They are AUTONOMOUS that mean you can get rid of (at least!) half the people and still have as many cars!

Cruise’s robotaxis created a traffic jam in Austin, here’s what went wrong

According to the team at Cruise, the fleet ended up in a high-demand area, which also brought with it a slew of pedestrian and passenger vehicle traffic. As you can see in the video, one of the Cruise vehicles got stuck in an intersection while committing to a turn, thus further congesting traffic in three different directions.

Unfortunately, more and more Cruise robotaxis flooded the narrow Austin street to meet the peak demand, only to join in the traffic jam. But why were there so many robotaxis in this one specific area? Cruise states that at the time, there were limited routes going north and south through the city, and a detour from an alternative route led the EVs to the same doomed parkway.

Unfortunately, Cruise could not manually reroute the vehicles quickly enough, so there was nowhere for them to go.

Unfortunately, what you end up with automation is often more of a thing than what you actually need, as surplus saturates the market even when it isn’t desired. Rather than a single dedicated lane operating at maximum available capacity on a predictable schedule, you get a flood of functionally independent actors all congregating within a small area in an effort to maximize individual revenue.

Autonomous means you get more cars than there are people all contributing to the traffic that the people are looking to escape.