> ... new cities to be designed differently in several ways. One of which is for roads to be only for small autonomous vehicles and entirely separate ...
As I understand it, this vision does not compute. The number of movements of people in a dense city is too large for everyone to move in a car, autonomous or not. Cars take a lot of space. They need to stop someplace for someone to get in and out, merge in and out of traffic. Streets cant be designed in a way that accomodates this at the scale of a city like NY.
Similarly, in spread-out suburbia, autonomous cars would still get stuck in traffic jams if everyone has to use them to get to work. Making cars autonomous makes things a bit more efficient, but not by orders of magnitude.
Mass transit, combined with walking and biking, is simply way more efficient for moving people in cities and is a proven model that does scale.
As I understand it, this vision does not compute. The number of movements of people in a dense city is too large for everyone to move in a car, autonomous or not. Cars take a lot of space. They need to stop someplace for someone to get in and out, merge in and out of traffic. Streets cant be designed in a way that accomodates this at the scale of a city like NY.
Similarly, in spread-out suburbia, autonomous cars would still get stuck in traffic jams if everyone has to use them to get to work. Making cars autonomous makes things a bit more efficient, but not by orders of magnitude.
Mass transit, combined with walking and biking, is simply way more efficient for moving people in cities and is a proven model that does scale.