a) If anything, it is not a feat of Company, but of nowadays IFR systems in cooperation with ATC guys who probably sweated off at least 10 pounds during that shift.
b) Each and every airline does that, from top notch VIP charters to those we-are-declaring-emergency-because-our-company-doesn't-let-us-take-in-enough-fuel-so-we-are-landing-RIGHT-NOW-GET-OFF-OUR-WAY poor souls piloting Ryanairs.
c) Aviation is a market. If you pay, you get aircrafts and pilots. If you pay good, you get good pilots. That's it.
d) This is very inside the box thinking. An equivalent of this would be showing a video of a bunch of guys running to the local hardware shop, hastily throwing HW boxes into a car, driving fast and furious back to the site, assembling a server, plugging it in, installing OS and presenting it to the customer: here, your server.
So Amazon can beat them only when they can do all of this on demand?
No, they just built the AWS and "on demand" now means just clicking "I want an instance now" or even letting a balancer spin that up for you, done.
The article is talking about 15 years horizon and although that is a very brave speculation of Amazon's business plans and future events, just think about what 15 years means. 15 years ago, Windows XP has just RTMed a week before. GPS meant some ugly expensive box waiting an eternity to get a fix. Common large and heavy desktop crates called personal computers struggled with even playing a DivX video in CRT resolution. Capturing overhead footage meant flying an expensive helicopter running on expensive fuel and operated by highly trained pilot.
Nowadays, you can buy an entire device called "quadcopter" for less than an hour of helicopter flight time and fly around and videotape everything like in a computer game. We have small slates of glass called "smartphones" that smoothly play 2880x2160 videos while projecting them onto a 3D surface twice (VR phone-based headsets) or even smoothly render an entire VR game scene from polygons. We have cars using half as much fuel. You can tap on your slate of glass and a car arrives for you.
In 15 years we can have supertough drones flying right through hurricanes, micro hyperloops moving small cargo around entire states, warehouses on every other corner with duplicated stock, carpooling packet delivery services like some Uber-Fedex hybrid, or even outright cargo teleports spitting out pizzas from local restaurants, shoe orders from Amazon and hell monsters from Mars military bases with id Software calling out software patents on that and claiming intellectual property on 50% of incoming daemons...
Sorry for long post - basically what I wanted to say is that everybody can do that with airplanes.
Thanks for your post - I appreciate the constructive criticism - and agree the video isn't much to anyone with an aviation background.
I guess what I was trying to say, is that if you are an air-<whatever> business, you ALWAYS have to be an airline first - with all the Regulatory, Union, personnel, hardware, etc issues that come with it - and whatever else you want to do SECOND (air freight, passenger etc).
You know waaaaay more than I do - this is just my oversimplified take I am sure. I just am always impressed at the stakes / volume of traffic that goes in / out of the FDX hubs daily.
This is very manipulative picture, although not as bad as the famous Munster photo (this: https://headwatersolver.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/64408578... notice how each photo has different perspective and zoom to make cars appear the biggest and bicycles the smallest).
When I need to get to the work, pick up groceries, transport two 30-inch displays across the town, etc., I simply do not walk out to the street, pose for a photo, smile, camera flash and go back to the building.
Transporting somewhere in terms of congestion is 'space integrated over time'.
First and obvious nitpick - there is single person in each car and absolutely no cargo.
Then, if it really worked like the picture suggest, the tram would need to:
a) transport each person directly between their endpoints,
b) do it in the same time as a car would do,
c) be full to its capacity all the time.
Given all these conditions, the cars in the picture (disregarding the single person occupancy and cargo) would really equal to the single tram.
But that is not the case:
a),b) In a car one can drive the shortest/fastest route between his desired endpoints, in the tram/bus one needs to follow the lines. There simply cannot be a complete graph of public transport lines going from every possible start to every possible destination, so you need to run up some extra distance to a 'hub' and switch lines, adding time. And even if there is a direct line, it typically goes as it can serve more people. One example, suppose you have a city with predominantly commercial and industrial parts in the centre with majority of the jobs and predominantly living parts in a star shaped pattern on the outskirts. If you happen to travel from one living neighbourhood to another (e.g. you work there, you are visiting a girlfriend, sport venue), the public transport will take you through many many stops around the centre, while in individual transport you can go between the quarters directly skipping the center completely and getting there a lot faster. There simply isn't enough people to fill a tram/bus between non-major stops in a reasonable intervals.
c) Unless you have 100 % mixed jobs, industry, commerce, leisure, education, everything on each stop and unless you have this with perfectly balanced population density end-to-end, you won't have fully occupied vehicle.
In order for that picture to be true, the tram would need to fill itself on its very first stop and on each stop, equal pax would need to enter/leave. Fiction.
I live at the end of the tram line and in order to get my seat in the happy photo of a full tram in the picture, then the tram must first arrive almost completely empty (in the morning, everyone goes from this living neighbourhood to the jobs in the centre and back in the afternoon, reverse flows are minimal) to pick me up. Then, the tram continues quarter- to half-full for several stops until it really have at least [# of seats] pax onboard.
