Finding parking when you’re already running late. Gas. Car insurance. Traffic. Smog. All of these things come with the territory when you own your own car. But according to John Zimmer, co-founder of Lyft, it’s highly likely that car ownership will end within 10 years.
This may seem strange; after all, Zimmer himself acknowledges that our world is built around cars. However, it makes sense when he throws down this statistic in his Medium post, “The average vehicle is used only four percent of the time and parked the other 96 percent.”
According to Bankrate, the average monthly car payment is $479. So if your car is parked 96 percent of the time, that means you’re paying $459.84 a month to park your car — that’smoney that could be put to much better use. This is just one of the reasons Zimmer thinks car ownership will all but cease to exist.
He paints a pretty picture of the way the world will look with fewer cars on the road: greener communities, wider sidewalks with narrower streets, new businesses and housing on what are now parking lots across the country. His vision of this transportation revolution contains three phases: the widespread use of autonomous cars (a large number of these belonging to Lyft’s own fleet, of course), the end of private car ownership and a change in our physical environment bigger than anything we have experienced in our lifetime.
If you think that people giving up their cars isn’t possible, Zimmer points out what Netflix did to DVDs and Spotify did to CDs and MP3 players. He says that ride-sharing will become the “ultimate subscription service.” For those of you worried about losing your Lyft gigs, don’t fret — Zimmer reassures us that human drivers will still be needed, especially for those areas where autonomous cars might have difficulty, such as in inclement weather or higher speed roads. He anticipates having human drivers in the cars to take over if needed.
Overall, the idea of fewer cars on the road is very alluring, and the positive impact it would have on the environment makes it even more so. Now let’s just hope people are willing to say goodbye to road trips!
(Photos via Getty)
