voltage said:
I don't understand how self driving vehicles will impact city life in a huge positive way
I keep reading commentary that suggests autonomous cars are going to eliminate congestion, but only measures like running in convoys and interleaving at intersections might plausibly help achieve that goal. And those measures can't be implemented until
all cars are autonomous, which isn't going to happen for quite a few decades. In the meantime, autonomous cars which actually drive at the speed limit and stay far enough behind the leading vehicle to be able to stop in an emergency will actually take up
more road space than human-driven cars do today. Autonomous cars won't have magic brakes that can stop faster than human-driven cars can, and even their faster reaction times will require a greater following distance than is maintained by the vast majority of commuters.
People seem to be conflating the idea that car ownership might drop (why own a car when you can just summon one) with fewer cars on the road and then leaping to the conclusion that there will be less congestion. But that's
completely fallacious. It's not the number of cars
owned that governs congestion, it's the
number of trips being made. And unless autonomous cars can somehow break people's need to commute alone in their own vehicle, the number of trips isn't going to drop. In fact, having autonomous cars traveling on their own between rides is going to increase the amount of traffic on the road, and lead to more congestion.
The one thing that autonomous driving technology might do to ease congestion is to automate transit service and eliminate the high labour cost of the drivers. That will lead to cheaper transit, which might lure some more people out of their cars. But given how a lot of people seem to look down their noses at public transit I'm not expecting any miracles on that front.
