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Sorry to pick out one bit in an excellent post but, since this is the internet...
This seems unlikely in the near term. Currently, self-driving cars solve ambiguous situations by slowing down. When that doesn't work, they stop entirely. Thus the phenomenon of "coning".
https://www.npr.org/2023/08/26/1195695051/driverless-cars-san-francisco-waymo-cruise
In crowded areas, drivers have to exercise a lot of agency to facilitate the flow of traffic. You have to know which rules to bend and which ones to break. In extremely dense situations this gets a lot more serious. I was in a cab recently in Latin America where we were going up a steep hill on a rainy night. The taxi, some sort of shitty Kia knockoff, was struggling to get up the hill. Suddenly a delivery vehicle parks in our lane. A car is coming in the other lane. Our driver calmly pulls into the uncoming traffic, forcing the car in the other lane to the far edge of the road. And this was the right move. Had he stopped he never would have been able to start again.
But will an autonomous vehicle do the same? What if it (inevitably) kills someone doing a similar maneuver? I don't envy the Google lawyer who has to explain to the jury that the deceased's life is nothing compared to the hundreds of man lives saved by breaking traffic laws.
I think driverless cars will have much less throughput than human driven ones. The idea of cars flying through four way stops at 25 miles per hour with precise timing to avoid collisions is a fantasy.
I did add alot of prefaces and assumptions to my argument, yes. I personally doubt we'll be seeing functioning, self-driving cars any time soon.
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I think the big benefit of autonomous cars is that they are both a taxi and a valet service in one. Your car drives you to your desired place of work (for simplicity we assume the hypothetical person works in the downtown core.) It then shuttles itself off into a place where space is cheap, to charge itself. Perhaps in an old industrial zone. When its owner gets off work, it dutifully begins to make its way ahead of time, travelling in packs of five or ten.
Because there is no need for a steering column, the interior of a autonomous vehicle can be structured in a radically different fashion. The interior can be made much more luxurious, especially if it is for a single occupant! Since it's going to have an internet connection anyway, there's no reason not to do it up like a office, or put in a bed if desired. And when it drops off its occupant, it goes to another warehouse to charge. The convenience factor of not having to negotiate two permanent parking spots in a major metropolitan area is extremely high.
The increase in commute time could be greatly mitigated by the comfort factor, in my opinion.
I think that if autonomous cars are ever widely adopted, the idea that they can also be a valet service will die pretty quickly. Imagine a typical Wal-Mart on a typical day. The vast majority of people park in an available space and walk to the store, then walk back out to their car. Now imagine if everyone were dropped off at the entrance. Now imagine if everyone summoned their car to the entrance as soon as they hit the checkout line. Now imagine both happening at once, all day, every day. The road in front of the entrance would be a nightmare. Now imagine that instead of the dropoff area being a private road with a large, adjacent lot, it's a public through street where the nearest parking is blocks away, and the cheapest parking is miles away. Imagine what an already busy downtown street would look like if 500 office workers all summoned their cars to pick them up at 5 after 5.
This is the kind of idea that sounds good when you assume the current traffic environment stays the same and you're the only one doing it. It changes greatly when everyone is doing it. If autonomous vehicles are ever widely adopted, I imagine there will be legislation prohibiting deadheading, with possible limited exceptions for people with disabilities.
Maybe I am missing something, but don't Airports already solve this problem? I feel like you could trade the 500 car parking structure for something like an arrivals/departures lane that could quickly and easily see 500 people into their cars and on their way. Apparently 60,000 people go through Dulles every day, and their arrivals area is four lanes for about a quarter of a mile (from eye-balling it).
From my experience, every major airport is a clusterfuck of traffic. Numbered lanes with numbered stops help, but every lane is still a disgusting snarl-up. Adding more lanes would require more space for splitting and merging, plus you need to provide a way to reach the furthest lanes.
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The impression I got from OP was that he was referring to the benefits of privately owned autonomous vehicles and not necessarily a subscription model. In that case, you can't just eliminate parking and replace it with a dropoff area. And while that may work for something like a Wal-Mart where there's a lot of space, I don't see how you'd implement it in an area like a downtown where the nearest parking structure could be a block or more away from the destination. A business district where I live has a four lane road running down the middle, and with disturbing frequency I'll be stuck in a traffic jam because an Uber driver making a pickup has effectively eliminated a travel lane. I can't imagine a situation where this becomes the usual mode of travel.
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