[softgrow]

Driverless cars will bring safer roads in terms of exposure measures like deaths/injuries per 1 Million/km. They will also lower the monetary cost of transporting a person per km due to reduction in fleet size and optimised driving and resource allocation. This will benefit nations and economies in providing more economic growth, employment etc by moving more people and goods over the same road network and a smaller fleet.

However they won't solve the fundamental problem of roads being a scarce resource that lack a price signal so the demand is infinite. If you set the price too low you get congestion. If hamburgers were free, everyone would want one and a queue will develop, so instead of paying money you pay with time. It's just the same as "free" parking where you pay time instead of money. Obligatory mention of Donald Shoup and "The High Price of Free Parking".

[Cthulhu_]

You say reduction in fleet size and whatnot, but I believe that's assuming population remains the same; as it stands, it grows with about 1% per year. That fleet size reduction would need to exceed 1% a year; I don't think that's very likely.

It also implies people are willing to move from owning a car to time sharing a car. That's not likely, because it'll be businesses that will offer it, and they need to make a profit. As it stands, Uber is more expensive than taxis (and they undercut taxis using dank investment monies); take away the driver and replace it with a more expensive car, and I don't think they'd be able to operate cheaper. Plus, traffic comes in peaks, so that fleet would have to be optimized to handle said peaks.

And of course, a large percentage will need (and want) to use it. It's possible if the transport system becomes government owned or it becomes competitive with car ownership, but I don't see that happening. Sci-fi utopias usually don't explain why everything is going as smoothly as it seems; one explanation is that companies are just that awesome and managed to get a cooperative traffic system up and running whilst making automagic cars cheap enough for everyone, another is that the government or some other singular but benevolent organization is in control of all transport and is making sure it's standardized.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> Driverless cars will bring safer roads in terms of exposure measures like deaths/injuries per 1 Million/km.

That's what Google's marketing says. Independent research indicates that self-driving cars may need to be driven many hundreds of millions, or even billions, of miles before their safety is actually proven [1].

This makes sense. For self-driving cars to be safer than human drivers, they don't just need faster reaction times, they also need an ability to understand and reason about their environment that is as good as humans'. And that's a long way off.

_____________

[1] Driving to Safety: How many miles of driving would it take to demonstrate autonomouse vehicle reliability?

https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/...

  Autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and sometimes hundreds of    
  billions of miles to demonstrate their reliability in terms of fatalities and injuries.

[ams6110]

That's not exactly what "free" means in an economic context, but probably doesn't alter your point.

Something is "free" if, at a price of zero, there is enough supply to meet demand.

[dmichulke]

Interesting definition.

It follows that nothing is universally free, it can only be free within spatial (and probably temporal) constraints. The usual candidates (water, air) are certainly not free everywhere.