WHAT THE WORLD WILL LOOK LIKE WITHOUT DRIVERS
BY ERIN BIBA ON 1/14/16
NewSweek
01/22/16
COVER STORY
For the past century, the greatest ticket to freedom for every teenager inthe suburbs was a driver’s license. After a lifetime of being chained to yourparents—chauffeured around from school to practice to the homes offriends—there is no feeling more adult than the first time you take a car outalone. The next stage of your life has finally arrived, and you are barrelingthrough it at 75 miles per hour.
Car culture waspervasive in the United States for years: The annual number of miles traveledby auto rose decade after decade. Until 2004, that is, when itstopped short. And today, youngerAmericans are changing their minds about the car. The number of high schoolseniors with driver’s licenses dropped from 85 percent in 1996 to 73 percent in 2010. “Young Americansdrive less than older Americans and use public transportation more, and oftenuse multiple modes of travel during a typical day or week,” concludes a 2014U.S. Public Research Interest Group study.
The trend isn’t easy to explain. Some have attributed it to the recessionfollowing the financial crisis of 2008, but interest in cars continues to waneas the economy rebounds. The study suggests a number of explanations:Millennials have no memory of consistently low gas prices; they are eager tolatch on to technologically enhanced transportation services like Uber; universitieshave taken steps to significantly reduce the number of cars on campuses; andmillennials have a stronger affection for more walkable communities andtransportation alternatives than older Americans.
Try Newsweek for only $1.25 per week
On the horizon, though, is a technological innovation that could reinventcar culture, return people to the road in droves and appeal to theenvironmentally conscious, tech-loving driver of the future. Except they won’tbe drivers in the traditional sense: Transportation experts agree that withinthe next 25 years Americans will start giving up their cars for vehicles thatdrive themselves.
Killing the Soccer Mom
Driverless cars are already finding their way into the mainstream. In2012, Google started testing its cars on the roads of Silicon Valley and SanFrancisco. In October 2015, Tesla introduced a software update that allows itsModel S to steer, change lanes and park without driver intervention. Google hassuggested that its vehicles will become available to the public by 2017, and atthe Consumer Electronics Show this year an entire section of the floor isdedicated to “Vehicle Intelligence,” featuring technology from companies “thatsupport the future of autonomous/automated driving, including parking assist,collision avoidance, emergency braking and much more.” In other words, it’sonly a matter of time before humans let go of the wheel altogether. Within 100years, young people won’t even remember a world in which a human drove.
Self-driving cars—likethis Google prototype, on the road in 2014—are supposed to be much safer thancars driven by people because they don’t make human errors.JASON HENRY/THE NEW YORKTIMES/REDUX
When they do finallyarrive en masse, self-driving cars will unleash a wave of changes—especially inthe United States, where the largest cities were built (or rebuilt) in thegolden era of the automobile and lives are built around driving. Accordingto the Texas Transportation Institute, American commuters spent almost 7 billion hours inching their way towardwork or home in 2014—and paying for it in more than just lost time and money.Studies have found that people with commutes longer than 40 minutes areunhappier, more stressed and generally experience more worry than those whoonly have a 10-minute commute. A study in Sweden that tracked more than 2 million married Swedes found thatpeople whose commutes are 45 minutes or longer are 40 percent more likely toget a divorce than those with shorter commutes. A study out of New York University looking at 21,000 U.S. commuters foundthat there was a strong correlation between length of commute and hypertension.Another study out of Texas that looked at 4,297 adults found that commutingdistance was associated with larger waist circumference and higher bloodpressure. And finally, another study out of Sweden that looked at 21,088 Swedesconfirmed previous research that commuting contributed to poor sleep qualityand everyday stress.
For commuters, driverless cars bring good news: “The driverless car willsmooth the traffic flow,” says Egil Juliussen, director of research andprincipal analyst of automotive technology at IHS, an analytics firm. “Thelights will be coordinating [with the cars], so you don’t have all that stopand go.” The amount of time people spend in traffic jams will decrease significantly,and that could reduce the amount of pent-up stress and anger many commutersfeel, says Jay Lebow, a psychology professor at Northwestern University’sFamily Institute. Additionally, “you can use the time better,” he says. “Thereis a helpful effect. It might promote more leisure time.”
