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Person transport by rail and self-driving cars are hardly substitutions but rather complements. The wave of self-driving will, I think, hearald a new wave of rail as personal ownership of motorcars goes the way of the horse drawn buggy. Cars won't take one from London to Cambridge. Trains-- or self-driving buses-- will.
Lacking the demand for parking places will mean that few if any motorcars will be private but find usage patterns like taxis. More problematic, I think, will be transport of goods as rail will find it also difficult to complete with fleets of linked road trains (mega-trucks). Railways are currently not doing well with freight and I suspect the conflicts will increase.
EdwardZ-
I doubt this very much. 'Self'-driving precisely levels out one key advantage of rail travel today, that people can work while they're on the train. While ownership of cars will probably move away from the individual, it's a fairly well-publicised fact that the car companies see the future of their business models in building cars, not selling those, and instead charging for trip hire. The aim is to undercut public transport and to effectively privatise it. This would obviously not be possible in the inner cities, but outside them it is a distinct possibility. Obviously, it's all speculation at this time, but I think this is a much more likely direction for it to go in.
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I'm sure someone (probably in this thread, my memory is shite) said freight on trains is no good because the railways make too much off the sheeple using them whereas all of us tax-paying idiots are subsidising trucks to deliver stuff via roads, hence trains struggle to compete? Don't know if true.
Oliver Schick
hippy
http://www.christianwolmar.co.uk/2016/08/rail-808-driverless-cars-going-nowhere-soon/