GHung wrote:What we need is an app to get people to stay the fuck at home or walk/ride bikes more.
You're actually right about that, old bicycles and smaller-scale walkable / bikable towns would be best. Just for the exercise. Though bad weather is a problem, nobody wants to ride a bike in a tropical storm or 100 degree heat or a blizzard.
Bikes are a good idea but in a free country.. you can't stop people from buying ice cream if they want to eat ice cream. It's the nature of the market.
I think there's less car ownership, especially with the younger crowd, because people are poorer than they used to be and can't afford a darn car. Now, there's always been taxis -- but taxis are a bit overpriced and therefore limit their market potential.
And that's where uber stepped in.. undercutting taxis.. and add to that, the convenience of ordering your uber driver from your phone. For some reason, a lot of people that use uber would normally never call up a taxi company.
Uber alone is worth $50 billion. Who knew, there was so much money, in taxicab 2.0?
Now enter the driverless car into the equation.. that will cut the ride cost by another 50%.
Driverless taxis will be more convenient and possibly cheaper, for some, than owning their own driverless car. It's the principle of distributed cost / shared use, and it makes it cheaper.
A certain percentage of people will still want their own cars, of course. Overall, the roads and highways will be FAR more efficient (computer driven cars), and nearly 100% safe (saving millions of lives per year), and better for the planet since fewer new roads and highways will need to be built (due to the enormous efficiency of computer-driven vehicles).