It’s happening, the worst mayor Toronto has ever had is removing three major recently completed bike lanes at tax payer expense. That’s right, Ontario tax payers are footing the bill for Ford to meddle in Toronto municipal infrastructure. This is of course to distract us from failing healthcare and education while appealing to his mostly car centric base.
There is a protest happening Wed. 23rd of October, please come out if you can. https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/rally-ride-for-road-safety-tickets-1045417761667
As much as I hate to say “wait for technology to solve the problem”, driverless cars would massively improve both congestion and parking (the other thing bike lanes interfere with) in cities. I hope some company that isn’t run by a drooling memelord can actually deliver and provide real disruption to the transportation world.
I would agree that they could improve congestion on highways, but in cities? The congestion is there because a huge ass vehicle is being used by a single person x 1 million. Unless you’re talking driverless buses :)
And if infrastructure isn’t balanced, so it benefits ALL road users, and not just driverless cars, then it will cause more harm than good. City infrastructure that is balanced won’t make cars go any faster than everyone else (in fact, it makes drivers take less direct paths to their destination!), so the only thing you might be solving is fewer crashes caused by negligent drivers.
So, indirectly, yes, they may help with congestion, but not for the reasons we’d assume.
We already have perfectly good examples of things working in other cities and countries. It’s our (Government’s) stubborn refusal to implement what we need that’s causing these problems.
Not unless driverless cars somehow end up reducing trips made. Which seems unlikely!