Most Americans won't even entertain the thought of giving up their car even if alternative modes of transport make more sense.
But I think I disagree just a little with you that autonomous driving is extremely difficult, when the real difficulty is teaching a car to drive while sharing that road with human drivers. To the OPs point, if we were solving the problem of moving people from point A to point B, we'd realize that autonomous vehicles should not be on the road with people. They need dedicated roads, where the the problem is substantially easier to solve.
We're working on the wrong problem. The question isn't "how to do we make cars drive themselves safely while people are on board" because we have mostly solved that ages ago (see airplanes, drones, etc). The problem that needs a solution is "how do we safely and efficiently move people from point A to point B in <any vehicle>". The former cannot be solved. The latter is substantially easier when you remove human drivers from the road.
Now I'm not suggesting I know the solution here, but I'd like to think its pretty straightforward. Re-allocating roads for autonomous vehicles only seems like the right direction to start in. Because ideally you want to encourage people NOT to drive any way (its very expensive for most families and dangerous and tedious). You simultaneously begin to solve a host of problems: safety, remove gridlock, faster travel, cheaper. And I'm thinking all forms of transportation here, cars would be the least efficient of them all but they have an important role to play. Especially for last mile travel.
Putting aside the challenges of car-culture and entrenched interests in the auto industry, if we can give autonomous vehicles their own roads, half the things we're trying to "solve" right now would become irrelevant.
Hard to be racist when your neighbor is black. A lot easier to do it while you scroll Facebook algorithms on your autonomous 45 minute drive to an office.
Is it really that difficult? I often assume this difficulty comes from real world situation where you have human drivers on the same street and people walking pass.
What if none of these are problems. And all cars in the X state have to be AV Lv4?
It's not, if you build correctly. It's only "faster" when you spread things out into suburbia.
Is it faster for you to get in your car and drive next door or to just walk over there?
Of course its faster to walk.
Walking is faster.
You can't just say "driving is faster" without qualifications.
> your car is available virtually 24/7
So are your legs. Walk and bike.
I don't see the relevance of many of these other items you mention. Who cares if you can personalize your car? I'm not saying cars should be banned, but we should stop optimizing for them at the expense of everything else, especially when they aren't necessary.
If I add in:
- I have children
- Temperatures range from -15C to +5C to -15C on the same day, and same outing
=> I need to pack backup clothing for the children in case they get wet in the +5 weather, and backup snow winter clothing for when it's -15 and they get wet.
=> We aren't talking niceties, a 25kg child exposed to sub zero weather in wet clothing will approach hypothermia and other detrimental conditions quickly.
If I add in:
- physical limitation including breathing (reliant on oxygen), exercise intolerance, amputation, pregnancy, pregnancy induced physical limitations, broken limbs, nerve damage, inner ear disorders due to concussion or older age
=> "So are your legs. Walk and bike." becomes... well, I hope you see.
How do these people in Dinan in Brittany do these things?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinan#/media/File:Dinan_on_the...
I don't see highways and suburbs. Why can they do it but we can't?
How about Nantes (if you want a larger city)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nantes#/media/File:Ile_de_Nant...
Where are the suburbs and highways and gas stations? Maybe we should ask them how they handle having kids. Do you think they have Ford Explorers?
*Also sorry I know my words are coming off as angry, but I promise it's just passion about a problem I feel very strongly about.
Edit: I'll note that many of them will take the subway during rush hour if both ends of the trip are within a couple of blocks of the subway. However, if there is a transfer they won't, the subway becomes time inefficient very quickly if you have to walk far from it or wait for multiple trains.
I would prefer it if the congestion charges were scaled to usage rates for that reason (example, you can enter the toll zone once per month for free, but if you do it 20 times the toll eventually ends up being $100+ per journey). It seems more fair to me especially since a lot of people occasionally need to haul a box or something to Midtown, but don't usually contribute to traffic congestion.
I also am willing to bet if you compared "everybody walk" vs "everybody drive" walking would win out by a large margin in Manhattan.
Flying a private jet is faster than taking a Southwest Airlines flight too...
Here's a walkable and bike-able neighborhood in Columbus. There's a mix of houses, businesses, and apartments (it's mostly single-family homes). https://api.trekaroo.com/system/photos/229733/original/11943...
Why can't we just build more of that?
Sure some people can live in the middle of nowhere and take their car everywhere, but you're crazy to think that most people can afford to do that. It's just not going to work. We see it fracturing right now.
-edit-
But anyway, we don't really have options now and the things we are doing are completely stupid. There's no way we can just keep building suburbs, strip malls, and highways and have everybody drive a car and it's dumb to even want to do that.
Maybe, depending on traffic. But parking sure as shit isn't.
Public transport on the other hand, is a massive undertaking which involves a lot of politics. So it is not nearly as profitably or incentivized.
I would personally like to see public transportation improved over cars, but I may be in the minority like you.
People have the same mentality around electric cars and range. They'll say, well I can't have an electric car because if I go on this road trip that I might do 3 days out of the year my electric car won't be able to handle that. But 99% of the time it covers your use cases...
I know this is a losing battle though. We won't build public transportation, bike lanes, or sidewalks. There's little doubt that we'll ever do that. It's just frustrating that we're so intent on just driving everywhere, spending 45 minutes each way in a car, thousands of teenagers dying, vast amounts of pollution, an untold number of habitats destroyed, pavement and concrete everywhere, and it's just because we decided that every family should live in the suburbs and drive everywhere. There's no good reason. It's insanity.
No.... I'm assuming we build that and design cities to be walkable and bike-able instead of just optimizing for car traffic.
We can just build effective and efficient public transportation, maintain some of our current roads (so you can still have a car) and build cities and towns to be walkable and bike-able.
> How do you do those things without driving?
Idk. How do people all over the world do it today?
I typically walk. I take buses or trains if I need to go further than walking distance, which is fairly rare.
> Are you assuming everyone has access to effective and efficient public transportation?
That's usually what you'd build to get rid of cars, yes.