How Self-Driving Cars will Destroy Cities (and what to do about it)
How Self-Driving Cars will Destroy Cities (and what to do about it)
Destroy the cars. That's what should be done about it.
I'm all for mass transit, but there are some jobs that require cars. My partner does home health, for example. She often has to take a lot of bulky durable medical equipment (DME) to a person's home. Even if mass transit existed in all of her territory, transporting DME on it would be prohibative, especially when there are often multiple people that need different pieces of equipment.
This is precisely the kind of niche, but vital use case that even places that have otherwise already completely banned cars (like certain islands) allow cars for. Nobody will ever take this away.
That's a good point to illustrate the importance of banning cars for personal transportation; all of the traffic is making your partner's job slower and more stressful
Singular acts of violence don't work, organized violence doesn't work either and will only lead to organized repression in response. The actual solution is to elect local representatives who are willing to prevent the nightmare scenario from the video from happening.
If you want to see a real-world example of this: Toppling over rental e-scooters didn't get them removed from cities, but petitioning municipal governments to ban them did.
Inner cities are better served by trolleys/buses anyhow. Self-driving taxis would work best at the edges of a city, or to fill gaps between train stations in suburbs
How would self-driving taxis do this any better than taxis that already exist and aren't relying on large tech corporations?
Cheaper, safer and one extra seat.
We're obviously not there yet but I haven't heard a single good argument for why we wouldn't be in the future.
Watched this video earlier today and I definitely hope German city planners in my area don't embrace this required car-centric approach to infrastructure more than they did for cities like Munich .