Originally Posted by
cooker
Yes and no. The cars themselves may be better at following closely and merging while maintaining constant speed, and using alternate routes to avoid local congestion, but if a subset of people now use subways into town because they hate driving, or avoid crowded malls because parking is a nightmare, they might go by driverless car more often in the future because the car will take on the stress, so it might get more congested. I-Like-To-Bike posted a link showing Uber pickups and dropoffs have led to curbside congestion in some places, so presumably cheaper, driverless Uber might be even worse.
yes, this is a concern. A lot will depend on cost, too. If it is cheap to operate a driverless car, some people might send them all over for no reason. Some of the stuff though ... like buying favorite cookies ... is the car going to go to the store, go into the store, pick up the cookies, and pay for them?
Seems a lot more likely that a small driverless car Operated By The Grocery Service will make neighborhood deliveries (or drones will---I mean, this is already happening in some places, it isn't a dream of the future--I have read articles about pilot programs) which will limit traffic somewhat.
Shopping will be done online, deliveries will be arranged by the stores via road-going or flying drones---people are Not eager to drive morte, and won't need to drive more, and the foolish fantasies about cars going shopping ... that is stuff invented by peple grasping at straws.
Hey, folks ... Everything is going to change. And the stuff that works will be kept and the stuff that doesn't will get axed. Same as it ever was.
Some people have no grasp of the passage of history. hundreds of years from now, we will be seen as living in the dawn of the automotive age. The first motorized carts from 1896 won't bee seen as a lot different form the latest Lexus with all the driver aids and all that.
Hundreds of years from now if there are cars they will All be robot-driven because obviously a computer can do it a Lot better than any human (we have been happy with 30-40 thousands highway deaths a year since about 1960 ... and almost all were driver error.) Pretty sure the internal combustion engine will have been long dead, and quite possibly everything will be maglev or some propulsion system we cannot even imagine.
And here we have to wade through people saying effectively, "The horse and buggy were too far advanced ... and since then everything has gotten worse!"
I can tell you this---if we every have anything approaching a "perfect World" it won't be because of the transportation modalities ... it will be because people decided to place emphasis on personal growth and development instead of material wealth and acquisition.
Nothing wrong with being rich, but rich and greedy is a bad combination. If people were honest, caring tolerant ... if "Virtue" became a word with a serious, not a comical meaning ... if "Being good' actually meant something, and "being rich," "being popular," "being famous" no longer excused the worst sort of human behavior ... then the rest of the crap would be easy to fix.