“Where you have cars driving with no steering wheel, no pedals, I think first what you’re going to see is designated areas of cities that are going to be cordoned off,” said Jack Weast, Intel’s chief architect for self-driving solutions
“Think about 40 city blocks — let’s say the entire downtown [of Washington], D.C. — off-limits to human-driven cars, only automated robo-taxis cruising around.”
Potentially a huge step for auto dominance: the designated use of streets only for automated vehicles. Everything ‘irrational’ will be prohibited or tightly controlled: non-automated vehicles, bicycles, even pedestrians.
When I think about auto-car retrofits, more than anything else I think about the removal of a great deal of static parking, and the enlargement of facilities for efficient pick-up and drop-off.
CBC Ideas episode from Sept. 12 is a good overview of where we are and where we are headed with autonomous vehicles.
http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/autonomy-the-unexpected-implications-of-self-driving-vehicles-1.4284446