Analysts believe the future of city transit will be a network of shared electric cars According to a new report examining technology and personal car ownership, city streets may soon be less crowded?a lot less crowded. Rethinking Transportation 2020-2030: The Disruption of Transportation and the Collapse of the ICE Vehicle and Oil Industries, suggests that the continued embrace of new technologies, and an eventual wholesale shift to autonomous vehicles, will lead to a sea change in car ownership and personal transportation, which will then have a ripple effect on cities and city planning.
With more and more people adopting ridehailing and ridesharing services, transportation as a service (TaaS) will become the norm, much faster than many mainstream analyses predict. The authors of the study?Tony Seba, co-founder of the RethinkX think tank and a Stanford Continuing Studies instructor and James Arbib, a technology investor and philanthropist?believe the embrace of a cheaper, more efficient way to get around will lead to a drop in private ownership. They predict the number of passenger vehicles on American roads will drop from 247 million in 2020 to 44 million in 2030, a nearly 80 percent reduction that will free up massive amounts of space in urban centers. ?We are on the cusp of one of the fastest, deepest, most consequential disruptions of transportation in history,? said Seba. ?But there is nothing magical about it. This is driven by the economics.?

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