Originally Posted by
cooker
How will all this affect living car free? As cyclists will we be safer, or will there be another round of attempts to get us off the road? Will we be required to plug into the system with transponders as suggested earlier? Will people drive less because there is less need to own a car, or drive more because it is easier and less stressful?
And most important to us northerners, will there still be road hockey?
It's so difficult to say. I see what seem like compelling arguments for this or that outcome one day only to have that refuted by other credible arguments to the contrary that discuss subtle factors not previously well considered. A case in point is to consider how pedestrians will interact with driverless cars and what the outcome of that will be. The argument goes, that pedestrians will cripple driverless cars without significant changes to infrastructure. Today when a pedestrian walks across the street they are wise to exercise a lot of caution. Pedestrians have the right of way but won't walk willy nilly into a busy intersection for fear that all but the most cautious driver might wipe them out. But once pedestrians observe and develop confidence in the consistently attentive driverless car will they care at all about stepping into traffic? After all if your trajectory has you steadily approaching the road driverless cars will slow down and emergency-stop as necessary to avoid you. Why worry? Does this end up being a big impediment to flowing car traffic? In some areas this might simply parallelize cars. At one extreme would be thousands of people getting out of a sporting event etc. They wait for traffic signals to give them walk-indications now. Why wait when you know driverless cars won't hit you anyway? The same effect is there even in much smaller numbers. Yes there's jay walking laws but those are hard to enforce in big numbers.
I'm not real optimistic on the impact to LCF. Since ride sharing will bring down the cost of using driverless cars there will probably be a lot of that. You might even be able to own your own car but still let it leave the house and go earn you some cash while you don't need to go somewhere. Rather than sitting at home in somebody's driveway then, the cars are always out on the road consuming a footprint in the available space for motorized traffic (assuming demand of course). If driverless is cheap per mile and available within minutes or less where you can for example summon a car when you get into the checkout at the grocery store, the total amount of traffic out there could go up a lot. That won't have a nice effect for LCF.