1. Allow autonomous cars during “the Witching Hour”: from 4 am-5 am. They can drive slowly in order to be safe and quiet; say, at no more than 10 km per hour when in residential neighbourhoods. Even at these slow speeds, this will allow car-sharing cars to be delivered to peoples’ homes for use the following morning. (In fact, the cars themselves do not even necessarily need to have an autonomous capability. They could instead just hitch a ride on top of slow-moving road roombas). In the case of electric cars, this will also allow them to drive themselves to and from battery-charing stations at night, when electricity tends to be cheap and road-traffic sparse.
2. On main streets, have both an express LRT lane — with stops very far apart from one another — and a non-express bus lane. On narrower streets, have the non-express busses share a lane with regular car traffic.
3. Next to many of the LRT stops, as well as next to train stations, construct “take a car, leave a car” vertical parking lots. These will be “valet” lots: you drive a car-sharing car to the lot’s entrance, then get out of the car and have it drive itself (or be carried by a road roomba) into the lot to park. This will not only save drivers time in parking, but will also allow the lot to hold far more cars than any traditional vertical parking lot could, since without humans it can have much shorter ceilings, more tightly winding ramps to get cars up or down floors, and many more parking spots per floor. It will allow easy pick-up or drop-off of car-sharing cars. Along with the Witching Hour, this will overcome the “first mile-last mile” problems that otherwise tend to limit public transit’s effectiveness and appeal.
…So, there you have it. Three easy steps! With the Witching Hour, and car-sharing, and vertical parking lots, we can finally help to get rid of our cities’ spooky traffic problems.
Future Economics 