Quote:
Originally Posted by Mikemike
That's assuming that those autonomous cars have somewhere to park or that their reverse trips don't take up road space(thy do, doubling the total vehicle mileage), that autonomous vehicles can efficiently and safely operate in areas with high pedestrian density (probably never will - pedestrians are as unpredictable as those human -driven cars), that everyone currently taking public transit can afford a auto-automobile (they can't), and as the article above points out, that even if everything else is worked out and things work smoothly, fast,east autonomous cars will encourage longer an longer commutes, more and more driving until we're back in the same congested situation.
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When a city reaches the stage when their street grid is fully autonomous (that's when things will really start to get interesting), if every car is a shared car, the number of vehicles required to service all residents of a particular city will be far less than what is on the roads of our cities now, so parking would not be a problem.
Cost would not be an issue either. Since every car will be shared, no one person is required to own a vehicle. Most likely a transit authority would operate such a network. A city of 1 million people could certainly function with 150 000 or so shared vehicles (likely less than that). Even if each vehicle cost 20 000$, that would be 3 billion to set up a transit system for an entire region. Very cheap considering 3 billion buys you around 20 km's of rapid transit. And with very little labour costs, so cost to the consumer would easily be at the same level as a bus fare.
Safety for pedestrians would certainly increase. The autonomous car would sense or see a pedestrian far faster than any human, and be able to break far quicker.
I think it's only a matter of how willing society is to accept this kind of change. My guess would be Chinese cities will be the first to see a fully autonomous network, and with that example, the rest will follow.
Hatman - Observing how inefficiently people use city streets, especially intersections, I tend to think the capacity improvement will be closer to 10x, which would render all other forms of transit obsolete, even in the densest cities.