Yes, You Can Mix Self-Driving Cars And Urbanism

By reinventing what the car means, self-driving cars will change how cities work, too. Many “urbanists” are wary of self-driving cars, seeing them as “just more cars,” as they see cars as the root of the problems in cities.

If all that gets deployed is personal vehicles, though, only some of the benefits happen. There can be even more negatives–as robocars make car travel better and cheaper, that naturally means it will be more popular. On its own, that could mean more car-miles-travelled, more congestion and even more crashes, in spite of the abilities of the robocars to reduce congestion and crashes on a per-mile or per-vehicle basis.

A mistake, however, would be to focus on a particular solution. The right thing to do is focus on goals, and motivate others so they will figure out how to make those goals happen. It’s not usually a city’s job to innovate; their job is to protect the public interest and the interests of residents.

I’ve written about the goals, and my shortest summary of them is as follows:

People want to get everywhere quickly, reliably, safely, cheaply, comfortably and easily, any time, while not overly disrupting others. They also want to serve various specialized individual needs, from moving cargo to sightseeing. Society wants to help all the people get this, with low externalities (like emissions and street disruption,) with low public spending and lasting into the future.

The good news is that self-driving vehicles are much better behaved than the human driven cars (and pedestrians and cyclists) we are familiar with. If a rule is made or a goal is set, they will follow it. You can tell human drivers not to speed, fine them if they speed, but they will still speed. With self-driving vehicles, there will only be a handful of different systems in the city. If one type of vehicle is misbehaving, they can be talked to. All the different teams can gather in a room and work out problems and solutions.