Twice the cost of the salary is probably not a bad rule of thumb if you are making large numbers of people redundant. As you say, on top of the direct on-costs there are all manner of additional organisational costs in HR, legal, training, payroll and so on.
I’ve deliberately not included those because I don’t know enough about the organisational structure of bus companies and the indirect costs could be significantly more or less than I would guess.
Gut feel, the indirect on-costs would be on the low side. We’re talking a fairly homogenous skill set doing fairly routine work so I don’t imagine huge training or back office requirements. But I don’t know.
I’m rolling up the costs of the self-driving system into the capital costs of a new set of buses.
The problems that I think are going to be difficult to sort out are the ones you mention on behaviour of the passengers on the bus. What does the bus do if someone has a heart attack? A bus with a driver might drive to the nearest hospital. Do you install an emergency override? If so, how do you stop idiots hitting it every couple of minutes? Who is the designated leader of the hierarchy and therefore able to tell other people to turn down their ghetto blaster?
There would be software support and some extra hardware to service - and people with the skills to do that will be more expensive to employ than drivers but I think you would need many fewer of them than one per bus.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2012-02-24 01:03 pm (UTC)I’ve deliberately not included those because I don’t know enough about the organisational structure of bus companies and the indirect costs could be significantly more or less than I would guess.
Gut feel, the indirect on-costs would be on the low side. We’re talking a fairly homogenous skill set doing fairly routine work so I don’t imagine huge training or back office requirements. But I don’t know.
I’m rolling up the costs of the self-driving system into the capital costs of a new set of buses.
The problems that I think are going to be difficult to sort out are the ones you mention on behaviour of the passengers on the bus. What does the bus do if someone has a heart attack? A bus with a driver might drive to the nearest hospital. Do you install an emergency override? If so, how do you stop idiots hitting it every couple of minutes? Who is the designated leader of the hierarchy and therefore able to tell other people to turn down their ghetto blaster?
There would be software support and some extra hardware to service - and people with the skills to do that will be more expensive to employ than drivers but I think you would need many fewer of them than one per bus.