Of course, not everyone takes their car into work, but when driverlesscars start arriving in fleets, subways, light rail and bus lines could end upbeing replaced (or at least greatly supplemented) by a new mobility industry.It’ll be like Uber, Lyft and the dozens of other on-demand car services thathave popped up in the last six years—on steroids. And without drivers.
In places like NewYork City, where public transportation is completely entrenched, things might notchange all that much. But in Los Angeles, where the words subway or bus are often met with laughter, public transportation could become extinct.Instead, cities like L.A. may start running fleets of driverless publictransportation cars and vans. It’ll improve the transportation network, andcities will save money by making the switch, says Juliussen, because therewon’t be any more need for fixed stations to support light rail or busroutes—just call a driverless vehicle from wherever you are.
Shared self-driving cars will also gradually replace the personal vehicle.“Cars are idle 95 percent of the time, so they are an ideal candidate for thesharing economy,” says Carlo Ratti, director of MIT’s Senseable City Lab. “Ithas been estimated that every shared car can remove about 10 to 30 privatelyowned cars from the street.” In the future, people—and families—may stop owningcars. Instead, they’ll be licensors, owning the right to use a car (or sit incar) for a period of time, shared with others. Even car manufacturersthemselves are betting on this future: Lyft announced in early January thatGeneral Motors had invested $500 million in the ride-sharing service company.“We think there’s going to be more change in the world of mobility in the nextfive years than there has been in the last 50,” said GM President DanielAmmann.
That means we can probably say goodbye to the “soccer mom.” There will nolonger be a need for a member of the family to dedicate days to chauffeuringkids to school, ballet class and soccer practice. A family will be able to giveup their now-average 2.5 cars and opt for a share in one driverless car thatwill take the kids to school in the morning, then swing back around to bringMom and Dad to work. Families will also have increased mobility, since no onewill need a driver’s license (or even the ability to see) to get around. Itwill be a boon to the elderly and anyone who otherwise wouldn’t be able todrive. And Mom and Dad won’t have to leave the office early to make sure theirkids are at hockey practice or guitar lessons.
There will still be people who want to drive, but the drivewaytinkerer—who works on rebuilding classic cars and drives them around theneighborhood with the top down—will no longer exist. We might not even havegarages or driveways. And some experts expect that human-driven cars might evenbe banned in some, or all, places. The car enthusiast will have to hitch hisMustang up to a driverless car and take it to a different kind of drivingrange—where he can tool around on a closed course.
Meanwhile, says Chandra Bhat, director of the Center for TransportationResearch at the University of Texas, public transportation will become muchmore efficient by cutting out low-volume routes. People who live in areas thataren’t as highly populated will rely solely on car services (or their share in adriverless car).
Bhat says that states considering big high-speed rail projects—likeCalifornia—may rethink their plans. “What does high-speed rail achieve? Itallows us to travel without having to drive. But with driverless cars, you’renot driving,” he says. That means you can be completely flexible about when youtravel and what you do while on the road. Maybe you drive overnight and sleepthe whole way. Or maybe you spend the whole trip working. After all, when yourattention no longer needs to be on the road, you can do almost anything insideyour car. The automobile of the future might not even have traditional carseats—instead, it might have couches or beds. Perhaps it will even have smallkitchens or entertainment centers; cars could easily become mobile living roomswith all of the amenities.
The highways of the future will be filled to the brim with cars traveling3 to 4 feet apart from one another while going 60 to 70 mph, passengers kickingback and doing whatever it is they want to do. This will significantly increasethe capacity of roads, and the number of cars that travel on them willskyrocket. Massive intercar communications networks will help them all runefficiently and safely. And that means a huge burden on the world’s globalpositioning system networks—better known as GPS. The U.S. has 24 satellites inthe sky that run its GPS systems, which many software manufactures use intandem with 24 of Russia’s positioning system satellites, called GLONASS.That’s fine for now, but in order to manage worldwide fleets of cars that relyon digital maps to find their way around, someone—countries (Europe, China andmaybe India) or car manufacturers or fleet owners—will have to launch newsatellites. According to Juliussen, the number of satellites in low-Earth orbit“goes to 120 by the early- to mid-2020s or so.”
What that means is we won’t just have an electrical grid anymore. We’llhave a new type of closed system—a car grid—that features a worldwide networkof moving parts controlling all of the Earth’s cars. Our cars will all talk tothe grid, and through the grid, they will also talk to one another.
