no, autonomous cars will not "abolish transit" in dense cities

Jarrett Walker · 4 Nov 2014

Others here said this too

Self-driving cars will not fix commuting; the US needs public transportation instead.

Their wordsHowever successful driverless cars become, transit will remain crucial for dense cities because cities are defined by a shortage of space per person.

Also said by Armin Ronacher

Read the piece on humantransit.org ↗

3 korrents from this piece ↓

Jarrett Walker did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
Self-driving cars will not fix commuting; the US needs public transportation instead.

Their wordsHowever successful driverless cars become, transit will remain crucial for dense cities because cities are defined by a shortage of space per person.
Our reading
In low-density places driverless taxis really will beat buses, and transit agencies should hand that work over and concentrate on dense corridors.

Their wordsDriverless taxis will be more efficient than transit in these areas.
Our reading
No dense city anywhere runs without heavy reliance on transit, and no new transport technology changes the space arithmetic that makes that true.

Their wordsThere is no dense city in the world that does not rely heavily on transit, for reasons of space-efficiency that none of the new technologies can change.

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