The concern I have read from urban planners is more that autonomous cars are simply an improved variation of a car, and they won't actually fix many of the core

The concern I have read from urban planners is more that autonomous cars are simply an improved variation of a car, and they won't actually fix many of the core problems that cars have created in cities. Autonomous cars absolutely have the potential to be much safer than human driven cars, but their innovations don't change many other aspects of car oriented transportation. It remains questionable then whether our cities will be all that different if the cars on the road are autonomously driven or not. In this sort of discussion I feel it must be added that it's fully possible to build walkable, bike friendly, cities right now with current technology. We just choose not to do so. We don't need new technologies to achieve this.