Like Preschool Parking Lots
Humans are flockingto cities now more than ever. Accordingto the World Health Organization, urban population worldwide was 54 percent of the human race in 2014, upfrom 34 percent in 1960. But will everyone want to live in the city when theircommute becomes so much easier? There’s a chance the driverless car revolutionwill propel a suburban exodus bigger than was seen post–World War II.
On the other hand, with a massive fleet of on-demand, self-driving cars,there will be no more worry about the downtown traffic on Friday nights, whereto park when you arrive, surge pricing when all the Uber drivers are busy orsqueezing into overcrowded subway cars at peak hours. Still, it’s possible that“location, location, location” won’t be able to sell cramped condos anymore.
People could insteadjust live any old place. And when it no longer matters where people live, italso won’t really matter where they work. Maybe everybody will still go to workdowntown, and the street in front of office buildings will look like preschoolparking lots at the end of the day with driverless cars lined up waiting totake workers home. But that seems unlikely, given that the idea of the officehas been changing. We’re already trending toward a world of telecommuters, andthe number of freelancers is on the rise. According to a recentGallup poll, 37 percent ofthe U.S. workforce telecommuted in 2015, up from just 9 percent in 1995. Ifcontract workers are the new normal, and the location of the office no longermatters, then the office itself might disappear completely. “Will we even havedesignated workplaces?” Bhat asks. “The technology is so ubiquitous forcommunication the whole concept of the home and workplace could vanish.”
If more people move away from the cities and suburban sprawl increases,the environment will take a hit (see: L.A.). But if people use significantlyfewer cars and all those cars are electric, which seems likely (industryleaders Google and Tesla build only electric cars), then it won’t.
A man stands in a parkabove Manhattan's FDR Drive on June 17, 2003. Self-driving cars can be inconstant use, picking up one passenger after the next, which means that parkinglots and garages can be turned into more human-friendly environments.VINCENT LAFORET/THE NEWYORK TIMES/REDUX
On the other hand, getting human hands off the steering wheel might makecities much more green, and livable. For example, all the space currently takenup by parking is going to be put to a more environmentally friendly new use. “Ithink we can just let our creativity run wild,” says Ratti, who imagines therewill be many more green spaces in cities. Transforming parking garages will bemore difficult, Ratti says, because their floors are angled—not really idealfor most of the things humans like to do in open spaces, like play soccer orhost flea markets. However, that might change as well: “In a current designproject in Singapore, we are already designing a very large parking structureby thinking about how it could be converted,” he says. “You want to havehorizontal floors instead of sloping ones and a slightly higher than normalfloor-to-floor height to allow for other uses.”
According to Erick Guerra, a city planner at the University ofPennsylvania School of Design, over the next few decades, the smarter urbanplanners and civil engineers—the ones who anticipate the arrival of theself-driving car—will start to put streets on “road diets.” In the suburbs,that means highways won’t be widened and fewer new ones will be built. In thecities, some lanes will be repurposed for biking, and roads will get morepedestrian-friendly features like wider sidewalks and easier crossings.
An invisible but potentially huge change, Ratti says, is the convergenceof cities with the digital world. Our cars and our cities will talk to eachother, share information and track data. It’s already beginning to happen: TheCenter for Urban Science and Progress at New York University is working withNew York City to harness the massive amounts of data generated there on a dailybasis from things like Metrocard swipes, closed-circuit camera footage, tweetsabout traffic and smart energy meters. This information is already makingcities more efficient. For example, CUSP is helping the city analyzeovercrowding in subways, as a result it has begun to increase service on atleast one line and unveiled new digital apps to help commuters manage thesystem.
A touchscreen panel showsa demonstration of an automated car parking assistance app at Robert Bosch GmbHdriverless technology press event in Boxberg, Germany, on May 19, 2015.KRISZTIANBOCSI/BLOOMBERG/GETTY
Once cars on the streets are linked into a single citywide network thatshares all data, those efficiencies will be able to happen on the fly, makingthem even more powerful. Cars will be able to identify problem intersectionsthat cause congestion and avoid them or even spot and report small crimeshappening on the street. Reporting everything that happens around every car ina city will make big data and its benefits even bigger. It’ll save time, moneyand lives.
