the first driverless city

The World’s First Driverless City May Be In China

Longer-term, says Jing, the hope is that a successful all-autonomous city will provide an example not just to the Chinese government, but to any city. If the experiment works, then other cities may be more likely to try it for themselves.

Other cities are already experimenting with ways to reduce car use. Germany is building a car-free neighborhood designed entirely around pedestrian use, and Oslo will ban cars entirely by 2019. It seems that, finally, we’re collectively starting to realize that the car has no place in the modern city. Driverless cars are a great stepping stone, as are electric vehicles, but ultimately the best result for city-dwellers (currently half of the world’s population) is a city where we can go unmolested by cars, and the ridiculous amount of space that they waste, whether parked or on the move.

Can’t this be an American “university town.” At my alma mater, Rutgers (New Brunswick), this would transform everything.

Rutgers-NB is a series of several completely separate campuses (Livingston, Busch, College Ave, & Cook/Douglass) spread across different cities, bisected by a major highway, multiple huge parking lots, with huge traffic issues.

Why aren’t Rutgers and Google working together to make a hub and spoke system? Each campus has a major parking lot where staff/students/visitors would park their car and get into a driverless car/van. A huge increase in usable land, decreased congestion, decreased pollution, resulting in faster trips and a much better experience (and probably a lower net cost for all). What am I missing?

Sidewalk Labs, be all over this.