My apologies, I'm a bit annoyed by comments everywhere on this discussion that don't count shared taxis as public transport. I wrote in another comment that without congestion pricing or aggressive expansion of HOV lanes, the efficiency gains of self-driving cars would not be realized. Even without that we'd still have the increased road safety gains.
> About buses you have say 30 people using a bus
The problem is that it's difficult to match transport demand and supply perfectly because the bus is such a large unit of transport. The more common scenario is a close-to-empty (off-peak times, unpopular routes) or bursting-at-the-seams (peak times, popular routes) vehicle. Because the self-driving car is a smaller, more granular unit of transportation, you can deliver more targeted supply to the places where there's demand, at the exact times when there's demand.
My question is that you think the number of cars on the road (not in garages) will drop or rise ?
I think it will rise:
- the people that afford expensive cars now(Tesla,BMW) will continue to own their own cars
- people that can't drive now but have enough money will buy their own cars
- some of the less rich people that own a car will keep using it
- people that use buses would use the new taxis if their are cost effective
So I think we will get more cars so we will have more energy consumed and we need better roads, better electric infrastructures that includes clean energy generation.
About safety my personal opinion is that with current software and hardware we are far for self driving cars in general conditions, we could get this cars maybe to work safely on specific roads.
I am also of the opinion that what Tesla is doing is wrong, aka here is auto pilot, it drives for you but you MUST still be 100% aware of the driving because you must intervene at any time, what advantages has this system ?
-advantage 1 you don't use your hands and legs that much
-no other safety that is not included in the driving asist packages from non self driving cars
- autopilot makes many drivers behave illegally and don't pay attention, the PR shows the cazrs driving themselves where the small print in manual tells you to pay attention 100% of the time
I think I understand your point, I am also frustrated by bad drivers that text, speed and kill people, I want them out of the roads too but it will not be easy to replace human inteligence, driving is a complex process and software and hardware is not there yet (I was an optimist like you about an year ago until the cases with Tesla hitting trucks, police cars and concrete obstacles happened and I read about the fact they have to ignore inputs because there are too many and the hardware is not good enough to process it) maybe Google cars have better sensors,hardware and software and can bring the optimism back for me.
I think it can drop or stay the same if the costs of driving by yourself and owning a car rise sufficiently.
You can do this by implementing congestion pricing and heavily advantaging carpool vehicles on the road by giving them more dedicated lanes, or by restricting single-occupant vehicles to a single lane on highways.
In urban areas, renting a parking space for your own car is already quite expensive. It's an easy decision to give your car up if robo taxis are cheap and plentiful.
In suburbia the calculus is a bit trickier because there's still a bit of keeping up with the Joneses. But there are many who'd jump at the chance of getting rid of their garage and driveway and have more living or personal work space.
Yeah, though adding more taxes will be hard, people don't like more taxes and the car industry will fight hard to keep selling cars to individuals.
With some good regulation and investing in infrastructures we could reduce the car accidents and pollution today without having to wait decades until most cars will be self driving cars, but we don't have the regulation and investment unfortunately.
> About buses you have say 30 people using a bus
The problem is that it's difficult to match transport demand and supply perfectly because the bus is such a large unit of transport. The more common scenario is a close-to-empty (off-peak times, unpopular routes) or bursting-at-the-seams (peak times, popular routes) vehicle. Because the self-driving car is a smaller, more granular unit of transportation, you can deliver more targeted supply to the places where there's demand, at the exact times when there's demand.