[oflordal]

I have been thinking this will change as self driving cars becomes more prevalent. Commuting by car is very inefficient since all the time spent driving is wasted (compared to public transport were you can potentially work on the way to work, or cycling/walking were you get exercise). Self driving cars that are sufficiently good to handle the commute most days would change this and allow you to live further away from work in places that lack public transportation.

[Toenex]

If you own a car today it spends most of it's life sat there waiting for you. Not so the self drive car which can be off doing errands - picking up those Amazon deliveries for instance - or working as a taxi for someone like Uber and making you some money by providing the individual, door to door, on demand public transport we want. This is gong to have a significant impact on how many of us own a vehicle I would imagine.

[peatmoss]

We still have geometric problems with everyone driving. Namely, cars take up space in two or three useful dimensions on roadways that are fixed in length, and have limited capacity to grow wider or higher. In short, self-driving cars won't handle peak demand and the accompanying congestion.

Where I am more excited about self driving cars is in their potential to change vehicle ownership economics in slightly denser areas. A car2go that delivers itself makes it pretty hard to justify buying an expensive capital asset that sits idle an average of 95% of the time. In other words, a rental service that is able to utilize its vehicle fleet more fully, should be able to make a handy profit while reducing travel costs for many people. The opportunity frontier is enormous here.

Once more people switch to user-fee based travel as opposed to all-you-can-eat-buffet travel, people all of a sudden start choosing how to travel rather than automatically hitting the default option. That opens the door to better public transit, which can handle peak demand, as well as more walking and bicycling.

And, we should have room for more and better bicycle/pedestrian facilities, since we won't need so much land to store all our mostly-unused boxes of steel and plastic.

I think self driving cars will be transformative for cities, but it won't be some Jetsons vision of the future where we simply upgrade suburbia with tech. That will probably happen too, but those changes will be rather less profound.

[davidiach]

You can listen to audiobooks/news etc. while you drive. I do it all the time.