Roads are congested because people commute. If you ask an engineer you'll get an extremely technologically ambitious complicated system of just in time short t

Roads are congested because people commute. If you ask an engineer you'll get an extremely technologically ambitious complicated system of just in time short term rental logistics, and being engineers they'll handwave away the whole social engineering cultural stuff because that's not on any microcontroller datasheet or EE resume I've ever read. Ah well, build it and they will come. Maybe some authoritarian demands to have the government punish people who don't subscribe to my private profitable service. I mean, what could possibly go wrong with good ole authoritarianism? If you ask a social sciences type they'll whack the engineer over the head with a 2x4 and ask why we're not applying existing proven legacy technologies for remote working and distributed offices and VPNs and flex time. My employer already has something like 50 offices nationwide, why can't they scale to 2000 including one in my suburb for me and the 30 or so coworkers living here, why do we have to drive to the big city coworking office of 300 people? Most of my work is with coworkers in other states I've never met, why can't I do that from home, for all I know they're already working at home! If you think its going to be easy to get people to give up private automobile ownership, have I got a homework assignment for you, try getting them to support remote working. It "should" be much easier, so if you can't social engineer 90% of the population into working at home or locally, then you have no point in even trying to socially engineer a new transportation system. Stick to daydreaming about flying cars. Ditto the supermarket comparison. I used Peapod for years, nothing bad to say. I don't need to invent a nationwide network of short term loan self driving self cleaning distributed dispatched GPS guided semi-autonomous cars to buy a head of lettuce. I just want cheaper Peapod. It works, its cheap, and cheaper would be nicer. Trying to social engineer people into having peapod hand them a head of lettuce is likely a heck of a lot easier than social engineering a new transport system. Wake me when 90% of the population has been social engineered into the simpler task of using peapod for food, then maybe I'll expect a success at re-engineering the entire transportation system. After all, if you didn't require people to drive, they wouldn't need overloaded roads or parking lots... The obvious solution isn't a fancier car, its less driving.