No one is yet sure whether traffic will increase or decrease.

As you describe, people may buy self driving cars and use the self-driving feature to drive them more often. Wealthy folks and people in rural areas are almost certain to take this route.

Others predict that people won't buy cars at all and will instead rent them from ride services, who in turn may promote ride sharing on an unprecedented scale. Poor folks, for whom a car is a major expense, are almost certain to take this route, as well as city dwellers.

Personally, I think we may see traffic increase in some areas and substantially decrease in others. I suspect the largest source of traffic -- the commute -- will shrink considerably as networks of reasonably dense self-driving vanpools and small busses pop up.

You have five or six revolutions happening all at once. Self-driving isnt going to revolutionize car ownership. People own cars for irrational reasons (fashion etc). Nor will self-drive suddenly make carpooling cool.

>> reasonably dense self-driving vanpools and small busses pop up.

Utopia much?

Alternatives probably will decrease ownership at the margins. For example, I know a couple in SF who don't own a car and that wouldn't have been nearly as practical before Zipcar and Uber.

However, it's not like paying a driver $100/day to drive a minibus around to pick people up and drop them off is likely the reason that isn't a widespread service today. So someone would need to explain to me why self-driving changes that equation.

I own my car for pretty rational reasons: to commute to and from work, and to run other errands in and around the medium sized city I live near.

And to carry a car seat for the toddler, and a bike rack, and a change of clothes for the gym, and a bumper sticker saying "26.2" to say you've done a marathon, and some tools because after the gym you're going to fix your parents' sink, and a bag of sand because the roads have iced up where they live.

Quite rational reasons for why a driverless taxi won't work.

And some of us have very practical reasons not to ever rely on others for transport. I'm in the military. I'm expected to be able to get to work no matter what. We are in a tsunami area. Should that happen and my unit be stood up to respond, I need a vehicle that will get me to work even when the power/cell towers are all out. My CO doesn't want to hear that I cannot get in because the Uber app on my phone is down. Without private vehicle ownership we would all have to live on our bases.

Those are funny things to get upset over. Most of those don't sound irrational if you have the need, but I don't have any of those. I never knew what that "26.2" bumper sticker meant. I do have a CUV for the winter snow and ice though. Also, I don't think taxis, let along driverless ones, service my area which is out in the country (rural) even though it's only 30 minutes from downtown.

"upset"? I don't understand how that's relevant to this thread.

sandworm101 mentioned "People own cars for irrational reasons". I wanted to add some rational reasons for owning a car, beyond what RightMillennial wrote.

Many people don't have a car and don't need a car. The point is that there are reasons for owning a car beyond 'irrational' things like fashion and coolness.

Sorry, I thought you were being sarcastic and criticizing those things people use cars for.

Maybe. I'd have to ask why we don't see more of this today. If you're looking at services transporting multiple passengers in a car or even minibus, self-driving isn't as important because the driver cost is amortized across multiple passengers.

That said, I agree that habits can change. Car-pooling was probably more common at one point than it is now. On the other hand, a lot of people seem to favor Uber because they don't want to deal with public transit even when it's available.

I think we do see a lot of this today: Uber and Lyft already have incorporated ride sharing and I use that option every time -- when I'm in a city I frequently have another rider or two. I'm curious to see how this will increase as ride sharing density grows.

I think people avoid public transit because it is necessarily slow due to the multiple stops. They may also avoid it because it is too accessible. Sharing a vehicle with other commuting professionals is a vastly different experience than what you'll find on most public transit.

Because right now, this class of service is broken up in ad-hoc service companies, none of which have been incentivized to become a regional rental pool.

Consolidate taxi/minibus/event bus/medical&elderly ride/mass transit into a pool of vehicles available 24/7 with resources for surge times/maintenance/cleaning etc, and this will become the norm easily enough.

Then it's just a question of who operates and at what cost?

Various towns have looked into this sort of thing. [1] It doesn't seem to be very common however.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/12/17109708/via-arlington-te...

A couple of things to take into consideration with the autotaxis. We have the potential for a hybridization of taxi-bus.

Dynamic routes based on individual demand, grouping together a small number of people into a quick access people carrier. E.g I want to go right across town, you have a shorter journey that roughly overlaps my route, the vehicle will deviate slightly to pick you up.

The second thing to consider is the opportunity for mass-transit level control of autotaxi fleets (or all cars in a glorious future where everything is awesome(tm)). Optimsing the merging and cross traffic flows beyond what traffic lights do today.