[stouset]

Not only don’t autonomous cars solve traffic, they will actively make it worse. The marginal cost of operating a car drops dramatically when you remove the human drivers from them (who also suffer from pesky conditions like boredom and drowsiness), and so we can expect these vehicles to drive signficantly more frequently than their human-operated cousins.

Think about uses like DoorDash. Instead of (in a city) walking to nearby restaurants, we now replace a larger share of those dinners with ones where cars are driving back and forth across the city to pick up the food and deliver it. This will only become more common when the cost drops by not having to pay a human being, and so we can expect a much greater volume of traffic from this one example use.

Other currently-marginal use cases will see equivalent growth due to the similar economics.