Traffic saturated cities like Bangalore and Beijing have the strongest reasons to make self driving vehicles work, however. It is laughable that Americans would be the ones to do this, given their relatively traffic light cities (even LA is nothing compared to BJ) and high rates of personal car ownership.
Don't the traffic saturated cities have a better incentive to make public transportation as good as possible? Less people on the roads seems like it would benefit everyone in that case, whereas most american cities are too sparse to support that kind of infrastructure
They do that as well. The problem persists inspite of Beijing’s huge and growing subway system. Take myself as an example, I decided taking a taxi to work was worth it over a subway ride because of the crowded conditions...even though it lived and worked near stations on the same line.
American cities has plenty of space to build new roads, that isn’t possible in many Chinese cities. Anyways, roads and private transportation will always be there, why not optimize it along with a decent public transit system to boot?
The key is to start with a self-driving autorickshaw. Then you can pathfind as a straight line and just move forward whenever there is at least an inch of space.
