[seanmcdirmid]

A. Today is definitely not tomorrow. Self driving cars also don’t have any network advantages atm.

B. See autocratic country claim. China has done this before with certain cars in certain cities (e.g. breadbox vans). Japan deprecates all cars after around 5 years to make them basically unusable. Singapore has that $60k car plate thing going on that I think only lasts five years.

C. People told me LA traffic was bad. When I moved there from Beijing, I thought I was in paradise. Same with Seattle, the USA does not have traffic problems, at least relative to China; the problems are just at different scales. Also, taxi ridership is much much larger in these countries (it isn’t unusual that every other car on the road is a taxi). Enforcing self driving only on the ring roads would already be a huge win; capacity is easily controlled already by plate lotteries.

[joe_the_user]

Sure, a sufficiently strong state could impose a sane and efficient commuting system in some fashion if it chose to.

That would require some central control for whatever resources the transport system use (road, car position, etc).

Just about all the profit centers for cars and transport today hinge on entities that just control some parts of transport - so prying loose their hold would be quite a challenge. We shall see.

[seanmcdirmid]

That is incredibly American centric. There is plenty of diversity in the way things work in the world. It will only take one country to use self driving cars as an economic advantage (by optimizing infrastructure investments) for the other countries to follow to keep up their competitiveness.