Promoting his upcoming book on transportation planning, Randal O'Toole says his central argument is that rail is a dead end and driverless car technologies are the answer to our congestion problems.
O'Toole's argument is that since mass transit of any kind can never approximate the personal mobility afforded by the automobile, and expanding highways is politically difficult, the only solution is to make the highways we have more effective. And that means technologies that take control of your car on the freeway so you can zoom along in sync with the other cars at higher speeds.
"Because computer response times are much faster than those of a human, cars controlled by on-board computers can operate much more closely to one another than human-controlled cars. This means that highway lanes that can now move only about 2,000 vehicles per hour will be able to move 6,000 to 8,000 vehicles per hour.
Unlike the infamous flying cars, driverless car technologies are not pie in the sky.'"
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