It might be a far-off scenario for now but self-driving cars set to cruise rather than pay for parking have the potential to cause gridlock, says Adam Millard-Ball, transportation planner and associate professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Millard-Ball claims that because cruising is less costly at lower speeds: “Self-driving cars will slow to a crawl as they kill time”.
“Parking prices are what get people out of their cars and on to public transit, but autonomous vehicles have no need to park at all. They can get around paying for parking by cruising,” he says, adding: “They will have every incentive to create havoc.”
His estimate – using a traffic micro-simulation model – for the repercussions of only 2,000 self-driving cars in downtown San Francisco is that it will slow traffic to less than 2 miles per hour. We shudder to think of the effects of even 20 on Dublin city centre traffic.
https://news.ucsc.edu/2019/01/millardball-vehicles.html
