[Theodores]

Currently only a minority of people aged between 9 and 99 drive a car. Although almost every baby boomer drives it is not so for other generations. With driverless cars that you can just hop in 'taxi style' or own outright then there are going to be a lot more people taking a lot more journeys.

However, the self driving car solves many other problems. For instance, in some of our cities most of the traffic is people driving around looking for some place to park. That is it, that is what they are doing rather than going somewhere important.

At some stage the existing dumb cars we have parked on our streets now will get sent off to the recycling facility, if, at the same time, more people are getting glorified driverless cabs and not buying their own cars, then there really can be a sizeable bit of highway real estate to recover. Hopefully because the self driving cars go in convoy this extra road space can be for people, e.g. on bicycles, and not for yet more automobile infrastructure.

Then there is the school run, no need for the journey there and back, plus the ride sharing can get smarter to know who needs to be where and when, i.e. self aware of all the meetings in town.