At the beginning of your essay, you said that “the best blog posts…are the ones which change your mind.”

Based upon that criterion, this piece is an abject failure.

To put it another way: if your view of our collective transport future, replete with its burgeoning suburbs, is accurate, I hope I’m dead before it arrives.

Sincerely,
Garl B. Latham

What, if any, licence do I need to sit in an autonomous vehicle and who is going to jail if that car runs over some grandma?

Should do everything where appropiate- self driving cars won’t solve the bottleneck such as Holland tunnel. Maybe self-driving car to the train or bus rapid transit station then back to self driving car.

Now you’re just being a bi’atch, Felix. Stop rubbing it in that we have a Governor who is more determined to prepare himself to run the nation into the ground than run the state.

With a carsharing model, you don’t have to pay all of those fixed costs on your first necessary use. So your cost barrier to using a car on that first use is much, much lower. Still, those categories of costs are still present, and they have to be spread out to users somehow, usually on some sort of per-unit-of-use basis. The reason this can be beneficial overall is that the everyone-owns-their-own-car model involves an awful lot of waste in these areas, so eliminate that waste and even after paying your fair share of those costs you can come out way ahead.

OK, so now imagine driverless cars allow universal adoption of carsharing. When deciding if, say, you want to use your carsharing service for occasional intercity travel rather than an alternative mode, you will likely now have to choose whether or not to pay what once were fixed costs under the old system, but now are variable costs under the new system. In other words, the “I have a car anyway” reasoning is no longer really applicable.

I don’t know how this will all shake out, since it really comes down to which intercity technology is most efficient in any given case, and I can see some gap-closing coming from driverless technologies for cars (and also some fundamental inefficiencies remaining, such as those arising from the need for the cars to be capable of independent operation, even if for intercity purposes they are in a “platoon”). But I do think it is very important to keep in mind that these cost calculations look very different when the once- fixed costs are redistributed as variable costs.

And in fact, it might be telling that while lots of people do use taxis for local travel (and what are driverless cars besides just much cheaper taxis?), they are not so popular for intercity travel, and there might be good reasons for that observed split in functions which will persist even when driveless cars (aka cheap taxis) replace personal car ownership in serving a bunch more local travel needs.

If cars can be improved so much that they challenge the efficiency of trains, it’s likely that trains can also benefit from the same technological advances, and maintain their huge economic and energy efficiency over cars.

There is no justification for public subsidies for air travel over these short haul routes, yet that is what we have been doing. And even if self-driving electric cars were available, unless they also drove at 200 mph, many people would still prefer air or trains over them, for the simple reason they don’t want a 6 hour trip. So the question isn’t whether we use trains or cars for these 300-1000 mile trips, but rather trains or planes.

There are other ways the vision doesn’t make sense. If the technology really did become pervasive and people really did stop owning cars individually, the main use for cars would still be commuting during peak hours. To support this, the fleet would have to be nearly as large as it is today, and most vehicles would sit idle during the work day. Peak hour congestion would still be a big problem, whereas rail handles large volumes of people more gracefully. If the fleet stays almost as large as it is today, sharing driverless cars will necessarily be almost as expensive as individual car ownership, providing little incentive for people to give up their cars. People who can’t afford to travel by car or choose not to spend the money would be left with still-mediocre public transit infrastructure.

Also, most of the US probably isn’t urban enough for this kind of thing to be viable. I could see it working in a few big cities, but those are places that already have car-sharing and lots of taxis. Both are too expensive for more than occasional use, and I’m not convinced that self-driving cars would do much to lower the costs. Mass transit will continue to be the primary mode of transportation in big cities, and it would be tragic to keep underinvesting in it.