Innovative technology continues to make its way into people’s daily lives, particularly in vehicles. Other than the fact that tape cassette decks and even CD players are highly uncommon in more modern cars, there are now options that make even drivers a thing of the past.
Evan Shieh, an assistant professor at New York Institute of Technology, said he rode in Amazon’s Zoox fully autonomous ride-hail vehicle last year as part of research he was conducting on self-driving vehicles for his new book, Autonomous Urbanism: Towards a New Transitopia.
“[It] explores the latent and transformative impact autonomous vehicles will have on the future-built environment of cities,” Shieh said.
Some notable features he mentioned in the Zoox in which he rode include shuttle-style doors and inward-facing seats that Shieh said make the vehicle seem more similar to a “public shuttle.” He said there are also various amenities—including charging ports, temperature control, and music selection options—per seat for passengers to enjoy. One thing he didn’t notice, though, was a drastic difference in how the car got him from one place to another.
“The vehicle maneuvering experience was nearly indistinguishable from a human-driven vehicle,” he said. “The vehicle itself was, however, redesigned ground-up with the passenger and traveling experience rethought, which made the experience much more unique than a typical car and even different from other self-driving vehicles that are currently focusing on just retrofitting existing vehicles.”
One concern many individuals have regarding self-driving options is the overall safety and reliability of arriving at a destination on time, particularly in situations involving time crunches (such as catching one’s flight at the airport). Dallas-area resident Stephanie Hone said she is somewhat skeptical.
“Have you ever seen that episode of The Office when Michael trusts the GPS, and he drives right into a lake?” she said. “I’m not saying I wouldn’t ever ride in one. I mean, humans aren’t necessarily trustworthy, either. I guess I would just be nervous about it being faulty or becoming destructive—like driving you off the highway.”
Shieh said the reliability of these vehicles is contingent upon the service model of the specific vehicle as well as the methods of operation employed and how the individuals riding in the vehicle choose to use them. There is also the possibility of autonomous vehicles increasing traffic and overall congestion of city streets.
“They could be sent home by their owners to park freely at home, or they could roam around the streets empty while waiting for their owners, instead of having to pay for parking,” Shieh said. “If they are deployed as fleet ownership models through mobility as a service (similar to Uber and Lyft), they could also possibly increase traffic and congestion as empty driverless vehicles circle our streets looking for passengers to pick up.”
Shieh said research has indicated that transportation network companies like Uber and Lyft actually add miles traveled on city streets because they are often the easier and more appealing option than public transit, walking, and biking in situations that include limited or expensive parking options. As a result, such companies are competing with the alternative modes of transportation rather than with individual cars, and what ensues are more cars and miles traveling on the road and additional traffic.
“It is only if driverless vehicles are rethought and used more like an extension of transit services that can incentivize the movement of more people in less urban space that there could be possible time savings from decreased traffic on our city streets,” he said.
Despite the room for improvement and the unknowns, Shieh said he does believe that self-driving vehicles will continue to grow in popularity and become the future of ride-share options.
“It is only a matter of time before they proliferate all over our cities,” he said. “The current model of their deployment will primarily be through ride sharing and mobility as a service, which will have the exciting possibility to transition our mobility away from individual ownership and, in fact, release much of the land that we dedicate in cities to parking all of those privately owned cars.”
On average, 22 percent of urban land area in U.S. cities with more than 1 million people is used for parking and storage of vehicles.
“A shift toward mobility as a service presents exciting opportunities to rethink new urban purposes for this space and land (from parking lots, street parking, parking garages, etc.) for new uses, ranging from affordable housing to landscapes and parks and more,” Shieh said. “This is the possible exciting future for our cities if we deploy driverless vehicles in the right way.”
Not everyone is ready to release human control behind the wheel into the hands of technology, though. Dallas-area resident Kyle Burnett has never ridden in a self-driving car, but he also doesn’t have a desire to do so anytime soon.
“I would be afraid to, but I handle auto insurance litigation, so all vehicle issues give me anxiety,” he said. “And although I think the acceptance of self-driving cars will grow, I would prefer the technology to improve a bit more.”
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