"Portable platforms (mostly smartphones) using software (often modular, self-contained apps) and connecting over the internet mean that transaction costs are plummeting. Uber doesn’t sell taxi rides; Airbnb doesn’t rent hotel rooms. These companies, and a thousand others, “sell” reductions in transaction costs. ...
... We’ll need a lot less stuff and a lot fewer parking spaces if we can take better advantage of what we already have. And cities will have a lot more space once we aren’t paying the costs of storing cars in parking lots and loads of equipment and clothing in self-storage facilities."
The WSJ (June 21) includes "The End of Car Ownership ... Ride sharing and self-driving vehicles are going to refine our relationship with cars ..."
Planners' holy grail for as far back as I can remember was to get people out of their cars. Mega-billions spent on public transit and HOV lanes had no effect (except all the red ink). But the profit-seekers have now entered the picture to bail out all the smart people.
We hear a lot about "stagnation" and also "disruption". Inevitably, there are both. Are there trends? N-gram viewer says "no". Each has held its own.
All of this in the very politicized U.S. health care system that's in the news all day. What would it be like if the disrupters were really allowed to operate? Perhaps the stagnation, to the extent that it is real, can be pinned on our politics.
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