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Comment by prophetjohn | Hacker News Reader

Why are there going to be traffic jams? Computers are driving the cars. There's not going to be accidents anymore. There's not going to be that weird bottleneck effect where one sheepish person slows down to much and eventually everyone behind them stops.

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There will still be traffic lights, bottlenecks, and for the foreseeable future there will still be conventional cars.

Driverless cars will still be limited by physics (their size and how fast they can accelerate). If car routing algorithms deliberately route cars to places where the traffic is slow (because they can loiter, saving on parking while using little power) then the traffic jams will be worse.

If we rebuilt the road system specifically for driverless cars maybe we could eliminate traffic jams. Otherwise...

In such a case, parking costs will reduce. Since the number of cars are expected to be lower if they are driverless, the amount of space required for parking will be less. It would also mean that expenditure on the prime real estate required would be less (marginal costs are higher, marginal decrease would hence be more benefitial) and that will result in cheaper parking.

Secondly, it also opens up the scope for private taxies. A person can allow his car to be utilized by a certain section of his peers - colleagues, neighbours etc for low prices - resulting in lower parking time.

It'd also be possible to double-park (triple, or more even), using less parking space. If the car in the middle needs to get out it can ask its neighbours (several levels deep) to shuffle around and make a path

Loitering can be easily avoided by taxing the time on public roads, possibly taxing more for the time the cars are empty and stay on public roads.

That was exactly my point.

Traffic lights have no purpose except for conventional cars. Driverless cars can just go through intersections whenever no vehicle needs to go through perpendicularly. All intersections would just work like four-way stops, minus the requirement to stop when not yielding to another vehicle, and with more batching and parallelism for efficiency rather than strict serialization.

Traffic lights have no purpose except for conventional cars.

Yes, and for the forseeable future there will be conventional cars, as well as bicycles and pedestrians.

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