I think automation will combine with the mobile phone and electrification of transport to change the paradigm of personal ownership of vehicles.
Cars are only used a fraction of the time, and cost a lot of money for that occasional use, as well as taking up huge areas of land and making walkable neighbourhoods difficult.
We already have the technology to make door to door on demand public transport possible:
http://www.taxibus.org.uk/

Journeying by taxibus is delightfully easy. Prospective passengers request a taxibus ride simply by submitting their current location and desired destination addresses to the IGT computer system, typically using an ordinary cellular telephone. Regularly-used addresses would be pre-programmed on the passenger's phone, so this address submission is very straightforward. As soon as a taxibus journey is requested in this way, the IGT computer system searches its database for a nearby taxibus vehicle whose current itinerary is compatible with the passenger's submitted itinerary. Once a suitable taxibus is found, it is immediately diverted to pick up and convey the new passenger.

New passengers are collected extremely quickly, generally within three minutes of submitting their journey request. Such rapid pick-up is feasible because IGT operates with a large fleet of taxibus vehicles spread across the city, continually travelling the road networks, constantly conveying passengers. A new passenger is allocated to a nearby taxibus vehicle already on the roads carrying commuters, this vehicle's itinerary being modified on-the-fly to incorporate the new passenger.'

The major cost of public transport is wages for the driver.
That goes away with automation, and the fleet can have all sorts of sizes of vehicles so that during rush hour big buses are connected to on the major routes so optimising use of road space.

Automated car parks could hold the vehicles not in use, and they could be much more compact than current car parks as there would be no need to provide access for people or their head height, so they would be stacked really tightly.

Welcome back our city streets!
Hello e-bikes and pedestrians!

Goodbye lethal traffic fumes!
Goodbye almost all road deaths!

As Davemart says, this could well be the elusive key to changing the paradigm of personal ownership of vehicles.

Most of us believe that if about half of all vehicles were eliminated and the remaining half magically converted into some sort of mini-taxis or car-swap we would have all the transportation we need.

But how to make everyone continue their car payments (onerous as they might be) but divert those payments from something you own to mini-taxis?

Not to mention that present MASS transit is represented mostly by inefficient, MASSively expensive fixed facilities and rolling stock.

Fewer people every day really care about the ability of their vehicles (reliable?; maneuverable?; OHC?; VVT?;good mpg?)- they care about the style; like clothes it is not about functionality (warm?; durable?;) but appearance.

When the grid controls the car it will finally be possible to deliver it to you - so why park it at your house - why let it sit idle most of the day - why even own it.

And who cares if the taxi that comes to pick you up is a German car representing conspicuous consumption.

Most on this site (including me), are car enthusiasts, and it will be sad to have the steering wheel yanked from our grip. But things change.

The technology will be exciting (even more so if you are a pedestrian).

And it will be the car we are in that will text while driving - but then, so can we.

The world fleet is approaching one billion vehicles and is replaced every 12 years or so. At close to 100 million units a year, it could become as popular and profitable as smart phones and tablets.

A good field for Google, Apple, Microsoft and many others to move in?

Repair shops, car parts suppliers, car dealers, car manufacturers, insurance firms, towing firms, private ambulances, private hospitals, many doctors and many more people earn their living from unsafe accident prone 'fun' drivers behavior, killing about 100,000 people/year.

There may be a similar, close relationship between the 270,000,000+ automatic guns and 30,000+ people/year killed by gun bullets in USA. Sales-manufacturing of all those guns-ammunition together with associated organisations and lobbies make any changes very difficult.

The 'not in my backward' addiction goes very deep. Our 'so called' right to defend ourselves and to kill others is like crazy clue. It is very difficult to take off. Many right wing groups are in favor of arming all teachers with up-to-date machine guns instead of stopping guns from entering schools.

Lethal automatic guns and 'fun' drivers control (restriction or ban) is required but will meet with resistance from we know who.

"People won't like it and will switch into manual mode"

Some people will. I suspect most will be willing to drive, er... , ride a bit slower and watch TV, surf the web, eat their breakfast, put on their makeup, get some work done, snooze, .... They'll trade getting there a couple minutes later for not having to drive and being able to use their time in a more productive manner than dealing with road jerks.

Self-driving cars will move to the right and let the speeders through.

The highway patrol will find the speeders easy pickings.

Our cities and states need the revenue.

