This video arrives well in the context of Ontario’s Premier Ford pushing stupid ideas like removing bike lanes would improve traffic. Autonomous roads are car and car-subscription selling policy, not a safety policy. In the US, considering some billionaire auto industry technocrat is likely to get a high position in the upcoming government, hold onto your butts for more insanity along these lines. It’s up to communities to defend and improve infrastructure in their cities.
Autonomous vehicles - very much unlike the Tesla snake oil - are not geared towards ownership, and would actually reduce road usage while increasing safety.
As the video points out, what you’re describing is very similar to what was said about Uber & Lyft. At first glance, a cheaper, more available taxi service seems like it should reduce road usage. However, that assumes car trips are replaced by rideshare trips. In actuality, when Uber & Lyft have entered a market, it has resulted in increased road usage. This is because of induced demand, and if rideshares are replacing another form of transportation, it’s usually public transit, walking, or biking, not driving.
In that case, it shouldn’t increase demand since Uber and Lyft already exist.
Taxis existed before Uber and Lyft. What’s being touted is that AVs will be cheaper and more available than ridesharing, the same way ridingsharing was to taxis.
No, the difference was that you could summon an Uber from an app, and it would actually show up.
I thought so too originally, but the linked video shows a few reasons why it wouldn’t. Autonomous cars have the same space inefficiency per passenger (in some cases worse) as driven cars. They still need a place to charge, but that can’t be only in non-congested areas because people wouldn’t want to stand around waiting 12 minutes for their pickup. If they don’t use parking they’d spend their day roaming around, causing traffic like 24/7 taxi drivers waiting for an order except taking up road space.
And watch with Elon Musk in government and schedule F employees, safety will be the nth priority behind profits for Tesla.