USING SELF-DRIVING CARS AS A MORAL TECHNOLOGY FOR CITIES

a conversation with legal & public policy expert, Leili Fatehi

Leili Fatehi is a legal and public policy expert specializing in the intersection of science, technology and society. She was Director of the Initiative on Governance of Emerging Technological Systems at the Hubert Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, where she also received her J.D. She also attended Cornell University and the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Leili, your consulting firm, Apparatus, is currently working on an initiative called Drive Together MPLS that is supposed to help Minneapolis plan for the convergence of self-driving cars, car sharing and electric cars. What do you hope to achieve?

We’re actually working on getting the City away from the traditional approach to planning for emerging technologies and, instead, build the city’s adaptive capacity to deal with the uncertainty that’s endemic to these technologies. Under a traditional planning approach, the City would try to forecast the growth and impacts of self-driving cars and then implement formal top-down tools like laws, policies, and infrastructure. Should forecasts not align with reality, which history suggests is the case more often than not, we have ineffective, inefficient or insufficient laws, policies and infrastructure. We may even be locked into a technological direction with widespread and enduring unanticipated consequences.

In contrast, the Drive Together MPLS project seeks to guide the City toward foreseeing the range of alternative futures that could exist because of self-driving cars and opening deliberations about technological and policy choices to a broader participation by other stakeholders, including residents, businesses, and non-profits. This approach supports shared public-private-community influence and responsibility over the design and outcomes of new technologies like self-driving cars and the policies, planning, and infrastructure that support them. ‘

The ultimate goal is to help ensure Minneapolis has the greatest chance of getting the social, environmental, and economic outcomes it wants from these technologies. That doesn’t just automatically happen because the technology manufacturers say it will. It requires proactive and collaborative work by everyone early in the R&D, planning, and policy-making processes.

That seems ambitious. Whose idea was it?

This is an original project developed by Apparatus, and it is ambitious, but it’s what every city should be doing and what virtually no city is. Right now, cities across the U.S. are racing to change their ordinances and policies to accommodate an imminent future with self-driving cars, but to the best of our knowledge, none are stopping to ask “is this technology and the way we’re setting it up to be used compatible with the values and goals of our community?” Minneapolis deserves a lot of credit in this regard because it has established a vision for the city that’s based a set of shared values — equity, safety, health, vitality, connectedness, and growth — and it has been true to letting these values guide its comprehensive planning, ordinance decisions, etc. We’re extremely fortunate that we live in this city and have the opportunity to do this project here. We’ve gotten nothing but support from elected officials and city staff, as well as from residents and the business community. There’s a spirit for co-responsibility for ensuring that self-driving cars change how we move about, work, and live in ways that first-and-foremost serve our community’s values.

What does it mean for self-driving cars to be compatible or incompatible with a community’s values?

People tend to think of technologies as being value-neutral, but they’re not. One of my favorite scholars, Peter-Paul Verbeek, speaks of the concept of “persuasive technologies” that either inadvertently or bydesign persuade people to do things that have a moral or ethical dimension. I think self-driving cars are a categorical example of a persuasive technology. By design, they’re intended to persuade people not to drive themselves and thereby avoid putting people’s lives at risk. Unintentionally, however, self-driving cars may also persuade people to drive more often and greater distances by making it more convenient to do so. This has a moral dimension, too. It may increase pollution from driving. It may discourage those who can afford self-driving cars from using public transit, making fares more expensive and routes more limited for those with lower incomes. It’s critical that cities understand this and think through how policies they enact may serve to mediate these kinds of technology persuasion to the benefit or detriment of their chosen values.

In practical terms, what do we need to think about to prepare cities for this disruption in how we use cars?

Here’s an example: The State of Minnesota is set to receive $47 million from a court settlement with Volkswagen over diesel emissions. Up to fifteen percent of that money can be used for expanding vehicle electrification in the state. We’d like the City of Minneapolis to build out electric vehicle infrastructure but do so in a way that supports car sharing and accounts for the downstream introduction of self-driving cars. On the one hand, if you just looked at electric cars in isolation, you might put into your zoning code that buildings with X level of occupancy and Y number of required parking spots must have a certain number of charging stations. But, if instead your goal is to reduce the number of parking ramps in the city by reducing the number of people driving their own cars, it may make more sense to build charging infrastructure into street design to support the convenience of using electric car-sharing services. Now, if you also anticipate that these shared, electric cars could be self-driving in a couple of years, you might want to think about where they’re all going to go to charge themselves at night. In a giant parking lot in some unlucky neighborhood that’s presumably home to a major portion of the city’s low-income residents of color? What if you only build the infrastructure downtown, limiting access to clean, shared vehicles to certain parts of the city? These are critical environmental and equity issues that must be part of how the city initially foresees different alternative futures.

It’s a lot of stakeholders to keep happy.

Yes, the process has to inclusive of different and, sometimes, competing viewpoints. That’s why we’re approaching the initiative as a public-private-community collaboration that includes everyone from land developers, investors, employers, and retailers to specific neighborhood associations, a diverse range of non-profit organizations, and multiple departments of the city government.

Are there other cities that are approaching this in a similarly planful way?

There are many cities that currently have self-driving car pilot projects, including projects that are looking at how self-driving cars can support car-sharing (Pittsburg), transit (New Orleans), and even things like non-emergency medical transport (Hackensack, NJ). There are also some cities like Los Angeles that are developing well-conceived mobility action plans thanks to the work of organizations like the Shared-Use Mobility Center in Chicago, which is also doing a shared-use action plan for the Twin Cities. Cities like Chicago and Washington, DC have done some great proactive work to induce demand for things like bike-sharing, including through significant redesigns of their city streets. But we are not aware of any cities that are working across the public, private, and non-profit sectors to develop a proactive approach to inducing demand for specific value-based outcomes, especially at the nexus of self-driving technology, vehicle electrification, and car-sharing.

But isn’t there a lot more uncertainty about the future of things like self-driving cars than some of these other technologies?

There is no uncertainty about the imminent widespread use of self-driving cars. Every automanufacturer is developing them. There’s a U.S. government policy that explicitly seeks to encourage their use. For me, all uncertainty was gone when the manufacturers started saying that they’d assume liability for accidents resulting from the autonomous technology. If nothing else, your insurance company will see to it that you no longer drive your own car because they won’t underwrite you for a policy to do so. The uncertainty is not about whether or when, but how and why. That’s the uncharted territory of Drive Together MPLS.