The driverless road ahead

Flying cars are uncommon not because they are dangerous, but because it requires a huge amount of energy to defeat gravity in addition to propelling the vehicle forward.

Cities are more populous and wealthy than ever before because there is no substitute for human proximity in a service economy, and more humans in close proximity makes for more productive services.

The most dramatic counterargument is with distribution of goods, which mostly occurs with cargo ships, trucks, and trains--simply because those are way cheaper & more efficient than flying. The simple physics argument is that it requires extra work to keep something flying, which is better avoided. So roads and rails will need to be kept anyway, and it's highly unlikely that people wouldn't use them.

On the other hand, I do have to say I'm a big fan of airships, but I'm not holding my breath for their return. I even doubt people would accept that travelling has to be so much slower in an airship, now that he jet age has arrived.

Other comments have criticized this article as too utopian, but I like the submitted article a lot, as a summary of several effects of the development of driverless car technology. Technology projections are often too ambitious in the near term, but underambitious in the long term. I think the submitted article here, which discusses trends we can reasonably expect without being really specific about dates, gets the general picture about right. There will be surprises from the introduction of driverless cars that perhaps this article has not anticipated.

I think the article "Why Driverless Cars Are Inevitable--and a Good Thing"

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044352490457765...

by Dan Neil of the Wall Street Journal, published last month, is a good commentary on why ordinary people will mostly be glad to use driverless cars, and regulators and insurers will be glad to nudge drivers to use them.

"As a mature, postindustrial society, the U.S. has in many ways topped out economically (population growth, consumption) compared with younger competitors on the world stage. Americans are learning hard lessons about the value of their work in a race-to-the-bottom global economy.

"The one brilliant part of the U.S. economic profile is productivity. It turns out, Americans are a little nutty when it comes to work.

"If autonomy were fully implemented today, there would be roughly 100 million Americans sitting in their cars and trucks tomorrow, by themselves, with time on their hands. It would be, from an economist's point of view, the Pennsylvania oil fields of man-hours, a beautiful gusher, a bonanza of reverie washing upon our shores."

Driving here in Minnesota, I can't wait until the typical Minnesota driver's low-grade performance is replaced by the performance of road-certified driverless car systems. And I most definitely look forward to having much more time to think and to enjoy undistracted conversation in a driverless car than I can now safely achieve while driving. That indeed will be a boost to my productivity and to the quality of my family life.

Another subthread here talks about the trade-offs between owning a personal driverless car versus taking rides from a driverless taxi service. My family, like many families in the United States, considers the issues of the one-car-per-adult lifestyle versus the one-car-per-household lifestyle. Most United States families with children would probably make their choices about car ownership with that being the key decision point. I can see a lot of United States families deciding to have one owned family car that is filled with all of their favorite things to have along during road trips (so that the car is one more personal storage unit, in part) that would accumulate a lot of pleasant memories of family outings and so forth. But the family's second car (in some families, the third car) would be replaced with a subscription to a driverless car service, which would reliably pick up family members on a moment's notice for trips to the grocery store, the soccer game, a music lesson, a party while the other parent is still at work, or whatever. If the driverless car services become reliable enough to whisk a child (with or without parent) over to an urgent care center for sudden injuries and illnesses, one major reason parents keep a second "transportation car" besides the main commuting and traveling car would vanish. I fully expect individual rates of car ownership per household to drop when driverless cars become reliable.

If the cars cost $20k and drive themselves, droves of those people will be able to access them for some of their transit needs (because they will be available, cheap!, on a per mile basis).

Clearly there are existing regulations that would have to be reformed - criminal record checks for self-driving cabs wouldn't make any sense, for example! What I think (and what I assume swombat means) is that these reforms will be made when self-driving cabs come on the market.

After all, why wouldn't they?

London is one place that doesn't have any limit or medallion system regulating the number of cab drivers - although they do have regulations regarding eyesight, criminal record and route-finding ability.