Quote:
Originally Posted by Stryker
I don't understand why this is so hard to understand, it'll be very much like your modern taxi. With one big hitch being a fraction of the cost, and far more predictable.
Once you think about it in those terms I believe its a lot more obvious.
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I think it is more complicated than that.
As a civil engineer, I enjoy thinking about the changes that autonomous cars can bring to our urban infrastructure. Infrastructure is simply a reflection of how people want to live - most people want to have a car and the personal mobility it brings, so our US infrastructure consists mostly of roads and parking lots. Autonomous cars sever the link between personal mobility and owning/operating a private vehicle. I think people will adopt autonomous technology pretty quickly, because who likes driving in trafic jams, or paying car insurance, or taking your car to a repair garage? Drivers are already so bored; they are already trying to text/eat/sleep/anything-except-focus-on-driving because the actual task of keeping your car between the painted lines is not what they like about driving. They like the freedom of mobility.
So once these cars are accepted enough that manually-driven cars are phased out, how does that change the infrastructure that was designed for human drivers? How do those changes affect the people living/working nearby? We've talked on this thread about densification of cities due to the in-filling of parking lots, and we have talked about what transit services may be replaced or enhanced by autonomous taxis (and autonomous buses too). But there are other things as well. Social changes, such as everyone, no matter how young, having access to the mobility previously reserved only for those old enough for drivers licences, or where illegal drug markets that used to be done in parked cars and parking lots will go (I'm trying to find the article that brought these points up without much success).
When the needs of the people changes, then the infrastructure changes too. How the people then react to those changes is the most interesting part.