Given how many people treat speed limits as suggestions, at best, having your vehicle obey the limit would turn some people off of them.
People ride the bus and you can’t speed there either.
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.
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.
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.
Truly self driving cars would allow you to participate in other activities safely while the car moves you. You could read a book, play a game, apply your makeup, etc. Given that trade-off, I think most people would be willing to sacrifice the extra 2.5 minutes a trip.
2.5 minute estimate derived from the difference of travel time between half the average US daily travel of 42 miles at a speed of 60mph and the same distance traveled at 68mph.
Most people would accept the trade-off of being in the car 5 minutes longer per day if it meant they got 42 minutes of leisure instead of 37 minutes of weaving through traffic.
Also with a critical mass adoption of self-driving cars the speed limit could be increased.
Also with a critical mass adoption of self-driving cars the speed limit could be increased.
Only if the bicycle paths are separated from the road by a wall.
Ride share is very popular and it offers a similar service to what most people expect from self driving cars.
I think that the majority of people want a vehicle for transportation and those who want a car for recreation are a minority.
If there was 100% adoption of self-driving vehicles with a inter-vehicle communication network, there is no reason why the left lane couldn’t go 100+ mph. There still would be lower speeds outside of the highway, but they could be substantially higher than today on most major roads.
Human drivers are why speed limits exist. People follow too close, people are impatient, people are aggressive, people are risky, people don’t know what the vehicles in front of them are going to do, people don’t use turn signals, people hit the brakes and cut across multiple lanes of traffic because they weren’t paying attention or missed their exit, etc.
Networked autonomous cars can communicate and collaborate, allowing for faster and safer travel. The left lane could have no speed limit because every car using it, leaving it, or entering it are all in agreement on what needs to be done and what to do and when to do it. Cars on major roads would slow down so another car can turn without causing the cars behind it to stop. Oncoming cars could slow to allow for an opening that a turning car can use instead of waiting for an opening in irregular traffic, or taking a risky turn that causes an accident.
Getting to that system will require laws against manual driving and mandating that all new vehicles have full autonomous driving. I hope I am dead before that happens because that future sounds awful to me.
The major roads are already nigh impossible to walk across. Finding a way to raise the speed just makes it harder to be a pedestrian in yet more places.
I, too, love the idea of networked autonomous swarm agents behaving in an even more efficient setup. The problem is that if the only focus is on moving cars faster at the cost of people’s comfort, access, energy, and walkable anything we lose out on reasons to ever be outside of the car at all.
More cars and faster cars in our cities makes the city worse, even if they’re self driving.
I’ll echo that there are safety issues. Motorcyclists (I ride my much more fuel-efficient bike when I don’t have something too big where I need my car), bicycles (which I also ride for leisure and errands close by), and pedestrians (same here) aren’t going to work very well in that. You’re not going to mandate that every person carry some kind of transponder and that it must always work. Where I live, many students are walking and cycling. I also think tractors, dump trunks, and other special equipment will still have human drivers for at least part of the journey for the foreseeable future.
Also, smacking into an animal at 160kph is terribly dangerous and potentially damaging. A blowout at that speed also has much scarier implications for control. A lot of hazards would need to have issues solved here as well.
