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Comment by Mawr | Hacker News Reader

I can't imagine any of that since it relies on >99% of cars being self-driving whereas currently <1% are. Even under the most optimistic estimates, how many decades would it take to get to that? 5? 10?

> Self-driving vehicles give us the opportunity to rethink almost all of our physical infrastructure and create way more human-friendly cities.

Ok, that's just giving me a stroke. We already have that. It's called public transport, walkability, bikeability. These have the upside of being extremely well understood and use technology that's available today. We could start seeing benefits within a few years, not decades.

Even in your dream scenario, 50 or so years from now, cars would still have a lot of the same downsides they have today of using way too much space and causing way too much pollution per person for the utility they provide.

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I live carless in NYC and primarily use a mix of public transit and cycling. That being said, infrastructure costs so excruciatingly much in the US that it would cost tens or hundreds of Waymos (company, not individual car) to replicate an NYC subway-tier system in most American metropolitan areas.

Forcing people to take public transit that is any worse than NYC subway will definitely and rightfully lose an election for that party. Building such a system at modern American construction costs will also lose an election. What is left to do but embrace autonomous driving as the first step toward retrofitting American cities to be slightly more people friendly?

Besides, this is the decadent west, we can afford for people to use more resources for more comfort. Even the well off in china have embraced cars as mobile living rooms.

> I can't imagine any of that since it relies on >99% of cars being self-driving whereas currently <1% are

Technology famously has a linear adoption curve, and convenience is famously not something that drives adoption /s

> We already have that. It's called public transport, walkability, bikeability.

Do we have that though? In the US, mostly not. So what's the path? Hoping that sprawled out cities somehow magically get the political will to build $billions in light rail? What do you think is the path of least resistance to these goal states?

> Even in your dream scenario, 50 or so years from now, cars would still have a lot of the same downsides they have today of using way too much space and causing way too much pollution per person for the utility they provide.

Read other comments, don't get stuck on the notion of 'cars' as-is.

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