I think Shoveler might be right, and here’s why – a very common scenario in the future will be privately-owned autonomous electric vehicles that stay busy giving rides while the owners aren’t using them. The income that it would take to cover the car payment and electricity would be ridiculously low – at a wild guess, a handful of rides/day at 25-50 cents/mile. That’s bus pass territory for the lowest income brackets. There would need to be some regulation, because there may be far more cars available than customers. I can see a market for small vans with routes decided by computer, though – a few people from my Temecula neighborhood going to the same area in San Diego, for example.
I would personally prefer a ride to the bay area in an autonomous car (mine or someone else’s) over flying or high-speed rail (and I mean actual high-speed rail, not the joke currently under construction).
More predictions: California will raise gas taxes so high that most people start buying electric, but the roads will continue going to shit, so they’ll need to enact a mileage tax on everyone, which of course they will promptly spend on something other than roads. Even some gearheads will realize that many all-electric cars are so fast they don’t need that flat-plane crank V8 anymore, and go to the dark side of silent running. They will be mocked by the rest of us even as we lose to them in drag races. Uber and Lyft drivers will be out of a job. Internal combustion engines will be outlawed in LA and SF first, maybe shortly before (20 years?) human drivers are outlawed in the entire state – which will also reduce that bay area trip time to 3-4 hours at the speeds allowed when there are no distracted monkeys at the controls. First responders will have the only vehicles with steering wheels. Many traffic lights and stop signs will be removed, as they aren’t needed with a linked network of autonomous vehicles. It will be interesting to see how they handle pedestrians in those situations – the cars would stop for them, but that would mess with the efficiency of traffic. Maybe foot bridges/elevators in the metros. Gas stations will be converted to charging stations, with the only functional gas pumps found near race tracks, which will eventually be the only places a real, breathing motor is allowed to run. Towed there by a self-driving electric truck, of course.
