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- Zero traffic fatalities would be nice - Reduced congestion/traffic, people can get to places faster - Never having to worry about parking again - No more need for cars parked on streets, more space & safer for cyclists and pedestrians - Reduced income requirements for those that need access to a car
There are countless benefits. The transition period to get there will be a little tumultuous, but we'll get there eventually as a society
They won't reduce congestion and traffic, because people won't have to drive they'll be OK with being on the road longer. You just hang out in your living room on wheels.
Parking... Where are the cars going to park exactly? How far from the restaurants and homes etc? Won't the extra trips from/to parking lots create more traffic?
Reduced income requirements, that's a new one to me. These cars will have more tech that's more expensive to build and maintain. How does that make them cheaper?
50%+ of car trips are less than three miles... as a society what we need is a way to make those trips without cars.
In the extreme, imagine if a light turns green and all cars in line accelerate at the same time. Intersections would let through a lot more cars.
Or think of freeway speeds where the length of a car is near-negligible. A one-second following distance means almost 60 cars pass a given point in a minute, versus almost 30 cars per minute for a two-second following distance.
Traffic flows would become well coordinated and way more efficient, no more accordion effect and accidents to cause traffic jams.
> Parking... Where are the cars going to park exactly? How far from the restaurants and homes etc? Won't the extra trips from/to parking lots create more traffic?
It could be several miles from where the passengers are being dropped off. See above for why traffic won't be worse.
> Reduced income requirements, that's a new one to me. These cars will have more tech that's more expensive to build and maintain. How does that make them cheaper?
Of course new technology is expensive initially. Over time, it becomes cheaper and cheaper. Just like air travel, personal computers, broadband internet, etc.
> 50%+ of car trips are less than three miles... as a society what we need is a way to make those trips without cars.
More efficient use of the roadways from self driving cars would create opportunities for improvements in this area as well. Dedicated protected bike lanes, for example.
then you've only fixed 50% of car trips, and much less than 50% of vehicle miles and probably not done much at all for highway deaths.
all the urban bike infrastructure in the world isn't going to do much for rural and interstate problems.
You might like driving. For many, driving is stressful.
This is besides the point someone else brought up about how notoriously bad at driving humans can be, and the capacity for how much safer an automated car could be when the tech is matured.
Public transit like efficient railroad infrastructure across the US would be even nicer, but I've about given up on that for the USA. They're doing self driving cars because we sunk too much money in roadway infrastructure (sunk cost fallacy.)
We could use... trains & buses. Self-driving trains and buses!
But self-driving individual cars, because they will make the time more bearable, will induce even more driving, which is the opposite of what we want.
To give the benefit of the doubt, my assumption is that they're solving it this way because the road infrastructure and market for cars already exists. You'd see big tech working on automating public transit if states actually started improving their public transit infrastructure.
Progress is always good IMO.
If you mean it more generally, MattY would like to have a word. https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-techno-optimists-fallacy
Self-driving cars isn't progress. Larger and heavier cars isn't progress. Cars with insane eye-searing LED headlights isn't progress.
There's a rural cost/benefit that ensures we will never not need cars, probably. But I can't fathom why eight lane interstates exist. If we can justify that many lanes of road traffic, we can certainly replace six of them with a train.
Self-driving trains? Easy. And no matter how hard you try, even the most efficient electric car will never end up greener than a train on a per user basis.
I've witnessed tons of anti-social behavior over the years taking the DC metro and honestly, have never been comfortable ever since I was a child and got stuck between two drunk men arguing after a baseball game. I was feeling claustrophobic and could even feel the spit hit my face. The car was packed and no room to really get away from it. I think its gotten better but I wouldn't know as I haven't used it in years.
I think is the qualifier the other user put in to disqualify public transit. But yes, ideally.
- No more car insurance
- Cheap transportation to work/school
- Less deaths on the road
There is plenty to gain from having true driverless vehicles accessible to the public.
They might be safer than human drivers, but there are already superior solutions to that in the form of transportation systems that are not overly focused on cars.
"Fixing" commutes by making everyone sit alone in their car while it does the driving part as if that's the problem with an hour long commute, is the single dumbest way to make cities better.
Instead we've got "it's a car but you can doomscroll while on your 45 minute commute and we harvest your data to sell ads".
This has nothing to do with public safety.
>But they want freedom more.
Sure, it's a very individualistic society where one's personal convenience is more important than societal good. But let's call a spade a spade and not pretend that self driving car companies are selfless benefactors out to solve pedestrian deaths.
Every other country has seen a reduction in the number of deaths over time, without self driving cars.