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10 | AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES 
Intertraffic World | Annual Showcase 2015
AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES | 11 
The 
end of 
driving 
The world waits in anticipation for the first self-driving 
cars. But after all the impossible pieces 
are sorted and the wonder dissipates, what will the 
world be like? And will there be some unintended 
consequences that belie optimistic predictions of today? 
Words | Bern Grush and John Niles 
Annual Showcase 2015 | Intertraffic World 
The fully autonomous vehicle is increasingly 
an object of fascination, ridicule and 
hype. Opinions on market viability for this 
innovation range from 2017 to 2060 – or 
later. The autonomous vehicle promises so 
many benefits that some see it as an escape 
from the unintended tyranny of today’s 
motorized vehicles. To greet this new utopia, 
there are calls for changes in how we plan 
transportation; demands for paradigm shifts. 
There are also contrasting tendencies 
to see the self-driving car (SDC) as 
unlikely for a long time, a marketing ploy, 
or an interesting idea with more flaws than 
benefits. Whichever way opinions go, they 
are usually viewed through a technological 
lens. The SDC will be safer because it will 
never be distracted. It will see more and 
respond more quickly. It will be cleaner 
because it can be smaller and lighter. It will 
reduce congestion because it will follow 
more closely and have fewer accidents. 
Alternatively, naysayers argue that it 
is too complicated. It can’t work in snow. 
To greet the new autonomous 
utopia there are calls for changes 
in how we plan transportation; 
demands for paradigm shifts
12 | AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES 
SDCs need to be far safer than human drivers. Who 
will be liable? And so on. 
Chris Urmson, director of the Google car team, 
is targeting 20191 while Todd Litman predicts 2114.2 
According to the estimates of eight transportation 
consultants in Intertraffic World’s sister title, Traffic 
Technology International, 80% of all vehicles will be 
fully autonomous by 2045. If you average all such 
opinions, estimates fluctuate between 2035 and 2045. 
What will happen when we get there? 
Some see the autonomous vehicle as a boon to car 
and ride sharing. Just look at current trends in car 
use among Millennials to extrapolate a great deal 
of such sharing – or so the thinking goes. But these 
straight-line predictions are unreliable. 
The self-driving vehicle has already dangerously 
distracted the automotive imagination from the 
critically important electric vehicle to the new thrill 
of a robotic, effortless ‘Jetson’ comfort bubble. The 
tedium of debating EV range has been replaced by 
dreams of texting while driving. Technologies that 
have important social potential are being hijacked 
by the lure of personal advantage. 
Surely the autonomous vehicle – as a 
technological wonder and engineering marvel – 
will be solved by logical processes. Of its solution 
there is little doubt, barring disagreement on 
‘when’. What matters far more is whether the 
autonomous vehicle will relieve us from the burden 
of the current motor car, from which we wish to 
escape. The SDC will not do so of its own accord, 
nor will it do so via merely technical processes. 
Intelligent consequences 
Motorized automobility is a good thing, but our 
achievement of it has gone badly. The autonomous 
vehicle could relieve this problem or make it worse. 
The SDC, if unpacked principally for its marketing 
and profit value, as is highly likely, will become 
Motor companies such as 
Nissan are keen on the 
concept of autonomous cars. 
This one was on display at 
the Geneva Motor Show on 
March 6, 2014 
Intertraffic World | Annual Showcase 2015 
another Faustian bargain, evident shortly after 
pervasive deployment, just as was our trade of the 
horse for the car within two decades of the arrival 
of the Model T. 
The deployment of the autonomous vehicle is 
already much less a technological problem than a 
social one. Certainly there is a lot of engineering 
work left to do – perhaps a couple hundred 
thousand person-years. But as the ‘father of the 
hydrogen bomb’ Edward Teller pointed out, 
“human problems are very often solved, and rightly 
solved, by illogical processes”.3 Every behavioral 
economist offers the same lesson. 
It is possible to imagine, with a world population 
of autonomous vehicles the same size as today’s 
motor vehicle count, providing four times as many 
person miles traveled (PMT) as we do with current 
worldwide vehicle miles traveled (VMT). 
Whether or not we view the problems of today’s 
automobile as unintended consequences, we can 
hardly rely on that excuse if the SDC results in 2.4 
vehicles for every human on the planet by 2108; if 
the SDC ends public transit; if obesity quadruples; if 
The Edag Light car is an 
attempt to solve excessive 
vehicle ownership and 
pollution at once: it’s a sharing 
concept designed to be 
100% electric, with induction 
charging in its parking spaces
this time we know it. This time there will be 
far fewer unintended consequences – just 
unintelligent ones. 
