AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES TRANSIT LEAP


Getting past the hype: revisited A


Bern Grush and John Niles from Toronto-based Grush Niles Strategic offered a cautionary analysis for Thinking Highways North America’s January 2016 issue, describing why the market perception of the fully autonomous vehicle would be guaranteed to falter for the next five or 10 years – and falter badly. Given the majority positive press, daily announcements and apparent progress being made for semi- autonomous technology they return with more analysis for Connected Canada, supporting their observation that negative hype has taken root and is growing in intensity. We are reprinting their original article, including its proposed transit-oriented solution complete with a preface and seven new, compelling sidebars.


couple of years ago, we started writing about getting ready for autonomous vehicles. We called our collected work The End Of Driving in recognition of our certainty that robot-


ics will displace the driver just as the motorcar had replaced the horse. We were as excited then, as would be anyone contemplat- ing all the utopian mobility on offer. We’re still certain of a driverless future, but by now we hold a


much more sobering view of the path to get from no AVs to all AVs. We are reminded of the 40 years spent getting from only horses to no horses, and the unfortunate turn city planners took almost universally as they reacted to an exciting, empowering technology and began creating automobile-centric urbanscapes, carved up by eight-lane highways embedded in a matrix of park- ing lots. We now contemplate the very real danger of planners taking


the same turn and building AV-centric cities biased for household owners of robotic vehicles. What would stop planners and city leaders from repeating the past if they see the AV as addressing all the ills of the motorcar car and its fallible, human consumer? The motorcar was such an improvement over the horse that embedding the automobile into civic design was certainly logi- cal 100 years ago. Today, there are legions of consultants, jour- nalists and entrepreneurs painting a future of all the upsides of the new robotic car that would eradicate all the downsides of the old human-driven, fossil-fuel car, while maintaining the personal mobility model that emerged in the last century. We remain convinced that no one can yet forecast how this will


unfold in any useful detail or at least useful enough to write infra- structure plans or social policy. We continue to describe the next quarter century as the most difficult transportation planning horizon ever faced by urban planners.


CONNECTED CANADA SUPPLEMENT


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