AASHTO, AMPO, ACT, APA, APTA, CTAA, EPA, NACo, NADO, NARC, T4A.*
These are all acronyms for organizations, not to mention Mobility Lab, that are shooting for much of the same thing: to improve the quality of our lives and of our transportation options. However, we can’t help but notice that, despite our many common goals, we sometimes get a little siloed in our issues.
But now is one of the perfect times we could all come together on a sub-issue of transportation that is going to create an earthquake in our industry.
At conference after conference – just like a panel at the recent Eno Center for Transportation’s Convergence event – auto executives, academics, and government officials discuss the technology and safety aspects of autonomous vehicles. And, no doubt, these are crucial to the eventual success of AVs.
But few dig deep into perhaps the most important question of all: Should people use them, how will they affect our daily routines and the communities in which we live?
“There are so many unknowns about the market impact and the local community impact,” said Howard Jennings, Mobility Lab’s managing director. “I would suggest that there should be, probably among the federal government and with the industry groups, a research and policy group looking at these impacts – just as there are groups looking at vehicle technologies, infrastructure technologies, vehicle-to-vehicle, vehicle-to-infrastructure, and safety, among other things.”
Jennings notes that guidance being drafted by the Federal Highway Administration to state transportation officials doesn’t yet have any of this language in it, and that transportation research and advocacy organizations should aid regions in building policy recommendations for now and down the line.
With the federal government investing $4 billion on bringing driverless cars to the market, it certainly would be ideal to incorporate the decades of progress in creating walkable, livable and multi-modal communities as significant changes to the transportation system begin to reshape our streets. We don’t want to see policies arise in support of autonomous vehicles negate others that support livable communities.
“This inevitably comes up in all the conversations when we talk about it across the ,” said Blair Anderson, deputy administrator at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. “The Federal Transit Administration is very interested in how it could play into last-mile connections. And from the general infrastructure standpoint – how do these interact with pedestrians and bicycles – that’s all part of the safety conversation.
Blair Anderson, left, of NHTSA, speaks with Sam LaMagna of Intel.
“But elevating the conversation is probably not a bad idea,” Anderson added.
Harry Lightsey, executive director of the Global Connected Customer Experience at General Motors, agreed that very little is known about the exact impacts of these technologies at this point.
“I would suggest we do need some controlled projects that help us learn in, say, a five-mile urban setting and we study the impacts on not just how safe the vehicles are but also the public acceptance and whether people are willing to get into a vehicle without a human driver. And we can study the impacts on the neighborhoods and the traffic patterns,” Lightsey said. “We can use that learning to direct how we go forward.”
Vincent Valdes, associate administrator for Research, Demonstration, and Innovation at the Federal Transit Administration, echoed the sentiment that we should come together to craft the vision of what we want our communities to be, and then shape the technology to serve that vision, not the other way around.
That kind of prioritizing rings true with the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy’s Colin Hughes, who added in an email: “We have to remember that mobility is not a primary good, no one consumes it for its own sake. Accessibility to destinations is the primary good. These shiny new technologies should only be adopted as far as they help us maximize accessibility and minimize the cost of mobility.”
For now, cities stand at a liminal stage in the development and adoption of driverless vehicles. It’s also the stage when forward-thinking policies can do the most to protect development and transportation goals fundamental to the structure and function of our communities. Creating these intersecting guidelines now are key, because as the Brooking’s Institution’s Adie Tomer notes, there’s much we still don’t understand about driverless vehicles:
“… he self-driving car will have impacts far beyond the technological. What will it mean for housing preferences? If still powered by fossil fuels, could they lead to net increases in fuel consumption? Will car ownership rates stay the same or will the country move to more shared mobility? These spatial and environmental questions are significant, and it will take years to figure out the answers.”
* American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, Association of Metropolitan Planning Organizations, Association for Commuter Transportation, American Planning Association, American Public Transportation Association, Community Transportation Association of America, Environmental Protection Agency, National Association of Counties, National Association of Development Organizations, National Association of Regional Councils, and Transportation 4 America, among others.
Photos, from top: A multi-modal street in Berlin, Germany (Eric Sehr, Flickr, Creative Commons). Blair Anderson and Sam LaMagna speak at the Eno Convergence conference (M.V. Jantzen).