At least some of those people will continue to rely exclusively on public transportation, the same as they do today. In our urban areas, public transportation + car sharing / rental services make a whole lot more sense than continuing to incentivize everyone to own a car (electric or otherwise)
The car sharing won't cover everyone's needs and some people will stick to keeping their own car. I'd imagine people living in urban areas are more likely to use a car sharing service since it's uneconomical to own a car in most cities. I'd imagine the suburbs will be a mix of sharing and ownership. I can imagine a family having a car they keep for weekends or whenever the parents and kids need to go somewhere but they still use a car sharing service during the weekdays when mom takes the family car to work and dad need to get to work too.
Everyone basically needs their cars at the same time. They all need them to commute. Not owning one will mean ride sharing or extremely high prices. My guess is that people will continue owning their cars forever.
People aren't eschewing cars, outside of a few specific urban areas. SOME people in NYC, SanFran, and a few other cities are eschewing cars. This has always been the case. Renting cars is now just getting a bit easier. But most people in the developed world will continue to buy cars and own them.
The younger generation is using cars less exactly because driving/parking/owning a car is expensive and a hassle, not because they suddenly prefer watching bums on the subway to watching Netflix alone. Choosing between Uber and shared public transportation is a question of cost, and self driving cars will get the cost down so it's much less of a factor. In all the countries where the share of public transportation is significant, the main reason is economical. Gas is more expensive in the EU, free parking is scarce, wages are lower, etc. Actually walkable cities help, but it's not like europeans couldn't find a use for a car if they could easily afford one. Or how about private car ownership growth in China [1]?
The other point is that American society is pretty well-segregated, and personal cars and suburbs ensure there's minimal contact between the classes. Unless your shared car service has tiers that allow that segregation to continue, a significant amount of people won't use it. Physical security is a part of the equation - you're probably not getting sexually assaulted or burgled in a personal SDC.
On renting vs owning: again, it doesn't matter - if the cars are not shared, this doesn't really affect the traffic volume (driving between drop-off and the next pick-up are empty miles, but that's hopefully insignificant).
Yes. People moving to inner city apartments are dropping the car altogether, so for them what matters is what's most convenient for car-rental companies when they occasionally rent a car....
In an environment where people only use cars for special trips, not for day-to-day activities, the longer range of gasoline might end up being a bigger advantage than it is for current-day Americans.
As someone who doesn't want to own a car I am biased, but to me there are still a few usecases where a car still makes sense:
- If you don't live in a big city, public transportation is far from enough
- When you want to go on vacation you not only want to travel from A to B, you also want to be able to transport all your stuff and not be bound by infrequent scheduling, and you want some kind of mobility freedom at your destination
- For your bi-weekly grocery shopping you need to be able to haul a few dozens of kg of stuff that takes something like half a m^3
For all of those, there's no easy alternative, and I understand why people used to this way of life don't really want to change. Bikes can replace some of it, electric bikes even more, and why not electric cargo bikes. But it's still very expensive, especially when you can't totally replace your car. I think the intermediate solution will be some carsharing solution, where 1 car is not owned by 1 person or 1 family but shared on average with a few families, accross a whole city.
Most of the millenials I'm friends with try to not own a car themselves. The whole leaning on the friend with a car thing seems to be enduring past college for this generation. I imagine this will work pretty well for most people until they have a kid. Not sure where it'll go then.
Car-sharing isn't going to work well, in this scenario, because there'll be a bum-rush for the car-share pool at the same times in the morning and afternoon. Maybe we'll have to go back to using school busses? -gasp- ;)
They should at least reduce the number of housing locations where owning a car is necessary, which might get more people thinking about non car modes of transport. But that depends on how expensive they end up being to utilize on demand.
I think there are lots of people that believe they will need a car some of the time and end up doing their planning in the context of owning one. Cheap, on demand access can change that thought process.
I feel like a lot of people suggesting that everyone will pass on personally owned vehicles in the near future has never lived outside a city. I definitely see the benefits inside major cities (where I always opt for public transportation anyways), but I don't think you'll see the same transition in suburban or rural areas.
You are correct, I was talking about people who live in the city whereas most who may consider a car don't. But I literally did know a few people who lived in the city and drove a car.
I do still think that for most others near public transit it would still net less costly to use that than to drive given cost of parking and gas on top of these new fees.
But people do still buy cars, I assume voluntarily, so there must be some benefit for them.
I live in a urban area and my commute by public transport is twice as long as by car. Yes I know it's not something to be celebrating - but I am definitely and objectively better off by using a car.
For the same reason I use a combination of transit, Ubers, and rental cars to get a far better experience than car owners at a fraction of the cost. For the same reason that the average person gave up horses and large plots of land and indoor woodfires for heating and cooking: if something is horribly inefficient and costly relative to an alternative, eventually society stops subsidizing it, and the only ones left doing it are the highly irrational or the highly passionate (compare horse ownership 150 years ago to now).
There are obviously advantages to owning a car that transport-as-a-service doesn't offer, but the point is that once an alternative is available that's better from a global utility perspective, it doesn't make any sense to subsidize the costly decisions of the irrational (barring interest groups that we as a society choose to explicitly subsidize, like families or the disabled).
Cars are useful tools of course. If people used them only for the odd errand or a long distance trip, we wouldn’t have a problem.
Public transit for all our regular trips to work, restaurants, dentist, etc. and private or rented cars for the rest is the way to go towards a prosperous future.
Your last point is certainly true. Even today, I know people who would have been stereotypical two-car households who now get by with one car + Uber/Lyft/Zipcar/etc. The various services available today definitely make a difference at the margin of one car vs. two cars or barely need to own a car.
Eventually, cars will become a shared resource right? If cars can drive on their own then you could rent your car out while you're at work to lyft or uber. Eventually wouldn't most people do this? Eventually, wouldn't there be a multitude of cars roaming the city? Why would you need to own one?
I live in a fairly walkable city but it still seems odd to me that people hold such a personal connection to their cars.
Personal anecdote: I've been living without a personal car for 4 years now thanks to my city's dedication to public transportation, choosing to live close to where I work, and using literally every car share service available when the need arises. The only part of driving itself I consistently enjoy is listening to my music louder than normal. If I buy a car in the future it will absolutely be entirely electric and have autonomous functionality.
owning a car is almost always the convenient option, especially if you disregard all the downsides like the (monetary) cost to one personally and to society at large. i agree that living car-free is not practical for many, mostly those living in rural or suburban areas, but even here the car is part of the problem, having made this possible in the first place for people who shouldn't even live there. we've got to break the self-reinforcing loop on car dependency, starting with the cities. we'll lose a lot of convenience and some things will be unreasonably hard compared to before but i think it's the future and it'll pay off in increased quality of life.
Agreed. Owning a car, let alone two or more for a family, is currently very difficult or prohibitively expensive in an urban setting. If you can have the same access as owning, but without the hassle, this removes a barrier for many people. In fact, car-sharing would likely have higher availability and therefore lower wait time in densely populated areas, in some ways increasing your "travel freedom" compared to an exurb.
I think people are going to take it in baby steps. There are a lot of advantages to simply owning a car. If you aren't in a dense city, they vastly outweigh the hassles inherent in any type of non-owned transportation.
People really are short on time. Waiting for the vehicle and even having to stand outside aren't great - you may even have to worry a bit more about the clothes you're wearing in the heat or cold. It's the little taxes on everything.
Plus whenever you share a ride, someone's going to have to take a detour of some distance.
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