Trains

All modes of transportation will eventually end up as trains.

Here is another example of why this newsletter is called Recurrent Patterns.

Did you know that Uber offers Scheduled Share Rides, Group Rides and Commute, and more recently Route Share?

A service which started as a replacement for taxis is slowly adding features which you might be familiar with in some other context. In the case of Commute, Uber describes it as '...  a carpooling service on Uber that allows commuters to share their ride with neighbors and colleagues while getting reimbursed for their costs.' and says '... every ride you request and share with a local commuter allows you to enjoy a more comfortable commute at a low cost.'

For the Route Share, it '... offers consistent and frequent pickup options along direct routes during morning and evening commute hours (6-10 am and 4-8 pm local time Monday through Friday)', '... with pickups every 20 minutes along busy corridors during weekday commute hours'.

Don’t the above descriptions sound like a version of public transportation? I think that even Uber is realizing that there is a limit to how many cars it can put on the road without completely clogging the roads and the only way to grow its business is to start grouping people together.

Before you know it, we will see Uber buses traveling along the same route as the ones you can use in cities around the world. What happens when you connect multiple buses together? You get a train.

While Uber is no longer the cool kid which everyone was talking about a few years ago, we have the upcoming self-driving cars and taxis.

The same will happen here as well if we ever, ever get fully autonomous self-driving cars, but it probably won’t be from Tesla with its again and again broken promises. What will start as an individual car for one or two people will expand to 4 and 6 and more. Eventually these cars will ride connected as the The Alliance for Automotive Innovation envisioned where '... tightly spaced platoons of AVs could reduce congestion-related delays by 60 percent on highways.'

Our self-driving cars will morph into trains again.

You’ve got to love recurrent patterns. They are everywhere.