The increased speeds are excellent for those who can afford the toll. This is a universal benefit of toll roads for those people.
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Car-centric urban planning is hell with kids. You have to load them up into the car for any small trip. You can't walk or bike anywhere because cars make it so dangerous.
My only regret about living in the US is this car hellscape that is so hard to avoid. It's mandated by law, not chosen by the market.
Everything will be connected and commutable, especially the suburbs. Automated, on-demand delivery will become a part of everyday life.
Instead of busses and semis, we'll have small pods for smaller cargo and small parties. Highways will turn into logistics corridors, and we'll route people and goods seamlessly.
All the clamor for trains and rail will go away when our roads become an even superior version of that. Private commuting to any destination, large homes with lots of land, same day delivery of everything.
The problem with self driving cars is that they can only optimize road bandwidth a bit more than they are now (and even then, only if you outlaw human drivers), they aren’t a magical shortcut to increasing bandwidth beyond indicated demand (like mass transit can).
In the case of CPUs, there's sync and communication overhead; for highways, there's more turbulence and slowdown generated by lane-switching.
As a mode of transportation, self-driving cars already exist--they're basically a taxicab service, the main difference being that some people hope that self-driving might magically make the cost of providing a taxi service cheaper.
> Instead of busses and semis, we'll have small pods for smaller cargo and small parties. Highways will turn into logistics corridors, and we'll route people and goods seamlessly.
"Lots of small things going point-to-point" is a much more difficult problem to route, especially at high throughput, than "bundle things into large containers that get broken apart near their destination." In the space of transit, your idea is known as Personal Rapid Transit (PRT), and PRT systems have invariably underwhelmed every time they've been built, as they struggle to live up to their promise.
Rail transit is incredibly efficient at moving large numbers of people--a metro line can easily move a dozen lanes of highway traffic--and there is nothing that you can do to roads to make them approach that level of efficiency, in part because the routing problems are insurmountable.
If you’re sensitive to commute time, you’ll want to live in the same ‘city’ as you work, for instance, or at least nearby. But it will cost you a lot of money, and you’ll get a closet.
If you want the ‘big house with a lawn’ experience, you’ll pick a distant ‘city’ or even another ‘state’ (in this case, a city in a nearby suburb).
Typical case, it’s an hour+ end to end from one side to the other even on the fastest transit for Tokyo or London, and they have really good transit systems.
Singapore similar when it’s busy (which is actually quite a feat considering how small of an island it is).
It’s been awhile since I’ve been in Manhattan, but I remember it being roughly 1-2 hrs too.
Mega cities like Mumbai? Double that.
As you say, the solution of course is to not go that far on a daily basis. You can make your life convenient, as long as you are living alone.