Hyper Transit

What is Coming in Transit

As self-driving cars become closer to reality so will robo-taxis. This presents a problem for traffic congestion. While vehicle ownership may decrease, the number of vehicles on the road will increase without the available road bandwidth increasing in kind. Also as people are not driving in traffic but attending to other tasks the avoidance of traffic congestion may also decrease. In the far future automated vehicles may be able to share the same amount of road by communicating with each other to be able to drive closer together at higher speed. But, at first it will be a mixed environment of both manually operated and automated vehicles with existing road bandwidth.

Robo-Taxi Economics

Taxis charge by mile but what many forget is that they also charge per minute. In a high traffic situation, low utilization of the vehicle is recovered by the per minute fee. For the passenger this means that the cost of the trip increases. Even for Robo-Taxis there will continue to be a per minute cost of being unable to utilize the vehicle to charge per minute miles. Even if this is not charged to the passenger on a per minute basis, it lowers the utilization of the vehicle which would be reflected in higher per minute charges for everyone. On a much broader scale all vehicles in traffic congestion are paying an extra cost for operating while not moving. At a certain point these costs are absorbed by the state to increase the road bandwidth at a cost for all.

The Dawn of Hyper Transit

The cost of increased traffic congestion combined with the advent of communications connected vehicles presents an opportunity for robo-taxis and mass transit to work in tandem.

Hyper Transit User Experience

A passenger in the vehicle is alerted to the savings of transferring to mass transit for a portion of the journey. If they accept they will be dropped off to the mass transit without any waiting involved at no cost. If their journey requires additional distance after mass transit, they are automatically picked up at the other end without any waiting.

How Hyper Transit Functions

For Hyper Transit to function the current and projected state of traffic congestion along a route as well as the current and projected state of the mass transit system (where the buses or railcars are and will be). From this information along with cost information for waiting and transferring, options can be given to the passenger. Since this information is analyzed on an ongoing basis it automatically supports not only planned mass transit changes but any temporary traffic congestion or mass transit issue. This flexibility extends to special scheduled events that change traffic congestion and mass transit schedules. In an advanced form mass transit could be added on a per needed basis.

Hyper Transit Planning

All three stakeholders have benefits in negotiating the plans for Hyper Transit

• Robo-Taxis — higher mile per minute utilization, increased customer satisfaction
• Government — lower demand for increased road bandwidth (new roads, more lanes)
• Mass Transit — higher revenue paid centrally, advance prediction of who is about to utilize services, ability to predict and add ad-hoc service

Lasting Hyper Transit

While the Hyper Transit helps to avoid initial traffic congestion that may be caused by the availability of inexpensive robo-taxi services, due to its flexibility it also can support future options such as robo-buses and HyperLoops.