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Our utopian, dystopian future with self-driving cars（716 words）
By Jonathan Margolis
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As a civilisation, we have not taken on board the implications of the coming revolution in self-driving cars.
Auto manufacturers, technology companies including Google, and legislators predict that by 2020, self-driving cars will be navigating public roads in countries such as the US, UK and Finland. Most autonomous vehicles will not be owned by individuals but by companies, then rented out to travellers by the hour.
Self-driving is heralded as a way of improving traffic flows and decreasing road accidents. But what about the secondary effects of autonomous cars on public transport, the property market and health?
As with most techno-disruptions, opinion is divided into the utopian and dystopian.
Let’s look at the upsides
• Removing fallible, emotional, inattentive humans from behind the steering wheel, where they really have no place, could free up ambulances and hospital accident and emergency departments. Stephen Hamilton, a lawyer in Cambridge who is working on the legality of autonomous cars, says one manufacturer is expecting 99.7 per cent of road accident injuries to be eliminated. It has a team working on ways to prevent the remaining 0.3 per cent of deaths and injuries on the roads.
• Car parks are an urban eyesore but their days are numbered if car ownership diminishes. Self-driving cars will rarely park. Instead, they will circulate in cities between passengers. Multi-storey car parks could be turned into homes. Domestic garages and driveways may be turned into green space or living rooms.
• Out-of-town pubs and restaurants could enjoy a boom. No need for a sober designated driver if the car is doing the driving.
• City and suburban streets will be reclaimed. Over half of their width is taken up with cars parked for days on end. Children could use the liberated space to play and their parents to socialise.
• Ugly road signs and lines will become a thing of the past. Autonomous cars do not need them. The cityscape and rural views will be improved.
• We will have more spare time — an extra 50 minutes a day typically, according to a McKinsey study.
• Autonomous car operators will be imaginative. Cars could come equipped as a gym, cinema or bedroom.
• The cost of personal transport will plummet, according to Barclays, from between $1 and $1.60 a mile to as little as 8 cents a mile.
• Transport could even be free. When you book a ride in a self-driving taxi and accept ads played at you, the cost could reduce to zero.
• The tipping point, says Mr Hamilton, will come when there is a 70 per cent take-up of self-driving vehicles.
But there will be downsides
• Hacking will be a menace. Individuals will try to dismantle their cars’ software, causing accidents. Organised hackers and terrorists will seek to cause large accidents.
• Chaos will ensue when autonomous car operators fail to charge their cars sufficiently and run out of power on busy roads. But self-driving cars will be better at negotiating their way around stalled vehicles.
• Thrill-seekers could play an updated game of chicken, in which they run in front of a self-driving car to see if it uses its superhuman reaction time to swerve into a lamp post.
• If the cost of going a block or two by car is negligible — or zero — fitness and health could decline.
• With travellers free to drink and be driven, alcohol and drug consumption could soar.
• Local councils and national government, stung by diminishing parking and traffic fine revenues, will try to make transport expensive again with taxes per mile travelled.
• The media will go nuts for the first 20 or so years about every accident, however minor, involving a self-driving car, even if they currently ignore the global 1.25m deaths and 20-50m injuries on the roads.
The grey areas
• Trains could be doomed. What is the point when cars and lorries can combine to make what is effectively a train on virtual tracks, with each driver enjoying their own space?
• While city car parks will be more productively re-purposed, unattractive out-of-town brownfield sites could become vast recharging parks where autonomous cars go for power and servicing through the night.
• There will be a boom in out-of-town racetracks for people to drive fast and take risks in manually driven cars.
• Being late to a meeting “because of traffic” will be over as an excuse.
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