>I've always been of the mind that this technology can only work if you reduce the number of variables at play... that means removing the human element altogeth

>I've always been of the mind that this technology can only work if you reduce the number of variables at play... that means removing the human element altogether (and even then, mother nature may have other plans), meaning self-driving cars should have their own roads. Pipe dream, I know. That’s not the only way of reducing variables. I think the key is rethinking how self-driving cars can fit into a broader ecosystem of transportation, instead of narrowly thinking about self-driving cars as a one to one replacement for human driven cars. Self-driving or not, cars are a terribly inefficient way to move people. 10 buses that are only a third full replaces 260 single commuter cars. A light rail running at 50% capacity carries more people per hour that 4 full lanes of highway [1]. Even if we build more and more roads, that just causes more traffic, not less [2]. The problem with public transport is the “first mile, last mile” problem. Unless you are in a dense well-designed environment, it is a huge pain getting from your house to the public transport, and from the public transport to your office/store/ballet recital. People don’t want to drive 3 miles and park their car at the light rail station, ride to the closest stop, take a bus 2.5 miles, and then walk the last half mile to the office. But if a self-driving car could pick you up at the curb and take you right to the lightrail, and another could pick you up from your stop and drop you right at the office, suddenly that changes the calculus. Why sit on the highway for 90 mins in your self-driving car, surrounded by 100,000 other people in self driving cars, when you could make the same trip in 40 mins using the light rail and a couple Uber-driverless. In that situation, you can reduce variables by having self driving cars drive at lower speeds (in residential and urban areas) and by having a few dedicated lanes on strategic artery roads to move people to central locations for transport on bus/lightrail/train, much like we have dedicated lanes for buses in some places. Once you have some basic infrastructure like that, then it makes more sense to reduce the massive amount of streets and parking wasting space in dense urban environments. If you want a car for your suburban life, fine, but you have to park it outside downtown and take the lightrail in and grab a little self-driving car to get where you want to go. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_rail [2] https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/ https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/