Truly fantastic article on the implications of self-driving cars for urban life and the environment (although doesn't really get into the future of jobs). If you only have time for one overview, this is it.

Great article! Things I learned:

1. A 2011 study at the University of California-Berkeley found that the United States has somewhere close to a billion parking spots. Since there are only 253 million passenger cars and light trucks in the country, that means we have roughly four times more parking spaces than vehicles.

2. The average automobile spends 95 percent of its time sitting in place. 

3. Anywhere from about 30 to 60 percent of the cars you see driving around a downtown core are just circling, looking for an open space to claim. An IBM survey found that worldwide, urban drivers spend an average of 20 minutesper trip looking for parking.

4. If you totaled up all the land devoted to parking, it'd be roughly 6,500 square miles, bigger than Connecticut.

5. Research by the Frontier Group, a think tank that often publishes work on energy and transportation, found that the average annual number of miles driven by American 16- to 34-year-olds dropped 23 percent between 2001 and 2009, a pretty stunning fall. Meanwhile, millennials took 24 percent more bike rides and used more public transit. Indeed, they're much less likely than previous generations to even be able to drive: In 1983, some 87.3 percent of 19-year-olds nationwide had a driver's license. By 2010, only 69.5 percent of them did. 

6. 70 percent of Uber's customers are under the age of 34, and 56 percent of them live in cities.

7. Uber Pool, which matches travelers heading to roughly the same destination. In exchange for sharing a ride, the fare is at least 25 percent cheaper than a regular Uber fare. The company introduced the service in San Francisco a year ago, and already nearly 50 percent of all Uber rides in the city are pooled.

How did I never notice before that Geege's self-driving car stash is called "My Cold Dead Fingers"?

Genius PW feature: Personalized  curation.  :)

"Another engineer riding shotgun held a laptop showing how our car "saw" the road with its laser, radar, and camera vision..."

I wonder how the cars perform when the weather's bad with fog, rain, etc.

Not well.

http://jalopnik.com/this-is-how-bad-self-driving-cars-suck-in-the-rain-1666268433

Snow is even worse. 

Keep it coming Joyce. This is crazy nuts - ”On Beacon Hill [Boston, MA], the asking price for a parking spot hit $650,000, briefly”

https://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/2015/11/03/beacon-hill-asking-price-for-parking-spot-has-hit/PvAGZtPfwTEGk6Jm1z1DKO/story.html

[A look inside the Brimmer Street Garage in Beacon Hill.]

That's crazy but no buyer actually paid that price.