The self-driving car in tomorrow’s cities: heaven or hell?

A group of companies led by transportation expert and Zipcar founder Robin Chase that includes transport research institutes, NGOs, consultants, and a long and varied list of companies in the field of mobility (up to 17) companies including BlaBlaCar, Citymapper, Didi, Lyft, Mobike, Ofo, Ola, Uber or Zipcar has published 10 shared principles for livable cities. But some of the proposals have already prompted an angry response, notably the group’s tenth and final recommendation banning private ownership of autonomous vehicles in inner cities, which instead would be operated exclusively on a shared basis and run by fleets.

In reality, this is a far from radical idea and one that is shared by most transportation experts, as I’ve noted in previous posts: there are two possible scenarios for autonomous vehicles in cities: the hell scenario, in which individual ownership just means more traffic chaos as we use them to go shopping, pick the kids up from school and clog up our streets as we drive round looking for somewhere to park. The heaven scenario is where we hire from a range of self-driving vehicles from fleets, either on a shared basis or individually, thereby significantly reducing the amount of traffic on our roads. The first scenario pretty much continues the system by which we own vehicles we only use 5% of time, while the latter differs in…