The Future of Public Transport.

Google is searching for an answer.

“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transport”

– Enrique Penalosa, for­mer Mayor of Bogotá, Colombia

What would be the perfect public transportation system of a city?

Google is searching for an answer.

Getting to the Point.

A future transportation system would require a few building block. A key element would be as close to point to point system as possible, requesting a car from any location to anywhere.

Uber, a company Google has invested in, does just this with taxis. Open the app on your smart phone, (here is a referral code), tap “Set Pickup Location” — your phone knows where you and where available Uber cars are, so Uber can give you an ETA and a journey quote, and then just confirm. Payment for the trip is all done through the app so no cash needs to change hands. The process takes less time than reading this paragraph.

However, there have been a couple of notable problems with Uber’s service. Firstly the drivers — like all taxi systems the customer just does not know who they are getting in a car with. Secondly, there is Uber’s ‘Surge Pricing’ — increasing prices of a journey when there is an increase in demand — also know as capitalism in action.

Getting Rid of the Driver

While drivers need added incentives to work on New Years Eve, computers do not. Google’s Self Driving Car could do this job on New Years Eve, and every other day of the year, all day long — only taking breaks to charge up (more on this later).

“The Google car knows every turn. It never gets drowsy or distracted, or wonders who has the right-of-way.”

There are now a lot more companies producing self driving cars. At CES2014 Google launched the Open Automotive Alliance. This will bring car companies together to make an open standard for Android OS for the car — a Trojan Horse to implement self-driving cars perhaps.

“Google has been road-testing a fleet of more than 20 self-driving Audi’s for the past few years, and has said the technology will be ready for the commercial market by 2017.”

The car need to be Omniscient

So now we have self-driving cars that come on your command, they need to efficiently get from A to B. The cars need to be omniscient of the current (and future) road conditions. Thankfully Google have brought Waze.

Waze is the world’s largest community-based traffic and navigation app.

“Join other drivers in your area who share real-time traffic and road info, saving everyone time and gas money on their daily commute.”

The US Department for Transport has already announced plans for vehicle-to-vehicle communication so cars will be aware of other cars on the road. The integration of Waze into Google Maps could see it potentially installed in to every new car that is part of the Open Automotive Alliance. The potential information that Waze could have at its disposal will only make the service better.

Reimagining of cars and roads.

In the short term the technology described above will be wanted to added to an electric car, such as the Tesla’s Model X — the cars could charge during off-peak hours for the service.

However, in the longer term these changes to the way we imagine public transport in cities will allow us to fundamentally reimagine the car and the road.

In self driving cars, the seats don’t need to face forward, the standard 5 seats and a boot (Americans read: trunk) can be reimagined to provide a more useful space for people to spend their time. The road can also be adapted to this new system, by allowing cars to charge as they drive.

The technology for this is almost ready, are we?

There are just three main hurdles: people’s perception, price and politics.

Are people ready for self driving cars on this scale, we have had driverless trains in London in the form of the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) since 1987. There are fewer variables for the DLR compared to a car on the road, but the system has been proven to work and people have accepted it as normal.

Self-driving cars are safer drivers than a human behind the wheel. Every year, 2 million people die of car accidents; 1,800 in the UK. Of these, 40 percent of accidents occur due to drink driving and 93 percent from inattentiveness. The driver is the problem. By removing the human driver many of the accidents could be avoided.

The current costs of the cars will need to be reduced from their current $150,000 price tag, mass production on the scale needed should help.

The benefits of a such a scheme will be talking thousands of cars of the road. A car spends most of its life parked, this is wasted utility. Parking spaces would become redundant, as would petrol stations. Valuable space would become available in city centres. Lanes that were previously used for parking or buses will become available to reducing congestion. The system takes away the worry about finding a place to park.

Voilà, we have are city wide robo-taxi service. Google is slowly putting the pieces together.

Past the city limits?

This will take care of public transport within cities, but what about city to city travel? Elon Musk has presented two answers. The first is a the hypothetical Hyperloop. The second is the actual roll out of the Tesla Supercharger Network across the Western Europe and North America.

Elon Musk is a fascinating person in his own right, while devising Hyperloop and running Tesla, he has sent reusable rockets into space as CEO of SpaceX and has invested in SolarCity (which is some lovely vertical integration for Tesla). If you’re a fan of TED talks then Elon Musk’s is worth a watch. Elon Musk has just topped The Verge 50 List.

Elon Musk might be Google’s final piece to their puzzle.