I'm just finishing up Peter Norton's excellent book, Autonorama, and came across this lovely metaphor:
The worst news about AVs (automated vehicles) is not that they can't deliver on their promises. In two ways, AVs are not just disappointments by their own standards but actual threats. First, to the extent that they are indeed developed and deployed -- that is, to some fraction of the extent that promoters promise -- AVs are likely to worsen the very aspects of passenger transportation they are supposed to improve. Second, AVs are an attractive but expensive distraction from things we can do today at far less cost that yield affordable, sustainable, equitable, healthful, and efficient mobility. Much as elaborate but ineffectual cigarette filters were an attempt to perpetuate cigaret smoking when it was clear that smoking itself was the problem, AVs are, more than anything else, an attempt to perpetuate car dependency when car dependency itself is the problem.
[See also my Cars are the new Tobacco post, or my post on why robot cars will fail.]
1 comment:
In the large chunks of the nations where the infrastructure and political will to reduce that dependency will take decades to change, is an electric car a useful intermediate step or just a substitute activity?
I'm all for reducing our dependence on the automobile. But, at least in North America, the auto-dependent environment was built over decades. Expecting to dismantle that any time soon is madness. There are strong generationally distributed beliefs in personal freedom accomplished through automobiles. How does that get changed? Sprawl has been subsidized for decades to the point where it's hard to imagine how it could be reined in short of punitive charges to sprawlees that would cause political backlash (or, looking at recent headlines, bodily harm )to proponents. The financial losses of companies built on sprawl and distance (home builders, shopping center builders, car manufacturers, even Amazon [the size they are because you can buy almost anything from almost anywhere]) will result in pushback because auto culture has been very very good to them. The impact of money in the American political system, as well as the emphasis on reelection and on feeding the machine rather than acting in the best interests of the country, would have to be removed or at least neutered, because going without autos trips a lot of very rich wires.
There are many moving parts to this, and, as we've seen with the establishment of the auto-dependent environment to start with and with other large projects over time meant to encourage individual behaviors (like the U.S. tax code), sometimes pushing one thing forces another thing to pop out. Not saying we shouldn't take some steps in the direction of reducing our dependence on the automobile, but it has to be appealing to people. Reducing parking, increasing use fees, and generally making life harder for auto users without offering real alternatives will not get the job done.
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