2031 100% of vehicles on the road will be fully autonomous, and all roads everywhere will be choked with empty cars going to pick up their next passenger.
Um....a mention of obvious stuff regarding self-driving cars is needed here.
Empty cars picking up their next passenger is not necessarily inefficient per se, since one car can now be used by MANY people, reducing the need to own cars, especially multiple cars. Many of those will be unmanned ZipCars/Hertz/Ubers, and also every body else's personal cars that's been freed up to taxi service roles to pay for kid's college or pay their apartment/condo/house rent/mortage.
There's no difference between a taxi or a car rental or a carshare service, if all of them are self-driving. When the streets are full of robocars, each car is efficiently used by multiple people during the day, and there is no need for car ownership for many people. Prices plummet below the price of carownership, making them even more preferable than ownership of a car.
Apps will also make selfdriving carpools feasible too, just imagine:
ALERT: Reduced-fare robocar carpool taxi available; with a route containing your destination address. Please select:
[SOLO: $12.50 arriving 3min]
[CARPOOL: $3.75 arriving 2min]
In a single section of a city, even with tens of thousands of solo cars, there could also be thousands of robocarpools occuring, thanks to easy phone apps, road usage efficiency goes up and prices fall. Some will elect to go solo, and others will elect to pay cheap bus-style fares for carpools. The number of solo-occupied cars falls. Viola. Brand new public transit invention cross between a taxi and a bus.
Services will pop up that allows you to "sell" time of your own very personal "owned" completely autonomous self-driving car, to be shared by others. AirBnb-style, or Uber-style. Whenever you're not using it (e.g. when you're at work), you earn money that pays off the cost of your self-driving car by preventing other people from needing to own a car!! This allows you to earn thousands per month, maybe pay for your kids college. Until everybody does it, and the prices fall so dramatically that robocarpools become a new public transit alternative when roads are so full of them that you can hail one in seconds.
Beck or Capital Taxi or Uber or Lyft or ZipCar or AutoShare or Hertz or Avis...
...
all of them might pay you to borrow your owned autonomous robocar between 9:30am and 4:30pm when you're working and currently not using it. If it's a good dollar amount per day, for a whole month, you are going to be awfully tempted to pay for your car lease bill, insurance, and kid's college by letting your car be used by them. 5%, 10% or 25% of the car owning population may do it. Boom. The roads become easy to hail, many people give up now-too-expensive car ownership because of the new convenience. Prices fall due to massive competition, convenience goes up, a new equilibrium is reached where just enough cars fill the roads and it too expensive to keep cars unused/idling (e.g. cost of parking or cost of long distance unattended driving, versus profit of instead taxiing someone else) The first cities with the right legislation will be wildly successful (elimination of taxi cartels, dramatic falls in robotaxi/robocarpool prices, dramatic increases in robotaxi/robocarpool counts, ), forcing other cities to follow suit to increase efficiency of roads. Some cities may choose to start to begin owning fleets of carpooling robocars as a public transit system. It becomes a brand new form of public transit that dramatically reduces the necessity of suburban carownership, when all of them become door-to-door, and each car can be used by several people per day. Later this century, some people will begin demolishing parking garages and converting them to living space, or subdividing them to new houses, etc, when garage-idled cars falls presumably below 50% before the end of the century.
For almost a decade, I used carsharing services including VrtuCar in Ottawa and AutoShare in Toronto. I was an AutoShare member for several years, and made do with carshare services, driving without needing to own a car. It was not until I needed to do roadtrips outside of Toronto much more often, that I had to purchase a car for the first time. Now, if the carshares were self driving, cheaper, and the weekend roadtrip costs were cheap enough to be covered
by cheaply buying time on somebody else's robocar, for a family road trip to Kentucky Derby, then I don't want to own my car anymore. One less car wasting parking or road space. That is an example!
Streetside parking can be eliminated from downtowns, when street parking is no longer necessary, since the car can immediately drive itself to a garage or be immediately entered back into the robotaxi pool. If manually driven cars are extinct from a downtown core, all the cars can keep flowing faster with less stop-and-go with intelligent V2V communications for improved city traffic flow far better synchronized with intelligent stoplights. Moving cars that stay empty, is far more expensive than simply telling your sun to hail a selfdriving schoolcar (whether using a favourite hailing app, or using a school-authorized app), so people aren't going to send it unmanned an hour across town just to pick up your kid from school to take him home. Downtown road capacity goes up, when streetside parking is eliminated, thus increasing downtown car capacity, too (which also helps freeway offramps).
Self driving cars are also going to be more expensive than non-self-driving initially for a very long time -- the smarts is not going to be cheap for several years yet. Also,
they currently cannot yet drive in rain/snow (Google safety drivers manually takes over driving whenever it starts raining or snowing). There isn't a Category 4 self-driving vehicle on a public road yet (legally unmanned autonomous in all weather conditions) and it will be at least ten years before that happens, and afterwards, pricing and manufacturing bottleneck will place this at roughly 2050+ than 2031 for roads to become full of self-driving cars. At least for access to ALL streets and freeways in ALL weather humans can drive in. Unless using engineered city with a custom-made street grid that is robocar-friendly in all weather, then perhaps ~2030s-ish is possible.
However, once it actually happens with Category 4 fully-autonomous self-driving cars become cheap and profitable enough to manufacture in massive quantities -- provided they are legally licensed to be permitted to drive themselves in the worst winter/weather allowed by human drivers, and they aren't too expensive, it is going to seismically change the transit ballgame.
