Driverless Urban Futures

A Speculative Atlas for Autonomous Vehicles

AnnaLisa Meyboom

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351134019
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Stadtplanung & Landschaftsgestaltung

Since the industrial revolution, innovations in transportation technology have continued to re-shape the spatial organization and temporal occupation of the built environment. Today, autonomous vehicles (AVs, also referred to as self-driving cars) represent the next disruptive innovation in mobility, with particularly profound impacts for cities. At a moment of the fast-paced development of AVs by auto-making companies around the world, policymakers, planners, and designers need to anticipate and address the many questions concerning the impacts of this new technology on urbanism and society at large.

Conceived as a speculative atlas –a roadmap to unknown territories– this book presents a series of drawings and text that unpack the potential impacts of AVs on scales ranging from the metropolis to the street. The work is both grounded in a study of the history of urban transportation and current trajectories of technological innovation, and informed by an open-ended attitude of future envisioning and design. Through the drawings and essays, Driverless Urban Futures invites readers into a debate of how our future infrastructure could benefit all members of the public and levels of society.

Chapter 1
Envisioning Future Infrastructures

Introduction

A transportation revolution is imminent. By the time this book is published, there are likely to be self-driving cars operating taxi services. By the time you are reading this book, perhaps they are ubiquitous. It is the nature of research into this subject that by the time it is completed, technological advancement has outpaced the research. And while there is much talk about the impact of the autonomous vehicle (AV), there is very little true understanding of the revolution that this technology will bring—within society, on the design of the street, and on the urban realm. This book theorizes that in order to understand the impact of the technology, it is necessary to visualize the future with the technology well enough to understand it and, further, visualize it demonstrating multiple outcomes so that we can imagine the impacts of different decisions on the outcomes. By doing so, society at large will be able to make better informed decisions because they know the implications of those decisions, essentially collectively designing the future of the city.

The people who are actually at this point designing the future of the city are the leaders of the tech industry and the car companies. They may or may not have a thorough understanding of the future beyond their inventions but if there is an understanding, it has not been illustrated. The general discussion of the self-driving car is led by the heads of these organizations, thus providing a techno-utopian viewpoint and demonstrating only a limited understanding of the unforeseen impacts of these developments. The AV is presented as a great benefit to society without much evidence to back that up except for a predicted reduction in accident rates. Although these industry leaders present the technology as a social project, in fact the companies are developing this technology for profit and to keep up with the competition as others also race to develop and market their technical prowess. This is concerning: these companies are much more highly monetized than most governments and have some of the most talented people in the world working to deliver this technology as quickly as possible. The problem is not that the technology is being developed but the lack of critical discourse surrounding these developments. In and of itself, the technology cannot be defined as good or bad—but how it is used by society, and by whom it is used, are critical.¹

The legislated relationship between the street and society helps in this regard, since there are well established societal norms regarding use of the street which have been codified through laws and regulations since the early 1900s. These developed over time as the space of the street became more contested—first by the introduction of cars and the desire to freely drive and park, and later on by the pedestrians and bicyclists who sought to take back the street from the car. As a result, the road is not a free market space but instead a highly controlled public space. In most cases the street is owned and under the jurisdiction of some level of government, and use of each part of the street is highly regulated by things such as speed limits, highway regulations, parking bylaws and bylaws regarding biking and walking, not to mention infrastructure control systems such as traffic lights and crosswalks.

It is clear that autonomous vehicles will have an impact on our society, our transportation choices and urban form. This raises many questions, such as what are the social and urban impacts of these changes? As noted by Hodge, who studies the relationship between equity and transportation, “urban transportation is important to defining which social groups, which factions of capital, which geographic areas in cities are to gain and which are to lose.”² In the intense and expensive race to realize these technologies, what areas have not been thought through and should be? What will be the impact of these technologies on urban form, public transportation and decisions with regard to public infrastructure design? The answers to these questions will clarify what is at stake and what should be investigated thoroughly prior to the implementation of these technologies in order that they contribute as positively as possible to our society; the discussion within these pages is designed to advance this aim.

Conceived as a speculative atlas—a roadmap to unknown territories—this book presents a series of drawings and text that unpack the potential impacts of AVs on scales ranging from the metropolis to the street. The work is grounded both in a study of the history of urban transportation and current trajectories of technological innovation, and further informed by an open-ended attitude of future envisioning and design. The intent of the drawings is to allow readers to ‘inhabit the future.’ When we draw something in the future we must fill in the details of how things have changed or stayed the same, raising questions of why and how they became this way. The power of the drawing is that, sometimes, the image becomes the blueprint of the future. As architects, we draw that which will then come into being; as architects of future infrastructures, we may be designing the future itself. In the case of this book, multiple futures are depicted and this is intended to present a range of options for discussion so more informed choices can be made.

