Quote:
Originally Posted by logan5
With vehicle to vehicle communication, cars will be able to run in platoons through intersections...
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You're describing a vision of the future which isn't going go happen for a few decades. The technology may be close at hand, but we can't achieve anywhere near close to those kinds of efficiences until we get all the manually driven cars off the road. Don't think it's going to be easy to pry vehicles out of drivers' hands. And we're not going to see the kinds of narrow safety margins you're scenario needs until we've gone through a few generations of automated vehicles and worked out the technological and legal liability kinks. That means generations of expensive vehicles that aren't even on the drawing board yet will have to be bought, become obsolete, and be retired before we can get there.
In the meantime, the population will grow, demanding more capacity. Platooned cars carrying individual occupants are still
way more space consumptive than a mass transit vehicle. The geometry and physics are against you, and they can't be altered by technology - at least not until we can "beam" things via a Star Trek-like transporter.