Diverging slightly from my usual topics, Koushik Dutta's post prompted me to put into writing what I've been thinking for a while about the future of both public and private transportation. People reading this blog have probably all heard by now that driverless cars are coming along nicely, and that Google has already demonstrated a vehicle capable of autonomous road traffic, at least while being supervised by a human. This was announced a year ago.

Now, the technology certainly isn't perfect yet. It's debatable how perfect it needs to be, in order to be better and safer than a human driver, but we can probably agree it's not quite there yet. It's also quite clear that communities and regulation will have a hard time swallowing the idea of 2-ton lump of metal going about without a driver in a city at deadly-to-pedestrians speeds (anywhere 40km/h upwards would qualify), let alone perhaps while carrying children. This is not happening in the near term.

At the same time, there are problems the technology already is capable of solving, and I'm not talking about reducing highway inter-car braking distances or autonomous warehouse navigation, both of which are already in place for some high-end models, and factory automation, respectively. No, I mean daily problems on the streets of every metropolitan area.

In my home town of Helsinki, traffic isn't really a problem. There are a few places where, for 25 minutes in the mornings and 30 minutes in the afternoons, traffic slows to an average of 15km/h rather than 30. However, downtown parking IS a problem. I've long conjectured that if only 10% less people wanted or needed to park in downtown, there would be no parking problem. Where you now have to drive around a couple of blocks to find a space, there would be 5 free spaces in every block. That's more than enough. This is the nature of bottlenecking issues - you don't have any, until you do, and then it's bad immediately.

Public transportation will not fix parking, because public transportation will go from every place to every other place, and allow people to conveniently transport more than they can carry themselves. People need cars for these purposes, as well as for many conveniences. Yet every private car spends an overwhelming majority of its lifetime parked. This is why parking is such an issue. In a city like Helsinki, we don't really need less cars, we need less parked cars, and that can also be solved by having more of them on the road. The bottleneck would obviously move toward traffic conditions, but there will be a sweet spot.

What if you could have a car of the size you needed, at the time you need it, at costs much lower than constant taxicab use? If you are an in-city occupant, as I am, would you care to own a car, with all the associated worries of insurance, maintenance and so forth, even if parking was no longer a problem? I would not. Well, I don't own a car as it is, so I don't qualify for the question, but what about you?

Collective car services have sprung about in the recent years in many municipalities. We have City Car Club, Zipcar is known across USA, and so forth. Yet a problem with these services is that the parking spots the cars are at are not immediately adjacent to most people, and the companies need relatively complicated logistics for making sure cars are available in all places. This means that the customers need to often reserve a car ahead of time.

But what if cars could take themselves from where there are too many, to areas where there are fewer, and to customers who need one immediately? You could have exactly the kind of car you need at a couple of minutes of notice, just like you can have a taxicab in most places where there are enough of those.

And what does all of this have to do with community acceptance? Well.. Lets accept as a given that it'll take a while before we'll be ready for automated cars carrying passengers around on streets where people are driving, moving at regular traffic speeds. But what about having empty cars move themselves through preassigned routes, on specific lanes, at lower speeds, yielding to all human traffic? How many municipalities suffer from too many cars around bad enough to consider arranging for those special routes? I'm guessing there are a few.

This is a disruptive thing, and to many different industries at once. Car companies will need more service capability and less manufacturing capacity, if more and more of private cars resemble taxicabs in their replacement and maintenance schedules. Taxis will be challenged by automated cars, but only when the passenger is willing to do some driving themselves - and many taxi customers are specifically looking for not just a car, but also a driver. But public transportation will also be challenged, because for many, the choice between a car and public transport is a balance between the inconveniences of longer pedestrian distances and indirect routes versus finding a parking spot.