Mobility Lab has been working on autonomous vehicles unlike almost anyone else in the AV sector.
We partnered with a handful of other organizations earlier this year to release a report entitled Preparing Communities for Autonomous Vehicles. We’ve written a lot about how AVs could affect our day-to-day lives and the fabric of our communities.
That’s why it’s heartening to see that our friend at the University of Oregon’s Urbanism Next Center, Nico Larco, is spreading a message that aligns with our own: AVs are not a transportation issue.
After all, think about our smartphones. People don’t think about smartphones as just a technology issue. No, smartphones are like a small TV, phone, and encyclopedia that is pocket-sized and basically guides us through all aspects of our lives. AVs will be similar.
“ an everything issue,” Larco told a TEDx audience recently in College Park, Md., captured in a short video called “How will autonomous vehicles transform our cities?” that has racked up more than 42,000 views on YouTube.
“If this is just a conversation that takes place among people who work in the transportation field, we’re lost. We need to have everyone at the table. People who are interested in housing, community development, economic development. This is going to affect all of us,” Larco says in the video. “So we need to shift from AVs being a tactical issue to being a community issue.”
He wisely notes that there are tens of thousands of engineers working on the technical aspects of AVs, but “how many people are working on the community ramifications? I can count on one hand the number of people in Portland whose full-time job it is to work on these topics.”
He notes that we can’t afford to let AVs roll out in our cities the same way that automobiles did, causing all kinds of unplanned-for negative effects on society.
Homepage photo by Paul Hudson.