We are only human 
It may be fair to class most of our current 
automobile problems as unintended 
consequences. They were not only 
unintended – they were unforeseeable at 
their origin. But now, as we stand on the 
cusp of another revolution in automobility, 
we have some important models of how 
these things work. We have the lessons 
of both the horse and the automobile. We 
have the Jevons paradox that says when 
we make consumption of a resource more 
efficient, we’ll use more. While transport 
isn’t a resource in its purest sense, it is 
nevertheless true that the easier we have 
made it to travel around this world, the 
more we have tended to do so. We have 
clear lessons that within the success of any 
idea, any technology or any revolution, is 
AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES | 13 
the germ of its demise. What would prevent 
the SDC from suffering the same fate as the 
horse and the non-autonomous vehicle? – ie, 
the fate of being ‘too successful’ – whatever 
that will mean for the SDC. 
If we are to be smarter in the 21st century 
than we were in the 19th or 20th, we need to 
set the stage for intelligent consequences. 
Certainly it will be harder to rely on the 
‘unintended’ excuse. How can we prevent 
excessive numbers of overused, misused 
and oversized SDCs? Better yet, how can 
we deploy SDCs to increase person miles 
traveled (PMT) – a good outcome – without 
increasing the vehicle population? 
The answer, we already know, lies 
in sharing – robo-cabs, robo-buses, 
robo-shuttles, robo-jitneys, robo-shares, 
robo-co-ops – all in support of mobility as 
a service (MaaS). So the question becomes: 
“How do we dramatically increase PMT 
in shared vehicles and decrease VMT by 
single-owner (unshared) vehicles?” 
Annual Showcase 2015 | Intertraffic World 
cycling and walking rates fall to near zero; if 
the roads we have then are still not enough; 
if there is more asphalt than forest; if 15% of 
the world’s population is living in vehicles. 
Given what we know now, such 
consequences would amount to unintelligent 
consequences. Certainly they are 
unintended, but we can imagine them. 
In fact, these dangers have already been 
predicted. No one in 1808 guessed that 
in 1908 some cities would be ankle-deep 
in horse manure. No one in 1908 could 
imagine an everyday, multi-hour gridlock 
in many world cities, even though that had 
already started in some US cities less than 
20 years later. But today – 10 years after 
Sebastian Thrun won the 2005 DARPA Grand 
Challenge and four years since he left 
Stanford to join Google – we can question 
how the autonomous vehicle will change us 
over its first 100 years. 
The autonomous vehicle provides tons 
of good potential – and tons of bad. But 
This time there will be fewer opportunities 
for unimagined consequences, but many 
more opportunities for unintelligent ones
14 | AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES 
Cultural Theory ➜ 
Recognize that contradictory 
perspectives can be addressed 
Clumsy Solutions ➜ 
Find solutions inclusive of 
contradictory perspectives 
This is likely to be a larger problem than the 
technology of the autonomous vehicle itself, due to 
the tremendous attraction of vehicle ownership – its 
personalization, its expression of social status, sense 
of independence and accomplishment. It is not 
enough to point to rich-country Millennials and say: 
“See how they drive less? That will be the future.” 
It is not enough to point to evidence of peak-car. 
The world vehicle population has a doubling time 
of 17 years. That means four billion cars by 2050. Is 
that okay as long as they are all SDCs? Or can that 
doubling time be transformed to PMT while holding 
VMT constant? Can we quadruple PMT by 2050 
with the same fleet size as now? 
Perhaps – but it will be neither as easy as we 
wish nor as difficult as we might imagine. 
Additional perspectives 
Changing the majority human preference 
– stated or revealed – for owning and using 
personal motorized vehicles will be much harder 
than building autonomous transportation systems 
themselves. We’ll need to look for solutions outside 
the customary frameworks of transportation 
sciences, traffic network design and urban 
planning. That is not to say that these structured 
approaches are inappropriate – only that, while 
necessary, they are insufficient. 
The sizeable body of work developed by 
sociologists and behavioral economists can be 
Wicked Problems ➜ 
Appreciate the lack of shared 
understanding 
Intertraffic World | Annual Showcase 2015 
used to parse and address complex, large-group 
human behavior problems. It may provide insight 
into how we can change the preference for owning 
motorized vehicles into a pervasive preference for 
sharing them (see table above). 
