Technological change, part 2: Autonomous vehicles
Two cars navigate around each other at the DARPA Urban Challenge.
In part 1, I speculated about the effect of automated systems to build complete tunnels that could drastically cut the cost of building heavy rail subways and trains. I also suggested DARPA fund research into this.
One area of research DARPA is funding in the realm of transportation is autonomous vehicles. They’re not just having teams design cars to navigate tricky off-road obstacles anymore: the most recent challenges require autonomous vehicles to navigate in traffic, obey stop signs, park, and more. Completely automated cars that can drive anywhere aren’t so far away.
What will that mean for our settlement patterns? On the one hand, longer commutes won’t be so painful. A long-distance commuter can settle in and watch some TV, read, or do work while his car navigates to the office. (Gas prices will still make this a more expensive proposition, of course.)
On the other hand, autonomous vehicles would improve the urban quality of life dramatically as well. Road accidents should plummet with the computer’s higher reaction times and inability to get drunk. (Occasionally systems might break down, but I predict that would happen much less often than humans breaking down.) We could operate transit vehicles much more cheaply without needed bus or train drivers.
Perhaps most significantly, we’d also need a lot less parking. Why have your own car when you can just press a button on your iPhone 6G and have a Zipcar come to you. Or, if it’s autonomous, maybe the better analogy is a fleet of ubiquitous driverless and cheap taxis (and, as Ryan has been discussing, primarily electric).
Until researchers perfect autonomous vehicles, we can improve auto utilization in other ways with technology. Via Arlington’s CommuterPageBlog, discusses the iHitch, a concept for an electronic device that lets drivers and potential ride-hitchers find each other and exchange a small fee for a ride somewhere the driver is already going. It’s still just an idea, but with so many seats going empty in individual vehicles driving everywhere, all the time, it’s an area ripe for innovation.