Originally Posted by
sggoodri
The trouble is, robot-only streets can't happen until the number of robot car owners hits critical mass to pay for them, and people won't buy robot cars without somewhere to drive them. That means robot and human drivers will probably be mixing on existing roadways. And because some errors/traffic violations by human drivers can create crash scenarios that robot drivers cannot avoid due to the limitations of vehicle maneuverability, these systems will not be 100%. But lawfully operating bicyclists will not create any significant difficulty for robot drivers, and so there is no safety justification for removing lawfully operating bicyclists from streets that include a mixture of human and robot drivers.
I can't help but wonder if this issue of lawful robot cars vrs "less than lawful" human drivers will cause any sort of shift in the blame of humans in collision situations? Everybody wants to assume the robots will fail, but if over time it can be shown that the robot drivers are less likely to be the cause of collisions, there might be some rather interesting repercussions toward human drivers.