> The promise of a relaxed, comfortable commute to work could even make some people move farther away from their workplaces and accelerate suburban sprawl trends.
At least where I live (suburbs outside of NY), more self-driving cars will not likely lead to more people commuting from farther away. The road capacity is already maxed out. Everyone I know either takes mass transit. In most other cities where I have coworkers, the roads were not built for the number of commuters, and again whether it's comfortable or not, people would rather not be commuting an hour and a half by car each way. This is especially true now in a world where we've all gotten used to a commute of walking down the hallway.
> it’s unlikely to evolve that way on its own.
They don't really explain why. They mention the idea of having shared fleets of cars, which would greatly reduce the cost of ownership and which become more plausible when cars are driverless. It seems like most people would have sufficient financial incentives (saving hundreds of dollars per month) to move in that direction.
The article also doesn't explore the downstream impact from moving to shared fleets, and how great that would be for the environment. We dedicate a huge amount of resources, both real estate and financial, just to parking. If we have fewer total cars in existence, we would have less need for parking. There's also environmental impact of battery production [1], and as we move to electric vehicles having fewer total cars on the road will mean we need to produce fewer batteries, creating fewer mines for metals needed and using up less water which is needed by mining processes.