Banning human-operated vehicles and private car ownership would be two huge, cultural hurdles to clear. So why don’t we do it in two steps? We can ban private car ownership right now to prepare. It would be pretty easy to transition over to everybody driving a vehicle from a car-share system. It could be phased in over time while we’re working on perfecting self-driving. We could probably reduce a lot of parking and vehicle demand, too, since private vehicles sit idle over 95% of the time. Then, when self-driving vehicles are ready, the operators of the car-share vehicles would be in position to switch them all over to autonomous mode, en masse.
If you think I’m insane to suggest that it’s politically feasible to just ban private car ownership, hey, that’s exactly the point I want to make.