Autonomous Vehicles and Our Cities
When I first heard about autonomous vehicles (at the time they were still fictitious and I little), the idea drowned my imagination with possibilities -what would be conceivable in our commuting? What our transport routes would look like? And whether I would feel safe looking over to an empty driver seat with self-moving steering wheel. All of that seems less imaginary today, we already have autonomous vehicles using our old roads, following our signal paths, and making sure to stay clear of peoples’ way — okay, that last one didn’t go so well. But imagine with me what the possibilities would be for this technology to replace our obsolete modes of transport that have material and health costs. I will refer to Autonomous Vehicles as AV’s from now on.
Our last seminar focused on the possibilities and obstacles of AV’s on our cities. I was really compelled by Ricardo’s and Carlo’s optimism to how AV’s can better our lives, that while much change would be needed to integrate AV’s in our daily lives, it is still possible to integrate them in the current socioeconomic system. Carlo’s article “How autonomous vehicles could transform the cities” discusses four issues on how AV’s would do to improve our lives thoughtfully.
I imagine with AV’s integration, ownership would shift from singular-owners towards service-based business model. Vehicles would be less perceived as items of possession, but rather utility, users would use AV’s more like how we use Uber and Lyft today. On the flip side, I grew up in Dubai for 15 years where cars make up part of the locals’ identities, and much like Texas, the larger the better. So cultural stigma might make the transition slower, or even less likely. I would have to think more about how AV’s would reform societies’ perception of transport in contexts that are attached to their automobiles.
We sprung off to issues of policy and taxation and how they would evolve to this growing technology. Streets, for starters, would be more efficient with less accidents, less congestion, and less cars occupying them. I asked our group how the transition from the current modes of transportation would be possible as I would imagine it would require a re-configuration of our existing systems today. We built for cars and human drivers, we put stop lights and signs, crossovers, wider streets with multiple lanes, and so on. Now we would have to not only go back to the drawing board, but we also have to account for existing asphalt streets and parking areas/structures. I worked on planning the roads for the masterplans of large projects in the Middle East and North America, and it was a complicated task to integrate older roads (that are expensive to tear down) into new networks of transport, for example.
I believe the Wired article “Self-Driving Cars Will Improve Our Cities. If They Don’t Ruin Them” falsely suggests that our transition to AV’s would be fairly easy, as it took us to migrate from carriages and horses to automobiles a period of 50 years. Moving to mobilized transport had clear lands ready to be carved out, designed for plots, and faced less physical obstacles to build these roads than we do today. I wonder if AV’s would utilize a different infrastructural system, as I believe the ones we have today are designed by human intuition providing unpredictability for machines.
To build another comparison, think about the flying vestibules, I saw they are being experimented with in cities like Singapore and Dubai. I would imagine the transition to this mode of transport not only be more possible, but also efficient in the sense there is less infrastructure to destroy. We discussed how as a result of AV’s, for example, there will be less need for wide roads, slowly changing the way transport planners and urban designers view arterials when designing larger pieces of land.
I was most intrigued by the possibility of AV’s and artificial intelligence (AI) to provide the platform of being artists: those who do not have to perform rudimentary tasks but instead strive toward their passion, taking us closer to Constant Nieuwenhuys’ utopia in New Babylon. The societal shift leans toward curation of our own lives, and how we can be our own artists. In other words, people start going after their passions, whereas AI takes care of the repetitive job one would otherwise have to take.
