Sustainability

According to the United Nations, 5 billion people will live in cities by 2030. Demand for urban transportation is expected to more than double, requiring a tremendous investment in new roads, parking lots and public transport. On average, cars sit idle 94 percent of the time. Driver less vehicles combining car sharing and ride sharing could remove 80% of private owned cars from the streets. Furthermore, slot-based intersections could allow twice as many autonomous cars to cross an intersection in the same amount of time as traffic lights usually do. The vast areas of urban lands currently occupied by parking lots could be redeveloped to increase the resilience of urban areas to climate change (broadened sidewalks repaved with materials that are permeable to water; trees planted to mitigate heat waves; etc.).
Countries are already making significant investments in autonomous vehicles. For example, Dubai aims to make 25 percent of all transportation autonomous by 2030, based on a strategy launched in 2016 that focuses on environmental and efficiency improvements and is expected to generate AED22 billion ($US6 billion) annually. Masdar City has already transported more than two million people on its Personal Rapid Transit driverless pods since 2010, running on special guideways.
While driverless cars could create overwhelming positive changes in urban transportation as conveyed in the above scenario, they could also result in negative consequences if not managed positively.
The cost of travelling with e-AVs could drop so substantially that people could abandon public transportation, leading to an increase in the number of vehicles in the city. As the technology makes individual transport more pleasant, restful, or productive, it could encourage households to move further away from their workplace and foster high carbon, high ecological footprint urban sprawl. To this must be added the energy consumption of AVs loaded with various equipment: cameras, radars and lidars, sensors, software, which are all energy intensive. Intel has calculated that an hour and a half of autonomous driving could generate 4 terabytes of data, as much as 3,000 Internet users in one day.
Combined, these undesired effects could generate epic traffic jams of electric vehicles, increase GHG emissions and hamper ecosystems restoration efforts while jeopardizing the livelihoods of millions of people working as drivers today. A review of the emerging experience from hailing services in San Francisco and New York concluded that: “Without public policy intervention, the likelihood is that the autonomous future mirrors today’s reality: more automobility, more traffic, less transit, and less equity and environmental sustainability”.
The impact of AVs will depend on whether they support or become an alternative to efforts to promote and electrify public transports in cities. The experience of cities such as Curitiba in the 1970s demonstrate the importance of public interventions to promote mass transit. In exchange for sorting garbage, people were paid in bus token, a sustainable mobility currency. Today up to 85% of its residents use the bus, and 90 % recycle. While many challenges of the 70s are still with us, urban planners of today must contend with a new generation of challenges and learn how to leverage new solutions. Many of the policies required to optimize the societal impact of new technologies and mitigate the risk of new, unforeseen problems have yet to be developed. Policy ingenuity will need to increase in lockstep with our technological and financial ingenuity to accelerate and steer innovation towards truly green, inclusive, and smart development.
Assignment Question: ​
Describe how governments can optimize the societal and environmental benefits of autonomous vehicles.
Length: 5 to 10 pages