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> It should be obvious that there would be plenty of room in that scenario, both on the streets and in the parking garages. No! It's absolutely not obvious. My

> It should be obvious that there would be plenty of room in that scenario, both on the streets and in the parking garages. No! It's absolutely not obvious. My biggest problem with your argument is that you're taking it for granted that streets can move as many cars as you think they can. They can't. For the sake of argument, I'm willing to entertain the idea that you can double throughput through automation, and that simply isn't enough for such a low-density form of transportation. Again - picture your system in Chicago where it moves 300,000 people into the downtown loop during the commuting rush-hour. Nobody owns any of these cars, so there isn't any parking to worry about. Fine. Where do these 300,000 people get in and out of their cars? Remember - bus lanes can't even scale past 6,000 people an hour per lane because of the need to get people on and off. Don't forget that these throughput numbers are under best-case scenarios, for smooth flowing traffic. We haven't even discussed intersections...

CamperBob2 10y ago
You're using present-day definitions of words like "bus" and "car" as if they're still going to hold in 20-30 years. I'm not sure how that fits into the accepted taxonomy of logical fallacies, but it's in there somewhere. Hint: An ensemble of coordinated autonomous vehicles is a train. (And no, there's no contradiction there -- you behave in a locally-autonomous manner when you drive your car, but your actions are still centrally coordinated by the traffic laws you have to obey, locally coordinated by the network of traffic control devices that your city maintains, and ultimately constrained by the other vehicles and pedestrians around you.) What's the difference between a light rail system and a chain of buses that can drive at high speed, nose-to-tail, along any highway in the city, capable of starting and stopping like a train to let people on and off but also capable of arbitrarily diverging from and rejoining individual routes like passenger cars? The only real difference is that the latter is going to be better at meeting its users' needs, because unlike rails, roads are everywhere. How cool will it be when your city can grow and reshape itself organically, instead of being tied literally and metaphorically to some existing rail infrastructure that was installed decades ago? The notion that there have to be some metal rails bolted to the right of way is just something some people made up 100 years ago. But damn, it's influential for some reason.

CamperBob2 10y ago

You're using present-day definitions of words like "bus" and "car" as if they're still going to hold in 20-30 years. I'm not sure how that fits into the accepted taxonomy of logical fallacies, but it's in there somewhere. Hint: An ensemble of coordinated autonomous vehicles is a train. (And no, there's no contradiction there -- you behave in a locally-autonomous manner when you drive your car, but your actions are still centrally coordinated by the traffic laws you have to obey, locally coordinated by the network of traffic control devices that your city maintains, and ultimately constrained by the other vehicles and pedestrians around you.) What's the difference between a light rail system and a chain of buses that can drive at high speed, nose-to-tail, along any highway in the city, capable of starting and stopping like a train to let people on and off but also capable of arbitrarily diverging from and rejoining individual routes like passenger cars? The only real difference is that the latter is going to be better at meeting its users' needs, because unlike rails, roads are everywhere. How cool will it be when your city can grow and reshape itself organically, instead of being tied literally and metaphorically to some existing rail infrastructure that was installed decades ago? The notion that there have to be some metal rails bolted to the right of way is just something some people made up 100 years ago. But damn, it's influential for some reason.