Because in most places school starts before work starts, this has always been the case, even in places where people don't have cars, and not everybody has a car in places where most people do.
> Won't most automated vehicles be electric?
Yes, but that doesn't automatically mean all that power is made with renewables.
Electric vehicles are consistently more carbon efficient than individual combustion engines, except for specific outlier instances in developing countries which are 100% dirty coal power grids.
This means a fleet of electric vehicles will have less of a carbon impact per mile than the average human driven vehicle.
But that's an entirely different subject. We are simply looking at the effect on the total number of miles driven here, which will absolutely explode once driverless vehicles are a reality. And those KWh will have to come from somewhere and they will have a carbon footprint even when they are entirely made with renewables.
The solution to this is to drive substantially less not to drive more with cleaner vehicles.
There is still no comparison between electric vehicles and combustion vehicles in terms of carbon footprint.
- Mass transit is full of big heavy vehicles running mostly empty on off-peak hours. It's more efficient only at rush hour. I'd expect net efficiency over the full usage is worse, compared to electric cars.
- As they start making custom robocar hardware, it'll become a mix probably including smaller lighter single-occupancy cars.
- Mass transit ought to become much more useful and attractive given on-demand robocar rides to and from your station.
- (Added:) Congestion pricing becomes more doable for cars that are already networked for other reasons. Congestion pricing is the obvious approach to really solving congestion.
That is really only true in the states right? In other countries with decent mass transit systems, it seems like they are really full during rush hour but only mostly full at other times, utilization is very good. American systems seem to be dysfunctional...probably because cars are more convenient for off peak travel. I can see how door-to-door automated vans or even taxis could fill in off peak travel here, while the big vehicles serve mostly peak demand (in the states, elsewhere it isn't as needed).
Isn't this backwards? Why should kids have to go earlier than parents if the parents don't need to drop them off before work?
> huge CO2 impact (negative) from all these extra miles
Won't most automated vehicles be electric?