[cassieramen]

This won't fix things. If you look at maximum road capacity for a highway lane it's pretty pitifully in the hundreds. Maximum capacity being exact speed limit driving with minimum safe distance between cars. Obviously, city streets have an even lower capacity even if you exclude pedestrian and bicycle traffic Ultimately cars can't be the only solution in dense urban environments.

[chrischen]

You’re right that cars can never compete with mass transit in density and bandwidth, and mass transit already operates pretty close to the ideals that I proposed for motor vehicles. If anything it’s an example of why we should implement trains on tracks rather than self driving cars.

But your calculation would be off because there would not be any inefficiencies associated with human driving. Cars would have reduced safe distance, increased max speeds, and would not have to slow down for stops, intersections (assuming walkways are built over intersections for pedestrians), as all cars would be part of the same computer system, and essentially one harmonious unit.

Even if cars are low density and roads are narrow, the increased throughout would be massive.

[njarboe]

"If you look at maximum road capacity for a highway lane it's pretty pitifully in the hundreds."

You need some units for this sentence to have meaning.

If a vehicle and its space buffer takes up 52.8 feet and goes 60mph one gets 100 vehicles/minute or 6000 per hour. With two people per vehicle, that is 12000 people per hour. Use mini-buses with 10 people each you can get 60,000 people per hour. This rate is about what BART does when completely full at rush hour.

Another cool thing about a road is that one can mix high capacity vehicles (buses) with lower capacity ones (cars) with cargo vehicles (trucks). You can even use them for tanks, ambulances, fire trucks, Humvees, etc.