[carlmr]

I also don't follow that argument. IMHO accidents and bad swarm behavior (people following too closely, switching lanes too often, accelerating and braking too much) lead to traffic jams. If we can get that improved our roads could take twice the cars.

[gryzilepek]

You don't get the point: if you create an empty space on the roads (whatever solution you invent), people will start occupying it immediately, and you face the same problem again.

[carlmr]

No reason to get offensive, I do get the point, I'm just saying the point makes no sense. If we get to a fully automated future (that is without human drivers interfering), we can get to twice the occupancy which is I think more than the amount of children and seniors now driving cars that didn't before, and still have less traffic.

It just runs counter to reality to think that every empty space you create is occupied immediately. After all there are less congested cities and more congested cities. Mostly because the less congested cities have a higher road/road width/road quality to commuter ratio. That's why Seattle and SF have huge issues. With the water and mountains it's impossible to get a good infrastructure to population ratio. And no, cities with better traffic don't start going on the road to occupy space just because it's there. There's always a need for people to commute paired with inadequate infrastructure.

By utilising the infrastructure better, self-driving cars can basically increase one side of the fraction. Higher number of drivers will probably happen (seniors and children especially who couldn't drive before), but they also usually I doubt it's even more than 20-30%, seniors won't start commuting to jobs they don't have, children have more vacation, they're already only a smaller part of the population.

[annabellish]

More, even. Driving into SF at rush hour is an exercise is mostly about being stationary with occasional jerks forward. You could improve that throughput a hundredfold if things could keep moving.

[carlmr]

Yeah, the non-accident, jerky kind of traffic is the one that automatic cars will almost eliminate completely. If we get to fully networked automatic cars we can use swarm intelligence to make them all accelerate at the same time and slowly increase the speed. Traffic is gone.

And accidents I believe will also be minimized as soon as we get to full-automation. Even the less than ideal automatic Teslas seem to be faring slightly better than human drivers. Imagine how far we can get in 10-20 years. I'd guess maybe 1% the accidents we have now.