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trains rule
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this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2026
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Giving everybody a self-driving car completely defeats the purpose. Human-driven cars spend about 23 hours of each day just sitting around. A car that can drive itself doesn't need to spend any time being parked - it can provide another ride! Liberally assuming a self-driving car would need to spend a full half of its time (12 hours/day) charging or being serviced, that would still mean that replacing all cars with autonomous vehicles could reduce traffic volume by a theoretical limit of 12× (12 hours/day/vehicle vs. 1 hour/day/vehicle).
Why would it reduce traffic volume? The cars that are on the road are the ones that are currently in their hour of driving that day, it would more reduce the size of parking lots and parking space allocation, or at least move it to charging hubs away from where people congregate.
Which would in turn affect city design, letting buildings be placed closer together, making it so you don't have to drive as far, which would then reduce traffic.
Elimination of personal vehicles would make public transit more attractive; with the previously foregone conclusion that one must own a vehicle gone, the choice is between a few dollars for transit, or several times more than that for a private vehicle. How many people currently choose to take an Uber or Lyft to and from work?
Is that realistic, though? A car is already a status toy, what's to stop conspicuous consumption in the form of buying one's own self-driving car? Or, say, moving to a cheaper house further from the city, because commute time can now be used as work time? Shared cars won't work in that scenario.
Also, rush hour is still a thing. There have to be enough UAVs to handle peak demand, and then most of them will be parked somewhere, idle most of the time. Or running errands. Traffic congestion is bad enough now, with average vehicle occupancy of 1.2 people; it'll be apocalyptic when that number drops below one.
Also, in cities with sky-high housing costs, i guarantee that people will live in self-driving RVs, because road space is "free."
In short, the only way to realize the benefits of the shared UAV future is to ban private car ownership, and cap the number of UAVs in a city. That sounds a lot like a train, except trains' enormous capacity offers better service.
I doubt that we'll be seeing UAVs for personal transport anytime soon. Terrestrial vehicles are significantly easier to manage.
The main thing that will prevent people from purchasing their own AVs will be availability. Waymo and Zoox, for example, are running services, not selling their multi-hundred-thousand-dollar vehicles to the general public. (I'm not bothering to address Tesla as their autonomy stack is an industry joke.)
Elimination of personal vehicles would make public transit more attractive; with the previously foregone conclusion that one must own a vehicle gone, the choice is between a few dollars for transit, or several times more than that for a private vehicle. How many people currently choose to take an Uber or Lyft to and from work?
Also, trains don't have curbside service.
UAV meaning Unmanned Autonomous Vehicle. (In contrast to rideshare services, like Uber. When they were heavily subsidized, it must be noted, they increased traffic congestion.) Availability of them will increase. The reason that we have an auto-dominated landscape today is that car makers wanted to sell more cars. There's approximately 0% chance that car makers today will be satisfied selling a limited number of vehicles for ride services, when they could sell vastly more cars to individuals.