I think the idea has legs (pun intended).  However, if we are going to avoid all of the at-grade traffic problems that will inevitably occur with this new device, it would be necessary to build a more separated facility.  In my opinion, this thing FAILS on the corners, on the turns.  It seems like a perfect idea for any straight corridor.  So maybe the train could just operate on straight paths ONLY, and transfers could take place at perpendicular locations.  This would avoid the conflicts of curves mixed with at-grade traffic, which I think is a critical fail.  Its kind of like LRT, but elevated, but unlike LRT it has a much much bigger footprint that has to be accommodated.  This means loss of capacity for at-grade traffic, to stop nearly all traffic at intersections while this thing navigates a turn.

More newspaper articles on this development, click READ MORE

It is possible, NOW, to have a car get around without any lights and so the cameras on board are not really cameras at all. They are LIDAR devices, a kind of radar that many engineering firms use to survey terrain, buildings, and all conditions of the environment.

• The car drove with no headlights, and no driver.
• It collected environment object and terrain data by beams of laser light shot out into the desert.
• On-board computers instantly concluded where the car was in relation to the landscape data provided by those laser scans.

FORD DRIVERS wore military-grade night vision goggles in order to monitor the car's behavior.  See how this went down with the Youtube video below:

The nation’s top auto safety regulator, Mark Rosekind, said the federal government wants to reduce the death toll in auto accidents, and thinks driverless technology could help reduce the annual death toll from traffic accidents: 32,675 people died in auto accidents in 2014!  He said 90 percent of vehicle accidents are human error.

It seems like a no-brainer that computers can do a better job at reducing these mistakes, many of which are from distracted driving, something a computer has no problem with.

Self driving cars will change everything, for the better. They will increase capacity of the roadways by three times minimum, and that means more room for bike lanes, ped lanes, and medians and rail.  It means a lot of good things.  Its not just Google pioneering on this, far from it.  Giant Tech companies are way ahead in my opinion, because they actually BUILD cars, and Google is making things from scratch, hence the little bug like cars.   Recently, Google announced that it would be testing its prototype of a driverless car on roads in the summer of 2016 inside of California.  Many still think that Self-driving cars are a futuristic idea, decades out.  This simply is not true. Numerous car companies are ALL working on it, all independently.  Ford, Mercedes, BMW, and Tesla, etc. all have self-driving features in the works.

TWO YEARS AGO: One of Google's safety drivers takes a ride in their second generation vehicle, the Lexus, to understand how Google's self-driving technology works on the road.