Self Driving Cars Offer Many Public Benefits.

The world of self driving cars is rushing towards us faster than I could have believed. Many cars already offer automated driving assists from stopping to lane following to pedestrian safety. Next year Nissan will offer many of the benefits of a self driving car (auto) for city driving. Down the road, mobility services will replace taxis and people movers at greatly reduced costs. The casualties will also be many drivers and insurance companies. This blog will just look at the benefits to congestion on our roads. We should stop building roads now.

Autos will generally be electric vehicles connected to the internet. They will talk to each other, so they will know what the traffic is like way ahead of them and be able to take signals and density into account. If they are forced to stop at a light, the backup behind a vehicle will build slowly; but here’s the important wrinkle: when they start again, everyone in line can start at the same time and know that they will make it through the light; or if they know they can’t, go slow so that any stoppage is radically reduced.

Imagine the benefit of synchronous stopping and starting and the effect on reduced congestion. If there is a spurious slowdown on a highway, it will disappear in minutes. Platooned trucks will take advantage of this first, but all autos will soon enough if regulations enforce this beneficial practice. Autos can break the car length per 10 mph separation rule of thumb, and follow much more closely, driving bumper to bumper at moderate speeds. Pity the inept human driver caught in this mix.

With auto density increased enormously and timed to take advantage of traffic signals, the roadways we have will be more than good enough for decades. Mobility services and people movers will increase their capacity many fold. NHTSA, are you listening? We need some detailed studies now!

Related posts:

At 10 a.m. at a hospital in rural Togo, West Africa, I stood at the bedside of a forty-year-old man who had come in the night before with altered mental status — he was confused, he couldn’t walk in…

Anthropometric measurements are mainly concerned with assessing a person’s body composition in order to determine their nutrition status. In terms of composition, it assesses the density, fat…

This has been declared over 390 times since 2010 and yet the cryptocurrency behemoth (worth roughly $927 billion at the time of writing) keeps exceeding expectations and growing rapidly. It has…