> first of all the end of car ownership as we have it today. I see the idea thrown around a lot that self-driving cars will make us all use taxis because, abse

> first of all the end of car ownership as we have it today. I see the idea thrown around a lot that self-driving cars will make us all use taxis because, absent human drivers, the taxis will be far cheaper than owning a car -- but I have yet to see strong analysis on this claim. There's lots of issues here: * inconvenience: Unless the network is extremely dense, this means waiting for a taxi vs. driving myself. Denser networks, however, all things equal, mean lower utilization. * storage: All sorts of people need to store things in their car. Contractors with tools, parents of toddlers with car seats, etc. Taxis prove to be too inconvenient, leading this population to prefer owning (hurting network density) * traffic patterns: Commute patterns are heavily one-way, meaning in practice, after dropping someone off, the car will need to return without a person. Say you have a core commute time of 2.5 hours and take people on 30 minute journeys; you've managed to turn 3 cars into 1 [1], but at the cost of increasing miles by 60%. It's somewhat questionable if such a conversion has positive ROI. * existing contrary evidence: You see plenty of private car ownership in areas with cheap labor (Chinese cities come to mind). Even cheap taxis aren't sufficiently solving transit needs. [1] Yes, you could also pick up multiple people.. but now you introduce inconvenience again!