Self-driving cars are the future

Technologists are working on infusing the objects of public space with data and artificial intelligence.  The futures they are proposing to enable sometimes look remarkably like the futures of the past.   People will be whisked around in self-driving cars which park themselves in parking lots, and make themselves available upon request.  People will still live in residential neighborhoods, and will be taken in these self-driving cars to office parks and shopping centers.  Mom will no longer need to chauffeur the kids to school and soccer practice, the self-driving robot car will transport the kids safely and pick them up when their scheduled activities are done.

Futurists promoting self-driving cars see the technology as a way to preserve the car-dominant paradigm, while overcoming limitations of traffic and parking.

I wonder how much Mountain View’s choice to prevent housing from being built in North Bayshore, preserving Google’s headquarters as an old-school standalone office park will continue to shape the vision of the self-driving car as tool of classic low-density suburban sprawl.

Alternatively, plenty of Google’s engineers are taking the bus down from the city these days – and maybe soon they’ll be in tall buildings in Mission Bay.   Will those engineers see self-driving cars not as the evolution of the suburb-mobile, but the evolution of the taxi and the zipcar.  In an urban context, where the necessities of life are within walking distance, an automobile isn’t a necessity of daily life. Instead, it is a an occasional convenience; a ride back from the bar, a trip out to the mountains.

This blog comment makes the case that mathematically self-driving cars still can’t solve traffic congestion when human social patterns create peak travel times.  In that case, and in the world of gradually re-urbanizing suburbia, the self-driving car will be a more efficient first-and-last mile connection to transit services.

It is not at all clear how self-driving cars will interact with pedestrians and cyclists, children and pets.  Will the unpredictable nature of these street intruders lead to calls to for further restrictions on uses of the street? Or by the time self-driving cars make their way to market, will people demand that these wheeled robots be programmed with respect to respect and accommodate the humans using the street as a place?

Or, will the debate between urbanists and suburbanists be inscribed in different use-cases for different types of places, and will the places themselves be designed for these scenarios?  Will Phoenix and Atlanta ban pedestrians from local streets, further limiting the movements of the old, young, and poor, while those who can afford self-driving cars are whisked to their destinations.  Meanwhile, will Portland and parts of Europe move cars outside the city and  require self-driving taxis travel at casual streetcar speeds?

Early visions of the future often forsee automation of the patterns of the present.  They take the social patterns as a given. The uses of emerging transportation technologies are affected by expectations and understandings of land use patterns.