DAVE ROSS

Ross: What about the War on Drivers in Seattle?

Nov 21, 2018, 12:38 PM | Updated: Nov 29, 2018, 1:49 pm

Kirkland residents might have caught a glimpse of self-driving cars in 2016. Google tested its own driverless cars in town. (AP) A Sedric concept car is displayed during a Volkswagen event prior to the 87th Geneva Auto Show in Geneva, Switzerland, Monday, March 6, 2017. (AP Photo/Jamie Keaten) Matthias Mueller, the CEO of Volkswagen, presents VW autonomous concept car Sedric, at the 87th Geneva International Motor Show in Geneva, Switzerland, Monday March 6, 2017. (Uli Deck/dpa via AP) Matthias Mueller, the CEO of Volkswagen, sits inside the VW autonomous concept car Sedric, during a presentation at the 87th Geneva International Motor Show in Geneva, Switzerland, Monday March 6, 2017. (Uli Deck/dpa via AP) Matthias Mueller, the CEO of Volkswagen, presents VW autonomous concept car Sedric, at the 87th Geneva International Motor Show in Geneva, Switzerland, Monday March 6, 2017. (Uli Deck/dpa via AP) Matthias Mueller, the CEO of Volkswagen, presents VW autonomous concept car Sedric, at the 87th Geneva International Motor Show in Geneva, Switzerland, Monday March 6, 2017. (Uli Deck/dpa via AP) This Friday, Nov. 13, 2015 file photo provided by Virginia Tech shows Virginia Tech Center for Technology Development Program Administration Specialist Greg Brown behind the wheel of a driverless car during a test ride showing the alert system handing over automation to the driver while traveling street in Blacksburg, Va. New cars that can steer and brake themselves may lull drivers into a false sense of security. One way to keep people alert may be providing distractions that are now illegal, just one surprising finding from Stanford University research that studied the behavior of students in a self-driving car simulator.(Justin Fine/Virginia Tech via AP, File) FILE - In this Thursday, Aug. 18, 2016, file photo, employees stand next to self-driving, big-rig trucks during a demonstration at the Otto headquarters, in San Francisco. Uber's self-driving startup Otto developed technology allowing big rigs to drive themselves. After taking millions of factory jobs, robots could be coming for a new class of worker: people who drive for a living. (AP Photo/Tony Avelar, File) 
              A group of self driving Uber vehicles position themselves to take journalists on rides during a media preview at Uber's Advanced Technologies Center in Pittsburgh, Monday, Sept. 12, 2016. Starting Wednesday morning, Sept. 14, 2016 dozens of self-driving Ford Fusions will pick up riders who opted into a test program with Uber. While the vehicles are loaded with features that allow them to navigate on their own, an Uber engineer will sit in the driver’s seat and seize control if things go awry. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)
            
              A journalist gets in a self driving Uber for a ride during a media preview at Uber's Advanced Technologies Center in Pittsburgh Monday, Sept. 12, 2016. Starting Wednesday morning, Sept. 14, 2016 dozens of self-driving Ford Fusions will pick up riders who opted into a test program with Uber. While the vehicles are loaded with features that allow them to navigate on their own, an Uber engineer will sit in the driver’s seat and seize control if things go awry. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)
            
              In this photo taken Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2016, an Uber driverless car heads out for a test drive in San Francisco. Uber is bringing a small number of self-driving cars to its ride-hailing service in San Francisco - a move likely to both excite the city’s tech-savvy population and spark a conflict with California regulators. The Wednesday, Dec. 14, launch in Uber’s hometown expands a public pilot program the company started in Pittsburgh in September. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)
            
              In this photo taken Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2016, an Uber driverless car is displayed in a garage in San Francisco.  The ride-hailing company is refusing to obey demands by the state's Department of Motor Vehicles that it stop picking up San Francisco passengers in specially equipped Volvo SUVs. Hours after Uber launched the self-driving service Wednesday, Dec. 14,  the DMV warned it was illegal because the cars did not have a special permit.  (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)
            In this July 20, 2015 file photo, a pedestrian crosses in front of a vehicle as part of a demonstration at Mcity, used to test driverless and connected vehicles, on the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor, Mich. The U.S. auto industry's home state of Michigan is preparing for the advent of self-driving cars by pushing legislation to allow for public sales and operation _ a significant expansion beyond an existing law that sanctions autonomous vehicles for testing only. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)
           
              In this Thursday, Jan. 26, 2017 photo, a driverless shuttle sits on display at the Riverside EpiCenter in Austell, Ga. Self-driving vehicles could begin tooling down a bustling Atlanta street full of cars, buses, bicyclists and college students, as the city vies with other communities nationwide to test the emerging technology. (AP Photo/David Goldman)
            
              In this Thursday, Jan. 26, 2017 photo, Vasilis Karavidas, center, an Easy Mile deployment engineer, explains to Johnny Liles, right, and Adam Ledgister how the company's driverless shuttle bus works while on display at the Riverside EpiCenter in Austell, Ga. Self-driving vehicles could begin tooling down a bustling Atlanta street full of cars, buses, bicyclists and college students, as the city vies with other communities nationwide to test the emerging technology. (AP Photo/David Goldman)
            
