Imagine: A World Where Nobody Owns Their Own Car - Eric Jaffe - The Atlantic Cities
Eric Jaffe at Atlantic Cities writes: Imagine: A World Where Nobody Owns Their Own Car :
"Skeptics have also charged that autonomous cars will disrupt any city-based travel models, since people freed from the need to drive will move even farther away from the core. That might be true for people who own their autonomous cars, says University of Minnesota transport scholar David Levinson, but a strong sharing system could promote the opposite movement. "If you're paying for the car by the minute, then you're not going to want to move farther out," says Levinson. "You're going to want to move closer in."
Levinson says SAV service that offers convenient on-demand trips gives people a much greater incentive to rely on that system — and a much smaller incentive to take the unnecessary trips often made by private cars. It's a recipe for the type of multi-modal lifestyle change only possible right now in places like Manhattan. Transit for essential daily trips, cabs (or other alternatives based on the type of trip) for the rest."
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The big market question is when this world will begin to emerge. Levinson subscribes to a timeline in which autonomous cars enter the luxury market in 2020, the technology trickles down into the affordable mid-level range over the next several years, and by 2030 every [edit: NEW] car on the road is driverless. (Other cars would be banned a decade later.) Since car- and ride-sharing operations tend to rely on smaller cars, that would peg SAV networks closer to 2030 — about 16 years from now.
"It's not that far away anymore," says Levinson. "But 16 years ago was 1998, and Google hadn't been invented. So it's a short time and it's a long time."