Vehicle automation is an evolution that we control

We need to stop seeing vehicle automation as a disruption that will “happen to us” and start seeing it as a long evolution that we can influence. A long trail of changes.

Sometimes fast. Sometimes surprising. Sometimes frustrating. Sometimes alarming. Seldom able to turn back.

Think in terms of “genetically modified mobility”. Both intentional and experimental.

This does not make it easier. It makes it more challenging. More unsettling. And, I think, more interesting. But with more potential. It means that we need to take some responsibility for the innovations that shape urban mobility as the autonomous vehicle becomes pervasive and persuasive, regardless of whether that is 2022 or 2032. Or 2042.

That is what I work through in the courses and workshops I lead.

The word disruption is generally misused and misunderstood. Disruption is portrayed as technology that will bring grief to some participants — say job loss or business loss — but disruption is about a change in business habits, structures or outcomes. A new technology may be the catalyst, but it is not itself the disruption.

For example, if nothing changed about personal car ownership, except that its steering wheel goes missing — i.e., if every family still owned the same number of vehicles and used them the same amount of time, drove them the same distances, parked them just as often in all the same places, then there would be little disruption to the business of personal car-owning, storing, financing, and caring from the perspective of urban planning.

Of course, if the energy source changes from oil to electric then both the fossil and renewable energy businesses would be disrupted. If the fatality rate drops dramatically, then the donor-organ business would be disrupted. There might be some changes in the vehicle sale-care-and-repair businesses or family-vehicle insurance premiums in balance with lower crash rates, but these are minor by comparison to the potential disruption in traffic flow and management.

In this scenario, the City remains undisrupted, or perhaps worse-off from a traffic management perspective. Regardless, a once-in-a-century opportunity will have been squandered.

BUT if 80% of today’s car-owners chose to stop owning a personal vehicle and start using automated for-hire vehicles or if 80% of today’s transit users switched to robotaxis the businesses of car making and selling or the business of public transit respectively is what would be disrupted.

So we do expect disruption. We just don’t know which. We don’t know how soon — or how much.

Much more important than all this future guess-work, is that we don’t ask often enough or hard enough how we could influence these disruptive outcomes by way of what we can plan now. Not what we imagine and plan for 2040 or 2050, but what we can do now. Today. In 2020, 2022, and 2025.

Can we choose between the disruption of the multiple car ownership businesses or the disruption of public transit? Big Auto can. Silicon Valley can. And they are doing that for us while we wait.

We claim to know what we want. So how can we prepare our cities? Us. Not “them”.

My next scheduled course is in Surrey, BC December 5-6. After that, Barcelona, Spain February 4-6. Then Seattle, WA, March 10-11.