adriel said:
How would one get a manually controlled sports car from the garage onto the local race track?
Don't they use flat bed trucks for that even nowadays? In the scheme of things that's a
very minor problem.
Government resources allocated toward a massive, national automatic roadway system are resources taken away from other areas of responsibility. While the annual roadside fatalities would drop, fatalities in other sectors of society would spike.
How so? My point in bringing this up is that most of the pieces are already in place. There is no massive government investment here. Many cars are already drive by wire. Outfitting a computer to guide them via GPS and roadway magnets is almost trivial, and probably more an exercise in programming than anything else. As for roads themselves they merely need to have magnets embedded every so often which costs practically nothing. They've even made self-driven cars which can follow painted lines but magnets gives a more reliable system.
Bicyclist or pedestrian walks into the path of an automated car and is wounded. Vandalism of the roadway causes cars to smash into guardrails or fly off bridges. Mechanical failure of a single car causes an accordian wreck for miles. No insurance?
The cost of auto insurance dealing with car-car accidents will be greatly reduced. As for the types of accidents you mention these are relatively rare even nowadays and will likely be even less with automated cars since the car can react faster to avoid the obstacle. If there is still auto insurance it will cost much less than now due to the greatly reduced rates of
all kinds of accident. BTW, the system can easily be programming to deal with the inevitable mechanical failure. Indeed, it must be. So even if there is still auto insurance, the liability part of it will likely be so inexpensive as to be almost irrelevant, perhaps tens of dollars annually.
A forced pathway is inherently less tolerant of unexpected obstructions. With manual control you can bypass pretty much anything since the precision of control allows near infinite possibilities. But with a forced pathway, the negotiable width of the road is suddenly much less.
The magnets are a guide but it is
not a fixed pathway like a railway by any stretch of the imagination. Every implementation I've heard of this so far has ways for the car to detect and go around obstacles. You just can't assume the lane will always be clear. In cases where that is impossible because the adjacent lanes are blocked the vehicle will come to a stop, and since all following vehicles will be at a safe distance behind(hardly the case nowadays) they can come to a stop also. Once the vehicle detects that the path is clear, it will proceed. The vehicle must inherently have this ability anyway to deal with stop lights.
There will be days when a pair of activists or terrorists decide to disengage their vehicles from the automated pathway system, each vehicle blocking one lane and one emergency lane.
The point is that they won't have that ability. Once fully phased in about the only control you'll have will be to enter the destination(s), and those destinations cannot include stops in the middle of a highway.
To make the analogy simpler, let's look at computers. The computer user doesn't decide which cluster of the hard drive to store files on. This is completely beyond their control. All they do is pick a name and a folder then the operating system does the rest. Likewise for automated cars. You pick a destination and then the system takes care of getting you there, including picking the fastest route based on prevailing traffic conditions. Just as with the PC there will be occasionally problems but the greatly improved efficiency more than justifies taking the decisions out of human hands. You wouldn't dream of picking what clusters to store your files on, would you? Think of all the times human error will cause problems. Ditto for driving.
I've studied this idea quite a bit and frankly I really can't think of any valid reason why cars should be under human control once the means to automate them exists, and we are practically there. People may resist the idea or think they can do a better job but 50,000 dead, two million injured, and billions of hours wasted each year driving says otherwise. You'll save in the obvious ways with far fewer deaths and injuries. Besides that you won't need to spend public money for police to enforce traffic laws, you won't need to pay people to drive trucks or buses, highly paid employees will be able to use their commute time productively. Of course there will be times the system fails, but I'll take a few dozen injuries or even fatalities a year over what we have now. It's gotten so bad now that I try to avoid riding in cars as much as possible. I can't think of one person, myself included, who hasn't been in at least one auto accident as either a driver, passenger, or both. I've already been in three, all as a passenger. My mom had an accident two years ago when some jerk ran a red light talking on her cell phone. Since then she's had shoulder surgery and two hip replacements. I can certainly think of better uses for her time than that.
Yet another good 
