| This post reads like a Buzzfeed article of pointing out not quite impressive iterations of known technologies or fixes to "it ain't broke" situations. Electric buses have been around for a while, they're called trolleys. Putting the batteries inside the buses is an improvement, but hardly a breakthrough, and I'm not entirely sure it would make me "Love the Bus" Likewise, autonomous buses have been around for at least a couple decades in the form of driverless trains. For high-density routes with lots of passengers doing the same itinerary, I feel it's probably cheaper in the long run, more maintainable and safer to use rails, so I'm not sure an autonomous bus is an innovation we want over trains. Seamless payment is not a tech breakthrough at this point, it's just a matter of getting regulators and government contractors to implement seamless payments. "Accessibility" is not a tech breakthrough and the things mentioned in the article make me question the author's understanding of the state of assistive technology and the actual current needs of people with disabilities. As for "Minibus or ‘trackless train’", that's indeed a super interesting question that hasn't been solved in the space of transportation: given a very dense ad-hoc demand for transportation from region A to region B, how can you broker a collective transportation solution that is cheap, efficient and desirable over, say, a slower multimodal option, or more expensive private transportation. Sadly, the article discusses minibuses (which we've had, in Brazil at least, for longer than I can remember) and only mentions they "can" be routeless but doesn't fully explain how that could be achieved. |