Quote:
Originally Posted by logan5
It’s pretty easy to predict these vehicles will use the roads far more efficiently when there are enough of them on the roads. Road space won’t be a problem.
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It's not that you can change the paradigm when "enough of them are on the roads", you can't really do that until you've eliminated ALL of the manually driven vehicles. And I suspect that's going to be big political obstacle for a long way into the future.
And the idea that a line of autonomous vehicles will somehow be able to turn themselves into something resembling a train is also a fallacy. There needs to be a margin of safety to handle failure scenarios. Blowouts, obstacles falling onto the road, wayward pedestrians or animals, all require vehicles to maintain space around them to give them time to react to unexpected situations. The only way to get train-like spacing is to have a grade separated right of way into which no potential obstacles are permitted to intrude. We have that already - it's called Rapid Transit.
And even if you could run cars bumper-to-bumper, they are STILL far inferior to a transit vehicle in terms of road space per person. Closer vehicle spacing may be able to move more people in cars, but it will never be able to move all the people and it will never be able to do so at the cost and scale of transit.
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