You don’t know that. I could make a prediction that it would lead to fewer cars on the street. Fewer parked cars especially.
> less investment into better modes of transport
I assume you mean subways, buses, and trams here. But I don’t think it’s fair to call them “better”. They’re hugely expensive and can be disruptive in many ways, are much less accessible.
> traffic will get a lot worse once people are ok with sitting in bad traffic
You also don’t know that traffic will get worse. Traffic could potentially get much better with better drivers. But also, if people are ok with it, then who cares?
> I assume you mean subways, buses, and trams here. But I don’t think it’s fair to call them “better”. They’re hugely expensive and can be disruptive in many ways, are much less accessible.
Now this is a bad take. Public transit is _always_ better than individual vehicles when we are talking about a metropolitan area. The amount of resources, land, and pedestrian freedom that is eaten up for roads is insane. Imagine how many people can fit in a subway, and then expand that to each of them individually being in a car on the road.
Public transit is expensive, but so are new highways, highway maintenance, road accidents, speed enforcement... Etc. The worst thing is that many times people who don't own cars pay for those services they won't use. All the while public transit is getting it's funding cut.
I think the original comment is a little off in that more autonomous drivers does not directly lead to less public transit. But it is a concern that these profit/investor driven companies will be competing with public transportation and this has a lot of implications.
I will definitely agree that a transportation system based off public transit is much better than what we have now. The advantage you get with a 100% AV based system is that you can get coverage that you’ll never get with public transit. NYC, which has a great system, still has lots of parts of the city which you can’t really get to without calling a car or walking a long way. The point-to-point routing should not be discounted either. Getting in a car and going directly to your destination rather than trying to make a bunch of connection (and dealing with kids or purchased items or a wheelchair) makes a big difference for a lot of people.
I think it's absolutely fair to call public transport "better" for society.
Every single time scientists and city planners are called to answer "how we make the city more livable and reduce traffic" the answer is always better public transport (more trains especially).
The only part I could resonate with you is that we don't know whether SDC could lead to less cars. That's true if people will use more self driving taxis over personal cars.
> even more cars on the streets
You don’t know that. I could make a prediction that it would lead to fewer cars on the street. Fewer parked cars especially.
> less investment into better modes of transport
I assume you mean subways, buses, and trams here. But I don’t think it’s fair to call them “better”. They’re hugely expensive and can be disruptive in many ways, are much less accessible.
> traffic will get a lot worse once people are ok with sitting in bad traffic
You also don’t know that traffic will get worse. Traffic could potentially get much better with better drivers. But also, if people are ok with it, then who cares?