Uber is debuting driverless cars. Amid all the speculation about the impact on people who drive for a living (cab drivers, truck drivers, limo drivers, even the folks at the controls of trains, for example) and those who supplement their incomes by driving, like Uber drivers, there's another area of life that might see an impact if driverless cars, like those that Uber and Google are contemplating, actually take off (so to speak).
If the cars we love that normally sit in our driveways or outside our places of work actually are converted successfully to "autodrive" mode, then they wouldn't have to sit lonely and unloved for so many hours of the day (and night). I would think that eventually they would be reliable enough to drive themselves back to wherever they're going (otherwise why have them?) We could rent them out. When we get to work, or to the mall, we could send them back home, for example, and then call them back when we need them, or off to earn us some cash. So what would we do with all those parking lots and parking garages we now have, which now pave over all that lovely green space? And what would cities do without the income from those parking lots and parking meters? We wouldn't need quite so many of them but the cities would still need the money. Costs would, I suppose, go up, people wouldn't park, might demand alternatives to get where they're going. Alternatives like mass transit. Which might result in fewer cars on the roads. It gives one furiously to think.
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