Quote:
Originally Posted by WarrenC12
If we are in a fully autonomous world, things will look a lot different. Very few people will own cars. There won't be much need for public parking, street parking, etc. Cars take up a ton of space and have very poor utilization rates.
There might be some congestion. There will also be deals to carpool with people instead of going alone. Still a way better experience than the bus.
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The issue isn't the space required to park all those cars downtown. That's already been solved. The issue is the road capacity to move a few hundred thousand more cars during the rush hour. That one is not easily solved.
If people are going to share cars, then doesn't it make sense to make the cars larger in order to lower per-rider costs? Oh wait, those are called "buses". They can self-drive just as well as the cars can.
When you start sharing rides you reduce convenience because of the need to circulate around pickup and dropoff points, or alternatively make your way to common pickup points. The more you share the less convenient and less appetite there will be. The bus is the logical conclusion of this.
Where I can see self-driving cars making a difference is in solving the "last mile" problem of getting transit to people's doorsteps. If the price can be brought down low enough, I can see a demand for transfers between rapid transit stations and front doors. That would make transit more palatable and may not contribute too much to traffic and congestion heading into the central business districts.
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