I spend a lot of time commuting, as I generally drive around 80 miles a day to get to and from work. With that time in my car, I also spend a lot of time sitting in traffic. Now, I get a lot of reading done on these trips—thanks, recorded books!—but I also spend a lot of time thinking about all of the other people sharing the roads with me. Are we all in the same boat (so to speak)? Probably. And then I get to work and hear about autonomous vehicles (AVs), and the processors that will be required to make them. I immediately jump to the end of the scenario: what a dream, to be able to use an automated service to do the driving for me. Instead of subjecting myself to the dangers of the other crazy drivers on the road (certainly not me , I’m the perfect driver!) (ha), all of the vehicles will be all connected to each other, and complicated AI algorithms will manage the congestion, and poof! Traffic jams are gone. ADAS systems ensure that we’re all safe. My fellow commuters and I will be able to work, read, sleep, practice the oboe, write poetry, knit blankets for our armadillos, meditate, do crossword puzzles, watch movies, make papier-mâché sculptures—all from the safety and smooth sailing of our AVs. We could play chess, too! But what is the real price of getting rid of traffic? Smarter people than I are only just starting to tackle this question. To put it mildly, there are vastly differing projected outcomes. San Cleveyorkucson Let’s consider a fictional city, let’s call it San Cleveyorkucson, where the only transportation is AVs. (We’ll assume that the challenges of having mixed transportation has already been overcome, and now only AVs are on the roads.) In this city, there are tech centers, industrial areas, service areas, hospitals, schools, maybe even a university or college; there is also low-income housing, luxury neighborhoods, and those in-between. There are public transportation and single occupancy robo-taxis; there are autonomous delivery vehicles and drones and shared AVs. San Cleveyorkucson First, let’s think about the design of the city itself. All of the current parking garages, all the fuel stations, all the auto service centers, even all the places that sell cars—all of this space will become space that can be utilized for something else. Imagine the urban gardens, the public spaces that can take the place of some of this current concrete. Streets themselves could become narrower and can be “re-programmed” over the course of the day to accommodate traffic flows, events, pedestrians, emergency vehicles. Yay, no more traffic! The AVs are managed such that even when there are more vehicles on the road, they are managed such that speed is still maintained, with no hindrance to getting from site A to site B. Semis and other freight vehicles run at night, further reducing traffic and increasing safety. The elderly and disabled will have a new sense of mobility that will solve so many problems. Sprawl So what is to prevent the Smith family from moving way outside of the city limits? Mr. and Mrs. Smith can work during their hours-long AV commute, so what’s the problem with them moving? One problem is that of urban sprawl. City planners, the guardians of natural habitats and productive agricultural grounds, tend to frown on this. The environmental ramifications alone are problematic at best (unless these AVs are electric, powered by solar farms). San Cleveyorkucson could experience cancerous growth beyond the reaches of the city borders and into that wild beyond. Urban blight may appear as all the upwardly-mobile workforce moves away from the city, relying on AVs to get them to and from work. Suburbs of Las Vegas, an example of urban sprawl In addition, my city planner friend also points out that: “… over the very long term, sprawl makes it difficult to generate the revenue needed to maintain the infrastructure. A lot of our current problems with roads, bridges, waterlines, etc. can be attributed to decades of development at densities that are not fiscally sustainable.” This is a good point, one that I hadn’t considered before. Interestingly, however, in this article , another model comes to mind. “The emergence of AVs helpfully coincides with a change in the structure of cities, says Shlomo Angel, an urban-studies expert at New York University. He argues that the monocentric model, with a center surrounded by suburbs, is a thing of the past. In many large American and European cities, jobs are moving from downtown to the periphery, and workers increasingly commute from one suburb to another, rather than to and from the center. His analysis shows that 75% of jobs in a typical American city are outside the urban center. In European and Asian cities with dense public-transport networks this decentralization is easier to cope with, but retrofitting the necessary infrastructure onto American cities would be too expensive. “American cities need door-to-door transport systems to get to work, and driverless cars will play this role beautifully,” says Mr. Angel. Maybe the problem of sprawl will become its own solution. Public Transportation Another problem may arise about public transportation. For a city to be truly healthy, all income levels must be able to live and work there. For the lower income levels, using AVs regularly may not be an economic reality and they must rely on public transit. That said, it could be that city managers may determine that due to the ubiquity of AVs, they no longer need to fund busses or subways or trolleys. According to the article cited above: “A study by UC Davis found that among Uber and Lyft riders in America, bus use fell by 6% and light-rail use by 3%. … This might discourage further investment in public transport, which in turn could create more “transit deserts” where large numbers of people (typically the poor and the elderly) depend on public transport but get an inadequate service.” De-funding the “luxury” of transportation is the first step in making people with low incomes move away from this utopia of San Cleveyorkucson. And once they start leaving, you have problems with gentrification: the poor leave, the wealthy move in to displace them, and the economic structure of the city starts to cave in on itself, leading teachers and police officers and service members and other middle-income levels to not be able to afford to live there. (See: San Francisco, Hong Kong, New York, Los Angeles, even my hometown of Santa Cruz…) It could be that a public AV fleet will solve the public transportation problem, however. Pricing models for AVs that cost the same as a BART or light rail or bus ride could make public transportation as it currently exists obsolete. Why even bother maintaining the tracks when the same number of commuters can be accommodated by ride-sharing AVs? It will become a challenge in building the proper infrastructure and developing pricing models thoughtfully and with this kind of growth in mind. The Answers to These Questions Sorry to get your hopes up, I don’t have the answers; I’m by no means an expert. Working at Cadence, where we build the tools that enable the chips/boards/systems that will build the future, I can’t help but try to follow the ramifications of our work on the rest of the world. Better processors, better testing, better verification, better simulation, better emulation—these are all required for us to get to true level-5 autonomy in transportation, and we at Cadence are no doubt a part of the AV revolution. I just want to be sure that those enabling the AV future will follow the logical steps to where this new technology will take us. —Meera Things I Read for This Post https://www.economist.com/special-report/2018/03/01/a-chance-to-transform-urban-planning An exceptionally interesting article in a special report on autonomous driving; the entire series is well-researched and thoughtful. https://www.facebook.com/meeracollier/posts/10214426068418739 I posed the question to the people following me on Facebook and got some fantastic and interesting replies; thanks to everyone who spent some time hashing this over with me! Take a look, if you’re interested in the comments that were added to my informal poll. And add your thoughts, if you’re so inclined!![]()
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