So self driving car brands are currently in the process of offering subscription based self driving features.
Soon these subscriptions will be cheap enough for everybody to abandon public transport and get into their self driving cars instead.
This means that everybody will be in their cars and it will create the biggest traffic jam in human history!
And finally, self-driving cars will be totally safe and able to drive completely unsupervised! While standing still in traffic going an average of 5 km/h…
It will be beautiful (/s)
Hi, traffic engineer here.
That’s never going to happen. It’s nothing but a tech-bro bullshit fantasy.
Why? Because cyclists and pedestrians exist. In order to make it possible for the kinds of gains you’re talking about to happen, every road user has to be an autonomous vehicle, but (aside from freeways) streets simply do not work that way and never will.
(Oh, and also: even at the limit, the best it can ever accomplish is to be an inferior approximation of a train.)
Maybe we should work on building out more trains?
I suppose self-driving cars could drive like regular cars on the small roads, but then go to big specialized highways where they can go full speed.
But that doesn’t make sense anyway, because that would not save you that much time anymore. And in that case you could just have regular cars to drive to a station with parking and then take the train to your destination
We already have those big specialized highways; that’s what freeways are. The trouble is, even if autonomous driving were capable of doubling the lane capacity (and IIRC the theoretical best case is actually less than that, closer to a 50% improvement), induced demand is still a thing. It maybe buys you a reprieve for a decade or so, but after that you’re right back to “just one more lane, bro!”
Since you stated that you are a traffic engineer, quick question for you. Are more lanes all together or more lanes separate better?
What I mean is are you better off with 1 highway that has 4 lanes in each direction or 2 highways that each have 2 lanes in each direct. Same total lanes, but split up differently? It seems like adding more lanes to a congested road just makes a bigger mess; a problem in any lane seems to propagate through all lanes.
I know it’s a lot more complicated than just building a parallel road, but (in my area at least) the lack of alternate routes is frustrating. The entire highway turns into a parking lot if there’s a crash. I also see a lot of near misses due to lane flanking: car in lane A and car in lane C both want in lane B at the same time. More lanes = more likely for this to happen.