Decide Up And Drop Off Problem Causes San Francisco To Oppose Cruise Robotaxi

Dedicated charging area for Uber and Lyft in Mountain View, CA

Brad Templeton

Dealing with the “curb” has become a major challenge for both self-driving vehicles and human-operated taxis and delivery vehicles. Driving on the road has its challenges, but every trip also requires picking up and dropping off goods or passengers, which can be a completely different problem in the city. It’s one thing the robot taxi company Cruise has not yet resolved, which recently resulted in the San Francisco MTA it operates in denying its application for a permit to provide robot taxi services.

When I recently reported on Cruise’s first Robotaxi ride, I pointed out that it was strange that the vehicle never stopped for pick-up and drop-off, even when the driver was waiting in front of a temple that had a large and empty loading area. Instead, it blocked the lane and the driver got on and off. I suggested that this is simply because Cruise is doing things “one thing at a time” and resolving all of “Picov Andropov’s” (the famous Russian chauffeur from NPR’s “Car Talk”) on the first day. While it’s illegal, it’s very common for human taxi drivers to do the same too, especially when the streets aren’t crowded just because it’s easier.

The SF Muni does not seem willing to have it worked out later. That’s not unreasonable, but they should also be balanced out – if Cruise isn’t supposed to do PuDo (pickup / drop-off) on the street, then crackdown on Uber, Lyft and taxis should also be tough. We want all providers, including Cruise, to be safe, but we don’t want to slow down the autonomous developers any more than others.

In some places the curb is often empty and this is an easy problem to solve. If there is a light loading zone or a wide piece of curb, it isn’t too difficult for a generalized algorithm to identify and use. To do it really well, you’ll likely want to map every PuDo spot in the city, including official loading zones, parking lots, and other approved zones. Likewise, you want to identify no-parking / no-standing zones, bus stops and other places where it is not allowed and their opening times. You’ll also want to know more about official PuDo zones (which some cities have) and even special alleys that are often found in hotels and office towers. These zones can have additional rules for their use.

If you have such a map and you arrive at a location, it is not difficult to see which of the mapped PuDo zones near the destination can be used for free. Parking spaces can even be parallel parking. Robots will get very good at this, although there is an argument that it is often faster and less disruptive to traffic to stop in the lane and release a passenger than to park and drive in parallel.

For pick-up, a waiting passenger could be shown the map with the spots in his vicinity and he can click on a free one. If there is only one, they could even “claim” the space by partially standing in it and waving away cars trying to park there – but they shouldn’t wave away other cars trying to do a quick PuDo. Otherwise, they should update the app when they are given away. You should also consider walking until you find a space.

Some of the best stops are just outside residential driveways. This is a little annoying for the homeowner when it becomes a regular event – more on this below. Another interesting and common opening is in front of fire hydrants. It is legal to stand by a fire hydrant place in some cities, but the law requires a driver to stay in the car while standing in the fire trail. This law may need to be changed to cover robot drivers who would, of course, start driving immediately if they spot a fire engine, just as humans have to.

Pick-up of food

It looks different with delivery drivers. You usually have to walk to a restaurant or go to the door of a house to transport the food. This makes them less likely to block the lane. For delivery, most robot delivery services now signal the customer on the phone that the delivery is about to arrive and the customer has to go to the curb. In this case, a quick turnaround can make sense if it would also make sense for the passengers.

A managed curb

In this scene from a video, the Cruise car stopped in the middle of the lane to drop the company off … [+] Founder Kyle Vogt, despite two open curbs that he could use. This angered the SF MTA.

cruise

The future holds the potential for something bigger, namely a fully city-managed curb, including parking lots and PuDo spaces. Many, including respected parking expert Donald Shoup, argue that the idea of ​​free parking was a huge mistake, and that thought could even be extended to include short-term curb use. Today all commercial users of curbs are computerized – with an app or soon because they are robots. It is not impossible to have a system where the use of the curb can be managed, calculated and reserved, if only for 30 seconds.

This could also be done without better parking management, although it would certainly be very helpful if it were done as well. Perhaps one day all parking options will be handled by just one app that will select, reserve, manage and pay for parking spaces (street and private parking spaces) in your city. In this case, vehicles that need to do PuDo in busy areas could reserve a single minute in parking lots as well as PuDo spots to facilitate arrival. But they could still do that for the no parking spaces that allow PuDo. In particular, the rooms that some cities have assigned as “TNC only”.

A vehicle that is on its way to a PuDo (and that includes a human-controlled TNC with an app) has an estimate of its time of arrival that improves over time. His headquarters could ask the city to reserve a place through a time slot. This would prevent any other such vehicle from using that space at the reserved time. If it’s just a TNC spot, private drivers are not allowed to use it, although they might be found surprisingly in other areas there, so this needs to be handled – including passenger handling. As the vehicle got closer, the timing of the reservation was refined until it was completely precise and of course adjusted so that it didn’t overlap with others who were also so close to arrival.

Reservations would even apply to the gaps in front of residential driveways if they are large enough. I noted above that the constant use of these houses would annoy the residents of these houses, so the reservation system could limit the number of PuDos in such places. In addition, if the residents of these houses happened to be on the move with a smart app or a car, they could block reservations for free prior to their entry if they could block the resident. While residents don’t own the curb in front of their driveway, we don’t want to upset them too much. Using these spaces means a lot more PuDo capacity and less traffic jams on your street, so it’s a win-win situation. (A single driveway is often not wide enough for PuDo, but many driveways are paired or combined with an unusable curb.)

Clogged bulk pickup

Special efforts will be required to handle locations with extreme pick-ups such as airports, office buildings at closing time, and the largest stadiums of them all. While it would be nice to develop a distributed system to have this done, these places will only have a limited amount of PuDo space and it won’t be practical for all the cars to show up at the same time. There is a possibility that such establishments could contract to have someone run a system to manage their PuDo room. Robocar companies would talk to the server managing a building to handle congested times and let vehicles know when to get a reservation to approach the building and drive to their seat – probably only if their passenger is is immediately ready to board.

This is already partially the case with TNCs at some airports, but each of them has its own area and some of them manage it themselves. Taxi PuDo areas like Singapore Airport, where taxis park perpendicular to the street, are probably the best design compared to the often slow-moving taxi lines found in some locations. The busiest places (especially the stadiums and convention centers) can do well to put passengers on buses that go to the satellite PuDo places in the direction each passenger wants to go. In some cases, these vehicles (be it cars, vans, shuttles, or buses) can even travel a long distance as no one will avoid them.

These systems are likely to be related or identical to the systems used to handle larger and heavily trafficked parking lots. If vehicles do not approach parking lots or loading areas until they are ready for a quick transfer, there should be no congestion in those areas. Old parking lots that were no longer needed in the Robotaxi era are excellent candidates for staging areas. At an airport, one can imagine taking the old short-term car park and assigning most of the spaces to the PuDo, which can handle all but the busiest times. Of course, if they are building a Robocar airport, this could also happen on the unused parts of the airport perimeter, where airside vehicles take people without checked baggage directly from their aircraft to a gate in the fence and the PuDo area for ground transportation transfers.

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