By Max Ufberg, October 15, 2014
Irony: When the car of the future might rekindle old problems.
Elon Musk announced last week that the Model S will feature “autopilot,”
an ability to take over for the driver in limited situations. The move
closes a gap between Tesla and more established automakers, which have
provided increasing levels of autonomous tech.
It will net the young company quite a windfall and make driving safer
and easier for its customers. It’s a significant step toward a future
where cars drive themselves, and doing so with electricity offers an
enticing view of a future where cars are awesome and the atmosphere is
squeaky clean.
Unless the new Tesla and other autonomous vehicles end up doing more harm than good to the planet.
As driving becomes less onerous and computer-controlled systems
reduce traffic, some experts worry that will eliminate a powerful
incentive—commuting sucks—for living near cities, where urban density
makes for more efficient sharing of resources. In other words,
autonomous vehicles could lead to urban sprawl.
It’s simple, says Ken Laberteaux, a senior scientist at Toyota. If
you make transportation faster, easier and perhaps cheaper, then people
won’t mind commuting. “What a consumer is expected to do is see what
they can gain by moving a little further from the job centers or the
cultural centers,” he says. That’s bad news: Urban sprawl is linked to
economic, environmental, and health hardships.
Proponents of autonomous cars predict that once humans are no longer
responsible for driving, we’ll see a decrease in crashes, a reduction in
congestion and a spike in ride sharing. The current model, in which
people own or lease a car, could fundamentally change to a subscription
model in which people simply summon a car when they need one, and it
appears, all by itself. Laberteaux says such a shift is possible, but
won’t happen for a long time.
Self-driving cars might one day lead to a decrease in personal car
ownership, and an increase in walking-oriented lifestyles. But first,
we’ve got to live through the phase of semi-autonomous driving. Those
cars will likely need human intervention at least some of the time, so
they won’t change the current ownership model. They will, however, make
driving way more convenient, incentivizing long commutes.
Laberteaux’s not the only one concerned about this. Autonomous
vehicles should ease highway congestion, and commuters will be able to
catch up on work or sleep en route to the office. That limits the
incentive to trade your McMansion for a brownstone, says Reid Ewing,
director of the University of Utah’s Metropolitan Research Center. The
implications of this go beyond transportation; in a 2014 report for advocacy group Smart Growth America, Ewing linked sprawl to obesity and economic immobility.
Ewing
likens autonomous driving to the construction of “superhighways” during
the post-war boom years, which spurred suburbanization. “If you can
travel at higher speeds with less congestion and you can use your time
productively while you’re traveling in a self-driving car, the
generalized cost of travel will be less on a vehicle-per-mile basis,”
says Ewing. “Just like when, before the interstate system, people were
traveling at 30 miles per hour, there wasn’t nearly the spread of
development that there is today.”
What’s interesting is that the potential for increased suburbanization comes as many American metropolitan area are seeing a reduction in sprawl, in large part through a city-loving “Echo Boomer” generation coming into the workforce. According to a report Rutgers University published last month, population growth in New York City since 2010 has surpassed its suburban communities for the first time since World War II.
So how can urban planners ensure that trend toward urbanization
doesn’t reverse again? Use traditional tools like zoning, pricing, and
urban design, says Ratna Amin, director of transportation policy at the
Bay Area planning nonprofit SPUR. “Transit sprawl and autonomous vehicle
sprawl, these things happen in the absence of growth management,” says
Amin. “We can put boundaries on sprawl.”
SPUR, like like-minded organizations, advocates for subsidized share
car parking, competitive pricing for suburban parking, to make driving
less appealing. The implementation of high-speed bus systems makes it
easier to get around with a personal vehicle. The risk of
autonomous-induced sprawl, Amin argues, makes priorities like these more
important. The conversation has just begun, she says, but it’s crucial
that these things are worked out before, and not after, the self-driving
cars show up.