A New Urban Myth: Hype + VC Finance Take-Over Our Roads

11 December 2018

A New Urban Myth: Hype + VC Finance Take-Over Our Roads

Now that the AVs - Autonomous Vehicles - have appeared - a guy who should know everything about how cars and people don’t get along, having been on the front lines for more than 50 years, has published a book. This book — written in an earnest, conversational style — is his attempt to grapple with a fresh threat that’s appeared after decades of progress.

Samuel Schwartz, who served as New York City’s traffic commissioner in the 1980s, was nicknamed “Gridlock Sam” for his devotion to the conundrum of traffic (and for coining the loathsome term).
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/books/review
"Futurists may have promised us flying cars, but what we’re going to get instead are driverless ones, and Schwartz’s is the first comprehensive analysis of what that will mean on the ground. Most likely, there will be far fewer fatalities. With nearly 40,000 people killed in 2017 in the United States alone, that’s a huge benefit. But cars that can drive themselves will bring with them other knotty societal problems. . .
Imagining What Happens When the Robots Take the Wheel
(Book review in New York Times by Matthew DeBord Nov. 27, 2018)

NO ONE AT THE WHEEL
Driverless Cars and the Road of the Future
By Samuel I. Schwartz
272 pp. PublicAffairs. $30.

An appalling statistic appears toward the end of “No One at the Wheel,” Samuel Schwartz’s valuable primer on self-driving cars: In the century since the automobile arrived on the scene, 70 million people have been killed by it, and four billion injured. . .

By next year, both General Motors’ self-driving unit, Cruise, and Alphabet’s Waymo (formerly the Google Car) aim to have driverless cars available for ride-hailing services in major American cities. And that’s just the beginning. Schwartz figures that autonomous vehicles, or A.V.s, will arrive in huge numbers in the decades ahead, bringing cheaper mobility options, improved safety, reduced pollution thanks to the electric motors they will favor, but also profound ethical dilemmas — namely, the restaging of the conflict between walking and driving. . . cars that can drive themselves will bring with them other knotty societal problems.

The advent of smartphone-enabled businesses like Uber and Lyft has accelerated this disruption, as Schwartz points out. The riches are plainly in sight: Cruise was valued at over $14 billion, and one Wall Street bank thinks Waymo could be worth $175 billion.

These players want to launch autonomous mobility services quickly to gain market share, leaving until later the debugging of the ensuing mayhem . . .

We should have better thought it through the last time around. If we heed Gridlock Sam and this valuable, humane book as we move toward a future in which we largely surrender the wheel, we can avoid messing up again.

From his perspective, we don’t have a choice.

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