Roadblock: Are cities ready for autonomous vehicles?
Implementation of innovative urban concepts using driverless vehicles require closer review and further estimation from urban planning perspectives. For example, existing urban infrastructure, developed for humans, includes easy readable signs and simply understandable signals. But do we need the same framework for driverless vehicles? Illumination of traffic lights and signs in urban areas will certainly upgrade cities and open up the streets. Therefore, while autonomous vehicle manufacturers focused on developing sensors and navigation systems to make self-driving cars travel the streets with ordinary cars and on the roads, that were constructed for previous century cars, urban planners and policy makers ought to proactively focus on urban infrastructure.
When we are talking about future urban infrastructure it is necessary to understand that the smart cities and driverless vehicles must be an integrated system, that provides not only safety and control of motion for all traffic participants, but also enables continuous improvement and employ a data-driven policymaking. The urban policymaking that helps manage and transform a city.
“The battle is to create a space in which the question is not how we get ready for self-driving vehicles but rather what kind of city we want.”
Jarrett Walker, president, Jarrett Walker + Associates
Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York, said during the CityLab 2016 summit of 400 global leaders in Miami, “The advent of autonomous cars is one of the most exciting developments ever to happen to cities. And if mayors collaborate with one another, and with partners in the private sector, they can improve people’s lives in ways we can only imagine today.” There are many aspects such as social, environmental, and economic that autonomous vehicles are going to affect. It is a matter of time when we’ll see active transformation of cities that makes them ready for the autonomous vehicles expansion. And all these transformations are not achievable without a robust data. The data that could be collected from the sensor system of smart cities. This system as a part of integrated structure should be developed nationwide to make the infrastructure of cities friendlier to autonomous vehicles.
