This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, March 24th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Self-driving cars could upend industries change the way people work and dramatically impact real estate values in the years

and decades to come, Randall O'Toole, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, discusses the

opportunities and challenges.

You make a claim that I think is actually pretty startling, which is we don't need any additional infrastructure

in order to facilitate self-driving cars all across the United

States.

I think that's true.

Last year, the President of Ford announced that they were going to start mass-producing

self-driving cars that are completely self-driving.

No steering wheel, no brake pedal, no accelerator pedal. By 2021, they expect to have fleets of these cars out on the streets,

which means the transition to self-driving cars is going to happen a lot sooner than a lot of people thought.

And self-driving cars are going to reduce congestion because you can probably fit three times

as many cars on a given road as a human-driven car and they're

going to totally replace urban transit except in New York City.

New York City is about the only place where urban transit I think will survive self-driving cars.

By 2030, 2035, anybody who doesn't have their own car will be using shared self-driving cars and urban

transit will be totally obsolete.

So what that means is if you're trying to talk about

15 years.

15 years, build new highways only where you have a lot of congestion and you expect to get a lot of use

...