Apparently, Ford Motor Co. is buying and renovating Detroit's abandoned train station and turning it into a research center for autonomous vehicles. This got me thinking about the relationship between autonomous vehicles and trains, as we know them. Could autonomous vehicle technology become the 'train rails' in an age of automation?
Let's really think about this: with all the debates about safety and hacking of autonomous vehicles, we seem to forget that rail-transport is and always was dangerous. Trains don't stop on a dime and so we've seen safety technologies emerge like cow-catchers and automatic crossing gates with loud bells and flashing lights. The one thing we never had to worry about, however, was steering. Rail vehicles steer themselves very well; after all the rail is what steers them.
Now think about autonomous vehicles with all their lidar, etc. to steer them. Why not just put guides on the roads that steer the vehicles the way rails steer trains and street cars? If these vehicles only go where there are 'rails' for them, how are they different from other rail vehicles?
Really, you could make the argument that rail vehicles are better than autonomous vehicles guided by a special paint stripe or whatever, but isn't the problem with rail that it costs too much? For whatever reason, it is easier to get investors, buyers, mechanics, etc. to coordinate their economic activities to build and maintain a fleet of cars than it is to get them to maintain a rail system, but what if the railroad is suddenly made of autonomous vehicles?
Finally, this leads to the question of whether LCF is really fundamentally about living 'car' free, or whether it's about living without having to own and drive a car. Often we talk about trains and buses as if those are fundamentally different from cars, but trains have 'cars' and buses have motors. So really LCF is about numerous other issues for most people, but if ride-sharing or car-sharing or autonomous vehicles or whatever innovation in automotive technology frees us from the need to own and drive a personal vehicle, and at the same time reduces the amount of cars and pavement, then maybe Ford is onto something and autonomous cars are a reason to revamp the train station.
https://detroit.curbed.com/2018/6/19...n-this-weekend