The range of potential outcomes is enormous.\u00a0In the best-case scenario, private car ownership gives way to shared fleets of autonomous cars, freeing up vast amounts of land\u00a0that used to be devoted to vehicle storage.<\/p>\n
Then there\u2019s the scenario promoted by Tesla, in which everyone owns their personal autonomous vehicle. The consequences would be frightening,\u00a0says\u00a0Yonah Freemark at the Transport Politic:<\/p>\n
\nRobin Chase, the founder of Zipcar, has laid out an intuitive way of understanding this issue using a binary \u201cheaven or hell\u201d construction (note: I\u2019ve interviewed her in the past on how autonomous cars will impact the transit system). According to this formulation, we could have \u201cheaven\u201d if we had fleets of shared, electric, driverless cars powered by renewable energy, plus a redistributive economy that ensures that people who once had jobs in the transportation sector have access to a minimum income. On the other hand, we could have \u201chell\u201d if everyone owns his or her own driverless car that does our errands, parks our cars, and circles the neighborhood waiting for us to need it again.<\/p>\n
Tesla seems to be resolving this issue for us.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\nIn the video the company released announcing its new technology, a man enters a car outside of his bucolic suburban home, from which it whisks him away\u00a0\u2014\u00a0without him touching the steering wheel\u00a0\u2013to the (also suburban) Tesla factory. Once there, he gets out of the car, at which point it goes off to find a parking space, where it will presumably sit all day until he\u2019s ready to go back home.<\/p>\n
One promotional video is hardly enough to make an assessment about the future, but the imagery Tesla is projecting, which is of an anti-urban, individualized nature, certainly aligns closely with Chase\u2019s \u201chell\u201d scenario. After all, multiplied across the millions of people living in a metropolitan area, Tesla\u2019s independently owned self-driving cars would simply replicate much of the existing transportation system, except this time, unlike for current drivers, they\u2019ll have no incentive to minimize driving time\u00a0\u2014\u00a0since automated cars can go driving off, circling the block or finding some distant parking space, without inconveniencing the driver.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Freemark says we shouldn\u2019t accept that. Public policy should shape the driverless car future:<\/p>\n
\nIt isn\u2019t a random coincidence that people commute in very different ways in New York and Dallas. We do not have to accept the \u201chell\u201d scenario of Tesla\u2019s creation\u00a0\u2014\u00a0but working to produce \u201cheaven\u201d requires more than resting our hopes on the economic benefits of sharing vehicles versus owning our own. Advancing positive change for our cities means recognizing the trouble with simply accepting whatever is most appealing on the market, or whatever the market leaders are promoting.<\/p>\n
In the course of my work developing Transport Databook (which, if you haven\u2019t checked it out yet, is a resource for up-to-date transportation data), I pulled together information on changes in transportation mode shares in U.S. cities over time. I was sadly unsurprised to find that the share of people commuting by car in the country\u2019s ten biggest cities is little changed from what it was in 1970. The level of car reliance is a fact of life, one might say. Given public interest in autonomous vehicles, cities should give up on bus lanes, abandon pedestrianized streets\u00a0\u2014\u00a0just give people what they want.<\/p>\n
Yet examining similar data for Paris and London suggests that, in fact, policy can matter. In those wealthy cities, the level of automobile travel has declined quite substantially since the early 1990s. That decline is not an accident. It is the product of clear-headed policies that implemented a vision of the city where travel by walk, bike, and transit is prioritized; the recent pedestrianization of the Seine highwayand the plans for new cross-Thames pedestrian bridges, for example, reinforce those policies.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Elsewhere on the Network today: Mobility Lab reports that Arlington, Virginia, is beginning the process of reforming its residential parking policies. Systemic Failure\u00a0says that changes to the boarding platforms for California High Speed Rail will effectively cut capacity in half. And Seattle Transit Blog fact checks the recent Seattle Times non-endorsement of the $54 billion light rail expansion plan on the November ballot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The range of potential outcomes is enormous.\u00a0In the best-case scenario, private car ownership gives way to shared fleets of autonomous cars, freeing up vast amounts of land\u00a0that used to be devoted to vehicle storage. Then there\u2019s the scenario promoted by Tesla, in which everyone owns their personal autonomous vehicle. The consequences would be frightening,\u00a0says\u00a0Yonah Freemark … Continue reading Tesla\u2019s Vision for the Future of Autonomous Cars Should Scare Us<\/span>