV lane (i.e. High Occupancy Vehicles) on city interstate highways but they are not used that much.  Typically there will be one HOV lane and three or more single-passenger lanes beside it.

To ban the POVs, there has to be efficient mass transit for moving large numbers of downtown workers to one or more nexuses in the city from where the legal taxis can take people to their desired locations, presumably optimized by Uruguayan taxi sharing.  That also means the smart city needs to ensure the taxi system works out beyond the limits of the city so people can get to the stations for the mass transit.  Unless people have the same or better convenience with any alternative solution than they have now, they simply won't use it.

We're not so much interested just now in the form of the mass transit between any collection nexus for going to the city and any distribution nexus within the city.  For the sake of our story, we will assume the rail infrastructure in America has been significantly improved so the trains are comfortable, safe, and fast.  Substitute a HyperLoop if you want to get more space age.  Now you can get downtown at 800 mph and maybe you're not even commuting from the same state.

The taxi system as envisioned by the Uruguayan researchers in a smart city without POVs could be one of the best ways to deliver the bacon.  One of the most wasteful uses of a POV is to park it outside the workplace for eight or more hours a day and that's only one example since most of the time your POV probably isn't doing much of anything.  Replacing that with an alternative system has benefits all across the economy although (sob) not so much for automakers but they're going into a new world anyway with autonomous vehicles and most of those are coming from new makers rather than traditional automakers.

Something shocking to fans of autonomous vehicles happened a few days ago when a Google test vehicle was whacked by a car which ran a traffic light and hit it broadside.  The car stood up to it surprisingly well since a hit from the side like that will often kill whomever is on the receiving side.  The shock to people was in thinking autonomous means immunity and that's impossible in a way no-one knows as well as motorcycle riders for whom the First Biker Law is don't let the fuckers hit you.

There's no way for an autonomous car to be immune when there are drunkie lunatics on the roads with them.  Presumably it won't be long before judges start banning drunkies from independently-driven vehicles and pull their license plates if they have one.  It's autonomous or the bus for you, out of control drunkie.

Researchers in Uruguay may be on the right track but I question the practicality without a larger view of the problem.  It seems an obvious thing that there are too many cars on the road.  That's excused by the corporation's pre-digested pap about 'Americans loving their cars' but you won't find many who really do.  If you have a VW and a headlight goes out costing you over a thousand dollars because it takes with it associated of the car's brain boxes, you probably don't love cars too much.  What we love is being able to do something without asking if we can do it.  That doesn't come from the car, it's just one means for it happening.  It does not obviate others despite all the advertising to the contrary.