After decades of relative stagnation, the world of transportation is on the cusp of multiple revolutions. The biggest three:
- Electrification: a shift from internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles to electric vehicles (EVs)
- Automation: a shift from human-piloted vehicles to automated vehicles (AVs) that drive themselves
- Ride-sharing: a shift from privately owned, often single-occupant vehicles to fleets of shared cars, vans, and small and large buses
There has been a great deal of discussion about how these revolutions will proceed. Urbanists, who have been fighting for decades to shift the focus of urban planners away from cars to a more holistic vision, with a wider variety of transportation options (“multimodal”) and more land devoted to pro-social uses, are particularly interested in these interactions.
For urbanists, these coming transportation revolutions might portend heaven — fewer cars, less parking, more places for biking, walking, and gathering — or they might portend a hell of more cars, more vehicle miles traveled, worse congestion, and more sprawl.
Which of these two futures comes to pass, or what mix of the two, does not depend on technology. It depends on us — our willingness to discuss, debate, and plan for the future we want.
Unlike the headline, this article makes it clear that we have a choice for the future, which might make things better or might make things worse. From an American perspective, the authors doubt if the US is prepared to accept the planning that would be needed for the low-cost, low emissions, high-convenience future. In Europe we tend to be more willing to accept planning – sometimes! But the essence remains that there is a choice to be made, and that choice will need to be made over the next 5-10 years.
Q & LBM
But, even here, the “Magic of the Market” proponents are shouting, if not from the rooftops (yet) that “Self-driving cars will make public transport obsolete”
As you know, I am of the opposite opinion & agree that even self-driving, autonomous vehicles will still take up road-space & certainly in city centres, there isn’t going to be space for them.
It’s going to be an interesting (political as well as industrial & social ) fight.