| > Maybe self driving cars can be the "last/first mile" in transit so that more people actually will use public transit. So the Park+Ride concept. That’s already possible today, yet completely underutilized. A criticism often brought against transit is "I’d have to switch trains at some point", do you think these people would start using that now? > They will be driving around and not be parked.. All the time? That’d be quite wasteful, considering most cars are only used for about 2h a day, during the rush hours, for the commute. > I think you have to think bigger. Why would you want to own a car if you could call one at any moment with your phone with an app? Why would you want to own a car if you could call a taxi at any moment with your phone with an app? Why would you want to own a car if busses and trains come every 2-5 minutes at every stop, and you’re never more than 400m from a stop? Reality is, as European cities show, all these "advantages" can already be gotten with public transit today. I’m not sure what self-driving cars actually improve compared to existing public transit methods. And especially because they’re using space more inefficient than existing transit methods, these advantages would have to be huge to make any tradeoff worth it. Otherwise you could just invest in better transit, not self-driving cars. |
Also, robocab+ride could work on both ends of the commute. Where I live, "office suburbs" tend to have transit connections just as bad as actual suburbs, or worse.