Kaid Benfield and Lee Epstein aren’t convinced that intelligent vehicles and automated highways are a good thing:
While it may be conceivable for bright engineers, planners and designers to come up with ways to fit such systems carefully and properly into people-first, walkable urban environments, at a minimum that fitting needs to be done as the systems are conceived and tested rather than as an errant afterthought. Likewise for the possibility that these systems will exacerbate sprawl: there are policy approaches that can moderate the spread and extension of highways, and/or to keep sprawling growth to a minimum – but, again, the track record is not inspiring. These policies need to be considered, developed and adequately applied concurrently with the application of the new technologies, before the damage is inevitable. …
[J]ust because it’s high tech doesn’t make it better.
Indeed, there are lots of “old fashioned” things we need to get right about our cities, urban regions, and transportation systems before we play with expensive new technology that still doesn’t solve those basic problems: we would place a higher priority on ensuring that cities are safe, hospitable to all, walkable, a pleasure to be in, and green (both naturally, and existentially); on urban/suburban regions that have defined limits, conserving important resource lands around them; and on transportation systems that help us get efficiently from point A to point B, but which take fully into account the first two problems as effectively as they solve the last.
Lloyd Alter thinks they ignore the “larger, longer term implications” of self-driving vehicles:
Last year the Institute Without Boundaries put a lot of smart people in a room to think about the issue. They concluded that the autonomous car is going to evolve into a very different vehicle. … Henry Ford is purported to have said “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” The autonomous car is at that “faster horse” stage, where we think of it as being pretty much what we have now, driven by robots. I suspect it is going to be as different a mode of transportation from what we are driving now as the car is from the horse.
The autonomous car will likely be shared, smaller, lighter, slower, and there will likely be about a tenth as many of them. Urban planners and theorists have to start thinking about this or we will screw it up again.
The Dish 