“Uber” Our Way to the Future

Traffic jam is always a headache for people from every corner of the world. Public transportation is currently doing its best to solve the problem. However, we need something more to resolve the issue. This is when carpool came into play. The idea of carpool was not as practical as it sounds until Uber announced its latest scheme — Uber Rent and UberPool.

In recent years, Uber has been developing not only taxi business but the whole transportation industry overall. This past week, Uber has recruited two more branches — Jump Bikes and Uber Rent. Jump Bikes is for people to share and rent electric bicycles. Uber Rent allows people to rent vehicles within the Uber app. From what we can see, Uber has been broadening its market massively. Although at the same time, we have to admit that Uber is certainly playing a very important role in solving our transportation issues. The idea of sharing has existed for quite a while, but it has not been utilized properly due to many factors. If a car is owned by only one customer, it is clearly not fair for him or her to lend the car to others. If a car is owned by multiple customers, what if they all need the car at the same time? Uber Rent has cracked this problem elegantly. By investing a lot of cars for the public to rent, not only that customers do not have to be able to afford a car, but also that Uber can make money by collecting the rent money. In addition, when the car breaks down, customers do not even have to take it to the auto shop. They will always have good cars to drive and they do not have to worry a thing about the condition of the car since it is the responsibility of the company’s.

 

Ofo bikes in Beijing

 

The idea of carpool has been utilized not only for cars but for bicycles as well. Ofo is currently one of the biggest station-free bike renting companies in the world. “Station-Free” means that whenever you are done with the bike, you do not even have to take it to a certain location. All you need to do is just to lock it and leave the bike somewhere as long as other people can find it. Every bike has a GPS system so you can locate the nearest bike to your location. The compy originated in Beijing, China, invested almost 5 million bicycles in a dozen cities. This service is being used in 25 cities right now in the U.S. In less than three months, the usage of Ofo bikes has reached one million. Ofo actually makes it possible for people to live a car-free life. If Uber’s idea of rental cars can be made the same as Ofo’s station-free, Uber Rent is no doubt going to change our way of transportation immensely.

The End of a New Era — Self-Driving Technology

Self-driving technology has been one of the hottest topics lately. As I mentioned in the last blog post, as far as I concerned, self-driving technology is going to take over the world in the near future. Nevertheless, problems have been emerging unceasingly. Besides the safety concern, there has been a new issue coming up — pollution. So, could this just be the end of a new era that has not even started yet?

Self-driving has been progressing rapidly in recent years. We currently have the proper technology to make something like this happen. All we need is time and practice. However, do we really need self-driving cars? Cars are one of the major causes of the pollution we have nowadays. President Obama set up a new standard for automakers to double their cars’ average fuel economy by 2025. Even though The Environmental Protection Agency is trying to reverse this rule since this is making car factories too hard and it will raise car price a lot, California and some other states are still sticking with the goal President Obama once set.

 

Beijing Metro System

 

Self-driving cars with much higher average fuel efficiency, no doubt car price will be raised by a huge chunk. Why can’t public transportation be a solution to all these problems? The answer to this is obviously YES. Many cities worldwide have been making their car-free zones to save the environment. Chengdu, one of the biggest cities in China, has been trying to reach the full potential of its underground system. According to the leading engineers Adrian Smith and Gordan Gill, people can walk anywhere within 15 minutes in Chengdu. Norway is trying to permanently ban all cars from its city center in Oslo by 2019. The government is investing a lot of money into public transportation. Nearly forty miles of roads which were previously dominated by cars will be rebuilt into bike lanes.

As much as self-driving is growing dramatically, car-ban and public transportation are also moving very quickly. Self-driving may have the possibility to solve traffic accidents but so do car-ban and public transportation. Besides, they minimize the pollution made by cars compared to self-driving cars. Maybe 15 years from now, driving cars to us will be only recreational like riding bikes.

Is Self-Driving Technology Really that Promising…

As artificial intelligence is getting more and more popular nowadays, the technology of self-driving is getting developed rapidly in recent years. Huge companies including Google, Tesla, Uber and a lot of others are all focusing on autonomous cars. It only took them a couple years to fully develop a rather functional self-driving car to put on the road. Nevertheless, is self-driving technology really the future after all the accidents it caused recently?

There are approximately 40 thousand people died from car accidents every year in the U.S. The idea of self-driving is designed to change this. It is true that machines do not make mistakes as many as human make. After all, there would not be any distracted driving or drunk driving if the drivers were all machines instead of human. However, we still cannot avoid making mistakes while we are trying to build the perfect robot drivers. Most companies started test runs for their self-driving cars last year. Unfortunately, accidents have been non-stop since then.

 

Tesla self-driving demonstration

 

On March 18th, a pedestrian was killed by a driverless car operated by Uber in Tempe, Arizona. An emergency driver was sitting behind the wheel but it still could not stop the tragedy from happening. The victim was walking with her bike on the side of the road and the car did not appear to slow down while it was approaching the victim. It does not matter whose fault it is since the car should have stopped or at least react when in situations like this.

Unfortunately, this was not the first accident caused by self-driving. Back in 2016, a driver was killed in China while he was driving in his Tesla with the self-driving mode on. The car crashed into a truck and it did not slow down at all before it had made the contact. In June 2017, a former Navy Seal was killed while his Tesla hit a tractor-trailer at a crossroads. The drive had put in too much trust to the self-driving technology that he only had his hands on the stirring wheel for 25 seconds during 37 minutes of driving. Nevertheless, this still helped cast doubt on driverless cars.

 

The Boring Campany is getting cars, pedestrians, and cyclist underground to travel through tunnels

 

All in all, our means of transportation is still one of the contemporary challenges, but it will be altered, either through the driverless cars or the idea of the tunnel by The Boring Company. Nonetheless, we should not rush it or it is going to backfire.