How Lyft sees road transport in 10 years

John Zimmer, co-founder of the Lyft service , believes that humankind is on the verge of the third transport revolution and will have to wait for it for a short time - for ten years.

Personal transport from the good and the vehicle has become a big problem for large cities: congestion of transport hubs and routes, total lack of parking lots and changing the urban landscape for the needs of vehicles, not pedestrians. One of the main arguments in favor of the fact that humanity should abandon personal vehicles and go to the use of fully autonomous vehicles, is the statistics according to which in the UK cars, on average, 95% of the time are parked . According to the survey, the average driver makes only 18 trips a week lasting 20 minutes each, which in total gives only 6 hours a week behind the wheel. The remaining 162 hours the machine is idle.

As many will notice, the car gives freedom of movement and a certain independence, the opportunity to arrive from point A to point B by the shortest and fastest route (if we are not talking about megacities like Moscow with its traffic jams), but this inefficient use of transport leads not only to an unreasonably large number cars, but also to a traffic collapse in almost all major cities.
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Based on all of the above, Lyft is actively developing the direction of autonomous vehicles, which can be used on demand. To this end, the company entered into an agreement with the General Motors carmaker. As part of the agreement, the companies will work on the withdrawal of a robotic fleet into the streets of major US cities under Lyft control. So in the first echelon go San Francisco and Phoenix, where this system is already being tested.

According to Zimmer, the average American spends $ 9000 a year on a car, which is more like a “weight on a chain weighing $ 9000”. He also gives statistics of past years. For example, in 1983, 92% of the population aged 20 to 24 had a driver's license. For 2014, this figure is only 77%. In 1983, 46% of the population received rights at the age of 16; for 2014, this figure is only 24%.

Having your own vehicle is becoming more expensive and meaningless. Many young people prefer public transport or taxi services to private transport, as a car is a series of serious financial obligations and problems.

At the same time, people are not ready to abandon private cars completely, since “collective” cars may not meet their expectations in terms of cleanliness and other qualities, and daily use of a taxi with a live driver entails even greater costs than owning your own car.


The vision of the development of the market of robotic cars from the management Lyft

Zimmer reduces his idea to the fact that as soon as autonomous vehicles become cheaper to own a car, the latter will no longer need them. It is precisely due to robotization and exclusion of the earnings of a specific driver from the carrier-passenger chain that such an idea can become a reality.

The total rejection of private vehicles in favor of collective robotized fleets will lead to a general decrease in the number of vehicles on the roads, which will no longer build cities for the sake of cars, not people.

If you rely on the statistics provided by Zimmer, then 95% of the fleet is constantly idle. Here, the co-founder of Lyft draws an analogy with hotel accommodation. In fact, now almost all the “rooms” in our “transport hotel” are empty. Zimmer's idea is to optimize the layout of passenger unmanned vehicles with software. Simply put: you come to the side of the road, get into the car, where there are three other people besides you, and you all eat in the same place, unloading or picking up someone as needed.

According to the same model, modern public transport works, adjusted for the fact that you are adjusting to its route. John, on the other hand, proposes the opposite - robobombs will adapt to the needs of passengers, building a route in an optimal way for everyone.

Even for opponents of robotization in the key “it will kill the driver’s profession”, the co-founder Lyft has a prepared answer. With the commissioning of robotic fleets, the need for professional drivers will only increase. How?

Robotic fleet will not be able to cover all possible needs of potential customers who themselves were previously drivers. It is for them that real people will work - in those situations where it will be cheaper and easier to use human labor instead of a standardized work mobile.

Humanity has already experienced the transport revolution in the past and innovation has always had many skeptics. If you dig a little deeper, the true transport revolution did not begin with the invention of the steam engine and the abandonment of cavalry, and not even with the invention of the wheel, no matter how wild it sounds. The first transport revolution is carrying our tool with our ancestors, instead of searching in the field. It happened tens of thousands of years ago and, of course, the "carrying the stick with you" had its opponents.

Since then, we have created an internal combustion engine, conquered the sky and went into space. And at this historical stage, when engineers are actively developing autopilot systems for cars, we are on the verge of another total change in the matter of our own movement and transportation of cargo.