I think that driverless cars would make up for it by increasing the total amount of traffic. If driving has little cost as an activity, people will drive much more and be ok with much longer commutes.
Right now much of the true cost of commuting is spread out in periodic costs like vehicle purchase, maintenance, licensing fees, paying for parking/storage, etc. But all anybody looks at is the time and gas.
If you're taking a car service of some sort, all the other stuff will getg figured into the per-mile cost and presented for payment each day when you get to work. I'm guessing once people are hit in the face with the full cost, they will make different (and arguably more rational) decisions.
There may be some truth to that but look at a city which has a large number of taxis and car services like Manhattan. It's not exactly a car-less paradise.
This is one of the things I find somewhat strange about how so many people go gaga whenever optimistic dates for self-driving cars get thrown out. If you live in a city, you already have a "self-driving" option. Maybe someday it will be possible to create autonomous cars (that can put all those drivers out of a job). But basically the only thing that you're doing that you can't do today is dropping the price by, I don't know, $10/hr?
It's not exactly carless, but IIRC the article mentioned 56% of Manhattanites don't own a car. Plus they have a massive influx of work commuters, of whom I'm guessing a vast majority don't drive. So it definitely does work, at least to some extent and when the conditions are right.
I thought cabbies made more than that when you count in tips, but you might be right. Living in a city that's not very well served by cabs, I don't use them much because when I call for one they only show up 50% of the time, and give very poor information about time-to-pickup. I like to imagine that the "car cloud" would be much better about both of those, and hence more useful. But that may just be wishful thinking.
Absolutely, Manhattan simply couldn't function if most people owned cars and tried to drive. But no visitor to Manhattan is going to even remotely think "Oh, this is such a wonderful place for pedestrians" :-) Of course, Manhattan is very densely populated but auto/truck traffic is pretty horrible for large parts of the day in many areas.
Manhattan taxis are readily hail-able on the street. And they're supplemented by both Uber/Lyft and private car services. So, as a city, it's probably the definition of well-served by third-party cars and it's very much a part of the city's fabric. Just good luck getting either a cab or Uber (at a reasonable rate) if it's pouring rain.
Maybe $10 should be $15 but who knows about vehicle costs in some hypothetical future or what human support would be needed. My basic point was that, to a first approximation, we already have what amount to self-driving cars within larger and denser cities.
I don't understand why this point isn't obvious to people. If I have a "driver" (actually doesn't matter if it's organic or electronic), of course I'm going to accept a longer commute if I can put my feet up and read a book or work on my laptop. There's a limit of course. At one point, I sometimes had a (long) commute by train and it just ends up being a big chunk out of your day. Likewise, if my driver can deal with city driving (and parking) I'm going to be much more inclined to take a car rather than mass transit unless congestion or other fees really tilt the cost balance.
The average speed in a city is probably around 20km/h, at least in the city I am in (Berlin, Germany). With perfect coördination of driverless cars, you could possibly raise that to 60km/h – which is the speed cars drive when they're not in traffic or stopped at traffic lights. That leaves a lot of road usage to disappear even if car usage actually increases.
That would increase the average kinetic energy on the roads 9 times. 9 times more severity and frequency of accidents with an unclear responsibility. 9 times more noise and energy consumption. 9 times less pedestrian and bicycle and humans friendly cities. Driverlessness does not change the physics of transportation.
