The system I describe fixes a lot of those problems. Many people would not bother to own a car with a system like that, instead just owning a small locker of personal items they like to keep with them that moves easily in and out of the self-drive cars they borrow.

Many of the cars might indeed be small, and the city cars would commonly be electric, in particular because the range problem goes away. Your car drives itself to a charging station when you get out of it, and it quickly takes you to a longer range car for rent when you need that, or one comes to your door (and your city car is rented out to others while you use the long range car.)

The young and the old are not trapped at all, in fact this is just what they want — I can’t understand why you wrote that at all.

And not only do we spend less on cars, we eliminate the largest single cost involved in cars — accidents. They cost more per mile than gasoline, more than depreciation, more than insurance.

This is the solution to all the problems you list, and many others. It’s literally worth a trillion dollars to the planet, PER YEAR, to get safe, self-driving cars. Odd we only spend a few millions researching it. There is no single thing on the planet we could research that would save more lives and money so quickly, I suspect.