Rethinking Transportation:
A Policy Primer for the Coming Transportation Disruption (2017)
About our Policy Primer:
Rethinking Transportation: A Policy Primer for the Coming Transportation Disruption
The disruption of road transport by a new business model, Transport-as-a-Service (TaaS), has the potential to provide cities, states, and the US economy with their biggest boost in a century, while helping solve some persistent social and environmental problems at zero cost. This Primer helps decision makers to make the right choices with regards to this disruption.
Fleets of autonomous electric vehicles, owned by fleets (not individuals) will offer ways to transport people at much lower cost, leading to a boost in disposable incomes of more than $5,600 per household (or $1 trillion in aggregate per year), with a further $1 trillion per year boost to GDP from productivity gains. These gains will be spread far more evenly across society than tax cuts and will flow back into the economy, with the potential to create many new jobs, helping to compensate on a larger scale for those lost. This is a technology disruption – not just an energy shift – and the infrastructure for it is already mostly here.
James Arbib and Tony Seba (RethinkX), May 2017
