Inspired by Kara Swisher’s prediction in the New York Times that owning a car will soon be as quaint (her words) as owning a horse, I will make some predictions of my own.
- I will not live to see high-speed rail travel from New York to Los Angeles.
- More automobiles will be sold in the United States in 2020 than in 2018 and more will be sold in 2025 than in 2020.
- Most of those automobiles will have internal combustion engines.
- Transcontinental and intercontinental air travel may decline slightly.
- Air travel will remain the primary means of transcontinental and intercontinental travel for the foreseeable future.
- In 20 years most people will still be commuting to work in automobiles that they own or carpool with someone they know. That’s true of 85% of people today (the rest either telecommute, take public transport, or cabs, Uber, or Lyft).
Why is it that those predicting the future see what they predict as being more imminent than it actually is? The persistence theory while imperfect is actually a better guide.
I think some kind of autonomous car is inevitable, even if they only work autonomously on primary routes or freeways that have built-in infrastructure to safely support it. They will, I think, kill off the large-scale public transportation projects except for dense urban areas (where they’ve always made some sense). Currently, long commutes suck because of the drudgery and time wasted. Just in my own case, I’ve been driving an hour 1-way to get to Denver 2-3 times per week. If I have to travel at peak times, it’s more like 1.5 hours each way. Most of that is on freeway. If the freeway portion could be automated, then the commute wouldn’t be very bad at all since I could do other things and even sleep.
That’s still pretty far in the future, but I think it will happen eventually. There are only so many extra lanes one can add so pretty soon we’ll need to look for traffic flow efficiencies rather than increased capacity.
There’s been talk for decades about some kind of “high-speed rail” along my commuting route. But we are talking billions of investment for a 50-mile stretch. If traffic gets bad enough the hassle and expense of making connections at each end of the route might be worth it. But if I had a choice between a semi-autonomous car and that, I’d pick the car every time. And so would most other people.
Many people actually enjoy their commute. Alone time with surround sound.
Gray,
It would be even better if you didn’t have to have your eyes open.
You drive with your eyes open? Takes the challenge out.
antiplanner blog specializes in transportation. It is well worth a visit.
The basic facts are that cars and buses are the most efficient means of transport by every measure on a per passenger-mile basis: total costs; operating costs; carbon dioxide emissions; fuel consumption. Trains of all sorts are worst by every measure. Air planes fall between.
Buses and cars, and especially cars, are the most flexible and convenient means of transportation. There are reasons why cars have come to dominate transportation (total passenger miles) in every advanced country, including Europe and Japan.