[LINK] itN: Reckless MPs okay Driverless Cars

[Karl Auer]

On Wed, 2016-04-06 at 11:33 +1000, David Boxall wrote:
> There might still be reasons to own machinery, but private ownership
> will be a tiny fraction of what it is now.

Car-sharing systems have been around for at least two decades; we used
one in Switzerland extensively as an entirely workable alternative to
owning a car. I would say that the two critical prerequisites for such
systems are a good public transport system (so that you are not always
using a car) and a sufficient population density (so that cars are used
enough to make it cost-effective for the provider, and cars are close
enough to their users - i.e. within walking distance or easy, rapid pub
lic transport distance).

However, if you add in the "Uber factor", that second condition
changes. It would be replaced by "sufficient density of participating
owners". "Sufficient" could be radically different from town to town or
region to region. I suspect you would converge pretty quickly on the
optimum number of cars for the market, but you might also see pretty
firm downward pressure on pricing.

Regards, K.

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Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)
http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer
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