Why Autonomous Driving Instead of Public Transportation?

I know that I am not supposed to ask that question, especially as a lover of technology, but it is one that I come back to over and over again every time I read about the issues with autonomous driving. Now, to be clear, I am not talking about assisted driving. Blind spot detection, lane change detection, assisted cruise control, assisted parallel parking — all of these make driving safer and they are all well tested and well proven technologies. But autonomous driving is really none of that and likely cannot ever be any of that.

Autonomous driving, letting a car drive for you, is arguably not attenable. We know that self-driving cars already have massive problems with handling emergency vehicles and people directing traffic. We know that they cannot handle unexpected circumstances well. We know that they work best in well defined, well mapped areas. We know that the companies involved aren’t necessarily reporting all the issues and accidents. We know that items like chain link fences, for example, may not be solvable.

But what if they are? What do we get then? How is the new autonomous driving supposed to work? How are these cars supposed to be for people who need assistance getting in and out of them? How are they supposed to solve the congestion issues if everyone is still taking single trips? Where are they stored during non-peak times? How much energy do they save of they are travelling empty constantly so as to not be stored?

And that is the best-case scenario — a best case that is never likely to be achieved. Autonomous vehicles seem like another example of capitalism run amok. We are turning our shared streets over to an experiment that likely has a substandard outcome compared to its competitors even in its best-case scenario and no realistic path to its best-case scenario. We should be spending money building up mass transit solutions and driver assistance technologies instead of pretending that lining the pockets of tech companies who don’t care about the implications for the rest of us will somehow solve all of our transportation problems.

Sometimes experiments fail. That is okay. It is past time to admit that fully autonomous cars are not worth the money and effort and redirect those resources back into driver assistance, electrification, and mass transit.