Cars changed the world. There's not really any going back from that. It works in places where the urban population is over 90% (like Japan) but not when urban population is substantially lower (like the US). How would the rural population get to the bus/train station? My grandma's house is half an hour by car to the nearest freeway, how long would she have to walk to get to public transport?

Public transport only works inside of cities, and there's a lot of infrastructure already built to support sprawling metropolitan areas where everyone has 1/4 acre of land surrounding their detached home. There's not a lot of push to tear all that up and forcibly relocate the residents to inner-city apartments.

You know the benefit of electric, self-driving cars, though? An intelligent car isn't going to run you over on your bike. Be happy about that.

People enjoy space and privacy.

And income inequality means that people can literally afford to pay for other people to not be near them as they travel.

Busses and trains and other mass transport will return when income inequality is reduced to the point where the amount it costs people to pay for their own space is no longer affordable for them, but if you're earning 500 times the person next to you, you'll happily pay what it takes for them to disappear.

I think the future is self-driving public transit. I imagine minivans that perform dynamic route optimization. Instead of a bus that stops every block on a pre-determined route, use an app to input your pickup location and destination and the self-driving van picks you and a few people up from a small radius, and drops people off in a small radius. This will be faster and cheaper than both public transit and even driving yourself (no hunting for parking).

This! A million times this!

While self driving cars will do great things for people such as yourself (and overall I fully support their development/adoption), I also share the fear that it will prevent American urban centers from a desperately needed shift away from cars dependence in favor of better public transit and urban density. I really don't see the idea of every person in the country having their own personal transportation device (or even shared self-drivings car with something like uber) as a sustainable path for the US to continue down.

The technology for good transportation in/among major cities already exists: walking, biking, mass-transit, and high-speed rail. I wish Americans would be more open to these concepts rather than dismissing them in favor of the form of transit that has yielded nothing but horribly designed and polluted cities.

The math in the following image is not going to change regardless who is driving the car. If you want to have a city, you need to have public transport. If you want to have a suburban sprawl, that's another story.

http://www.boredpanda.com/space-required-to-transport-60-peo...

Little bit sad right? I want a nation of walking.

But this is much more likely to actually happen. A grid of self driving cars powered by renewable energy. I will take it over the current state.

I will feel safer bicyling in LA when cars and trucks are self-driving though.

Self driving cars change what roads mean. Once we get to full fledged self driving taxi culture, cars won't park. Car sharing will be common at the cheaper end. So it becomes a lot more like busses. Much smaller fleet on the road. I expect that roads will get pedestrianized, returning them to common usage, because a Google car will calmly stop if a child is kicking a ball in the road.

Trains are intrinsically unequal, they serve hub towns at best and cities only at worst, they are dirty, cramped, noisy, unprivate and they don't go when or where you want to go. Even with Google maps seaming together journeys out of trains and busses, you end up waiting and walking a lot. And trains are an intrinsic monopoly with a staggering up front investment, you can't make them better with market forces. I foresee self driving cars cannibalizing the train's market of people who just want to pay for journeys rather than the vehicle.

Same. I'm really happy that, insofar there's cars, they're good. However, having lived in walkable cities, where the car is basically a specialty tool for moving furniture or going away to the country for the weekend, the idea of it becoming even more enmeshed into daily life is a grim prospect.

There is hope. More and more young urbanites in dense cities are already eschewing car ownership for walking and on-demand rentals. Even European-style public transit can only be so convenient[1], and a fleet of selfdriving ubers would be perfect. I hope that this will mean even fewer people decide to own cars and that car ownership becomes increasingly uncommon.

[1] public transit is great for when you have a lot of time and aren't carrying a lot of things. Doing, say, your weekly groceries by bus or walking is annoying af. Source: living in a European city without owning a car.

PS: I live in the US now and not having a car is much more convenient than it was in Europe. Uber and zipcar and getaround are magic. We didn't have that in my city

As much as I agree with you on the importance of good public transport, I am hopeful that the "car culture" will evolve into an alternative to the existing public transport systems; Once we have self-driving cars running on clean energy operating in an Uber like sharing economy model, there will be no need for car ownership and the cost of a ride will be low enough for the majority of people to afford. I understand that this is more difficult to achieve in reality than in ideas but I am hopeful. About health related issues, we will still have to look for other ways to make a healthier society.

don't compare europe with japan with regards to rail usage, they really don't compare. Japan's usage is over half again the nearest European nation; Switzerland.

plus in many if not most countries rail simply doesn't go where people need to be. in countries with a choice cars are winning out and with autonomous and eventual ev powered cars it won't be a bad thing

train networks and subways are significantly more expensive to build, operate and maintain, even electrified ones. Roads + autonomous electric cars are hard to beat in terms of efficiency, utility and ease of operation.