A wicked future? 
Labeling hard problems as ‘wicked’ sounds 
pessimistic, but it encourages solution seekers to 
appreciate that there is not a perfect solution, so 
that when an argument is won or a compromise is 
reached and a solution adopted, the problem will 
go away. It won’t. At best it will change, hopefully 
for the better. An example is the automobile, which 
addressed the problem created by over-reliance 
on the horse but soon gave us a new problem. 
Sustainability commentators now fill volumes 
decrying our failed attempts to nudge travelers 
away from over-reliance on the automobile. What 
will happen next as we wend our way toward the 
21st century autonomous vehicle as a solution to 
the 20th century motorcar? How will we frame and 
manage our new wicked problem? 
Solutions to wicked problems are neither 
right nor wrong; they are just better or worse. 
The clumsy solutions we invoke will be seen as 
more or less acceptable than other solutions or 
the status quo. Transportation has always been 
demanding in both cost and environmental 
degradation, and as the planet becomes more 
crowded and its wealth-yearning humans demand 
more, transportation will grow in wickedness and 
its solutions (hopefully) in clumsiness. This nature 
of transportation problems and solutions cannot be 
avoided, so we need to develop as many solutions 
as possible and find ways to make the clumsy 
Human preference for 
owning a dedicated personal 
vehicle is an example of 
a wicked problem, a type 
of problem that is difficult 
– perhaps impossible – to 
solve because of incomplete, 
contradictory and changing 
requirements and attributes. 
Wicked problems make it 
difficult to find consensus 
for change, or even for the 
direction of change. Why are 
wicked problems so difficult 
to solve? Because each of us 
has different ways of thinking, 
according to the model 
of social discourse called 
cultural theory. 
Cultural theory is guided 
by one of four perspectives 
on life: individualism, 
egalitarianism, hierarchy 
and fatalism. Each of these 
perspectives describes 
only a partial framework 
for reality, and each is both 
mutually contradictory and 
complementary to the others. 
In other words, none of us 
can see a solution that would 
satisfy all perspectives4. What 
limits us is that we continue to 
argue our perspective in these 
debates as though we will 
eventually win over the other 
side. We won’t. Certainly not 
sufficiently to settle the issue. 
Cultural theory teaches 
us ways to identify clumsy 
solutions – those that provide 
a holistic perspective on 
reality. Rather than being a 
perfect fit for any particular 
life perspective, they combine 
competing views. They are 
called clumsy because they 
appear imperfect to everyone, 
but such solutions are more 
resilient to conflict since 
they incorporate elements 
of all perspectives. They are 
negotiated to be inclusive 
of as many as three of the 
four rational perspectives 
(the fatalistic perspective is 
self-excluding). 
A domain of behavioral 
economics, choice architecture 
helps us to understand 
how personal choices are 
influenced by the manner in 
which options are presented 
(as nudges) to the consumer 
or user. Often this may 
mean simply the order 
in which options are 
presented, but it can be 
much more. It’s also 
important to consider how 
context, cost, availability, 
convenience, evident 
consequences and any other 
factors can influence how 
choice is communicated and 
decisions are shaped. 
We’ll need to look for solutions outside the 
customary frameworks of transportation sciences, 
traffic network design and urban planning 
Choice Architecture 
Present users with choices in 
a way to optimize outcomes
AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES | 17 
The automobile addressed the problem 
created by over-reliance on the horse but 
soon gave us a new problem 
Annual Showcase 2015 | Intertraffic World 
solutions that are adopted and implemented more 
acceptable, i.e. more often chosen for use by the 
population for whom the solution is implemented. 
Success means acceptance 
It is insufficient to define a problem and then design 
optimal solutions without also determining ways 
to be sure that the solutions will be adopted by a 
sufficient number of users or in intended ways. It is 
in this that many of today’s transit deployments fail 
to deliver hoped-for results. 
Parts of the impending solution to automobility 
– a new ecosystem called autonomous vehicles 
– will involve the manner in which we manage 
distribution, ownership, storage, operation, 
access and so on. These are problems calling 
out for clumsiness. The individualist (and auto 
manufacturers!) might see autonomous vehicles 
as safer enablers for more effective automobility 
and believe that everyone should have at least 
one. The egalitarian could see the opportunity for 
more efficient transit and shared vehicles, with few 
people having their own. The hierarchist would 
want oversight and control over access and use 
of the technology – the infrastructure – but would 
be unconcerned whether vehicles were owned 
or shared. Finally, the fatalist might see little use in 
debating how the autonomous vehicle should be 
managed on a broader scale, as long as personal 
benefits accrue. 
