Bikes, not self driving cars, are the technological gateway to urban progress
Go to a shopping center, or a sporting event, or any other place where people publicly gather en masse and ask yourself how many of them could realistically get around on a bicycle.<p>There are a lot of very fat people, old people, disabled people, and so forth who could not ride a bike half a mile.<p>This is ridiculous utopian nonsense. Society is not a blank slate, and we don't get to start over from scratch. We don't get to re-litigate the past and pretend it never happened. Some people seem to think that if something happened for bad reasons 100 years ago, we ought to just undo it, but that is not how the real world works. We have to build on what exists, no matter why or how it got to be that way.<p>We aren't going to rebuild our cities around bikes, and even if we did, a large number of people could not use them. On the other hand, we already built our cities around cars, and self-driving cars would fit right in (if they actually worked).