That being said, owning a car is still a must if you have anything close to an outdoor lifestyle. For example:
Leaving the car at the trailhead several hundred miles from home for the whole weekend.
With Uber and Lyft, I already see my friends living an Urban lifestyle completely dumping their car. When this will become automated, another portion will likely dump their car.
But for now at least, I cannot see the outdoor crowd, or the ones living in a real rural area (think opposite of the SF hipster) dumping their car.
You can take the Long Island Railroad to Montauk.
New Jersey Transit will take you to the shore.
There's a bus that will take you to Hunter Mountain to go skiing in the Catskills.
Look up maps of the above 3 train systems. In many cases you can take a train, then bike the last couple miles, and end up in a very very isolated place.
I can also go to places that feel isolated and rural like the Jamaica Bay, the Pelham Bay Park area, or Inwood Hill Park, but are technically not because they're so adjacent to developed areas. But they do feel locally rural if you avoid a view that lets you see the city, because there is a jump discontinuity in density.
Also, you can do traditional car trips and just rent a car for the weekend. City people do this crap all the time. You really think we don't get outdoors, huh?
Demand more from your transit systems!
Personally, I live in the city and like getting out but I just use Gocar (pay by hour car rental)
Nothing honors the beauty of nature like polluting it.
Yup, that's my concern. Hypothetically a lot of things should be cheaper, but without market pressure, there's no reason for it to be cheaper.
Eg, if we pretend that an AI company releases an amazing self driving car everywhere tomorrow. Years ahead of their competition. That means the only market force they have is to price it under taxis. Perhaps they could price it at as low as possible to get more people using it, but without the market pressure it seems less likely. ... then again, I'm clearly talking out of my element here, not an educated response haha.
(Lyft was originally just a little side project of Zimride, which was meant to link people who were already going on a trip between the same points)
It's roughly a $50-$70 ride for me every morning to work. That already puts me over triple my car payment. The other random trips to the store/etc would be far cheaper, thankfully, but depending on usage I can't imagine it being less than my gas costs in a month (roughly $50/m). There's still repairs/insurance/licensing/etc, but I doubt they're costing me the $700 extra that just driving to work would be costing me via taxi.
The problem is I don't live in the city, so my distances are greater, and tend to be very anti-taxi.
I actually want to take an uber to town on the weekends so I can drink/etc at dinner, but I usually don't because of how expensive it is.
Mind you, I don't think it's unfairly priced currently - but that still doesn't make it as cheap as I'd need it to be to use all the time.