Re: Today in Solution We Are Very Far From Having To A Problem That Doesn't Exist news ...
Sadly, I must agree with the above. Autonomous cars are NOT ready for use on actual streets, and letting them block intersections in a city is just irresponsible. Real-world autonomous driving, with the reliability required to make it not be the Bad Idea it is now, is an incredibly difficult task; that last 1% of corner cases is quite intractable. And THAT is the bit that AV developers and cheerleaders ignore or gloss over; acceptable real-world performance demands handling the railroad tracks and erratic crosswalkers at least as well as a human driver does, and current AVs just cannot.
But enough of that, let's look at the bigger picture. Do we REALLY want or need ubiquitous driverless single-passenger vehicles as the dominant transit modality, or is there a better solution in terms of sustainability, traffic congestion, and societal desirability? In urban areas, where most of the population lives, I would argue that mass transit (including, say, driverless streetcars?) with decent service frequency, reliability, and area coverage is a much better mobility solution than swarms of single-passenger vehicles competing for the same road space. Plus, mass transit doesn't present the income-based mobility barriers that private-hire vehicles do. That's a social equality issue these gadgets don't do a thing to address.
AVs are presently inadequate to the task of driving on real streets with real people, but even if we fix that, they're a poor solution to providing mobility to society at large.