Future of Transportation

The future of transportation is almost here. A lot of people are aiming at the self-driving taxi, Google, Uber, Nissan and others. If you have already used Uber you know how much cheaper it can be than your average cab ride. Two things are going to change in the near future: 1) we will no longer have to pay for drivers, and 2) we will no longer have to pay for fuel. 1 + 2 = 3) we will no longer pay for cars.

My $20 with tip cab ride to work is only $10 with Uber (no tips allowed.) Take away the cost of paying the driver and the gas, and I am betting that goes down to $5. The bus is $3. Taxis will be price competing with buses.

Solar is getting exponentially cheaper and better. Batteries, especially in cars, thanks largely to Tesla, are also getting much better all the time. It's easy to see a future with a solar powered Taxi company in the near future.

If your average cab ride is only slightly more expensive than the bus, then why buy a car at all, even if it's only a $10,000 car? That is the big economic impact of all this, is average person will have no need to own a car, and therefore won't. Inside of the next 20 years, the drivers license will no longer serve as the universal ID, because most people won't have one anymore. Because self-driving taxis will be drastically less accident prone than human drivers, not driving yourself will be considered the socially responsible thing to do.

This also means we ALREADY have enough roads and parking, maybe even too much parking. The parking we have will most likely be reformed for self-driving taxis to pick people up and drop people off. Because self-driving cars are better than humans at driving, traffic is going to be drastically improved as well.

This also means that universal internet access for ordering rides without using a human telephone operator is going to be seen as essential. A device smart enough to web browse and internet access for that device is about to become a right rather than a privilege.

My farthest out prediction is that the taxis will eventually provide a mesh network using nodes on the vehicles themselves, to guarantee this universal access. A combination of cellphone towers and vehicle nodes will guarantee that where there are roads, there is internet. Even when the power is out: