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Perry J. Greenbaum 🇨🇦 🦜's avatar

Sure, maybe; but let's think creatively about private vehicle ownership at least for urban areas. In the city, a private automobile sits most of the time on a driveway, residential, work or commercial business or shopping centre, or on the street parked. It is driven how many hours a week?

Let's have AVs, but only as a per-use trip option or people can have tiered plans on vehicle types and hours used, like phone data plans were at the beginning. And, at the same time, let's phase-out private vehicle ownership; this would solve a number of problems common to cities: reduce air pollution, GHGs, noise pollution, traffic congestion, and reduce the need for homes to have garages (People will have to get by with less stuff, another benefit for our planet.)

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Larry Hogue's avatar

Great article! It had a lot of pros and cons I hadn’t thought about. Another con I did read about is AVs heading back out of the city center after dropping owners off at work in order to find cheap or free parking. Or just circling while the owners do an errand in a place with little parking. So this could double the miles driven on these regular trips.

It seems like everyone owning their own AV could easily be more wasteful than the current situation. The true promise lies in robotaxis. Instead of parking a car for 20+ hours per day, each car could get maximal use, resulting in fewer cars needing to be built. Many people who are currently forced to own a car could opt out of ownership. The objection to this used to be peak-hour demand, but maybe the new flexibility in work places and schedules alleviates this problem somewhat.

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