Autonomous vehicles and RoboTaxi's will make SharedMobility, MaaS (Mobility as a Service), and free-floating Car Sharing more practical & feasible & provide a much-needed door-to-door both public and private 21st-century transport service for the Greater Dublin Area. They will be a vital part of the transport strategy and a major disruptor to traditional transport a lot sooner than any current transport plans have accounted for.
They will be electric by default, helping advance and speed up our nation's EV adoption goals. They will help speed up journey times by eliminating poor human driving styles and caused traffic and help significantly reduce deaths and serious accidents and injuries. They should and probably will use dedicated Motorway lanes and Bus Lanes and/or underground vehicle tunnels in cities, plus help reduce our overall national vehicle fleet, which is not needed. Currently, the average car is mostly parked stealing our urban realm, wasting precious resources for up to 95% of their lifetime, and a financial burden many can no longer afford, wasting resources with the supply chain shortages that we don't have to spare.
It is highly likely Autonomous Electric RoboTaxi's will be with us a lot sooner than the NTA seem to be planning for or not planning at all? They are already fully deployed in other cities around the world in the US, China, and starting this year in Germany, the UK, and will also be deployed here in Ireland privately.
When are transport planners going to take this seriously as a solution to public transport that isn't despised by the general public?
Fail to prepare, prepare to fail! the time to plan is now not in 5 years' time!
We must learn from past mistakes and not repeat and make foolish mistakes. We have an opportunity to invest in real desirable future public transport now or we will have wasted an opportunity to be a world leader and set an example for others to follow and waste taxpayers' and private investors and condemn the citizens and visitors to Ireland to an unhealthy undesirable public and private transport future.
Would we invest in landline telephones or fax machines? Would we build a new canal, depend on horse and carriage for transport? It's, not a stretch to say that traditional; Trains, Trams, Buses, and cars will be joining this list of outdated communications and transport technology and if we waste Billions investing in outdated, primitive, destructive, undesirable, public transport that does not end up being used or increase public transport use, it would be a terrible waste of public and private funds that are so badly needed for other climate change adaption and urgent mitigation projects, not to mention the waste of our human labor capital that will be wasted constructing them, that is also so badly needed for these other ambitious constructions projects such as the retrofitting of our national housing stock and retrofitting of our home heating systems, the conversion from fossil fuel gas and oil to District heating from waste heat from data centers and industrial premises, resulting in unnecessary extra carbon pollution and poor air quality affecting our climate change ambitions.