Ironic that their solution to reduced quality time with family is to put them on a bus with a Mercedes employee instead of driving them to x practice.
I don't know what to think about this app in general. They've identified the problem that parents don't have time to drive their kids to all of their activities. However I think they are missing the other problem that kids don't have time to take a "school bus" to all of their activities.
I imagine once you hop on that you will make many stops along the way picking up other kids and dropping some off. So instead of a 15 minute drive to the soccer field, it is now a 35 minute ride. I think that if kids have so many activities that parents can't drive them around, that the kids themselves may not be able to squeeze in these extended trips either.
The need and achievability of quality time lies on a logarithmic scale which goes downward from infancy to adolescence. When a kid is eight or ten years old, they want the bus ride and you want the train ride. Why go out of your way when you can both arrive at home at the same time refreshed? Driving is good for no one. Either through services or robots we should try to eliminate all driving that is not for enjoyment. Daily driving is common, mundane and does nothing to increase quality of life for those that have to do it. Riding is great. Driving is a chore.
It's all what you make of it. A ton of life is spent doing relatively mundane tasks, and I think there's a great opportunity to redeem that time. It all adds up.
I think the main difference is that driving is a dangerous activity. You won't be playing with your kid while driving, you won't look at the wonderful drawing he/she did in class, and you can't engage any discussion that make you think or feel too much.
I would disagree. If you can have a discussion with your adult passenger, you can have a conversation with your kid. Ask them how their day was, do they have homework, are they excited for soccer tonight? It all goes a long way to making your kid feel special, developing communication skills etc.
>If you can have a discussion with your adult passenger
To give a frame of reference, I don't believe that driving is so easy that most people can do it competently on a daily basis.
I find the experience extremely broken, and it seems difficult for a lot of people to drive 100% correctly; signalling before turning would be an obvious one: It should be simple, but the fact that otherwise competent people don't do it hints at a problem with the system itself. People commute and don't scratch their car everyday, but I think for the majority it's more a combination of luck and tolerance of the system than pure skill and mastery of the art.
In this respect, I think most drivers are not OK having a discussion with their passengers. They can, because they don't devote 100% of their brain power to driving (it's more of a chore than anything else, and no one wants to focus on chores), but personally I think they shouldn't. Eventually we should find a driving system more centered about user safety, better designed and less taxing for the driver, but I'm not holding my breath.
I guess it's obvious now, but I think most people should live in urbanised areas with good public transports, and/or high tolerance to walking/biking/kick boarding. Walking my kid to school is a nice experience, like you describe it; Driving my kid would be stressing at best, I'd be more focused on the brake light of the car in front of me than the soccer match tonight.
I don't know what to think about this app in general. They've identified the problem that parents don't have time to drive their kids to all of their activities. However I think they are missing the other problem that kids don't have time to take a "school bus" to all of their activities.
I imagine once you hop on that you will make many stops along the way picking up other kids and dropping some off. So instead of a 15 minute drive to the soccer field, it is now a 35 minute ride. I think that if kids have so many activities that parents can't drive them around, that the kids themselves may not be able to squeeze in these extended trips either.