Can robots save the human race?
"New mobility" is framed as technology vs. humans. Tech innovators seem to be in a race we can barely comprehend. What's a City Fixer to do?
Autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence, smart cities, the internet of things, mobility as a service...
Transportation is shifting from an engineering industry to a technology industry.
City Fixers are in a white collar panic. They’re taking “new mobility” to task as something that needs to be studied, studied, and studied some more before adoption. Automation has a history of eliminating jobs, and factory-minded professions tend to display slow and weak responses to innovation.
Engineers and planners were trained to be slow and deliberate. That’s a terrific way to plan and build bridges and hospitals, but a terrible way to innovate. A common tactic to preserve the status quo is to treat delays as the grown-up strategy.
“Let’s be conservative until machine learning is perfected.”
“We should take a couple years to develop a long-range mobility plan.”
“Self-driving sensors can’t distinguish pedestrians from light poles.”
Transportation professionals generally look 20 years into the future to develop long-range plans for moving people. And when I say they look into the future, I mean they use current day technology as a guide for what technology people will use to move around.
It’s an embarrassing form of fortune telling. (I was trained in the dark arts.)
Inevitably, a long-range plan includes outdated assumptions like these:
Mobile apps have nothing to do with transportation.
Personal automobiles are the only viable mode of travel.
Employees have no way to work remotely.
Developers are not interested in reducing parking costs.
I’m writing this as we near 2021, and City Fixers still use outdated prediction methods. So what’s the path forward? How can we be free from the shackles of status quo lockdowns on innovation?
There are countless avenues worth exploring. I’ll focus on the City Fixer’s top transportation priority: safety.
I took this picture in Detroit — The Motor City. I figure it’s the best place to start a conversation about the future of mobility.
Have you read any blogs written by city planners or civil engineers? People freak out about artificial intelligence. I’ll grant there are valid data management and security issues. But there’s nuance in those topics, not a Good/Bad lever.
The internet is awash with highly educated and well-meaning professionals intent on keeping things the way they are. Preserving the known.
In the transportation context, nightmare scenarios are described as if Stephen King were the expert:
Self-driving car becomes self-aware, wishes for more fulfilling occupation, drives into bridge embankment destroying shell and killing human occupants.
Fear is a powerful motivator.
Let’s take an imaginary leap forward to the year 2040, and use the benefit of hindsight to solve year 2020 problems.
30,000 to 40,000 Americans were killed in traffic crashes every year for most of the 20th century. Every year. That’s like having a 9/11 terror attack every single month of every single year.
Culture accepted the death toll, having been persuaded it was the price of convenience.
Vision Zero was the initiative to reduce traffic violence to zero deaths and injuries. It took several years to build momentum. What a radical departure from the mainstream doctrine of Vision ThirtyThousand.
Technologists unknowingly sparked the rescue mission. Robots were programmed to design roads for zero traffic deaths. Design speed, lane widths, turning radii, clear zones…
Everything was engineered to protect human life in a way humans refused to do themselves. Turns out humans even had a plethora of manuals and guides to design safe networks, so they didn’t need to write anything new for the robots.
Life in 2040 is a wonderful departure from 2020.
Well-meaning humans used to think in machine scale. Our cultural priority was moving cars and trucks as fast as possible through densely populated environments.
That’s how the trained experts thought back in 2020. But our travel habits and engineering practices shifted with the helping hand of robotics.
Humans once ripped neighborhoods apart with 45 MPH asphalt sewers. Danger was engineered into street networks, and then we watched each other recklessly operate motor vehicles. If it feels good to drive fast, we drive fast.
Thankfully, the machines use data to serve the public interest. The most relevant data point came from virtually every municipal department of transportation across the country: “safety is the number one priority” proclamations were plastered everywhere. Even the slowest programs could grok the goal.
Without emotional or political trappings, computer programs implemented street design concepts that were as old as human civilization. They understood cities, towns, and villages facilitated the exchange of goods, services, and ideas — human interactions.
Machines were programmed to follow the human-scale design. Vehicles now move at our pace.
Transportation systems now exist to safely connect people. Buses are right-sized and automated. Freight and trash are delivered and collected at night and out of our way. Road rage is nonexistent.
Now, in 2040, we’re alive to enjoy each other. Young and old, transportation systems serve and protect.
Technology set us free from dangerous design.
Free from driving vehicles into each other. And more importantly, free from Vision ThirtyThousand.
Robots saved us from the status quo. Robots saved the human race.