Lest we assume that sharing is obviously better, 
consider whether it will be any more socially 
equitable than owning. Will the ‘tragedy of the 
commons’ we now suffer with the automobile be 
reduced in its impacts or simply changed? Will 
personal comfort and safety be improved or 
will its meaning morph? Will transit efficiency 
improve or degrade? 
Many commentators believe that autonomous 
vehicles could and should enable a massive 
improvement, however during the expected 
evolution of the current automobile population to 
ubiquitous autonomous vehicles, we can expect 
two 17-year doublings of the worldwide demand 
for VMT. As mentioned earlier, business-as-usual 
ownership levels predict four billion vehicles 
instead of the one billion we have today. While 
retrofitting the current world with the autonomous 
car, we also need to consider how much that world 
will be changing even as this future unfolds. 
Lessons from the past 
Unintended consequences are the mainstay of human 
history. Ask the historians who trace the outcomes of wars, 
treaties, discoveries and inventions. Or ask Bill Ford, Henry 
Ford’s great-grandson and current executive chairman of 
the Ford Motor Company. While very many, if not most, 
of the positive contributions of the automobile were 
apparent to Henry Ford, very few of the downsides would 
have been. After all, the elder Ford was bringing a dramatic 
boost in mobility to a large portion of the western world 
that had no equivalent capability. The world was huge 
then, the population only a quarter of what it is now. 
He was in America. Many Americans were farmers and 
open space was everywhere. If anyone in 1908 had seen 
the trajectory of congestion, pollution and carnage over 
the ensuing century, he or she would have been a seer. 
Mr Ford is absolved. 
This CityMobil2 prototype 
driverless minibus is being 
tested on the streets of cities 
around the world
18 | AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES 
Increasing shared vehicle use and decreasing 
the incidence of owned private vehicles is the 
only way to keep PMT high and associated 
environmental degradation low. What makes the 
sharing solution especially difficult is the high 
social value currently placed on private ownership. 
Deeply embedded cultural history makes it 
difficult for most people to see themselves sharing 
rather than owning, which in turn means sharing 
currently has low adoption rates for most people 
and applications. How can we change that? How 
can we make the use of a vehicle not owned by its 
passengers far more acceptable? 
Sharing is key 
It is essential to promote the use of shared vehicles 
over the next 25 years, so that we evolve the social 
acceptance of sharing at the same time as the 
physical, intelligent and network aspects of the 
autonomous ecosystem evolve. In other words, we 
should seek to make sharing a fundamental part of 
the ecosystem, not just one of myriad minor ways to 
use that ecosystem as we experience it currently. 
The areas we have identified to date include: 
transit reform, taxi reform, parking reform, 
insurance reform, expanded employer involvement, 
infrastructure investments and policies, tax 
incentives, ways to influence SOV travel behavior, 
facilitation of ride sharing and van-pooling, 
encouraging sharing in non-transportation domains, 
new transportation business processes, developing 
technologies to make sharing feel safer and more 
Intertraffic World | Annual Showcase 2015 
comfortable, anticipation of what union members 
will need, designs and policies regarding land-use 
conversion, and maintaining an emphasis on 
privacy and security. 
These categories are discussion starters. 
Some may be very useful, others less so. Much 
of what we are exploring involves secondary or 
indirect approaches that would make sharing more 
desirable and owning less so. While easy access 
to personal-scale motorized transportation, such 
as robo-taxi and robo-co-op fleets, may be the 
preferred outcome for some, it’s likely that a high 
degree of heterogeneity will remain indispensable. 
If we simply wait to see how the autonomous 
vehicle turns out, it will be too late to seek to reform 
our social attitudes and political approaches to 
public and private mobility. The social reforms 
foreseen as necessary must proceed in parallel 
with the technology and its rollout. Technology 
and policy cross-pollinate. 
The wickedness of the 21st century autonomous 
vehicle problem will be more social than 
technological. The social complexity of future 
automobility will be profound in comparison with 
that of today. This in turn admits the possibility of an 
even larger error while solving the motorcar than we 
made while solving the horse. The good news is that 
we have some clear precedents from which to learn. 
