A death of parking
But wait, there's more
Currently, if you use a private car to travel to a destination, you also need to use it to return from a destination. Carsharing cooperates with other modes of transport. Go somewhere with a foldable bicycle, and if it starts to rain, no problem. Book the closest shared car and put the bicycle in the trunk. Go to a bar with a shared car, get tipsy, and book a Lyft ride back home.
Fewer parked cars means you spend less time looking for parking. Research shows that on average, 30 percent of the cars in congested downtown traffic are cruising for parking.
You need to walk from your location to the location where you parked a private car. In an ideal carsharing city, you just walk out and take the first shared car available outside.
Because people are driving smaller shared cars, there is less pollution.
If you need a van, a truck, or a limousine, you just find and book one using a smartphone.
Insurance and servicing is handled by the carsharing company, not you. Because they have a huge fleet, they get volume pricing.
When your car breaks, you don't need a replacement car. Every carshare you see is your "replacement" car.
With less need for parking space, through streets can ditch side parking and add two extra traffic lanes.
How does the future look now?
Death of traffic jams (and birth of queues)
Why does a traffic jam happen, anyway? All people jump into their private cars at once and decide to drive along a similar route. Main routes have limited throughput, so you end up queueing on junctions and on the highway. The queue just makes things worse, as it lowers car throughput. It is an expensive system in which you line up in a running car, waiting for your turn. In total carsharing, that can't happen. Since there are 3x or 6x fewer cars available, there is no way that everybody can just jump in a car and go. Now you don't wait on a highway, you wait for your turn to get a shared car. I would argue argue that this is better because:Total carsharing can eliminate the traffic jams of rush hour—but that doesn't mean you won't have to wait.
You are going to wait in your home or office (for a car to become available), not on the highway.
There is less chance of some route "jamming" and reducing car throughput.
"Shared" carsharing. Imagine that you open a carsharing app of the future and request a car. The app puts you in a waiting queue and says that the estimated waiting time for the next car is 30 minutes. But someone from the same street is going to the same part of town. The app offers to cut your waiting time to 15 minutes if you both share the same car. Since you don't know the person, the app offers to increase security by enabling a video camera inside the car (it is there anyway, to check whether you left the car clean). You accept the pooled ride, but decline the camera option, as the other person's profile is rated 4.5 stars. Your car is available in 15 minutes.
"Premium" shared cars. Let's say you are in a hurry and don't want to use a carsharing company that tries to maximize car usage. You use a more expensive carsharing company that promises to have a car available in five minutes or the cost of ride is on them. You pay a premium to get somewhere faster. It's a nice system, although I guess in some posh downtowns everybody will try to use the premium shared cars, in which case you are back to square one. Then you need a "super-premium" car share. Another option is existing car sharing companies adding surge pricing, but Uber showed that paying 4x more for basically the same service didn't go well with the customers.
Rebirth of the parking space
Make every second street a through street. Eliminate side parking in through streets to add two additional lanes of throughput.
Make other streets half dead-end streets (used for parking of car shares), half pedestrian-only zones.