The E-Scooter Isn't New – London Was Zooming Around on Autopeds a Century Ago

US or Imperial inches ? /s

Totally. Banning automobiles is usually a bad idea, especially for residential zones. Years ago, I remember seeing a presentation about redeveloping a bad public housing block that was built in the 1960s with no auto-access (the assumption being poor people don't have cars), but it turns out that it meant they couldn't even get pizza.

A road network isn't the only solution. In the early 20th century, there was a separate narrow-gauge tunnel network beneath Chicago dedicated to freight. Deliveries were made directly to businesses via subbasements or elevator shafts. The network had stations at rail and ship terminals for accepting freight that arriving from outside the city. At its height in 1929, the network had 150 locomotives pulling 10 to 15 cars per train.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tunnel_Company

Trucks or delivery vans should only be allowed on roads farther apart than 1-2km, with some exceptions (supermarkets, regular markets, etc).

We have all the technical tools needed, this is about political will.

I would invite you to come and have a look in the Netherlands. It’s very common for octogenarians to cycle. My wife cycled up to the day of the birth of our daughter. Children have more independence because they can cycle to football practice on their own. Bike lanes are great for mobility scooters. It rains here, a lot! And it snows. I picked up our Christmas tree with our cargo bike. When I need to transport anything larger I will book a carshare, which are dotted around our neighbourhood.

And the result? People are happy and healthy.

First is the cost of driving. A reasonable rule of thumb is $0.50/mile all in (i.e. including depreciation, repairs, gas, etc) -- you can get down to half that pretty easily and maybe a little lower, but especially if you're spending tons of time in this car you're probably going to want a nice comfy one, which will cost more and depreciate faster. So, these trips you're imagining everyone taking constantly are not going to be accessible to most people. Cars are already the second biggest expense in most Americans' budgets, one which scales with mileage, and which self driving would only increase (have to pay for the lidar, on-device compute, whatever remote service handled edge cases, etc).

The second thing your predictions miss is geometry. Despite the decades of predictions about self-driving cars being able to run safely at much higher speeds and with much tighter tolerances than human-run cars, the tyranny of geometry and stopping distances (which actually won't change much even with millisecond reaction times) means that throughput of car lanes is unlikely to change much (though we could all imagine top-down infrastructural changes helping this a lot, eg coordinated self driving cars and smart roads, those seem unlikely to land anytime soon given American political inclinations). Imagine how spaced-out people are on the highway -- in each lane, 1.6 people (average car occupancy) every football field (300 feet -- safe stopping distance at 70mph). If you're trying to go anywhere more densely packed than that -- e.g., a city, a restaurant, a ball game -- you're going to start to run into capacity constraints. Mass transit, walking, and cycling all can manage an order of magnitude higher throughput.

So while I think your prediction -- that self driving cars will increase demand for road space -- is right, the valence that takes for me is much more negative. The wealthy will be able to take up way more space on the road (e.g., one car each dropping off each kid at each extra curricular activity), condemning the poor to even worse traffic (especially the poor who cannot afford a self driving vehicle, who will not even be able to play candy crush while they're waiting in this traffic). People will continue to suburbanize and atomize, demanding their governments pay for bigger and bigger roads and suburbs, despoiling more of the areas you'd like to hike in, with debt that will keep rolling over to the next generation. Bikes and peds will continue to be marginalized as the norm for how far apart people live will continue to grow, making it even more impossible and dangerous to get anywhere without a car. I hope I'm wrong but this is how mass motorization played out the first time, in the post-war period, and if anything our society is less prepared now to oppose the inequitable, race-to-the-bottom, socialize-your-externalities results of that phase of development.

If people stay further away from tractor trailers, they’ll stay further away from SUVs too.

Even in an urban environment, if you keep X feet of distance from the back of the vehicle in front, if the vehicle is longer…

Anyways, street parking should be paid by the square foot * 1.25 to account for getting in/out/around parked vehicles.

> The engine was an air-cooled, 4-stroke, 155 cc engine over the front wheel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoped

Great, now accidentally click the big green button that says "allow all" and overrides the toggles you just spent time selecting!

And now the popup will disappear forever. Goodbye.

A shilling was 1/20th of a pound. 12 pence were in a shilling (so 240 pence in £1)

In 1915 or so, a single pound (GBP int al) was a banknote ie paper money and was thus until the coin took over in the '80s I think it was. The pound coin is not made of gold.

A gold sov. is something completely different. However "sov" is a nickname or perhaps a euphemism for a pound (GBP).