              In this Jan. 12, 2017, photo, the Navya Arma autonomous vehicle drives down a street in Las Vegas. The driverless electric shuttle has begun carrying passengers in a test program in a downtown Las Vegas entertainment district. (AP Photo/John Locher)
            
              Waymo CEO John Krafcik, left, sits with Steve Mahan, who is blind, inside a driverless car during a Google event, Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2016, in San Francisco. The self-driving car project that Google started seven years ago has grown into a company called Waymo. In 2015, Mahan became the first member of the public to ride in Google's self-driving prototype, alone and on public roads. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)
            The Montana Bar on Capitol Hill features a parklet. Seattle’s parklet program converts parking spaces into park space. According to RethinkX, driverless cars will cause a "land bonanza" to convert soon-to-be parking spaces into usable features. (File photo) Seattle has started a parklet program that converts parking spaces into park space. According to RethinkX, driverless cars will cause a "land bonanza" to convert soon-to-be parking spaces into usable features. (File photo) Seattle has started a parklet program that converts parking spaces into park space. According to RethinkX, driverless cars will cause a "land bonanza" to convert soon-to-be parking spaces into usable features. (File photo) 
              In this Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2017, photo, an autonomous vehicle is driven by an engineer on a street through an industrial park, in Boston. Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology are asking human drivers how they'd handle life-or-death decisions in hopes of creating better algorithms to guide autonomous vehicles. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)
            This May 13, 2015, file photo, shows Google's self-driving car during a demonstration at the Google campus in Mountain View, Calif. The U.S. auto industry's home state of Michigan is preparing for the advent of self-driving cars by pushing legislation to allow for public sales and operation _ a significant expansion beyond an existing law that sanctions autonomous vehicles for testing only. (AP Photo/Tony Avelar, File)

You’ve likely heard of Seattle’s war on cars. Folks around Seattle have complained about it for years as parking spaces go away and roads go on diets.

RELATED: Is Seattle prepared for a self-driving future?

But have you heard of War on Drivers? It’s being waged on a national scale.

“Cars are not going away,” noted KIRO Radio’s Dave Ross. “But the car owner – that’s another thing.”

Dave pointed out that forces are conspiring to chip away at car ownership. Uber is now partnering with a taxi company to help with selling rides via an app. An Uber spokesperson told the media this week that “it seems like strange bedfellows at first, it actually makes a lot of sense to us when we looked into it. We don’t see true competition being mirrors (similar businesses), we don’t see our true competition being the taxi industry. We see our true competition as being car ownership.”

Meanwhile, Ford Motor Company — a giant in the car industry — is switching lanes into the autonomous vehicle market. It’s a move that some experts have predicted will come as the market shifts away from personal car ownership. Ford is currently testing the driverless cars in Miami to deliver packages for Walmart and pizzas for Domino’s. The company hopes to have the self-driving product ready for the market by 2021. The goal is to have customers — former drivers — hail a self-driving car with an app.

Former General Motors Charmian Bob Lutz has even publicly said that companies like Uber and Lyft will take over the transportation market with self-driving cars. The vehicles themselves will be branded “Toyota” or “Ford,” but they will be operated by rideshare companies. Lutz says “we are approaching the end of the automotive era,” and that within 20 years, most people won’t be driving their personal cars anymore.

Ford has also gotten into the rideshare market, and bought the scooter-share company Spin. The company’s goal is to have customers hail a self-driving car with an app (which is what Waymo is gearing up to do in Arizona by the end of the year). Ford’s brand and marketing director Amy Marentic said that the company is disrupting its own business model to do all this.

“We’re looking at fewer cars and better ideas,” she told CBS.

Fight the War on Drivers

The industry is leaning more and more to a future where people buy transportation services, not cars — no car ownership in favor of driverless taxi rides. As Lyft co-founder and president John Zimmer recently said, Lyft is dedicated to “reducing the need for personal car ownership by providing reliable and affordable ways to move around our cities.”

But it’s never going to happen, according to KIRO Radio traffic reporter Chris Sullivan.

“Garbage,” he told Dave. “Garbage. So Uber gets a car, you don’t — not happening. Sorry.”

“Let’s address the real issue here,” he added. “Uber and Lyft has added to the congestion, overwhelmingly, in the City of Seattle and other major cities. And it has cut into transit use. So in their grand vision of reducing congestion, they have added thousands and thousands of more cars and trips that would have been taken on transit.”

Indeed, NPR reports that the influence of rideshare companies has encouraged customers to pay for the convenience of Uber and Lyft over the bus. Some even take trips that they may not have taken otherwise. That means more cars on the road to accommodate that need. Seattle is one of the top cities where such trips occurred. Nationally, the companies “transported 2.61 billion passengers in 2017, a 37 percent increase from 1.90 billion in 2016,” according to a study on the issue.

“They are part of the problem right now, in my mind,” Sullivan said. “It’s convenient, I get it. But I don’t like the idea that they get a car and we don’t.”

Also, 94 percent of car owners report that they will not give up their personal vehicles.

Sullivan also doesn’t trust driverless technology yet and feels that concern is going to deter people from adopting the driverless systems quickly.

RELATED: Are we ready to ditch mass transit for driverless cars?

Dave's Commentary

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