Economics blogger Matt Yglesias shows what fleets of cheap, driver-less cars could do for urban (and suburban!) planning:
The future is not very far off. Check out Google's driver-less car, which has been used by the blind in tests:
Many people dislike riding buses because they lose their privacy or have to deal with strangers. We've all been there, you get on a bus and some crazy or rude person is there. It's uncomfortable, and that's part of the reason we all pay large amounts of money to have our own, personal vehicle.
But what if you could have privacy and comfort in a single car but not have to own or even rent it? You simply schedule a car to come pick you up in the morning and it drops you off at work, then picks up another person who needs transport.
That'd be revolutionary, even here in the SCV.
-----------------
Imagine an SCV with thousands of driver-less cars
Every metropolitan area in the United States contains many, many more parking spaces than automobiles. When you're at work, the space allocated for your vehicle at home sits there empty. When you're at home, the space allocated for your vehicle at the office sits empty. Malls build parking to accommodate demand during peak hours, and the spaces mostly sit empty off-peak. But if the cars could drive around without a human pilot, there'd be no need for such lavish supplies of vehicle storage. In principle, a metro area could get by with fewer than one parking space per car since even at minimum-demand times a nonzero quantity of vehicles would be in use. That's probably extreme, but right now depending on how you count we have somewhere between three and eight parking spaces per car. If the cars don't need to sit idly waiting for you until you want to leave (imagine a world of cheap, ubiquitous taxis) that number is going to become totally ridiculous. After exploding for about 60 years, the torrent of parking construction is going to halt very suddenly and then start shifting into reverse.If what Yglesias says is right, perhaps we wouldn't need to devote such vast tracts of landscape in the SCV to the temporary storage of cars.
The future is not very far off. Check out Google's driver-less car, which has been used by the blind in tests:
An embedded YouTube video appeared here in the original post. View the original — embeds are preserved as links in this archive.
Many people dislike riding buses because they lose their privacy or have to deal with strangers. We've all been there, you get on a bus and some crazy or rude person is there. It's uncomfortable, and that's part of the reason we all pay large amounts of money to have our own, personal vehicle.
But what if you could have privacy and comfort in a single car but not have to own or even rent it? You simply schedule a car to come pick you up in the morning and it drops you off at work, then picks up another person who needs transport.
That'd be revolutionary, even here in the SCV.
-----------------