Letter: Driverless cars and the tragedy of jam

From Adrian Bowyer

You rightly say that we should be thinking about the implications of driverless cars now (14 May, p 5). I suggest that the most common number of occupants of a driverless car on the road will probably be zero.

A very important aspect of a highly automated and widely distributed technology is that it doesn't matter to users how slowly it works, within reason. It takes 15 minutes for you or me to wash a pile of dishes. It takes a dishwasher an hour, but we don't mind the extra three-quarters of an hour because it isn't our time.

Similarly a sprawling traffic jam of stationary unoccupied driverless electric cars on their way to collect the week's groceries is costing their owners nothing and emitting no pollution.

Driverless cars will create a vast tragedy of the commons, these commons being road space. The only solution I see is ubiquitous road pricing, which – with the encrypted secure logs that the insurance companies will insist that the cars have – should be easy to implement.

Foxham, Wiltshire, UK