I personally shudder at the thought of redesigning our cities any more around cars, and instead hope the next decade will continue the trend of adapting car usage to living in cities and not the other way around.
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Self-driving cars can and should be an amazing complement to city life: owning a personal vehicle would be unnecessary if the city were dense enough to support a fleet of ever-roaming self driving cars, allowing more space for pedestrians, residents, and workers to enjoy the city and reclaim all the land dedicated to street-parking and parking lots (Los Angeles proper has more area dedicated to on street surface parking than the entire city of San Francisco is big). That's more housing, more parks, more schools, more activity, more events, you get the idea.
Most of that promise would dissipate if we had to further redesign the city around the car, and for what: so the few of us lucky enough to own a self-driving car could live far away from everyone else and putter around on their phone while their car is stuck in traffic on ever wider and wider highways?
American city planning underwent a fundamental shift in the 1950/60s which prioritized cars (I'd argue for the worse), and I think it's past time we undergo another shift away from ever-extending sprawl.
At this point, why not just have tracks? Really, you can automate so much by just putting the damn thing on rails.
Of course that would require centralization and working with the government. The government has no incentive to do this because it would just create another problem for them (mass unemployment).
Actually the government DID try to do this. The U.S. DOT had an entire decades long program researching the following:
1) Costs and plans for updating roads with sensors
2) Upgrading traffic boxes (the things that control traffic lights and such) with a module to communicate back and forth with surround cars
2) Forcing manufacturers to install a module in all cars that would allow them to communicate with surrounding cars + road sensors + traffic boxes.
The problem was the amount of push back the government got from car companies was really absurd. And of course Republican funding games. Republicans love their private companies so they basically sapped the program's funds.
It was able to pick up momentum again from around 2012 onward though:
* https://www.its.dot.gov/about/federal_its_program.htm
* https://www.its.dot.gov/research_areas/automation.htm
* A practical example of its research: https://www.its.dot.gov/pilots/florida_agencies.htm
start designing roads specifically for ease of use. design lanes that are extremely easy to see. Traffic lights that are easy to parse. Street signs standardized and easily readable.
Good luck when it snows. And it's 3 AM. And no one else is on the road, so there are no context clues.
Um, a human sucks in this case, too.
There is a reason we put reflectors on the lane markers and rumble cuts in the road.
I'm from the snow belt, and these are invisible until the plows come through.
We'll eventually embed sensors in the road, but that's not really general purpose self-driving imo.
If the tech industry wasn't so bubbled, this would have been the plan from the beginning.
Obviously the cost of this is prohibitive. But at some point we have to get it through our heads that for a computer to excel at a task, the task needs to be redesigned.