awful article. yes internal combustion engines are inefficient. yes mass transit offers superior energy consumption per passenger mile in many cases. BUT whe

awful article. yes internal combustion engines are inefficient. yes mass transit offers superior energy consumption per passenger mile in many cases. BUT when cars are good enough at coordinating to make streetlights irrelevant, or park themselves, or self distribute among different routes to globally optimize road throughput, the carbon footprint will be substantially lower. when the grid is cleaner which is happening every day, the point of electric cars being dirty is that much less valid. cars are like packets. the cost per bit is higher, but the dynamacism compared to circuit switched systems is a GIANT feature. trains and buses lose their efficiency edge quickly as density lowers because of their inherent inflexibility. even if my commute was to take the same amount of time, have the same carbon foot print and nothing else changed. The fact that I do something else besides play organ with my cars controls is a giant improvement. Maybe i will spend my new found free time coming up with explanations for why this luddite can't see the forest from the trees as @inmyunix astutely points out. AND the author is suggesting that limited reagent is roadways and that cars don't offer a solution to that. well, there are more creative solutions that can play nice with self driving cars, like time multiplexing roadways. a global system can decide that you may as well leave 20 minutes later because you will get there in the same amount of time and hence send a car to pick you up later. or more generally, just shifting the hours slightly so that instead of most commuters leaving at ~8 and ~5, its half ~7, ~4 and half ~8, ~5 etc. or even more granular. These are difficult problems and there is no way a single solution should be expected to solve all problems. This is a step in the right direction, despite Ben Walsh's lack of vision.