[danssig]

>But I'm interested to understand why people think a robotised taxi service would be much cheaper than human-driven taxi service.

The overall cost of the system would be cheaper because you don't need as many cars. A human taxi service has tons of taxis sitting around doing nothing for some amount of time, parked somewhere when not in use, etc. If taxi were just an automated service you would just need enough cars to cover peak usage and you'd have more cheaper options on parking (e.g. parking can be LIFO, no need for each car to have exit access at all times).

>Oh, and your desire to ban manual driving is never going to fly.

I disagree. Once automated cars start gaining traction it will be pretty easy to make commercials of crying mothers talking about how they wish their star football player son had only taken an automated car, coupled with real traffic statistics. In a 100 years people are going to find the fact that we used to manually drive cars insane.

[brc]

Horses were more dangerous than cars, but you're still allowed to ride horses on the road. A total ban on manual driving is just not feasible in a democratic country. I agree that it's possible some roads would be automatic-only, but you're not going to get a ban on cars being driven by people.

You would need just as many robotic cars as you would current taxis. The demand shape isn't going to change just because you remove the driver. Yes, parking and other things will improve but it's going to be a small improvement, not an order-of-magnitude jump.

[danssig]

>Horses were more dangerous than cars, but you're still allowed to ride horses on the road.

They may have been at some point, but that hasn't been the case for some time.

>A total ban on manual driving is just not feasible in a democratic country.

I disagree. Maybe not this generation, but supporting manual driving makes the whole system less stable unless you make a road just for them, which is really expensive.

>You would need just as many robotic cars as you would current taxis.

I don't believe this is the case. I see taxis sitting empty for hours. In that time one taxi could have made several short trips. I'm certain that a computer calculating routes, etc., could manage to get the same work done as is being done now with less resources. That's why we made them, after all.