If you assume the point that people would prefer to use self-driving car services over having their own vehicle, then I imagine this wouldn't be as big a factor, since we already have a ton of unused vehicle capacity (with most people driving around with 1 or 2 people in a car that seats 4). You can imagine that modern car services with a significant customer base would be able to coordinate "carpool" type situations to significantly decrease spare capacity.
If I assumed that, sure. However, I'm not sure that I should. We're now talking about a situation that contains a highly social aspect.
Are you comfortable travelling with others who you don't know? I know many young women would be somewhat uncomfortable about climbing into a vehicle with some random stranger.
Even without that aspect, you've got to be around people you may not get along with. On buses people can mostly keep to themselves, and it's more or less expected; at least in my society; that they will - how much of that would be true in the tighter confines of a car?
And are you prepared to keep to someone else's schedule? A mismatch of five minutes may be more significant than we expect.
I'm not saying it won't happen. What I am saying is that I wouldn't care to make a strong commitment to the idea that in twenty five years or so most people won't have a car, or that there'll be fewer cars on the road. I can easily imagine a future in which most people decide that it's worth owning a car, even a self-driving one, for the privacy and convenience aspects.
Well, I mean, I'm on your side, I don't think that self-driving cars are going to cause a huge spike in people using car services because having a car you don't have to personally drive is not new technology at all. This may be somewhat cheaper than having a person driving you around or something, but I really think that on balance people will end up having their own personal vehicles.
All I was responding to was that if you grant the parent comment's assertion that people will move to car services, it's very likely to me that rush hour will be the one problem that is very easy to solve, because you would have such a large volume of people all going to the same place. Even the issues with personal space and shared vehicles aren't that big of a problem - self-driving cars don't need to look the way they look now. You could have 4 separate compartments in them, so that it's not possible to touch or interact with the other passengers, for example. (Also, I've participated in casual carpool in both New York and San Francisco, and it works remarkably well - many people, including young women, do travel every day in the car of a complete stranger that they don't know - and it's even more dangerous, because it's controlled by a human driver!)
My guess is, however, that in the future the hardware costs of under-utilized vehicles will be considered to be much lower than the "inconvenience costs" of not having your own vehicle, and rates of car ownership won't be dramatically affected by the advent of the self-driving car.
