Quote:
Originally Posted by logan5
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.
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1. Parking might be less of a problem, but street space would be more of a problem. All those cars would have to make return trips.
2. Shared cars are not part of the bundle with autonomous cars. Cars are a major vanity possession, the wealthiest 1/4 of the population, at the very least, will keep their private vehicles, self-driven or not. Parents, too, like to keep their carseats, strollers, etc. in the vehicle. Work vehicles are full of tools. Farmers, outdoorsmen, campers, have special needs - bike, canoe and kayak racks, trailer hitches, off-road capability. What about holiday long weekends, when everybody and his uncle wants to get out to the lake/ grandparent's small town/ farm/mountains and wants to take a cooler/boat/whatever. Shared cars will increase but will always be a niche.
3. Safety would be great, but it doesnt' stand alone. If all cars are autonomous, perfect at predicting unpredictable behaviour and always stop, what happens?
Pedestrians and cyclists are no longer bullied onto narrow sidewalks, that's what happens. Car speeds drop massively (other than freeways) as auto-cars drive at actual safe speeds, not 10 over the already high speed limit.
And cars would be super safe, and would be controlled extremely conservatively, because a wrongful death lawsuit against GM/Google would get a lot more traction than one against John Smith who was just in a hurry to get home to his family.
4. Estimates of 10X capacity require using all streets as thoroughfares, including residential side streets (maybe unpopular?) and ignore that there will still be non-networked users on the streets.