Cars to Cabs

So you can be sure that your car will be thoroughly inspected to guarantee both its dependability and road safety.

How is the relationship of taxis to other cars in Manhattan?

There are 40x more normal cars in Manhattan than cabs. By 2012, 1.6 million Manhattan ians will be living, 25% of whom own at least one Manhattan auto. This means that there are at least 400,000 privately owned cars in Manhattan.

By 2012, there were only 13,237 cabs in New York City. Let us assume that 75% of these are in Manhattan, then there are almost 10,000 cabs, i.e. a 40:1 relationship. Naturally, anyone who has been standing on a bustling downtown road knows that the number of cabs you see riding is much higher than 2.5% of all cars.

However, this is because most cars are always left behind, mostly in a garage, while practically all cabs are always in use, especially as there are 3.2 x more registered cab drivers than there are cabs that run the same cabs in shift work.

Self-propelled, shared cabs could carve 10,000 cars out of New York's streets.

New York cabs would only need 3,000 of them if they were to use effective carpools, far less than the more than 13,000 on the streets today. These are the results of a new MIT survey that focuses on improving urban traffic through the use of self-propelled taxi cabs.

Just think for a minute that New York taxis have been superseded by stand-alone cars. Those self-propelled interconnected cars could be able to transport two to four people simultaneously, thus cutting the number of cars needed without significantly shortening journey times and halting a great deal of congestion by moving so many cars off the road.

MIT' was designed using the New York Taxicab Public Dataset, which contains information from around three million live taxis. Based on this information, Rus' staff could try to make changes to "fleet sizes, capacities, waiting times, delays and operating costs". Since it is based on realistic information, it is of relevance to the true needs of urban transport.

Of course, the trouble is that 3,000 cars run with the same algorithms. According to the survey, 1% of US gross domestic product is squandered on roadblocks each year. Humans drive 5.5 billion hrs a year in road transport, and cars consume 2.9 billion gall ons of petrol while driving at Idle.

Shifting to on-demand carpools that use self-propelled, self-steering cars allows us to clear the streets of road congestion and make room for these intelligent taxis. Here, too, there is a snowshoe effect, because cleaner streets mean quicker trips, which leads more car owners to give up their cars and use carpools instead.

Youths simply don't buy cars, but they still have to move around and are already investing in the use of on-line service for everything. Perhaps we just have to sit and watch all the old auto drivers pass away to clear the streets for better choices.