Self driving cars solve the last mile problem. You get off a train close to your destination and a cheap self driving taxi finishes the journey.

And you could replace the train with a self driving bus. It can carry multiple people efficiently for the majority of their journey. And unlike current buses or trains, it can automatically adapt it's route based on where the occupants want to go. The buses can cooperate with the taxis to bring people to and from convenient pick up points.

The main problem with gridlock is that there is no limit to the number of vehicles on the road. There needs to be an economic advantage to things like buses that transport multiple people. A high tax on using the road in the city might work, if it could be enforced.

Turn major streets into payroads that are free for self-driving vehicles. It becomes a small tax on drivers and will convince them to use self-driving vehicles to save money. Work with companies so that self-driving buses arrive more frequently but only follow specific routes - while self-driving cars arrive less frequently but can take you to anywhere you need to go. People who are more time-pressed will take the bus. This would require cooperation between competing businesses and the cities' government though. Or a government-allowed monopoly / made into a public utility.

The benefits would be:

1) Compounds traffic on minor roads, encouraging people to fund the city via payroad taxes or begin using self-driving vehicles to get away from the traffic, which is now worse, for "human drivers".

2) Gets human drivers away from self-driving vehicles on major roads, which should reduce accidents. Less accidents means less traffic and more throughput.

Note: I don't think this would be realistically implementable. The regulations alone would be a nightmare to try and get passed.

London has a daily fee of £11.50 to drive in their congested area. No idea how much it helps.

> I don't really like hearing about tax money going into these projects

It might be better to think of it as an investment in public health rather than public transportation. Preventing the huge number of deaths caused by human drivers is more important than speeding up traffic.

There are lots of simpler ways to reduce traffic deaths that we could be funding.

for one, getting your license could be more than just a formality, and be more rigorous.

Options that Americans would choose to use?

Trains? Trams? Good rail networks in cities would greatly reduce the amount of drunk driving. It's simple tech. It's been around for decades. It works, and Americans block it at every chance because ... I still don't understand why.

Right, I didn't ask if other options existed but if Americans would choose them. You seem to have answered that question.

I think one reason Americans don't is because they like autonomy and comfort and cars are more autonomous and comfortable than other modes of transportation.

if you take out alcohol and cell phones, you've reduced 70-80% of driving related fatalities with those two alone.

>take out alcohol

that one worked out beautifully last time around

The problem was caused by the underlying political problems - namely, people didn't necessarily want to ban it, there was just a very ruthless political organisation that essentially destroyed any politicians who opposed the bans, regardless of what the constituents wanted. Politicians were forced to pass it.

If the alcohol ban had arisen organically - namely, as a genuine result of democratic support, the prohibition wouldn't have been such a spectacular failure.

> If the alcohol ban had arisen organically - namely, as a genuine result of democratic support, the prohibition wouldn't have been such a spectacular failure.

isn't that begging the question? If everyone had supported it then everyone would have supported it? If you want to ban alcohol to save lives, what needs to be done is still the same...getting everyone to support it.

And we still have trouble with people using drugs today with popularly supported bans. War on Drugs, etc.

> if you take out alcohol and cell phones, you've reduced 70-80% of driving related fatalities with those two alone

I don't believe that's supported by data. A quick search finds alcohol involved in ~30% of all fatal crashes and cell phones involved in ~20% of all crashes (though probably significantly underreported). Even boosting the cell phone rate by quite a bit, there will still be considerable overlap between the two groups, so likely nowhere near 70% in total.

The root cause is that we're letting a bunch of primates steer fast moving, heavy metal objects around a highway (and really the fact that we easily distract ourselves and make bad decisions about drinking and driving is a great example of why the whole thing is generally a bad idea).

> I don't believe > bunch of primates

Wow these primates are now at the cognitive level of belief? They are evolving much more rapidly than we expected.

Haven't really thought about the safety and maintenance part of this before. If people own their self-driving cars I suppose there's also a chance they can opt-out of software updates, which would potentially be very dangerous. I do believe that the autonomous car future will have room for owned vehicles, but at this stage I don't think any of us really know how it will shake out.

> If people own their self-driving cars I suppose there's also a chance they can opt-out of software updates, which would potentially be very dangerous.

Auto insurance companies would probably have a clause saying that their policy is void if the vehicle isn't updated within X days of the software update becoming available and that would be the end of that.

Brings to mind the situation the SodaStream company is in in most countries: pressurized gas canisters aren't safe for untrained people to do maintenance on (e.g. refill) themselves, so it's mostly illegal to own them without a license. Thus, the company operates a 'club' that lends them to people, so that the people are never the legal property-owners of the bottles. But this allows the 'club' to be able to recall the bottle at any time, and since it's not yours, you have to comply.

I assume a lease program with baked in maintenance costs and a lockout if maintenance is skipped would suffice.

Edit: And I assume the car could drive itself to preventive maintenance appointments if it's something that can't be done OTA.

Or just decertify outdated systems.

I guess "DRM" for self driving cars is something people will complain about, but for vehicles that have controls it doesn't seem real horrible to have an autonomous system do a check to see if it is still licensed.

There could be an emergency override if the person that needed the vehicle didn't know how to drive, an override that automatically issued a fixit ticket.

The thing is that today the average age of cars on the road is something like ten years. Many people don't and many people can't afford to buy new vehicles. They may not have the money to deal with that fixit ticket which probably has to be handled by a licensed service station with a lot of fancy equipment.

So, if all this comes to pass, you'll end up with a system where the wealthy lease or ride-share their self-driving cars while the plebes are stuck with trying to keep their manually driven clunkers running.

Sure, I was talking about addressing a particular safety issue with autonomous vehicles, not trying to solve economic inequality.

However, if autonomous vehicles are just for the wealthy end of society whether directly or by way of limo and taxi services, they're not going to be particularly welcomed by everyone else (aka the majority of voters).

> I really don't think people should be able to own self driving cars. They really need airplane style maintenance for sensors and companies need to work together so all fleets have the latest safety and security updates

Couldn't this be solved as easily as you car telling you that while you're at work it will head over to the repair shop to get its sensors checked up?

More importantly, while you are at work, it pick ups other riders. Which is why people won't need to buy these cars.

If I bought my own car, I dont want it picking up random people. Then its just public transport, vomit and all, funded by me.

Even if vomit isn't a common occurrence, there's wear and tear and empty soda cans and it means you can't leave stuff in your car.

The broader issue is that, if this sort of thing were to become commonplace someday, why wouldn't it just become a race to the bottom where your income/mile =~ operating costs per mile. (Or, even more likely as with Uber today for many people, operating costs per mile as calculated by a lot of people who don't really understand their full operating costs.)

Maybe fewer people will buy cars and more will use robo-taxis. But loaning out your car to compete against fleet operations does not sound like it would ever be a good deal.