To have the city planning work correctly you kind of need participation from the cars. I.e. if the traffic light infra structure knew the destination of every car it could do things more globally optimal.
So in that sense, driverless cars will actually help because of kind of nuanced reason. My guess is that there will only be a small number of driverless car companies (tesla, waymo, cruise, apple, etc) and it'll be much easier to add regulations that those companies need to send their destination data in realtime to the traffic light infra. I think that would basically be a non-starter for peoples personal cars.
So in that sense, driverless cars will actually help because of kind of nuanced reason. My guess is that there will only be a small number of driverless car companies (tesla, waymo, cruise, apple, etc) and it'll be much easier to add regulations that those companies need to send their destination data in realtime to the traffic light infra. I think that would basically be a non-starter for peoples personal cars.