WE ARE ON THE CUSP OF REVOLUTIONARY CHANGE TO DEAL WITH THE INCREASING FINANCIAL AND HUMAN COST OF MOBILITY, BUT WHAT WOULD SELF-DRIVE CARS MEAN FOR URBAN PLANNING?
Imagine it’s 6:25pm and you’ve just wrapped up a meeting. You still have several items on your “must-do” list before you can call it a night and a commute that used to take as long as 90 minutes in the “bad old days” of rush-hour traffic.
But no worries today. You flick open an app on your phone and request a pick-up at the office; a text confirmation comes back and a few minutes later a car pulls up. “Home,” you say and the car slips easily into the self-drive lane, checking road conditions and flashing a message that you will arrive home in 24 minutes. When you step out of the car it moves off to its next pick-up.
Sound like science fiction? No, it is the opening of a report by KPMG and the Centre for Automotive Research which states that we are on the cusp of revolutionary change to deal with the increasing financial and human cost of mobility.
I have mentioned before the great crisis of 1894 where cities were said to be doomed to being buried under 9 feet of horse manure. Then along came the technological solution: the automobile. Self drive cars may be our technological solution for congestion.
What would self-drive cars mean for urban planning? Within a couple of decades we could see the capacity on our roads increase radically as self drive cars will be able to safely travel faster and closer together. The most common argument put up against this transition is: if they are not all self drive it won’t work. The reality is a lane can be established on the freeway for self drive cars, once you are in you simply let the car take over. The technology is available today.
The uptake of change has been remarkably underestimated in the past. Thomas J Watson, then the head of IBM, allegedly said in 1943 that he saw a world market for about 5 computers. A Western Union telegraph company memo in 1877 read: “This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication.”
It is very likely that market forces will push the uptake of the self-drive vehicles, just as it did with the telephone and computer and, because more vehicles could be put to use around the clock, some land consigned to parking lots could be released for redevelopment. The question is: when does it move from an interesting concept to something we plan for?