To avoid accidents and other dangers, I'd see a mechanism where you park your car in a pod, and the pod is on rails, and it is getting routed automatically to your destination, that way even "dumb cars" could use it. There's already a system in France where you can park your car on a train, but loading/unloading isn't optimized at all, it's like loading/unloading a ferry : some batch processing. A steaming process would be more efficient
That wouldn't remove the need for ventilation and other things you mentioned if that system is underground. But it could be above the ground , on buildings 2nd floors, where the first floor would be retail stores and whatnot
> you park your car in a pod, and the pod is on rails
Why not have seats on the pod, that way you don't have to ferry around a 2-tonne car. Indeed if you have solved smart automation, why have rails at all? Presto, you arrive at the idea of self-driving taxis as a public service.
For the autonomous cars, it'd be interesting if they could do the equivalent of what computers do by "binding to a domain", letting things like these loaders connect to them and "drive" them onboard.
Really, the car would (should!) still be driving itself—it's the thing that gets certified on how to handle safety issues, after all; the car would just be given a dead-reckoning location target by the zone controller, which the car would get to as best it knows how, with the zone controller scanning to "see" when it had successfully boarded, just like with a human-driven car.
If there were few-enough human-driven cars, you could have a team of valet staff accompanying the train, acting as glue for the few human-driven cars in the pack.
That wouldn't remove the need for ventilation and other things you mentioned if that system is underground. But it could be above the ground , on buildings 2nd floors, where the first floor would be retail stores and whatnot