We’ve seen teasing glimpses of them in television commercials and futuristic sci-fi flicks: driverless cars that automatically park and instantly brake, that pick us up and take us to our destinations while we sit lost in thought or focused on our smartphones and tablets.
The autonomous vehicle (AV) isn’t just a gee-whiz, futuristic idea: Several organizations are already examining the technology’s potential to transform our lives—including UW-Madison, where the Traffic Operations and Safety (TOPS) Lab is one of ten places designated by the U.S. Department of Transportation as a proving ground for driverless cars and trucks. Several other cities, including Boston, Portland and Pittsburgh, have been piloting driverless cars on their roads. Major car manufacturer Toyota is building a 2,000-person city near Tokyo to test driverless cars and other smart technology.
But there’s at least one potential problem with this utopian transportation vision: It doesn’t appear that U.S. cities are remotely ready to accommodate it.
In 2018, Aslıgül Göҫmen, an associate professor with dual appointments in the Department of Geography and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, and an affiliate with the Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture, teamed up with graduate students Gillian Cooper and Haley Briel to survey more than 500 urban planners working in cities and municipalities across the country. Their aim was to gauge how many of these places had begun planning for the impact AVs might have on their communities, and to what degree.
“Communities need to be ready to determine their future with technology, and not have technology determine their future,” says Göҫmen, an urban planner by training.
The results of the survey were less than encouraging. While 76 percent of the municipal planners who responded said they believed that a future including AVs is going to happen, only 20 percent of them had begun discussing AVs with their communities, and less than 40 percent had begun discussing AVs with their departments or organizations. Only 8 percent of responding municipalities, representing a wide range of population size and geographic locations, had begun the official process of incorporating AVs into their plans or planning activities.
The survey results reveal not only the problem of unpreparedness but also a potential missed opportunity, says Göҫmen.
“This isn’t just a transportation issue. It’s a societal issue,” says Göҫmen. “Autonomous vehicles have the potential to transform our communities in the very near future. If we plan well for this, it could be really advantageous. If we don’t, it could be disastrous.”
Göҫmen says that AVs could represent an opportunity to upend the way cities currently use land. Take parking, for instance, the single largest land use in American cities. In Seattle, parking accounts for a whopping 40 percent of the Emerald City’s urban landscape. Given that AVs could potentially be summoned by users to downtown storefronts and apartment complexes from lots located on the outskirts of town, the need for on-street parking and large downtown ramps and lots potentially evaporates. Those downtown parking spaces could be repurposed into things like green space, retail or residences.
“That car doesn’t have to be parked right in front of the store,” Göҫmen notes. “You can call it to come get you.”
While some of the more detailed survey responses were thoughtful—some urban planners speculated about whether AVs would continue the current trend of single-owner vehicles, and a few raised the appealing potential of reduced parking spaces and lots, Göҫmen and her grad students were surprised by some of the other responses.
“More than a few respondents said, ‘It’s not going to impact my community much at all,’” she says.
There could be any number of factors driving the survey responses, a question Göҫmen has now turned to in her work. Resources are one obvious issue for cities and municipalities. Many of them scarcely have the staff to address existing transportation and land use issues, let alone begin planning for possible developments in an uncertain future that could be more than a decade away. But not addressing the question now could put them in a difficult situation later on.
“If we don’t have a clear vision and a plan for the future of a community in place when AVs become a reality, it could exacerbate urban sprawl and create problems with traffic and pollution,” she says. “Communities have the opportunity to plan for this. The question is, will they?”