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Notes -
Instead of thinking like an urban planner, can we think like an entrepreneur? What business models are possible if you're expecting for there to be a bunch of autonomous cars showing up downtown early in the morning and wanting to head back to the suburbs, making such transit super cheap? Cheap breakfast delivery from your centrally-located kitchen? (Heck, sell the 'premium' autonomous ride into work that comes with breakfast in it for you, having picked it up before it deadheaded your way...) Cheap delivery of business goods to outlying locations? Amazon is currently delivering to your doorstep, but would suburban customers be okay with an autonomous vehicle with a robot arm or something that can at least dump your package at the end of your driveway? Could they design a dual-purpose vehicle that can bring a passenger into the city, turn around, deliver some number of packages in the suburb, then pick up another passenger?
(Note that this is not a sort of argument that we'd get to 100% autonomous vehicles, but just thinking that if there is value in substitution on some margins, this may be a new margin that could be opened up.)
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