Many thousand aircraft fly across the Atlantic and automatically follow and stay within their assigned restricted rather confined space. No accidents happen, pilots and air traffic controllers do not have to interfere. Every plane follow their assigned route and duly respect their assigned speed, altitude and separation to others. All those planes eventually do an automated control approach and land on an assigned runway, exactly at the right spot....so much so that tire marks accumulate on top of each other and have to be cleaned often.

"I suspect that autonomous and manual cars will not mix well for long."

Why?

Autonomous cars will react faster and more reliably to the antics of manual cars than humans are capable of doing.

They will relay the alert to other autonomous cars around them that there's a car being hang-driven by a human in their midst. Humans in the autonomous cars will be alerted that it might be necessary to break faster than usual because you just never know when those humans are going to screw up....

A few years back I was badly injured by a drunk hitting me head-on on a narrow two lane road. He came around a curve at over 60 miles per hour on my side of the road and I had no place to escape. He got me in my lane.

I was driving between 30 and 35. Other cars had pulled off the road to get out of his way. Had we been driving smart cars it is possible that the other cars could have contacted mine and taken at least partial defensive action.

If nothing else, stopping would have removed my 33 miles of energy from the mix, lowering the overall impact. Stopping hard against the bank on the right side of the road might have allowed him to fish-tale on past me, at least not hit nose to nose.

--

Many years earlier I was t-boned by a drunk in a snow storm. He apparently didn't even slow down at the stop sign but plowed across three lanes of traffic into my car.

A smart car would probably have know that there was someone approaching from a side street at too high a rate and done an emergency stop.

That's two incidences in which I can see where smarter cars could have saved someone a lot of broken bones and hospital time.

I expect cars will be programmed so that they will take control back from drivers who are making significant mistakes, regardless of the reason. Cars will be programmed to protect themselves and their occupants.

Actually, it will be interesting to see how the issue plays out. Once self-driving cars become more available then we'll start having discussions about how much freedom the driver should have.

At first there will almost certainly be the ability to turn off the system and go into manual mode.

If people start abusing that (drunks deciding to drive) then sensors and program takeover will likely start happening.

My bet is that a few years after self-driving is a universal feature almost no one will choose to drive themselves. There's a certain pleasure in learning the skill of driving on a winding road, but there just aren't that many winding roads any longer.

There's no pleasure in being part of the pack rolling down the highway.

Why do you take an unnecessary shot at unions? I would imagine most of the people on this site are workers, not owners. Or at least during part of their lives were workers.

(Perhaps I'm wrong and the rest of you were 'lucky sperm' and born into wealth.)

Unions gave us the semi-tolerable working conditions we have today. Forty hour weeks with compensation for overtime. Workplaces that don't eat our fingers and kill us.

We have allowed the greedy "owner class" to view unions as bad things. Unions are what allowed us to move from "serfs" to middle class. People should read some history.

And here ends Bob's Christmas rant....

Fact. Nothing is perfect. If a union is behaving inappropriately then that needs to be fixed. But overall unions are a very good thing.

Consider the plight of Walmart checkers and fast food workers. Those are non-union jobs. Want one?

Henry Ford was a very unique case. Henry and Costco are not examples followed by the vast majority of employers.

Were we to change the minimum wage into a "living wage" which gave someone who was willing to work a 40 hour week the ability to provide decent housing, food, and a few modest amenities for themselves and their family that would solve part of the problem.

The US federal minimum wage is $7.25/hour. Think about what your lifestyle would be like were you to try to support yourself on $1,300 per month. Remember to subtract employment taxes. And take into account that you would be a renter and would not own a decent vehicle. All that housing and transportation stuff has to come out of less than $400 per week.

Yes, unions have at times been corrupt. Banks and financial institutions also break the law at times.

Because some break the law does not mean that the institution should be done away with, it means that better regulations and enforcement are needed.

We need a more fair system of profit distribution.

BW..

Salaries and benefits ($122K/each/year) for city bus drivers is already the major operation cost for many city bus fleet.

Secondly, many aggressive city bus drivers (excluding most female drivers) do not care about who they drive into and create 10+ accidents/year each and up to $300K/year in damages. All that because they are 100+% protected by their all powerful Union instead of being fired for dangerous driving.

Exact data is difficult to get but it is possible if you befriend and ex-Union leader. Have you noticed that the majority are female drivers on weekends and holidays? That's how fair most Unions are?

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