I doubt that here. Cars are already near saturation, at least in the US.
Essentially everyone has a car. The car is mostly idle. If car availability starts to approach instant then people don't need personal vehicles that are idle 95% of the time. Car quantity overall goes down unless you can 20x current utilization, which is a lot of trips and fuel.
Not to mention that if anything resembling current quantity of extant cars becomes the current quantity of cars using roadways at a given moment, most cities will gridlock.
If the thesis is "cars will approach 50% or greater utilization" then car numbers must drop barring a massive increase in road capacity for which the land does not exist.
Cars that are idle 95% of the time are replaced less than once in a decade.
Cabs are replaced something like 3x more often than privately owned cars. And when they run 24/7 because of self-driving, that factor will even increase.
> If the thesis is "cars will approach 50% or greater utilization" then car numbers must drop barring a massive increase in road capacity for which the land does not exist.
You can build stacked roads a few levels up. Capacity doubles or triples without any significant land use.
Amsterdam is very dense because historic reasons. Streets are narrow and houses are the same.
Los Angeles on the other hand was built on virtually unlimited land and could expand a lot. I could say LA County is bigger than the whole of the Netherlands.
Both have their charm, but LA is so much better than Amsterdam.
Yeah, the 405 might suck, but at least the weather is better.
Essentially everyone has a car. The car is mostly idle. If car availability starts to approach instant then people don't need personal vehicles that are idle 95% of the time. Car quantity overall goes down unless you can 20x current utilization, which is a lot of trips and fuel.
Not to mention that if anything resembling current quantity of extant cars becomes the current quantity of cars using roadways at a given moment, most cities will gridlock.
If the thesis is "cars will approach 50% or greater utilization" then car numbers must drop barring a massive increase in road capacity for which the land does not exist.