I see this thread pop up.
What if the roads are full of self-driving cars? (say, year 2050-ish)
Then we can have self-driving taxis!
This would require NHTSA Class 4 (fully automated self-driving) cars smart enough to be allowed to drive passengers without supervision in all weather (First self-driving cars won't be that fully automated yet, so that's why I said 2050-ish). Now imagine a legal mandate that ALL cars in a city must be self-driving capable, much like antilock brakes and traction control now is. The magic starts to happen:
Beck or Capital Taxi or Uber or Lyft or ZipCar or AutoShare or Hertz or Avis or TTC or MiWay or OCTranspo...
...
all of them might pay you to borrow your owned autonomous self-driving car part-time, such as between 9:30am and 4:30pm when you're working and currently not using it. Or when you're not using it for a week. Or when you need the money. You'll be tempted to pay your car bills and your kid's college by doing this!
- What if 10,000 people did? 100,000 people? They'd be literally everywhere!
- Robotaxis would be easy, fast and cheap to hail, thanks to all the competition!
- What if apps became available that made it easy to join self-driving carpools?
("ALERT: There's a carpool nearby, with a route going near your destination. $10 SOLO, $3 CARPOOL")?
- What if that causes ownership to plummet, with cheap robo-taxis and robo-carpools filling roads.
- What if carpools became as cheap and plentiful as public transit, with short waiting times?
- What if car ownership per capita fell because of the widespread convenience of cheap self-driving taxi services?
- What if that means far fewer single-passenger cars on the road, making roads more efficient?
- What if all these cars had the equivalent of Presto readers? Tap any "available" car and tell it where you want to go?
- What if that made it possible to eliminate inefficient streetside parking, when many cars drive themselves to parking garages instead and/or simply let go to taxi other people (make profit instead of parking cost)?
- What if public transit became door-to-door on all streets thanks to robocars?
- What if you can hail anywhere and you've got a car (solo or carpooled) in a mere one or two minutes, even in surburbs?
- What if every street in a whole city, is essentially serviced by equivalent of frequent public transit, while still using fuel/electricity efficiently?
- What it suburban car ownership dramatically fell by 50%? Parking garages converted to living rooms or subdivisions?
- What if less fuel/electricity is used per capita, thanks to automated robocar carpool taxi public transit systems? (or whatever we'd like to call it!).
With more average people per car, better car utilization, no manual-only cars, fewer cars per capita as widespread door-to-door public transit reduces car ownership, no streetside parking needed, and cars safely driving closer to each other, roads and highways become far more efficient! Hail via an app, and a car arrives within a minute or two (because they're everywhere now, including parked on adjacent streets and neighbour driveways if subscribed to autotaxi services), possibly already filled with a few passengers with destinations on the same route (if you allow the cheap carpool option rather than the solo option). Then headed to nearest train/subway/brt. It would be as cheap as public transit or faster and cheaper than bus/public transit (for short trips to public transit connections). Or even all the way to work (at a bit extra cost over transit, but far cheaper than today's taxi). Inefficient empty suburban buses no longer becomes necessary when served by highly efficient door-to-door equivalents of robotic carpool minibuses that serves frequent & fast door-to-door service to the nearest super rapid transit route. Sole-occupant cars no longer become necessary for many people, when carpool transit becomes as convenient as a subway, superfast & superefficient coming to your door in a mere 1-2-3 minutes of hail even in suburban locations because tens of thousands of people permitted their cars to do robotaxi services.
New problems (e.g. sanitation, vandalism) would happen and market solutions (e.g. Petro Canada robo vaccuum/windexer to clean your car before it picks you up at work or next passenger, to things like in-cabin cameras required for vandalism coverage in car insurance). Space for parking would be replaced by space for cars waiting for nearby people for their next ride, making it super-easy to hail a nearby robocar everywhere. Congestion will still happen at peak, but passenger capacity will be dramatically higher per lane due to more efficient car utilization. Rich people will still selfishly not free up their robocars to robotaxiing. Road congestion will still be a problem at peak, but big transit (subways/trains/brt/lrts) will still exist, and robocarpools can still take you to the nearest major transit station if you don't want to walk. Suburban sprawl problems will still exist, but would be practical to live in the suburbs without owning a car! For a lot, car ownership gets too expensive, and letting your car earn money robotaxiing pays for itself. Even just 10% of population can decide to profit by giving their car into robotaxiing, and serve the rest of the 90% that don't want to bother owning a car.
This could herald invention of new door-to-door public transit, for personalized last-mile commutes; practical carpool car instead of car ownership. And even more suburbanites can give up expensive car-ownership (or just pay for it by freeing their owned robocar to robotaxi services while they are working). Robocars can immediately pick you up at the subway/commuter train/bus station -- even if it's the middle of nowhere, to an house or office location not conveniently served by a bus.
Taxi drivers would be extinct in progressive cities that did this!
Railroads 1850s, Model T-Ford 1900s, Jet airplanes 1950s, perhaps robocar 2050s will be equally as big a transportation revolution.
(NOTE: I also have a
related post about self-driving cars in another thread)
