A reluctant upvote, but only because the author has put more thought into the matter than the typical futurist. But for some reason, he still is victim to the

A reluctant upvote, but only because the author has put more thought into the matter than the typical futurist. But for some reason, he still is victim to the same trap that befalls many futurists: A misunderstanding of the new problems that arise. Cheap taxis that don't require parking and can drive closer together at higher speeds is great. But new problems arise: 1) Bottlenecks on streets due to the expansion of cars in dropoff zones. Imagine the typical airport dropoff zone on a busy day...and then think about that happening on nearly every street. Through-traffic is guaranteed to grind to a halt. 2) Smarter cars do not fix transportation networks. Braess's Paradox is not just a theoretical scenario; It has been observed in multiple cities and sub-city networks. Increasing road capacity can and will increase travel times...and it gets worse when everybody is independently optimizing their paths while driving in the same direction. 3) Supply and demand matching for taxis is an easy problem when you assume spatially random demand for travel in spatially random directions during temporally random times of the day. In the real world, taxis have a limit on the number of places they can be at the same time...and the non-randomness of times, origins, and destinations creates real problems with the availability of taxis...in addition to carshares, buses, trains, etc. Thus, the hypothetical futurist scenario relies upon an abundance of taxis, which may or may not occur due to the delicate balancing act between marginal utilization and capital/operating costs. A taxi that is used twice a day during rush hour is a taxi that does not exist. 4) Deadheading (driving to a demand-location while underutilized) has costs of its own: Now your taxi ride is paying twice as much for fuel for the same amount of of human transportation. A more realistic future involves smaller net benefits which can be only be partially offset to the extent that modification of urban geography permits; We may not be able to turn a hilly isthmus into a flat plain with grid streets, but we can move away from our archaic zoning practices that ensure non-random travel vectors. Carpool lanes will continue to have benefit. If, and only if we allow it, transit systems will become more efficient and less costly on a vehicle mile basis, compounding the benefit of grade separation in the still-gridlocked future.