Comment by klabb3
> I will likely have my own personal self-driving vehicle.
The self-driving car ”utopia” (or rather moderate improvement) very much hinges on the space savings on roadways and parking, to increase utilization, reduce congestion and allow dead space to be reclaimed. If people think like you (no value judgment, I suspect this might be the future norm), then you’ll see almost no change to the urban landscape as a whole. It’ll continue to be a one-flesh-body-per-2-tonne vehicle utilization, a ~5:1 provisioning of parking spaces, 25-50% of urban areas being roadways+parking, and a double-digit productivity loss from commuting and running simple errands.
That leaves you with an individual comfort improvement (allowing you to be on your phone while in the car) for a premium price, and increased surveillance tech on personal vehicles. (And, to be fair, it can still be huge for drunk driving deaths, access for elderly & disabled, once costs come down). Overall, very mediocre imo.
Controversial take: the US has painted itself into a corner, where by ignoring the well being of people in their own communities, they need so many workarounds to prevent space sharing between the ~2-3 social groups where intermingling means friction and fear. There are very real logistical challenges to a gated community segmentation of the physical world. This paints the resistance to public transit in a different light: it’s not so much about being public, but rather being shared with strangers, especially of different social cohorts. It also explains the sacred status of air travel which mainly has been left outside the debate: imo because of the higher socio-economic average clientele. Now that cost has come down and low-cost airlines like Spirit share the same airports, the friction has come there as well.
Actually this is untrue. The congestion improvement comes from cooperation between vehicles. Basic control theory applied to cooperative vehicles found 5% of cars participating can eliminate stop and go traffic conditions, and in general as you approach 100% penetration all traffic moves at maximum rate effectively like a self assembling mass transit system. Only if you effectively replaced human drivers as adversarial agents with AI adversarial agents would things stay the same. Even at lower levels of 30% penetration you see most congestion resolve even in urban roads.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09680...