Self-driving cars will never be popular as you can't speed in them.
Given how many people treat speed limits as suggestions, at best, having your vehicle obey the limit would turn some people off of them.
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If self-driving cars got to the point where they were significantly safer than human drivers (a big if), I could see the creation of dedicated self-driving lanes with higher speed limits.
The biggest problem with automation is, it can't deal with things that aren't expected or detected.
The current roadscape is too chaotic to be able to code in all the edge cases, as well as deal with the sensor issues.
I think the only way self driving vehicles will be able to operate (until the roadscape changes/evolves) is to have dedicated roads(probably toll roads initially), where only compatible vehicles will be allowed to utilize, and only when in autonomous mode.
There the environment can be controlled much tighter, and we can get through teething problems with the inter vehicle/roadscape communications.
These roads will expand as society adopts them, and there will be fewer manually driven roads.
Eventually all cars can communicate with all others, as well as a centralized road traffic controller. And almost all roads will be autonomous required.
Then the car crash scene in irobot can happen.
That sounds like dedicated bus lanes, except you don’t need the higher speed limits since avoiding traffic takes care of the need to speed.
Now we just wait until some tech bro picks up the idea and resells it with AI in the name at 10x the cost to tax payers.
The difference with buses is that they’re less safe (or at least less able to avoid collisions) at high speed than cars are. So the purpose of bus lanes isn’t to increase the maximum speed of buses, but to increase their minimum speed during congestion.
I guess my point is that they would similarly get people to their destination quicker if implemented. The main difference is that one is fully proven and exists already with current technology.
Agreed—and to be clear, I’m not advocating for self-driving lanes. But I think one of the potential motivations for the creation of such lanes is that human drivers would feel more comfortable if they weren’t sharing lanes with self-driving cars, just like they feel more comfortable not sharing lanes with buses. And by the same token, bus drivers and self-driving cars aren’t going to want to share lanes with each other, so there would be pressure to have different lanes for each type of traffic.
That would just end with normal cars getting there to take advantage of the hight speed limit, which is a great way to cause an accident.