You're kinda taking the "faster horses" side of things, if you know what I mean.
You're comparing the real estate efficiency of cars to driverless cars, which is not what I'm doing. I'm comparing the RE efficiency of cars to segways, and segways win that hands-down, no comparison.
The other benefit is psychological. You transform a development from being centered around cars to being centered around people. Even a person on a segway is a person. A person in a car is a car. This, I would maintain, is the larger benefit to average citizen. It's a more desirable experience.
Developers win with more usable real estate, citizens win with a much more pleasant scale and experience.
The segways would be for intra-area transportation, the driverless cars for inter-area.
The bigger assumption you're making is that people will "have" cars, and I'm not sure that will be the case. For me, that's the biggest unknown about transportation in the next couple of decades. Will people own cars, or will they merely use cars from a large pool of cars (either civic or corporately owned)?
Uber, for example, is starting to promote the idea of not owning a car at all to young people. They've been doing a good job of hyping the convenience of that lifestyle, and a limited set of people have bought into it already. I also recently noticed they're starting to play a prestige angle with black SUVs and so on. They're actively playing that up, which fills the other need personal cars currently serve.
Uber's endgame is very clearly a fleet of autonomous cars, and some cities are making very early sounds about building their own fleets.
I don't know how that's going to shake out. There are powerful forces pushing both ways.
But, if personal car ownership does become a thing of the past, a lot of the pressure you imagine for city development to have an even greater universal (as opposed to limited areas) accommodation for cars goes away.
The other major unknown is if cities simply become less desirable in 20-30 years. Given increasing automation, the nature of work may change to a degree that some of the economic incentives for city living decrease. That trend, if it even builds at all, will be slower to develop, but potentially even more powerful.
I'm saying, "real segways are more space efficient than real cars. Despite that, people prefer cars to segways (by a gigantic margin)." So from there, I get to, "future segways will be more space efficient than future cars, but I don't see that turning people towards future segways -- because we can already tell that people don't value space highly enough to make them want segways, and it's going to be pretty much the same comparison in the future."
Here's another bit of pseudo math: real cars >>> real segways. Driverless cars >>> real cars. Driverless segways ~= real segways. Thus driverless cars >>>>> driverless segways.
I'm not taking a stance on the ownership model of cars, either. I don't know if in a driverless car world people would own them or rent them for hours or days at a time or rent them for the duration of a single ride. I'm just saying that people will USE them a lot. And regardless of who owns the car, if everyone USES the driverless cars a lot, then cities will be built around cars.
And cities that are built around cars are hostile to segways, driverless or otherwise.
You say this intriguing thing: "The segways would be for intra-area transportation, the driverless cars for inter-area."
I think that my fundamental point is that that doesn't seem true. If driverless cars are highly available to people, I think they'll just use the driverless cars end-to-end. Your driverless car trip will put you at the doorstep of wherever you're going. At that point you don't need a segway.
Segways are for when your inter-area transportation CAN'T get you the last mile of where you're going -- that is, they're for rail. And rail, I think, is dead if we get driverless cars soon.
> You say this intriguing thing: "The segways would be for intra-area transportation, the driverless cars for inter-area."
Yeah, this is the root of our disagreement. As I see it, the reason this doesn't happen now is a matter of convenience. As things stand now, there's the friction of transitioning from car to segway. In a fully automated world, I see that friction largely disappearing. You get out of the car, it goes away. The segway is waiting for you. It delivers you and goes away itself. There's very little friction.
It's true this only makes sense in certain kinds of living situations. Suburbs seem unlikely to go this way (though there was a brief trend last decade to more pedestrian-y suburban town center development). But for urban areas, this kind of development increases what people like about urban living, and decreases what they don't like. I don't think people know they want it, but I also don't think it's something they've been given much to consider. When they have, like 3rd St. Promenade in Santa Monica, it's been hugely popular. Segways would allow you to scale that up considerably, and expand it beyond retail and entertainment, possibly to an entire city center.
We're in agreement about the future of passenger rail. It looks bleak decades down the line. Interestingly, Mayor Garcetti of Los Angeles said much the same just a few months ago. He wondered in public if it made much sense to keep building massive rail projects given that automated cars were coming.
You're comparing the real estate efficiency of cars to driverless cars, which is not what I'm doing. I'm comparing the RE efficiency of cars to segways, and segways win that hands-down, no comparison.
The other benefit is psychological. You transform a development from being centered around cars to being centered around people. Even a person on a segway is a person. A person in a car is a car. This, I would maintain, is the larger benefit to average citizen. It's a more desirable experience.
Developers win with more usable real estate, citizens win with a much more pleasant scale and experience.
The segways would be for intra-area transportation, the driverless cars for inter-area.
The bigger assumption you're making is that people will "have" cars, and I'm not sure that will be the case. For me, that's the biggest unknown about transportation in the next couple of decades. Will people own cars, or will they merely use cars from a large pool of cars (either civic or corporately owned)?
Uber, for example, is starting to promote the idea of not owning a car at all to young people. They've been doing a good job of hyping the convenience of that lifestyle, and a limited set of people have bought into it already. I also recently noticed they're starting to play a prestige angle with black SUVs and so on. They're actively playing that up, which fills the other need personal cars currently serve.
Uber's endgame is very clearly a fleet of autonomous cars, and some cities are making very early sounds about building their own fleets.
I don't know how that's going to shake out. There are powerful forces pushing both ways.
But, if personal car ownership does become a thing of the past, a lot of the pressure you imagine for city development to have an even greater universal (as opposed to limited areas) accommodation for cars goes away.
The other major unknown is if cities simply become less desirable in 20-30 years. Given increasing automation, the nature of work may change to a degree that some of the economic incentives for city living decrease. That trend, if it even builds at all, will be slower to develop, but potentially even more powerful.