The first report from independent think tank RethinkXL predicts that by 2031, 95 percent of U.S. passenger miles traveled will be served by on-demand, autonomous electric vehicles owned by companies providing transport as a service.
Tony Seba and James Arbib introduce some of the ideas that will be required thinking as planners and engineers begin to consider the next generation of transportation technology:
A historic photo taken on Easter Sunday, 1900, shows a street filled with horse-drawn carriages. If you look very carefully, you can pick out a solitary automobile. A photo of Easter 1913 shows the same New York Fifth Avenue scene packed with cars. If you look very carefully, you can pick out a solitary horse.
That’s disruption: New technologies create a new market and transform existing industries in the blink of an eye.
We face a rapid disruption of transportation today that could end more than a century of individual ownership of the gas-powered vehicle that disrupted the horse. This disruption will reshape the urban landscape and the world’s energy economy and bring huge benefits — economically, socially and environmentally — if policy decisions are well-informed.
Seba and Arbib are writing as co-founders of RethinkX, which recently released a report that comes down on one side of an ongoing debate in the transportation planning world: will self-driving cars render car ownership by individuals obsolete?
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