Nothing to Get MADD About
It’s a moment we allknow too well. Traffic slows and you inch your way along the highway wonderingwhy, out of nowhere, you’ve lost all forward momentum. And then you see it, upahead, flashing lights. A drunk driver has wrapped his car around a tree, aline of tailgaters has caused a pileup, or someone has fallen asleep behind thewheel and drifted into oncoming traffic. Every year in the U.S., more than35,000 people die in caraccidents. It’s a reality that we all accept every time we climb behind thewheel: Driving is dangerous.
But once humans aren’tallowed behind the wheel, they’ll lose the power to cause accidents. Humanerror is the main reason for most car crashes. In July 2008, the U.S.Department of Transportation released a report to Congress called the NationalMotor Vehicle Crash Causation Survey. After studying 6,950 crashes over a period of three years theydetermined that 93 percent of all the accidents were caused by human error:Among other things, people were distracted, they were traveling too fast, theymisjudged the other driver or their own abilities, they overcompensated afteran error, they panicked or, in 3 percent of cases, they were asleep. Removinghumans from the equation will eliminate every one of those problems. Accordingto a2015 study by McKinsey & Company, fatalities from car accidents could fallby as much as 90 percent, saving $190 billion, when driverless cars take over.
It’s a huge publichealth benefit that will ripple through the health care, law enforcement andinsurance sectors. A recentstudy by the insurance, tax and auditingfirm KPMG found that if accidents drop by 80 to 90 percent, the personal autoinsurance sector could also fall by as much as 60 percent due to lost premiums.Some of that could be made up by insuring manufacturers, who will likely takeon the burden of responsibility for car-related accidents. After all, it’stheir software that will control how cars drive, so it will be on them toprevent fender benders.
Self-driving cars (likethis Kia Soul electric prototype) will do it all; log long-distance highwaymiles, navigate city streets and park themselves while they wait for their nexthuman pickup.KIA
The elimination of impaired drivers means there will also be less need forhighway patrol—after all, driverless cars don’t speed, have heart attacksbehind the wheel or drive drunk. In fact, the demographic of the highway willchange. The long-haul truck driver, for example, whose living is made travelingback and forth across the country will no longer be needed. Delivery serviceslike FedEx or UPS won’t need to employ nearly as many people. Trucks can easilybe loaded by machines, then transported without a driver to a central location.Once your package arrives at a local warehouse you can send your car to pick itup. There’s little to no human intervention needed. That means a loss of jobsfor the nearly 3.5 million professional truck drivers around the country.
It’s unclear how theself-driving car revolution will impact the job market overall. On the onehand, it seems like there will be huge cuts to both the public and privatetransport sectors. New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority employs morethan 65,000 people, and according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics therewere about 665,000 jobs for bus drivers in the U.S. in 2014. In the future,whether public transportation sees increased or decreased use, it willcertainly become driverless. And accordingto the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were more than 230,000 taxi and chauffeur jobs in the U.S. in2014—all of which stand little chance of making it through the self-driving carrevolution. Other sectors will grow: Juliussen says driverless cars will needto be replaced every three years due to their increased use, so manufacturersmay stand to benefit from an increase in sales.
California Scheming
None of this isreally all that new. In 1918, just a few years after the automobile began massmanufacturing in the U.S., ScientificAmerican wrote: “ The car of the future willhave no such thing as a ‘driver’s seat.’... Driving will be done from a smallcontrol board, which can be held in the lap... A small finger lever, not awheel, will guide the car.” It sounds almost like they are describing thedriverless car coming our way soon.
The transportation systemof Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, is testing “Personal RapidTransport” cars, pictured, instead of traditional passenger trains or buses.IAIN MASTERTON/ALAMY
And, like today, people back then thought the car of the future would bethe world’s savior. “City planners looked at the car as the solver of urbanplanning problems—most of which were related to density,” says Guerra. In someways, those predictions were accurate: Cities today have higher populations,but inside them people aren’t packed so tightly. And we certainly don’t livewith the health risks posed by the mess that horse-based transportation leavesbehind.
But the car wasn’tthe answer to all of humanity’s problems. We replaced human congestion withtraffic jams, air pollution and acid rain. We fight over drilling rights, andthe economies of entire nations hang on the price of a barrel of oil. Thedriverless car will bring with it a slew of benefits and drawbacks that we cando our best to predict—but there’s no way we can dream up everything that’s tocome. There are two things, though, that we can say with confidence: Driverlesscars will radically change the way we live, and 100 years from now no one willhear the words Los Angeles and automatically think “carmageddon.”
联系客服
