One reason I don't predict a lot here is that I am not sure anybody has the urban planning chops to figure out where this goes. It's highly chaotic. It is a big change, but there are other pressures that robocars bring, including the ability to tolerate longer commutes (because they are productive work or leisure time) the ability to travel with a fleet of RVs that follows you around and more. These pressures might bend the city in other ways.

People like low density natural settings with safety and play space for their children. They also crave easy access to resources, interesting places and social interactions. These forces will push against one another. If you can live on a farm but can quickly (or not so quickly but comfortably) find yourself in a walkable, engaging social and commercial space, you might choose that, making the city vanish. Cities exist because of social desires and because they are cheaper due to economies of scale. Robots and telepresence and delivery-on-demand change many of these economies of scale in ways we are just learning to understand.

He moved those pages and has a number of new papers and videos up. I have modified the links

There are going to be human driven cars on the road for many decades to come, and always some holdouts. Before the last holdout leaves the road, we may start seeing proposals that require human driven vehicles to at least have some computer networking equipment in them (even a mobile phone in a mount) to let them participate in virtual traffic signals, reversible streets and other ITS tools. Traffic lights are actually very expensive, even 4 way stops cost money.

Reversible streets already exist of course but today they are complex and expensive. It's mostly done on highways and bridges and involves remote controlled gates, or moving cones, or even movable dividers. On some bridges it's just frequent signal lights over each lane to tell if that lane is in your direction. While there are human drivers, each removable street segment would need to have a row of lights over each entrance, which is both costly and ugly, though worth the cost in the most congested areas. However, an app for the human driver that knows which streets reverse, gets positive confirmation and makes strong warnings if a driver appears to be about to headed down a street the wrong way could be cheap if it were mandated. Such a box need not be that expensive, and CBDs that are ready to do things like congestion charging could start insisting each driver have such a box -- which might also manage the tolls.

This is a bit big brotherish. People don't want devices tracking their speed and location, though you could do some work to try to make this a bit more anonymous.

I don't think it makes sense to charge people for being within 3 seconds of the next car. Cars on city streets actually are meant to bunch due to traffic lights. 2 seconds is the official recommended headway, but most people drive with less.

Your two rules also conflict, in that if the vehicle ahead of you is going slow (for valid or invalid reasons) then you are charged if you get too close to it, but also charged if you hang off a distance behind at the slow speed. While I can see ways to fix that, I am not sure these are the real measures of congestion.

Congestion is mostly more cars on a road than it can handle, combined with triggers which collapse to stop and go, such as accidents, merges (even if volume is low enough for the resulting smaller road) and irrational slowdowns. When volume is well below capacity, irrational slowdowns don't cause too much trouble. Accidents still do as people slow to look -- and when the accident is fresh and still in the the road they slow down with good reason.

A key problem though is whatever system you design to keep the flow regulated in the congested zone, you may just move the congestion to a zone outside of it, as people wait to get in. Thus you need wait-at-home I think. Metering lights use the on-ramps for waiting, but sometimes that fails as the line spills out into other traffic. Congestion charging doesn't make people wait, but it's been known to bump congestion just outside the zone as people skirt around it to avoid the cost of going in it.

Yes, the hour commute has been around as long as commuting, but that's not actually all that long, at least at volume.

Here are some factors which could change it:

• The commuter robocar can be a comfortable workspace, with full communications, screen and desktop. You will be at work when you start. The only downside, the little bumps and motions. New suspensions might alter that.
• It can also be a sleeping space, for those who find a nap as useful as regular sleep. Trips can take arbitrary times for those who sleep well in the cars and no human time cost, particularly overnight trips.
• Travel can be quite cheap in smaller, single person vehicles. Cheaper for the individual, and cheaper in externalities as well.
• Induced demand could be eliminated through road metering, but in truth, the extra congestion of induced demand is a lesser cost if the above factors apply.
• In some cities, the middle class are already priced out of homes. Even today we see people taking 1 hour one way commutes.

On the other hand, time is still time, unless you can productively sleep. But today we see rich techies happy to take one hour commutes on things like the Google bus not to live somewhere cheap but to live somewhere fun and expensive. It provides just a taste of the future.