alt Hacker NewsFun fact: you can do Zürich Madrid with 3 transfers and 14 hours. The car will take 16 hours. Obviously, nobody is going to do that, and the plane is a better alternative. Your example does not get solved by autonomous cars, I am quite certain nobody is going to do this in a rideshare either.
Most people commute to the nearest city, move within a city, or go see friends in a neighboring city. Yes, US is much bigger, but I am quite certain that most people don't do more than 75km on a daily basis. The US still has plenty of medium and high density, where good public transit would make a lot of sense, but it is seriously lacking. It is a political decision, not a inevitable fact of life that the US has poor transit compared to other countries.
The correct question to answer would be: how do you move people efficiently in a 75km radius? Are there trips that could be solved with a good train, tram or bus? Do you provide streets with bike lanes such that people feel safe riding the bike? What about pedestrians? Are autonomous cars really solving the congestion problem? Most of these cars still need to be parked during the night when demand is lower, exactly like a railyard. However, the space taken by one person in one car is much higher than any other forms of transit.
My point here is: autonomous rideshares may displace taxi services and Uber. But most importantly, good street and city design, which is hard but not impossible, matters much more than solving the autonomous car problem.
I did a poor job with my example. My point is that your example is just a cherry picked anecdote from an extremely small country that has the luxury of a handful of dense cities and a large number of smaller towns that sit on the couple of major roads arteries.
I think you don’t have enough exposure. Yes yes road design great. Bike lanes great. Higher density great. It still does not solve the problem in American. My own cherry-picked example. The DFW metro area is half the land size of your country. A lot of it is already built up and it’s massively sprawling. On a normal commute from any given 5mile radius is going to be highly unpredictable, people are going in every direction. It’s extremely hot in the summer and it rains. Huge change management problem that you will not overcome. At the end of the day it’s hard to make a comparison from a country where a city by land is 2% the size of Dallas.
Last mile is an incredibly challenging problem in the US. It is typically not economically feasible even ignoring the culture change management. Short of rebuilding entire cities and forcing people into high density buildings most of this will not change. Now if you can make really amazing autonomous vehicles that can actually solve most of the last mile problem and introduces the ability for cities to create mass transit that is an interesting solution. Even if use for the full commute those have real potential to eliminate congestion as after all it’s usually some combination of accidents and poor driving. Parking those at night? That is no issue at all.