NWA-PCUG Newsletter Article, January 2011
Public Transport Solution
By Wil Wakely, President,
Seniors Computer Group, CA October 2010 issue, Bits and Bytes,
The Official Electronic Newsletter of the SCG

http://www.SCGsd.org
wilw(at)adnc.com (click to email author)

Communications with cell phones, email, faxes and Internet are great, especially with the latest technologies, but another equally important activity in our daily life is transportation: physically getting from place to place. The promise of rapid public transportation for everyone is still only a promise. There is one major link missing: the portal-to-portal link. How do I get from my house or office to the nearest bus stop, or to the grocery store, or Doctor’s office, or neighborhood friend’s house? Until that piece of the transportation puzzle is available, cheap and fast, we probably won’t use public transportation very much. And that makes owning a car mandatory.

Often, good ideas must wait for technology to catch up in order for the idea to be successful. A case in point is the e-book reader which had to wait for small, inexpensive displays and better batteries to be developed before it became commercially viable.

We now have all the technologies in place to provide the last link of the public transport problem: portal-to-portal.

Labor costs are the major expense for almost any service we use. Over the long run, taxi drivers, bus drivers, train engineers, etc. cost much more than the vehicles they operate. Salaries and benefits often exceed $100,000 per year. Computer technology is rapidly allowing us to replace these expensive human operators with systems that sense and react to the surroundings many times per second, much faster than a human, and safer, too. This makes automated driver-less vehicles feasible. (see Google Autonomobile).

So here’s the plan: You press a rapid dial button on your cell phone which connects to a centralized transport (X-Port) computer. The X-Port database and GPS knows who you are, where you are, and your monthly X-Port credit balance. A scheduling program quickly calculates when a local short-range vehicle (Jitney) will arrive at your location and announces the exact time to expect it, usually within minutes.

The Jitney is an electric golf-cart style vehicle that holds up to four passengers plus storage for luggage, packages or groceries. It is unmanned and guided by GPS and smart computer control. You tell it your destination, and if it is close by, like a grocery store or local mall, it will take you there. A wireless link to the X-Port computer uses voice recognition, MapQuest and GPS to guide it. For longer trips, it will take you to the nearest bus or trolley stop. It is strictly a short-run vehicle, two miles maximum. This allows automated buses to have bus stops up to four miles apart. (Faster bus trips!) Jitneys hang out at bus and trolley stops to take you to your next nearby destination, such as your home or office. Again, computer scheduling tells you which Jitney to take for your short trip, which you might share with other passengers at a discount.

The computer also debits your X-Port credit account for the trips. For normal use, my calculations show that a personal automobile costs on average about $20 per day; that’s $600 per month. This system should cost much less, and in addition, reduce traffic snarls, parking problems and pollution. We now have all the technical ingredients in place to make this work. The time is here to make inexpensive public transportation a reality.

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