Abstract
We love our cars. Or at least we love the freedom, flexibility, convenience, and comfort they offer. That love affair has been clear and unchallenged since the advent of the Model T a century ago. No longer. Now the privately owned, human-driven, gasoline-powered automobile is being attacked from many directions, with change threatening to upend travel and transportation as we know it. The businesses of car making and transit supply—never mind taxis, road building, and highway funding—are about to be disrupted. And with this disruption will come a transformation of our lifestyles. The signs are all around us.
We must steer oncoming innovations toward the public interest—toward shared, electric, automated vehicles. If we don’t, we risk creating a nightmare.
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Notes
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Paul Barter, “‘Cars Are Parked 95% of the Time.’ Let’s Check!,” Reinventing Parking, 22 February 2013.
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These figures are based on fifteen thousand miles of travel per year. AAA, “Your Driving Costs,” AAA NewsRoom, 23 August 2017; US Department of Labor, 2015 Consumer Expenditure Survey, Table 1203.
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The cost per mile for an electric automated vehicle operated fifty thousand miles or more per year was calculated to be about the same as for a gasoline-powered AV, with the higher up-front costs offset by the lower operating costs (for maintenance and energy). See following note.
- 15.
These numbers are based on a cost analysis of automated and pooled cars done by Aditi Meshram and Daniel Sperling of the Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California, Davis, based on numbers from the Internal Revenue Service, the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey, APTA’s 2016 Public Transportation Fact Book, and unpublished sources. For transit costs, see chapter 5.
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Sperling, D., Pike, S., Chase, R. (2018). Will the Transportation Revolutions Improve Our Lives—or Make Them Worse?. In: Sperling, D. (eds) Three Revolutions. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-906-7_1
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