How Driverless Cars Will Change the Feel of Cities
It’s 6 p.m. in Tempe, Arizona and pitch-black outside. I’m standing in the middle of a five-lane thoroughfare, among a group of people too numerous for the narrow median. We got trapped here after a brigade of left-turning cars preempted our passage—that’s a thing that happens in cities like this one, designed for automobiles over pedestrians.
An SUV pulls up as we cower inches away, waiting for the next traffic-light cycle. The driver’s window is rolled down to allow some of the cool night air in. The man behind the wheel looks bored like most drivers do. But he isn’t a driver, not exactly. The vehicle he controls is an autonomous Volvo operated by Uber, which is conducting an ongoing test of its self-driving fleet here. With his hands idle in his lap, the driver is more like us pedestrians—waiting for the cars around him to move.
Whether in five years or 25, eventually cars like this one will probably convey most people to their destinations. That might free people from the risk and burden of transit, or it might bind them to new burdens when technology services run cities. No matter the case, the age of autonomous cars has felt abstract and hypothetical so far—the stuff of splashy corporate demonstrations and tech-guru prognostications, not everyday life.
