Elon Musk seems like a rich guy from the California suburbs interested in decarbonizing his lifestyle— a reasonably noble goal, but the California suburbs have a ton of issues totally unrelated to their ecological footprint— not least of which is that their car-dependent transportation system can't scale beyond a certain level of density without massive congestion. And preventing them from scaling beyond that density instead results in a profoundly broken housing market because everyone who wants to live in California is required to bid up a profoundly expensive patch of land.
A modest improvement in road throughput from automation is nothing but a short-term solution, and might well make congestion worse because of the reduced time/attention cost of driving— potentially much worse, since people many more people could move into RVs occupying the only free land in coastal California, its roads.
Elon Musk does not look like a smart guy when he rejects what clever outsiders who have been paying attention to these issues for years have to say and by calling them idiots— after all, he supposedly got into rocketry by devouring textbooks, not by getting angry during his commute.
This graphic makes the point about why cars can never be a solution for mass urban mobility better than pretty much anything else:
https://i.imgur.com/sCvRIEd.gif
A modest improvement in road throughput from automation is nothing but a short-term solution, and might well make congestion worse because of the reduced time/attention cost of driving— potentially much worse, since people many more people could move into RVs occupying the only free land in coastal California, its roads.
Elon Musk does not look like a smart guy when he rejects what clever outsiders who have been paying attention to these issues for years have to say and by calling them idiots— after all, he supposedly got into rocketry by devouring textbooks, not by getting angry during his commute.
This graphic makes the point about why cars can never be a solution for mass urban mobility better than pretty much anything else: https://i.imgur.com/sCvRIEd.gif