@yogthos How about a city like NYC that bans human driven vehicles altogether and has a network of autonomous vehicles of varying sizes constantly available on the street for both cargo and passenger travel. You need to get from brooklyn to an address in midtown? You call up a ride on your phone. One immediately drops out of traffic, picks you up, and takes you where you need to go. No human behavior caused traffic jams or accidents. For less specific destinations, bus or van sized vehicles.
No. That only solves some of the issues, and creates brand new ones.
You haven’t solved the inherent inefficiencies of having everyone sit in their own cars. The same bottlenecks will still exist and will still cause congestion, only with automation you can have slightly more capacity because it’s taking out the delays between one driver moving and the driver behind reacting and starting to move as well.
All the issues with tires rubbing asphalt creating micro rubber particles will stay, as will the massively cost ineffective infrastructure needed to support mass car travel like freeway interchanges, as will the fact that you need orders of magnitude more materials to manufacture enough cars to do the job of just a few hundred trains.
And having the cars autonomous will make them even more vulnerable to cyber attacks than modern cars already are.
Also, trains are even easier to automate than cars. I live in Vancouver and we’ve had autonomous trains since 1986.
@yogthos How about a city like NYC that bans human driven vehicles altogether and has a network of autonomous vehicles of varying sizes constantly available on the street for both cargo and passenger travel. You need to get from brooklyn to an address in midtown? You call up a ride on your phone. One immediately drops out of traffic, picks you up, and takes you where you need to go. No human behavior caused traffic jams or accidents. For less specific destinations, bus or van sized vehicles.
No. That only solves some of the issues, and creates brand new ones.
You haven’t solved the inherent inefficiencies of having everyone sit in their own cars. The same bottlenecks will still exist and will still cause congestion, only with automation you can have slightly more capacity because it’s taking out the delays between one driver moving and the driver behind reacting and starting to move as well.
All the issues with tires rubbing asphalt creating micro rubber particles will stay, as will the massively cost ineffective infrastructure needed to support mass car travel like freeway interchanges, as will the fact that you need orders of magnitude more materials to manufacture enough cars to do the job of just a few hundred trains.
And having the cars autonomous will make them even more vulnerable to cyber attacks than modern cars already are.
Also, trains are even easier to automate than cars. I live in Vancouver and we’ve had autonomous trains since 1986.