[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.