To sum up:
I) tram takes twice the time because I have to route around with the majority of the flow instead of going direct route,
II) it has to arrive almost empty to pick me up,
III) it isn't full to [# of seats] for significant part of the journey.
So for me as a single person, count not one, but 4 to 6 seats to achieve the same 'space over time' density.
If I pick up my colleague on the go or drop him of, count approx. 8 seats. Two colleagues, 10 seats.
Suddenly if all the cars in the picture doesn't conveniently fit into a single tram, but in several of them spaced apart, it isn't so nice propaganda...
PS: I lived in a socialistic east-bloc non-SSSR country. In order to have a car, you had to be privileged/bribe/camp on the waiting list (literally camp in front of the state-owned car dealership). The public transport was wonderful, there were railway tracks going to every forgotten small village, bus lines everywhere, intracity transport roared through empty streets. The catch? Be any small fraction different that the 'major' flow - morning shift, evening shift, night shift interchanges between industrial jobs/housing areas/villages and you are out of luck, you either got blackmarketed a car in any possible way (e.g. train drivers), drive bike through the harshest freezing conditions or go with the flow and forgo anything else than 'buy groceries at corner store' (with regulated flat prices regardless whether it is 500-ish person village or capital city), 'go to job early morning', 'return from job in the evening' (nevermind that job was compulsory). Think Venezuela in recent HN.
Making using a car more and more miserable without improving public transport is, in reality, beating everybody into the averageness of 'you need to go from this stop to this stop at this time', otherwise sit at home or in walking distance. I been there, seen the carless variant and the free carsupported variant and it is a lot better even if you have to sit out through a traffic jam.
TL;DR: The public transport excels at only one thing - very major traffic flows in peak hours. Sucks very much at everything else. Self-driving car can be a nice hybrid - offering full occupancy of vehicles traveling at minimal distances between them (coordinated braking) in peak times, while still functioning nicely outside of major flows and allowing complete freedom outside of the peak hours.
I don't think anyone denies that taxi services (which is what self-driving cars will eventually replace) are an important part of a city's transportation network. But owned-and-operated cars don't have to be, and using owned-and-operated cars as the backbone of an urban transportation network doesn't scale. And neither do taxis, and for the same reason.
> But owned-and-operated cars don't have to be, and using owned-and-operated cars as the backbone of an urban transportation network doesn't scale
This needs a citation. There are lots of cities in the US where public transport accounts for a minority of transit.
You have so far failed to make any argument and only made a provocative comment linking a totally non-informative picture. Have you ever ran errands by bus in a city like GP was mentioning? It's a huge and ineffective waste of time. Suppose GP makes $100 an hour and produces $400 an hour of economic output but you are arguing rather than pay $15 and save a 50 minute trip, he should 'bite the bullet' and be forced to take public transport (by regulating cars off the roads); for what purpose is that again?
a) If anything, it is not a feat of Company, but of nowadays IFR systems in cooperation with ATC guys who probably sweated off at least 10 pounds during that shift.
b) Each and every airline does that, from top notch VIP charters to those we-are-declaring-emergency-because-our-company-doesn't-let-us-take-in-enough-fuel-so-we-are-landing-RIGHT-NOW-GET-OFF-OUR-WAY poor souls piloting Ryanairs.
c) Aviation is a market. If you pay, you get aircrafts and pilots. If you pay good, you get good pilots. That's it.
d) This is very inside the box thinking. An equivalent of this would be showing a video of a bunch of guys running to the local hardware shop, hastily throwing HW boxes into a car, driving fast and furious back to the site, assembling a server, plugging it in, installing OS and presenting it to the customer: here, your server. So Amazon can beat them only when they can do all of this on demand? No, they just built the AWS and "on demand" now means just clicking "I want an instance now" or even letting a balancer spin that up for you, done.
The article is talking about 15 years horizon and although that is a very brave speculation of Amazon's business plans and future events, just think about what 15 years means. 15 years ago, Windows XP has just RTMed a week before. GPS meant some ugly expensive box waiting an eternity to get a fix. Common large and heavy desktop crates called personal computers struggled with even playing a DivX video in CRT resolution. Capturing overhead footage meant flying an expensive helicopter running on expensive fuel and operated by highly trained pilot. Nowadays, you can buy an entire device called "quadcopter" for less than an hour of helicopter flight time and fly around and videotape everything like in a computer game. We have small slates of glass called "smartphones" that smoothly play 2880x2160 videos while projecting them onto a 3D surface twice (VR phone-based headsets) or even smoothly render an entire VR game scene from polygons. We have cars using half as much fuel. You can tap on your slate of glass and a car arrives for you.
In 15 years we can have supertough drones flying right through hurricanes, micro hyperloops moving small cargo around entire states, warehouses on every other corner with duplicated stock, carpooling packet delivery services like some Uber-Fedex hybrid, or even outright cargo teleports spitting out pizzas from local restaurants, shoe orders from Amazon and hell monsters from Mars military bases with id Software calling out software patents on that and claiming intellectual property on 50% of incoming daemons...
Sorry for long post - basically what I wanted to say is that everybody can do that with airplanes.