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Comment by wheelie_boy | Hacker News Reader

If anything, self-driving cars would make congestion a lot worse. If I had a self-driving mini-RV, I would live further from the city, and do my morning routine during my commute. Maybe take a small nap or get some work done.

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On the other hand, it'd so radically change the nature of being in a vehicle that it'd be hard to classify it as congestion as we currently understand it. If you're sitting in a comfortable pod with all the conveniences of home and productivity tools available to you in an office, then the impact of taking longer to get to your destination is much less significant.

Disagree - if traffic flowed more evenly, same speed for everyone, less lane changes, didn’t require the “safe distance padding” re-establishment at every light, the congestion would lesson. Probably not eliminated though.

Yes, if the amount of traffic stayed the same, having all self-driving cars would be a big improvement. But what I'm saying is that a lower cost of commuting (in terms of attention, effort, and danger) would induce demand. People would hate commuting a lot less, and therefore more people would do it. To offset that you'd need to either increase the speed dramatically or do something else so that more people can fit on the roads. Maybe smaller cars. Maybe pack self-driving cars automatically into trains. Maybe build a lot more roads.

But whatever it is, you need something major to counter the increase in commuters or else the road system will get swamped.

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