Other comments have criticized this article as too utopian, but I like the submitted article a lot, as a summary of several effects of the development of driverless car technology. Technology projections are often too ambitious in the near term, but underambitious in the long term. I think the submitted article here, which discusses trends we can reasonably expect without being really specific about dates, gets the general picture about right. There will be surprises from the introduction of driverless cars that perhaps this article has not anticipated.

I think the article "Why Driverless Cars Are Inevitable--and a Good Thing"

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044352490457765...

by Dan Neil of the Wall Street Journal, published last month, is a good commentary on why ordinary people will mostly be glad to use driverless cars, and regulators and insurers will be glad to nudge drivers to use them.

"As a mature, postindustrial society, the U.S. has in many ways topped out economically (population growth, consumption) compared with younger competitors on the world stage. Americans are learning hard lessons about the value of their work in a race-to-the-bottom global economy.

"The one brilliant part of the U.S. economic profile is productivity. It turns out, Americans are a little nutty when it comes to work.

"If autonomy were fully implemented today, there would be roughly 100 million Americans sitting in their cars and trucks tomorrow, by themselves, with time on their hands. It would be, from an economist's point of view, the Pennsylvania oil fields of man-hours, a beautiful gusher, a bonanza of reverie washing upon our shores."

Driving here in Minnesota, I can't wait until the typical Minnesota driver's low-grade performance is replaced by the performance of road-certified driverless car systems. And I most definitely look forward to having much more time to think and to enjoy undistracted conversation in a driverless car than I can now safely achieve while driving. That indeed will be a boost to my productivity and to the quality of my family life.

Another subthread here talks about the trade-offs between owning a personal driverless car versus taking rides from a driverless taxi service. My family, like many families in the United States, considers the issues of the one-car-per-adult lifestyle versus the one-car-per-household lifestyle. Most United States families with children would probably make their choices about car ownership with that being the key decision point. I can see a lot of United States families deciding to have one owned family car that is filled with all of their favorite things to have along during road trips (so that the car is one more personal storage unit, in part) that would accumulate a lot of pleasant memories of family outings and so forth. But the family's second car (in some families, the third car) would be replaced with a subscription to a driverless car service, which would reliably pick up family members on a moment's notice for trips to the grocery store, the soccer game, a music lesson, a party while the other parent is still at work, or whatever. If the driverless car services become reliable enough to whisk a child (with or without parent) over to an urgent care center for sudden injuries and illnesses, one major reason parents keep a second "transportation car" besides the main commuting and traveling car would vanish. I fully expect individual rates of car ownership per household to drop when driverless cars become reliable.