Back in the late 90's, early 00's, the segway was released to much the same breathless prognostications that we hear today about self driving cars. Doerr said it would be more important than the internet. Kamen claimed it would restructure global transportation.
I don't need to go into everything that was said, you can google it. There was one thing said, however, that I think would be appropriate to touch on here. Kamen, just like you, claimed that traffic laws and the streets could be restructured to better accommodate the segway. That was the instant I knew the segway would not be taking off for a long, long time. If you need for people to restructure their laws and cities solely to accommodate your new technology, you should probably work a little bit harder on perfecting your technology. Because restructuring society's laws and transportation infrastructure simply to use your technology is probably not going to happen. The only time you get a radical restructuring of that nature is when the invention frees you from needing the infrastructure at all.
What I'm describing isn't reshaping your city to fit in self-driving cars. It's doing the things that we should be doing anyway to make road fatalities less embarrassingly huge and with that helping self-driving be an easier problem to tackle. Human drivers should be keeping much larger following distances and indicating properly. Road markings should be much clearer. Signage should be unambiguous. We should do all those things even if we don't care about self-driving cars just because they avoid accidents in general.
Yea but now electric scooter are all the rage and he was basically right (execution was wrong). Cities are even thinking about restructuring roadways to accommodate them (and more bikes).
Electric scooters are barely a blip in a city's overall transportation scheme. The biggest regulations going on is how to keep them from blocking the sidewalk.
Even restructuring a citys roadways for bicycles--a long-term, proven good technology--has been incredibly slow going. And this with something governments are actively trying to improve.
It will be decades until there is substantial enough change that self driving cars are viable as described in the great-grand-parent. And that's if it moves quickly.
I don't need to go into everything that was said, you can google it. There was one thing said, however, that I think would be appropriate to touch on here. Kamen, just like you, claimed that traffic laws and the streets could be restructured to better accommodate the segway. That was the instant I knew the segway would not be taking off for a long, long time. If you need for people to restructure their laws and cities solely to accommodate your new technology, you should probably work a little bit harder on perfecting your technology. Because restructuring society's laws and transportation infrastructure simply to use your technology is probably not going to happen. The only time you get a radical restructuring of that nature is when the invention frees you from needing the infrastructure at all.