But will we learn to cooperate sufficiently to 
achieve sustainable mobility? n 
Bern Grush and John Niles are transportation consultants with 
combined 70 years of experience. This text is a short preview of 
their forthcoming book, The End of Driving, in which they will 
investigate these topics in greater depth. They can be contacted 
at bg@berngrush.com and john@johnniles.com 
References 
1) tinyurl.com/googleobstacles 
2) Traffic Technology International, ‘The Road to 2024’ 
(September 2014), p16 
3) tinyurl.com/geeklifeteller. Originally: E Teller, ‘A Future ICE 
(thermonuclear, that is!)’, IEEE Spectrum 10, pp60-64 (1973) 
4) A Charbonneau, ‘Integrated coastal planning: wicked problems 
and clumsy solutions’. The Arbutus Review Vol. 3, No 1 (2012) 
If we simply wait to see how the autonomous 
vehicle turns out, it will be too late to start reforming 
our social attitudes and political approaches to 
public and private mobility 
If autonomous vehicles are too successful, journeys 
by bike (encouraged by bike-share schemes such 
as this one in London) may decrease, with negative 
consequences for public health 
(Above) Car-sharing schemes 
such as the one operated 
by Bluely in Lyon, France, 
could form a blueprint for 
autonomous vehicle co-ops

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The end of driving grush niles intertraffic 2015

  • 1. 10 | AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES Intertraffic World | Annual Showcase 2015
  • 2. AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES | 11 The end of driving The world waits in anticipation for the first self-driving cars. But after all the impossible pieces are sorted and the wonder dissipates, what will the world be like? And will there be some unintended consequences that belie optimistic predictions of today? Words | Bern Grush and John Niles Annual Showcase 2015 | Intertraffic World The fully autonomous vehicle is increasingly an object of fascination, ridicule and hype. Opinions on market viability for this innovation range from 2017 to 2060 – or later. The autonomous vehicle promises so many benefits that some see it as an escape from the unintended tyranny of today’s motorized vehicles. To greet this new utopia, there are calls for changes in how we plan transportation; demands for paradigm shifts. There are also contrasting tendencies to see the self-driving car (SDC) as unlikely for a long time, a marketing ploy, or an interesting idea with more flaws than benefits. Whichever way opinions go, they are usually viewed through a technological lens. The SDC will be safer because it will never be distracted. It will see more and respond more quickly. It will be cleaner because it can be smaller and lighter. It will reduce congestion because it will follow more closely and have fewer accidents. Alternatively, naysayers argue that it is too complicated. It can’t work in snow. To greet the new autonomous utopia there are calls for changes in how we plan transportation; demands for paradigm shifts
  • 3. 12 | AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES SDCs need to be far safer than human drivers. Who will be liable? And so on. Chris Urmson, director of the Google car team, is targeting 20191 while Todd Litman predicts 2114.2 According to the estimates of eight transportation consultants in Intertraffic World’s sister title, Traffic Technology International, 80% of all vehicles will be fully autonomous by 2045. If you average all such opinions, estimates fluctuate between 2035 and 2045. What will happen when we get there? Some see the autonomous vehicle as a boon to car and ride sharing. Just look at current trends in car use among Millennials to extrapolate a great deal of such sharing – or so the thinking goes. But these straight-line predictions are unreliable. The self-driving vehicle has already dangerously distracted the automotive imagination from the critically important electric vehicle to the new thrill of a robotic, effortless ‘Jetson’ comfort bubble. The tedium of debating EV range has been replaced by dreams of texting while driving. Technologies that have important social potential are being hijacked by the lure of personal advantage. Surely the autonomous vehicle – as a technological wonder and engineering marvel – will be solved by logical processes. Of its solution there is little doubt, barring disagreement on ‘when’. What matters far more is whether the autonomous vehicle will relieve us from the burden of the current motor car, from which we wish to escape. The SDC will not do so of its own accord, nor will it do so via merely technical processes. Intelligent consequences Motorized automobility is a good thing, but our achievement of it has gone badly. The autonomous vehicle could relieve this problem or make it worse. The SDC, if unpacked principally for its marketing and profit value, as is highly likely, will become Motor companies such as Nissan are keen on the concept of autonomous cars. This one was on display at the Geneva Motor Show on March 6, 2014 Intertraffic World | Annual Showcase 2015 another Faustian bargain, evident shortly after pervasive deployment, just as was our trade of the horse for the car within two decades of the arrival of the Model T. The deployment of the autonomous vehicle is already much less a technological problem than a social one. Certainly there is a lot of engineering work left to do – perhaps a couple hundred thousand person-years. But as the ‘father of the hydrogen bomb’ Edward Teller pointed out, “human problems are very often solved, and rightly solved, by illogical processes”.3 Every behavioral economist offers the same lesson. It is possible to imagine, with a world population of autonomous vehicles the same size as today’s motor vehicle count, providing four times as many person miles traveled (PMT) as we do with current worldwide vehicle miles traveled (VMT). Whether or not we view the problems of today’s automobile as unintended consequences, we can hardly rely on that excuse if the SDC results in 2.4 vehicles for every human on the planet by 2108; if the SDC ends public transit; if obesity quadruples; if The Edag Light car is an attempt to solve excessive vehicle ownership and pollution at once: it’s a sharing concept designed to be 100% electric, with induction charging in its parking spaces
