I spent last weekend in Calgary, and since it wasn’t my first time there I had a happy opportunity to walk around on my own pace, without a need to make it to the tower, Glenbow, Banff or other attractions, which I never can miss during my first visits to new places.
So this time I was just walking around and enjoying the variety bigger cities have to offer. Things, people, services, there is more of everything including transportation.
Calgary has slightly fewer transportation options than Toronto, yet there is enough to find one’s own way to get around. Besides obvious train lines, buses and cabs unlike Regina they also have Uber.
If you haven’t heard of it, it’s an app-based inexpensive taxi service with a wide network of private drivers. I used it in a few places, and usually, it was much cheaper and arriving much faster than regular cabs.
Besides, I still can’t skip the pleasure of getting out of the cab without a need to pay – the price of a trip is known in advance and after the ride is over it automatically gets charged to your card.
Moreover, there is a car-sharing system in place. It allows you to pick up any available vehicle (downtown I mainly noticed Smarts, but I believe they have more options) anywhere within the city limits, use as long as you need it and then drop it off pretty much anywhere (at any approved free parking spot).
It’s a kind of a car rental organized through an app as well, where you pay only for the time when you use a vehicle without a need to go pick it up or drop it off. It also allows drivers to check out different types of vehicles, which might be interesting to drive but not that exciting to purchase for full-time use.
(I hardly know anybody who would commit to a Smart, but I would like to see what it’s like to drive it).
The existing options give quite a bit of freedom and flexibility. However, when it comes to transportation my main problem is that I’m not a natural driver. I don’t enjoy being behind the steering wheel and sooner prefer to be a passenger, but it’s not always an option. On the other hand, public transportation doesn’t provide the comfort of privacy. And even cheaper cabs used on daily basis strain the wallet. So a vehicle with hired driver could resolve this problem, but it either still would be quite expensive (if you hire somebody to be around all day) or take the freedom away from you (if you have a driver available on call or at particular times to decrease the costs).
But apparently, there is another option – driverless vehicles. Sounds like something from the future, right? That was my reaction when a friend told me that self-driving cabs were already introduced and are soon to become widespread.
Fully automated vehicles, in which cruise control and onboard computers are so smart that they don’t need a real person to drive it. The first self-driving taxi debuted in Tokyo over half a year ago. The plan is to have them fully operating for the 2020 Olympics in Japan. At the same time Toyota and Uber, as well as a number of other companies are pushing hard not to fall behind the Japanese competition and fill global markets.
Would you feel comfortable riding without a driver? Some passengers who tried the demo-service in Tokyo said it felt quite natural. As for me, so far it sounds a little crazy, and I tend to believe that in my lifetime it won’t become something ordinary and mainstream. But when cruise control was first introduced (which by the way happened in 1948) it probably also took years for it to earn the trust of consumers.
There is a book called Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari (a must-read if you haven’t done so yet), which makes me believe that driverless taxis are much closer to becoming an everyday thing.
Closer to the end of the book the author discusses our three main theories about the development of humankind, which we still attribute to the future – clones, artificial intelligence and cyborgs. However, he then explains that this future is already the present. Humankind learned how to clone animals, and highly likely will clone humans as soon they find the way around ethical restrictions. Viruses used to attack computer systems are so advanced that they can develop and spread on their own, which pretty much is what we understand as artificial intelligence. And us being integrated with our smartphones is nothing but what we envisioned as cyborgs – persons with physical abilities extending beyond normal human limitations by means of mechanical elements connected to their bodies.
Thus, what we were considering as “future” is already here.
Now, are self-driving cabs a future? If so, it’s a very near future.
