Public Transport a 100-year vision, the human approach to the Public Transport of Tomorrow

Cities infrastructure will need a drastic change, as it is estimated that two-thirds of populations will be living in urban areas at the latest by 2050, to cope with the increase in passengers. Without change, the impact on any city can be measured in the loss of work opportunities, and through frustration, companies will relocate to be able to cope. 

Thankfully, the Internet of Everything, Artificial Intelligence, and Distributed systems will lead to Smart Cities, Cities that can do pro-active decisions through prediction and reactive decisions through distributed processing. 

In this paper, we will discuss how a Smart City could be implemented so that the population's need for transportation can be managed through public transport instead of private. We will in this paper specifically focus on connections hubs like Bus terminals, Train centers, and Autonomous public vehicles 

The idea that in the future we will not have a need of timetables and schedules, as we will be zoomed around in driverless pods on wheels, is, of course, utter nonsense, the street transportation grid of any urban area or urban to suburban needs to be planned as the amount of population that needs to be moved in short time frames is so high. 

But let’s start with the coming autonomous public vehicles aka driverless, what will it mean to the travelers that there is no driver.

It means that, if there is not an alternative system put in place, any public transportation carriage becomes a risk zone as a person having a heart attack, falling over, or getting stuck, there is no one responsible to take the steps necessary to guarantee the passengers safety and fast responses, we can also look at problems involving weapons and violent behavior, where certain individuals might, as there is no driver regard the carriage as a “lawless” zone. Therefore we see a need for a public transportation Alert-AI, an AI that not only takes over the responsibility of a driver but enhances them, by using visuals to detect motions and actions, that are happening in the carriage. 

Then we need to think about how large connection hubs need to upgraded and to be made human. Any interruption in the flow of traffic at a connection hub can be devastating for the citizens involved, as their planning and needs of being somewhere on time can be crucial. The task of maintaining people's freedom to move needs to be in focus. 

In this paper, we define the most common daily travel to be stationed to the terminal in the mornings and terminal to stations in the evening, so the major impact on travel quality, is at the terminal, it has the biggest single impact on the travel quality. 

Just like that streets are by definition a shared public transportation grid, where the space in the grid is shared between private, commercial, and public transport, a train system is by definition a dedicated public transport system. 

A simple way to look at this from an algorithm is, amount of people to move, distance and direction, time frame (zero being best), capacities of the grid for private, commercial, and public transport, taxis, and ride-sharing would be seen as small capacity public transport vehicles. With those values calculating and predicting the needs of the population becomes a straight forward task. By using a neural net learning machine with a feedback loop, transport routes can be optimized and interruptions in transportation from road work and congestions can be minimized and cost-optimized.

We recommend that just like there are Government organizations that simulate weather to predict and respond, we believe that there is a need to create National Urban Transport Simulation groups that can help traffic managers, citizens, and corporations understand traffic planning and modeling.

We have been developing the basis of both an Alert-AI for public transport, and a transport optimization AI, using in-house developed hardware (IoT) and software platforms. 

Contact us to discuss how we can help with your project. 

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