This book takes the reader through the development, assumptions and speculations about the future of urban space as influenced by the autonomous vehicle. The images run from street-scale specific infrastructures to urban-scale diagrams. Each image is designed to question how the future of technology will impact the space we live in and the ways in which we interact with that space and its other occupants, be they human or robot. Within the discussion of the images, technological assumptions will be outlined; for example, is the intelligence assumed to be within a controlling infrastructure or a vehicle itself? How is the infrastructural intelligence interacting with humans who are walking or biking and not in digital communication with the car or its network? What are the assumptions behind the technology in the drawing? What questions are raised for the city itself or for the ownership of the infrastructure? The intention of these images is to catalyze future thinking about the city and the transportation systems and networks that symbiotically exist to form and be formed by it.

Interspersed within the drawings are texts that elaborate and clarify specific aspects of how the topic has been thought about. Following this introduction is a glossary of vehicles, as well as a discussion of ownership models, and a brief consideration of the positioning of infrastructure with relation to the AVs themselves as well as a discussion about standards. This provides background context to orient a reader who may not be familiar with the technology under discussion. Secondly there is an exposition regarding drawing and its critical importance as it is conceived in this book.

The third chapter launches the reader into the future in two ways. Firstly, this chapter examines the future-visioning model that has been employed in this book. This model is based on a methodology used by companies who need to make decisions about the future for business purposes and the discussion elaborates on how this process was applied to the AV. Secondly, it depicts scenarios for different occupants of the future city and explains how, under a variety of different conditions, both the technology and the ways in which occupants use it are different

Beginning the discussion of urban scale impacts in Chapter 4 is an essay about the history of the car’s influence on streets and urban form; technology, and its interplay with societal concerns from the different periods, is emphasized. This frames the drawings and discussion in the Urban Scale Impacts chapter. The next section, including Chapters 6 and 7, opens with a discussion of street-scale impacts that reflects on disciplinary roles regarding design of the street and which cultural and social theories may be useful when designing the AV city. This examination extends the discussion in the previous essay to amplify the concerns within society at this time and how they may be incorporated into the critical design decisions that will need to be made in the next few decades.

It is clear as our discussion progresses that technology and the city is a topic which needs to be looked at more holistically and this is incorporated in the final chapters on future evolutions. While there has been much talk about Smart Cities as a topic, it becomes clear that the AV is really the catalyst for the implementation of future digital city infrastructure and, unlike many Smart Cities proposals, a clear way forward for this to benefit its inhabitants.

The book concludes with an essay about historical utopian images of future cities and transportation, the intent of which is to position the techno-utopian visions being put forward by large technology firms today in the context of previous utopian visions. It examines the societal outcomes and impacts of these earlier utopias with the wider intention of providing some thought-provoking reflections on our own future visions.

Explaining the New Paradigm

Vehicles

This book represents vehicles in a schematic way more related to function (see Figure 1.1). The AV is classified differently from current classification conventions, because the types of vehicles required in the future—and therefore their design and how we think about them—are likely to change. Categories will shift as Shared Autonomous Vehicles (SAVs) gain prevalence and become a type of public transit. As such, the vehicles are classified by function: Personal Mobility, Shared Mobility, Mass Mobility and Goods Transport (see Figures 1.2 and 1.3). Ownership models are likely to vary and as the distinction between public transit and ride-sharing blurs, it is increasingly unlikely that we will be able to distinguish between them (see Chapter 8 on Public Transportation).

Notes on General Design for AVs

There are several critical features to note with regard to AV design. The first is that there is no necessity for people to sit facing forward or in a driver position. This is relatively well understood; a driver is not required and therefore a passenger is free to sit in any direction and the cars can facilitate that. The second is that there is no longer a necessity for a front or back of a vehicle since cars can travel in either direction—this follows from the first point. Regulations regarding lights on vehicles are one of the main factors which may result in the traditional front/back design being retained, but from an operational perspective, driverless cars should be able to reverse direction without difficulty. However, these are radical changes in automobile design and it is not likely that vehicle design will undergo extreme change in the short term. This is because there are two diverging forces at work: on the one hand, tradition and familiarity; on the other, technological necessity and efficiency. Society is by now very familiar with this design tug-of-war as it was famously illustrated at Apple. From 2007 to 2013, Apple’s graphic interface used skeumorphism—a design approach that references that which we already know, such as the calendar image with leather like book edges or a folder on a computer that looks like a paper folder. This design approach was promoted by Scott Forstall and Steve Jobs,^3,4 who understood that people would be able to adapt to something new more quickly when it offered something that gave a visual indication of its function in a familiar framework. This approach was extremely successful and Apple enjoyed massive popularity due in large part to its user-friendly interfaces. In 2013, however, under the new design direction of Jony Ives, skeumorphic references were removed from Apple interfaces in favour of cleaner, more logical interfaces which do not reference the ‘paper era.’ Interfaces which do not relate to a previous era have a significant functional advantage over skeumorphic models: because they can work on their own internal logics, they provide opti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Envisioning Future Infrastructures
• Chapter 2 Notes on Drawing
• Chapter 3 Into the Future: Analytic Scenarios
• Chapter 4 Historical Trajectory of Transportation Infrastructure
• Chapter 5 Urban Scale Impacts
• Chapter 6 Urban Theories and Autonomous Vehicles
• Chapter 7 Street Scale Impacts
• Chapter 8 Public Transportation
• Chapter 9 Technology, the City and the Autonomous Vehicle
• Chapter 10 Utopian Visions
• Index