I'm 29, married with two young kids. We're excited to ditch our vehicle and never look back.
Short of utopian sounding solutions like the basic wage, I'm really not sure how our economy will take care of people as we automate more and more formerly manual tasks.
I think it's possible we may see a time when most vehicles stay in the network, and rarely need to sit idle. That would be ideal certainly!
I wouldn't be surprised if car ownership becomes 0% by the time my kids grow up. Cars will essentially become like trains - owned and operated by companies trying to make a profit. You just pay for the ride or get a monthly pass.
We can only hope so. Think how much people work for a resource that sits idle 95% of the time. New vehicle sales this year are at ~17 million units a year, with the average price being ~$35K/USD/year. That's $595 billion/year being spent on something sitting around most of the time. Just think about how much less work people would have to do if they didn't need to own a car.
This isn't to say that pervasive tracking of individuals' whereabouts isn't a problem. I just think that self-driving cars aren't going to make the situation any worse than it is / will already be (exact timing is modulo your present jurisdiction).
A NTHSA study states it has direct economic cost of $277 billion / year. Indirect cost of another $600 billion+.
Put it another way, car crashes is also a big business.
It's big business for hospitals, insurance, body shops, and lawyers.
As for the economics of car ownership, if almost everybody had to own a car or two, then people's average salaries would simply rise. If nobody owned a car, then salaries would job. The savings don't go into pockets of employees.
There is definitely some tunnel vision here. Not everyone lives in densely populated urban areas where owning a car is already almost not worth the cost and hassle.
I can't see myself ever owning or time-sharing a self-driving car.
You don't have to drive (leaving you free to do other activities), and you don't have to park / store the vehicle. (Our last hotel charged $65 PER DAY for parking.) Under this new model, parking can quickly become the least productive land use and will start to get much more scarce.
Finally, you likely won't ever own or time-share a self-driving car. They'll be provided by the likes of Google or Uber or Tesla as a utility model.
Will people still drive for the joy of it? Absolutely, but it will become more of a hobby / specialty market, just like private piloting.
But record numbers do, increasing every year particularly in Asia, where most people live.
Some people will always have personal cars, just like some people will always have personal horses. They are both sometimes practical and often fun, if expensive.
"In 1950, one-third of the world’s people lived in cities. Just 50 years later, this proportion has risen to one-half and will continue to grow to two-thirds, or 6 billion people, by 2050. Cities are now home to half of humankind."
http://www.un.org/en/globalissues/briefingpapers/cities/vita...
The urban areas of the United States for the 2010 Census contain 249,253,271 people, representing 80.7% of the population, and rural areas contain 59,492,276 people, or 19.3% of the population.
Do people like other things as well? Assuming you don't eat, use your laptop, watch a movie, read a book, or play video games currently while you drive, not having to drive so you can do these other things can be appealing. Especially when it's the same braindead commute to/from work every day, day after day.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2014/10/14/th...
Then, there's the economics of car ownership. Cars are the second most expensive capital asset most people have after their house. They sit idle, depreciating, taking up valuable land 95% of the time on average. A self-driving car is very complementary to services like Uber. If self-driving cars could be shared, increasing vehicle utilization past 5%, then we could repurpose vast swaths of unproductive urban land.
Once fewer people are owning cars, and instead paying a la carte, it also restructures the choice architecture of driving. Without a default option sitting in the driveway, I suspect that people may opt to walk, bike, or take transit with more regularity as well.
As a planner, I'm slightly more bullish on the potential of self-driving cars to remake transportation than my peers are. It was only a couple of years ago that I attended a demand management conference keynote in which the well-known (in planning circles) speaker was cracking jokes about how self-driving cars wouldn't change anything. I disagree--I just hope the future gets here soon.