Florida Republican: Vote Down Transit Because Driverless Cars Are Coming

First, driverless cars can drive much closer together than human-operated vehicles. This will significantly increase roadway capacity and throughput, so we should start eliminating roads and replacing them with bike lanes, sidewalks, parks, and housing. Since self-driving cars are so efficient, we can repurpose all that road space for more productive uses. At the very least we should impose an immediate moratorium on all new road construction, because fiscal conservatism.

Second, driverless cars don't need to be stored near our destinations because they can just operate as inexpensive taxis all day long, so we should immediately eliminate all parking minimums, requirements for garage construction, and probably disallow curb cuts as well. All that parking we build today is going to be wasted in just a few short years! (What isn't already being wasted, that is.)

With driverless cars available at our beck and call there will no longer be a need to own your own car, so we should prepare our citizens for this new transportation regime by aggressively promoting car-share services like Zipcar and Car2Go. To make sure they catch on, we may want to ban the use of curbside parking for everyone except car-share users, and give them priority on our highway carpool/toll lanes.

If someone buys a car a decade from now it might have to be junked five years later, once driverless cars take over and become mandatory. We don't want people to waste their money on such a poor investment, so we should probably just ban cars entirely until scientists get the autonomous vehicle technology locked down. Everyone will have saved so much money that they'll be able to buy new cars as fast as the factories can churn them out.