People who live in the suburbs without cars.
Cities are successfully discouraging car ownership by making parking scarce near downtown offices and even the suburban transit stations that lead to downtown offices. At the same time, cities aren't permitting the construction of dense, walkable neighborhoods, at least not fast enough to make them affordable. So you have a large and growing segment of the population with:
- A built environment where distances are scaled for driving.
- A hard time justifying car ownership, since it isn't useful for commuting.
- Neighborhoods which are now becoming crowded enough that parking is a hassle, but haven't become dense enough to have useful businesses within a convenient walk. (When they reach this point, they may cease to be affordable).
"Outsourced driving" is immensely popular in such environments. Instead of Target and Walmart and BestBuy, you use Amazon Prime for most purchases. Instead of driving the SUV to the supermarket every week, you use Amazon Fresh, or (in the case of Instacart) pay someone else to do it or you. Instead of going out to eat or picking up takeout, you order from UberEats/Grubhub/whatever. Each use case for personal car ownership can potentially be replaced with a fleet of service workers from further outside the city, and each permanent parking space can be replaced with one of them double-parking for 30 seconds every few hours.
How do the economics work?
- Labor + car operating costs for some contractors < value of the land the people they serve would otherwise park on.
- Delivery fees and markup on everything you buy < parking, gas, insurance, maintenance, and depreciation (by a couple hundred bucks maybe) < rent premium to live in similar apartment in a walkable area (by $1000+/mo) < psychological cost of the tradeoffs you'd have to make, like roommates, to live in high density on a middle-class income.
Whether that's $2bn, I don't know. But I think selling car-based services to the carfree will be a winning proposition as long as NIMBYs and anti-car activists remain simultaneously empowered.