Yes, it can still tie into transit services, too. TTC/GO parking lot size won't be as critical when the car picks up someone else nearby. More people can use transit services and half of parking lots might be converted to high-speed dropoff zones with many lanes for the purpose of dropping off/picking up passengers transferring between trains and robocars. Use one car going to the departing transit station and use a different car at the destination transit station. It can be quite convenient at your destination GO stop, if you're commuting to a job 4 kilometers away from very suburban Bronte and far from a bus route, as an example -- hailable robocars will be everywhere.
Many, many, many new companies are going to run incredibly big profits off "robotaxi" services, including companies that cater to carowners who AirBnb-style puts their own autonomous car into the robotaxi industry in exchange for some pocket cash. Even there can be ways to make them become resistant to vandalization (e.g. in-cabin cameras connected to confirmed identification of passengers, to meet insurance company requirements. Since insurance companies come up with a solution for self driving cars that serve robotaxi roles, to cheaply permit insurance coverage of vandalism by passengers of your self driving car, etc).
There is SO many potential efficiency improvements afforded to human society via self-driving cars. There's strong incentive (e.g. profitting off your car) that completely averts the nightmare of roads overloaded of empty cars doing soccermom roles, because of all the brand new markets. There will be some selfish robocar owners that waste money wasting road space, but those will be the rich people (1%), the middle class or enterpreneurial class could be the ones paying kid's college by freeing up their robocars to taxi-type services rather than just parking them. How would you like a monthly-payments-paid car AND get free college for all your kids, if you permit your autonomous car to be a taxi while you're working? Enough money can be earned to even also pay for cleaning.
Petro Canada and Canadian Tire gas stations can profitably provide selfdriving car cleaning bays (car vacuuming/window windexing robots) so if you hate a dirty or unsanitary car at 5pm after-work pickup, then use the service using part of the day's robotaxiing revenues.
And, heck, if transportation prices fall enough from all that massive competition of roads full of robotaxis, birthrates might even go up again in the western world, who knows? We won't know what effects (many good, many bad) self driving cars will have, but one thing for sure, once the roads hit critical mass perhaps later this century, the transit impact could be be so seismically massive like the railroad boom of 1850s that revolutionized travel, the Model-T Ford that replaced the buggy and whip, the invention of airplane travel, etc. Some cities will screw up with robocar legislation, but many cities (hopefully Toronto included) will eventually copycat the legislation of wildly successful systems found in other cities. Some cities may actually socially responsibly use robocar revenues to help do career retraining for former taxi drivers, as an example, since it is like the automatic Jacquard Loom laying off a lot of textile workers 200 years ago. Other cities will be selfish, keeping taxi cartels and having more expensive road transport that drives people to move to cities that have cheap robocar public transit, since the middle class would no longer afford to live in cities that still has taxi cartels, etc. Look at what happened to railroads and public transit -- almost every major American city has a public transit bus system, because they copycatted the successful public transit concept (some more successfully with good bus service, some pathetically, with bad bus service). It will be no different with self-driving cars
that makes door-to-door public transit possible via ultracheap carpool taxis. Cities with successful self driving car legislation that lets everybody in the city profit off their cars to robotaxiing, will be copycatted. For people not in a hurry and want to save even more money for door-to-door travel, small buses (minivans) will likely be operated by your transit service that dynamically modifies their route to pick people door to door up, like a large carpool. Like a Dial-A-Bus service, but much faster, more self-sustaining and more efficient.
Bad stuff will still happen. Congestion will still occur during peak, just as you would hailing with taxis, but more people will be moved in the same unit of time, and peak period will use bigger carpool taxis (e.g. minibuses, public transit routes that connect with outer robotaxis, etc) for more efficient peak period use of road capacity. Not everyone can afford to catching a slow/expensive solo robocar downtown during peak, and will elect to subway/train/bus/transit out of the core first to save money and save time. So, it does mean GO trains won't be extinct in the era of self-driving cars, but become more useful when you can use a robocar to get to the GO station, and from the GO station. It would no longer need car ownership to go to suburban GO stations, as an example. Sprawl won't become extinct, and it will still be expensive to commute far, but it will be cheaper to use a bunch of quickly-hailable speedy robocar connections to transit services, than owning a car. Ultraefficient rapid transit routes will have extremely efficient connections with robocars, e.g. former parking lots/garages replaced by robocar pickup zones adjacent to major stops. And when robotaxiing becomes too quiet (e.g. 5am), it could be told to go a free/cheap overnight self-parking garage within a 3-to-5-minute drive if it's cheaper to go there than to go back to your home (fuel/electricity/wear/amortization).
200 years ago, we didn't have public transit as convenient as today, and tomorrow, it's possible public transit becomes even more convenient when robocars of all kinds provide the final-mile connection to your suburban front door. This vastlt reduces the average number of car owned per capita, when most urbanites plus half of suburbanites find it cheaper and more convenient to hail a robocar, than to own a car and selfishly never free it up to taxi other people. The car ownership per capita, and city road capacity per capita, math equation totally changes with this, along with the ability to eliminate streetside parking and increased car density on road if human drivers are eliminated. Space formerly used by parking may need to be taken over by space for robocar streetside pickup.
So, you see, roads can become VASTLY more efficient with fully-autonomous Category 4 self-driving cars, because # of cars necessary per capita freefalls. Especially once they become cheap enough to be universally mandated.
This is the 21st century, people...
