# carriages: free uber as public transportation in small towns

modern, high density public transportation in cities is super convenient. i have high confidence that this hugely increases a city's total productivity.

but what about small, relatively high density towns where it is still not economical to build such infrastructure? i think such places would also see increased productivity if there was some transportation assistance. my crazy idea for this is that the town should offer free uber-like service for its citizens.

# why have public transportation at all?

most small town people own a car. otherwise their life would be quite hard. nevertheless, having an accessible public transportation is still useful:

• the elderly people often can no longer drive a car and want assistance hauling groceries back to home;
• young people cannot drive a car either;
• perhaps a mother wants to take the baby to the far-away park while the father is away with the car at work;
• perhaps a student injured herself at the swimming pool and needs assistance to get home;
• perhaps you don't want to walk home from the train station in heavy rain;
• perhaps town visitors are having hard time navigating and would prefer transportation assistance;

and many more. the point is that there's always a need for accessible transportation assistance.

# solution?

crazy idea: self-driving electric carriages. by carriage i mean something like this but more modern and spacious:

i'm imagining a large metal box frame with large plastic windows on the side. so the passengers have a good vision outside. and the other townsfolk also see who use the service because why not. it should fit about 4 passengers.

the idea is this: it's like an uber app. if a citizen wants to travel, he just enters the from and to addresses and an available carriage is dispatched. if there is no available carriage, then he will wait until one is available. when the carriage arrives, he enters, he travels, and then he exits the carriage. the carriage goes back home after use to recharge unless there are other travel requests queued up.

the service would be available only for short local distances. i'm not trying to solve the long distance travel problem.

yeah, i'm assuming that everyone is tech savvy enough to use this service. i think that will be a reasonable expectation within a generation or two. even in today's world we assume everyone is capable to read, write, and fill complex welfare and tax forms. nowadays most schools teach computer usage. so having a smartphone and being able to tap a few buttons to access optional government services should be an okay expectation in the future.

# stepping stone towards a serious solution

this solution might sound silly. however the most important feature of it is that it's a stepping stone for a more serious solution. in general i believe it's quite hard to estimate whether investing into public transportation is worth it at all. however this proposal is relatively cheap and gives super useful data about the potentially important local routes.

maybe nobody uses the service and the town can pass the carriages down to the next town who wants to try a similar experiment. or the town notices that there is a large traffic between the train station and the school. then it can invest into a bus, and later into a proper tram for that section to aid the affected people.

# why free?

money based alternatives already exist: taxies or actual uber. however they are often not economical in small towns so they are not available or generally more expensive.

furthermore, if you ask for money, then less people will use the service. probably the poorest folks will not use it. those are the people who would be best served with public transportation.

i think of it like this: this is an expensive way to gather potential route utilization data. but once the data is gathered and the efficient routes are built, the investment would return in an indirect matter.

# how many carriages does a small town need?

i say a town should start out with 3. there won't be much use initially since people won't know about it.

but then the townsfolk will see the carriages moving around and might decide to try them themselves. to increase adoption, the carriages could go to the church or to a similar communal service to pick people up and transport them back home. this way the town could easily popularize the carriages among the older population who need it the most.

to assist less tech-inclined people in this situation, maybe there could be a button in the carriage to initiate a call with the operator. the passenger can press that and tell the operator where she wants to travel. this way people going home from church don't even need to have a smartphone to use the service.

if the carriages get popular, the town could order more of them.

a small group might decide to use it all the time. but over time their requests might get deprioritized in favor of others to make the service's availability distributed more fairly.

# simple self-driving tech

tech-wise i'm imagining an ebike-like contraption perhaps with a bit stronger motor and more battery. to increase efficiency, it's better if the carriage has no driver on it. less weight to carry, more travel distance on a single charge.

no driver means it has to be self-driven. i don't think that's a hard problem as long as:

• there's a fixed path the carriage can go,
• the carriage goes relatively slowly, max 25 km/h.

at such slow speed even a track painted with a special reflective paint on the street could work quite well. that could be very cheaply painted over existing roads. or if that isn't reliable, perhaps rfid tags could be embedded into the roads that the software could easily follow. such solution should be perfect for straight roads.

it doesn't need very advanced radar tech. you can just install 4-6 cheap smartphones cameras around the carriage to act as the sensors. some of the cameras would try to follow the paint tracks, the other cameras are mainly for detecting vandalism.

there should be some distance sensors installed on it to detect people jumping in front of the carriage. nothing fancy but the detected distance should be just long enough that the carriage can stop in time. and there would be also a big red button in carriage that the passengers can press to stop it. perhaps the carriage might go slower (15 km/h) when it is driving in fully unsupervised mode until people start trusting it more. or perhaps the passenger could be fully in control of the speed of the carriage (but not the direction).

turns and crossroads could be quite tricky when it comes to self-driving. but for those, i'd just fall back to remote control. in the control center there would be a few operators who oversee the army of the carriages. every time a carriage comes to a crossroad, it would alert an operator to drive the carriage through it. they would also remote control the device in segments where there are no road markers.

adding more road markers and traffic lights could alleviate the need for operators handling the tricky cases.

# more small town life

this sort of weird free carriages could add a really interesting new character to small towns. it would be less hassle to go to places so it could liven up the town a bit.

however i'd emphasize that i really meant this for the last mile hauling at low density places. otherwise buses, trams, trains are much better solution.

anyway, i wish for a future where more people could live car-free even in small towns. i loathe cars, even self-driving ones (unless they go really slow). less cars in the suburbs will mean less cars in the cities too so it would be a win-win for everyone. biking too is more convenient around less cars so i hope at some point people in charge start implementing more stuff like this.

published on 2022-10-15

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