Why Driverless Cars are No Solution
Published at 19:23 on 28 November 2015
This is a good start.
To it one can add that driverless cars will mainly act to increase the capacity of freeways (by enabling cars to safely tailgate each other at freeway speeds). When it comes to congested surface streets in major employment and commercial centers, cars simply can’t move that fast. There’s too many intersections and other hazards to contend with.
Street capacity is already maxed out (or nearly so) in those areas. Making it possible for the freeway system to dump significantly more traffic on those streets will simply make congestion get worse until gridlock develops and the queues waiting to enter the congested area back up onto the freeways and congest them, too.
Self-driving technology does nothing to change the essential fact of personal transportation: that it doesn’t scale. Cars work well only when there are relatively few of them.