On your evening commute home, take a good look at the traffic and soak it in because we’re living at the end of an era. Although almost every household has a car today, and nearly six in ten own at least two, traffic’s reign over the American workday is beginning its sunset.
And it’s not because cities miraculously figured out how to solve the problem of public transit. If anything, the bullet train catastrophe of California demonstrates how ill equipped the government remains at solving the crisis of transportation.
No, it’s ultimately Uber and Tesla paving the way for the future of mass transit.
As Uber makes it increasingly easy for people to forgo car ownership, Tesla is making it more efficient. It seems likely that the country will return to the days where you own a car either for the joys of driving or for long road trips, not for daily commutes.
[Also read: Trump administration will ‘seriously consider’ ending electric vehicle tax credit]
Despite media blathering over self-driving car accidents, in order for autopilot to usurp human drivers, self-driving cars don’t need to be perfect. They simply need a significantly lower collision rate than human drivers. Considering that the fatality rate of car crashes has increased in recent years, computers will probably outpace humans in a matter of years.
Last week in Los Angeles, a drunk driver fell asleep at the wheel of a Tesla Model S running on autopilot. Highway patrol attempted to pull the car over through traditional means, but as they realized the driver wasn’t waking up, they called a second cop car to flank the car from the front and using Tesla’s autopilot mechanisms, guided the car off the road to a stop.
That’s a story that with any normal car would have ended in the serious injury or death of the driver, or worse, someone else on the road. That law enforcement is adapting so quickly to advances in increasingly improved self-driving car technologies only fares well for their future.
Then with Uber, we see a liberation of people from the hassles and expenses of multiple car ownership and a decongestion of roads as car travel is optimized to who needs it.
Whereas a mother would be unlikely to have an expensive cab with an anonymous driver take her child to school, Uber and Lyft rates have plummeted thanks to the introduction of different tiers to reflect elasticity of demand. People in need of a faster ride pay more for a driver who will only pick them up, meaning that the pricing model also absorbs the environmental costs of not carpooling. People in less of a rush can split a ride for a cheaper cost. And most importantly, drivers are vetted not once for criminality, but every time a rider leaves a rating. When a horrific story of an Uber driver assaulting a passenger hits the media, it’s newsworthy not because it’s an epidemic, but rather because the accountability of the app has rendered it so rare.
It’s not hard to imagine a future where a suburban family owns one cheap SUV solely for long distance driving and pleasure, using ride sharing, which will eventually be taken over by automated driving, for daily commutes. While driving on the open road is exhilarating, the joys of driving usually don’t involve suburban and urban traffic.
Commuters waste an average of 42 hours per year per capita and an extra 19 gallons of fuel solely due to traffic jams. Take more cars off the road via ride sharing and make those cars more efficient, and you have a perfect formula to save time, money, and the environment.
City and state governments had their chance to save Americans from the labor of mind-numbing and ozone-killing traffic. Luckily the free market did its thing, and we’re looking at a promising future ahead of us.