  • 4. this time we know it. This time there will be far fewer unintended consequences – just unintelligent ones. We are only human It may be fair to class most of our current automobile problems as unintended consequences. They were not only unintended – they were unforeseeable at their origin. But now, as we stand on the cusp of another revolution in automobility, we have some important models of how these things work. We have the lessons of both the horse and the automobile. We have the Jevons paradox that says when we make consumption of a resource more efficient, we’ll use more. While transport isn’t a resource in its purest sense, it is nevertheless true that the easier we have made it to travel around this world, the more we have tended to do so. We have clear lessons that within the success of any idea, any technology or any revolution, is AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES | 13 the germ of its demise. What would prevent the SDC from suffering the same fate as the horse and the non-autonomous vehicle? – ie, the fate of being ‘too successful’ – whatever that will mean for the SDC. If we are to be smarter in the 21st century than we were in the 19th or 20th, we need to set the stage for intelligent consequences. Certainly it will be harder to rely on the ‘unintended’ excuse. How can we prevent excessive numbers of overused, misused and oversized SDCs? Better yet, how can we deploy SDCs to increase person miles traveled (PMT) – a good outcome – without increasing the vehicle population? The answer, we already know, lies in sharing – robo-cabs, robo-buses, robo-shuttles, robo-jitneys, robo-shares, robo-co-ops – all in support of mobility as a service (MaaS). So the question becomes: “How do we dramatically increase PMT in shared vehicles and decrease VMT by single-owner (unshared) vehicles?” Annual Showcase 2015 | Intertraffic World cycling and walking rates fall to near zero; if the roads we have then are still not enough; if there is more asphalt than forest; if 15% of the world’s population is living in vehicles. Given what we know now, such consequences would amount to unintelligent consequences. Certainly they are unintended, but we can imagine them. In fact, these dangers have already been predicted. No one in 1808 guessed that in 1908 some cities would be ankle-deep in horse manure. No one in 1908 could imagine an everyday, multi-hour gridlock in many world cities, even though that had already started in some US cities less than 20 years later. But today – 10 years after Sebastian Thrun won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge and four years since he left Stanford to join Google – we can question how the autonomous vehicle will change us over its first 100 years. The autonomous vehicle provides tons of good potential – and tons of bad. But This time there will be fewer opportunities for unimagined consequences, but many more opportunities for unintelligent ones
  • 5. 14 | AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES Cultural Theory ➜ Recognize that contradictory perspectives can be addressed Clumsy Solutions ➜ Find solutions inclusive of contradictory perspectives This is likely to be a larger problem than the technology of the autonomous vehicle itself, due to the tremendous attraction of vehicle ownership – its personalization, its expression of social status, sense of independence and accomplishment. It is not enough to point to rich-country Millennials and say: “See how they drive less? That will be the future.” It is not enough to point to evidence of peak-car. The world vehicle population has a doubling time of 17 years. That means four billion cars by 2050. Is that okay as long as they are all SDCs? Or can that doubling time be transformed to PMT while holding VMT constant? Can we quadruple PMT by 2050 with the same fleet size as now? Perhaps – but it will be neither as easy as we wish nor as difficult as we might imagine. Additional perspectives Changing the majority human preference – stated or revealed – for owning and using personal motorized vehicles will be much harder than building autonomous transportation systems themselves. We’ll need to look for solutions outside the customary frameworks of transportation sciences, traffic network design and urban planning. That is not to say that these structured approaches are inappropriate – only that, while necessary, they are insufficient. The sizeable body of work developed by sociologists and behavioral economists can be Wicked Problems ➜ Appreciate the lack of shared understanding Intertraffic World | Annual Showcase 2015 used to parse and address complex, large-group human behavior problems. It may provide insight into how we can change the preference for owning motorized vehicles into a pervasive preference for sharing them (see table above). A wicked future? Labeling hard problems as ‘wicked’ sounds pessimistic, but it encourages solution seekers to appreciate that there is not a perfect solution, so that when an argument is won or a compromise is reached and a solution adopted, the problem will go away. It won’t. At best it will change, hopefully for the better. An example is the automobile, which addressed the problem created by over-reliance on the horse but soon gave us a new problem. Sustainability commentators now fill volumes decrying our failed attempts to nudge travelers away from over-reliance on the automobile. What will happen next as we wend our way toward the 21st century autonomous vehicle as a solution to the 20th century motorcar? How will we frame and manage our new wicked problem? Solutions to wicked problems are neither right nor wrong; they are just better or worse. The clumsy solutions we invoke will be seen as more or less acceptable than other solutions or the status quo. Transportation has always been demanding in both cost and environmental degradation, and as the planet becomes more crowded and its wealth-yearning humans demand more, transportation will grow in wickedness and its solutions (hopefully) in clumsiness. This nature of transportation problems and solutions cannot be avoided, so we need to develop as many solutions as possible and find ways to make the clumsy Human preference for owning a dedicated personal vehicle is an example of a wicked problem, a type of problem that is difficult – perhaps impossible – to solve because of incomplete, contradictory and changing requirements and attributes. Wicked problems make it difficult to find consensus for change, or even for the direction of change. Why are wicked problems so difficult to solve? Because each of us has different ways of thinking, according to the model of social discourse called cultural theory. Cultural theory is guided by one of four perspectives on life: individualism, egalitarianism, hierarchy and fatalism. Each of these perspectives describes only a partial framework for reality, and each is both mutually contradictory and complementary to the others. In other words, none of us can see a solution that would satisfy all perspectives4. What limits us is that we continue to argue our perspective in these debates as though we will eventually win over the other side. We won’t. Certainly not sufficiently to settle the issue. Cultural theory teaches us ways to identify clumsy solutions – those that provide a holistic perspective on reality. Rather than being a perfect fit for any particular life perspective, they combine competing views. They are called clumsy because they appear imperfect to everyone, but such solutions are more resilient to conflict since they incorporate elements of all perspectives. They are negotiated to be inclusive of as many as three of the four rational perspectives (the fatalistic perspective is self-excluding). A domain of behavioral economics, choice architecture helps us to understand how personal choices are influenced by the manner in which options are presented (as nudges) to the consumer or user. Often this may mean simply the order in which options are presented, but it can be much more. It’s also important to consider how context, cost, availability, convenience, evident consequences and any other factors can influence how choice is communicated and decisions are shaped. We’ll need to look for solutions outside the customary frameworks of transportation sciences, traffic network design and urban planning Choice Architecture Present users with choices in a way to optimize outcomes
  • 6. AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES | 17 The automobile addressed the problem created by over-reliance on the horse but soon gave us a new problem Annual Showcase 2015 | Intertraffic World solutions that are adopted and implemented more acceptable, i.e. more often chosen for use by the population for whom the solution is implemented. Success means acceptance It is insufficient to define a problem and then design optimal solutions without also determining ways to be sure that the solutions will be adopted by a sufficient number of users or in intended ways. It is in this that many of today’s transit deployments fail to deliver hoped-for results. Parts of the impending solution to automobility – a new ecosystem called autonomous vehicles – will involve the manner in which we manage distribution, ownership, storage, operation, access and so on. These are problems calling out for clumsiness. The individualist (and auto manufacturers!) might see autonomous vehicles as safer enablers for more effective automobility and believe that everyone should have at least one. The egalitarian could see the opportunity for more efficient transit and shared vehicles, with few people having their own. The hierarchist would want oversight and control over access and use of the technology – the infrastructure – but would be unconcerned whether vehicles were owned or shared. Finally, the fatalist might see little use in debating how the autonomous vehicle should be managed on a broader scale, as long as personal benefits accrue. Lest we assume that sharing is obviously better, consider whether it will be any more socially equitable than owning. Will the ‘tragedy of the commons’ we now suffer with the automobile be reduced in its impacts or simply changed? Will personal comfort and safety be improved or will its meaning morph? Will transit efficiency improve or degrade? Many commentators believe that autonomous