People making this sort of suggestion gives me The Fear.
No. Just no. Unless we can make them almost as smart as people but without the flaws. Have you seen what tends to happen in games when an accident actually does occur? They're not smart enough to turn around. How would they deal with pulling into or changing lanes in heavy traffic, when the available separation is less than the ideal? Can they sense children running into the road, or the marauding cyclists would would become kings of the road in our no-more-than-20mph-in-urban-centres utopia? Etc.
Plus something like that is very susceptible to interference by central administration. Talk smack about the government being a little more opressive than they used to be? Suddenly next time you decide to ride off to the shops, the doors have locked and you find yourself in dissident detention centre number 101. I was slightly worried about this sort of thing should Labour have won the election as they were quite happily wandering off down that road (even if it was just Project Veronica or whatever it's called, i.e. the vehicle tracking/auto speed limiting thing). There's all sorts of things wrong with Cons and Libs as well, but they're far less controlling.
You want to travel in a system where someone / something that's either highly drilled or specially programmed is in charge, go ride a bus or the DLR.
It also means motorcycles are pretty much banned because the control of them would be far more finicky and susceptible to alteration by the rider's posture. As a newb rider doing it for reasons of fuel-saving and travel time, I dislike that idea - if only because things would get slower, more expensive, and more environmentally threatening. The traffic and accident situation on our roads is far better than any of the paranoid types wanting to bring in all this stuff imagine. In 10 years and well over a million miles of driving I've only had 2, minor, non-accident collisions (caused by dipshits who shouldn't - and maybe hadn't - got their license), and not seen a great many more, and personally not even driven by anything that looked like it had caused death or serious injury. The traffic in my town tends to come from roadworks or sheer demand outstripping road-space supply, which an automated system wouldn't much improve unless it was very, very wide scale integrated to balance flows etc - and given that traffic lights already can/should be able to do that (and have been since the 60s... you've seen the Italian Job, yes?), I don't trust those in charge to get it right.
Anyway, if that was the plan you may as well just spend the money on genuine improvements to public transport provision, as it can shift far more people in the same space. (I'd commute by rail or bus if it was in any way a practical proposition, but getting to my workplace - which is still in the suburbs, just a near-rural and poorly served bit of them - would actually be more expensive than driving and take at least 3x longer)