vehicles could and should enable a massive improvement, however during the expected evolution of the current automobile population to ubiquitous autonomous vehicles, we can expect two 17-year doublings of the worldwide demand for VMT. As mentioned earlier, business-as-usual ownership levels predict four billion vehicles instead of the one billion we have today. While retrofitting the current world with the autonomous car, we also need to consider how much that world will be changing even as this future unfolds. Lessons from the past Unintended consequences are the mainstay of human history. Ask the historians who trace the outcomes of wars, treaties, discoveries and inventions. Or ask Bill Ford, Henry Ford’s great-grandson and current executive chairman of the Ford Motor Company. While very many, if not most, of the positive contributions of the automobile were apparent to Henry Ford, very few of the downsides would have been. After all, the elder Ford was bringing a dramatic boost in mobility to a large portion of the western world that had no equivalent capability. The world was huge then, the population only a quarter of what it is now. He was in America. Many Americans were farmers and open space was everywhere. If anyone in 1908 had seen the trajectory of congestion, pollution and carnage over the ensuing century, he or she would have been a seer. Mr Ford is absolved. This CityMobil2 prototype driverless minibus is being tested on the streets of cities around the world
  • 7. 18 | AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES Increasing shared vehicle use and decreasing the incidence of owned private vehicles is the only way to keep PMT high and associated environmental degradation low. What makes the sharing solution especially difficult is the high social value currently placed on private ownership. Deeply embedded cultural history makes it difficult for most people to see themselves sharing rather than owning, which in turn means sharing currently has low adoption rates for most people and applications. How can we change that? How can we make the use of a vehicle not owned by its passengers far more acceptable? Sharing is key It is essential to promote the use of shared vehicles over the next 25 years, so that we evolve the social acceptance of sharing at the same time as the physical, intelligent and network aspects of the autonomous ecosystem evolve. In other words, we should seek to make sharing a fundamental part of the ecosystem, not just one of myriad minor ways to use that ecosystem as we experience it currently. The areas we have identified to date include: transit reform, taxi reform, parking reform, insurance reform, expanded employer involvement, infrastructure investments and policies, tax incentives, ways to influence SOV travel behavior, facilitation of ride sharing and van-pooling, encouraging sharing in non-transportation domains, new transportation business processes, developing technologies to make sharing feel safer and more Intertraffic World | Annual Showcase 2015 comfortable, anticipation of what union members will need, designs and policies regarding land-use conversion, and maintaining an emphasis on privacy and security. These categories are discussion starters. Some may be very useful, others less so. Much of what we are exploring involves secondary or indirect approaches that would make sharing more desirable and owning less so. While easy access to personal-scale motorized transportation, such as robo-taxi and robo-co-op fleets, may be the preferred outcome for some, it’s likely that a high degree of heterogeneity will remain indispensable. If we simply wait to see how the autonomous vehicle turns out, it will be too late to seek to reform our social attitudes and political approaches to public and private mobility. The social reforms foreseen as necessary must proceed in parallel with the technology and its rollout. Technology and policy cross-pollinate. The wickedness of the 21st century autonomous vehicle problem will be more social than technological. The social complexity of future automobility will be profound in comparison with that of today. This in turn admits the possibility of an even larger error while solving the motorcar than we made while solving the horse. The good news is that we have some clear precedents from which to learn. But will we learn to cooperate sufficiently to achieve sustainable mobility? n Bern Grush and John Niles are transportation consultants with combined 70 years of experience. This text is a short preview of their forthcoming book, The End of Driving, in which they will investigate these topics in greater depth. They can be contacted at bg@berngrush.com and john@johnniles.com References 1) tinyurl.com/googleobstacles 2) Traffic Technology International, ‘The Road to 2024’ (September 2014), p16 3) tinyurl.com/geeklifeteller. Originally: E Teller, ‘A Future ICE (thermonuclear, that is!)’, IEEE Spectrum 10, pp60-64 (1973) 4) A Charbonneau, ‘Integrated coastal planning: wicked problems and clumsy solutions’. The Arbutus Review Vol. 3, No 1 (2012) If we simply wait to see how the autonomous vehicle turns out, it will be too late to start reforming our social attitudes and political approaches to public and private mobility If autonomous vehicles are too successful, journeys by bike (encouraged by bike-share schemes such as this one in London) may decrease, with negative consequences for public health (Above) Car-sharing schemes such as the one operated by Bluely in Lyon, France, could form a blueprint for autonomous vehicle co-ops