The future of autonomous vehicles is lawnmowers

For a long time I worked at bringing autonomous vehicles into government. At first, it was amplifying my seat at the table in municipal governments, to introduce the concept in basic land use, that cars, roads and garages weren’t always going to be dictated by a standard measure used in forecasting number of trips based on historical data. In a typical zoning meeting, whenever someone would present a plan to build an office building, apartment building, store, shopping center or recreation center, residents would decry the additional traffic that would inevitably arrival, and subject matter experts would point that the activity generated using these historical measurements would not disrupt the existing traffic patterns.

I would sit through these meetings, astounded that no one contemplated the huge disruptions that were so evident. E-commerce, delivery, ride-share, electric vehicles and the smart phone were disrupting everything and yet the metrics of urban planning was based on people’s perception of the hundred year old traffic light and an idealized fondness for cars.

As autonomous vehicles struggled with the inevitable consumer adoption phase in the form of driverless cars, despite the best efforts of Tesla, I embraced the idea that micro transit would ultimately be the more likely path forward. Here autonomous shuttles, running sedately through congested downtown areas, would solve the car gridlock as people would adapt to the dedicated lanes that these electric shuttles would use to ferry people between offices and train stations, downtowns and corporate campuses, and recreation areas and apartments.

The main thing I learned though, was the local, and even state government, was a slow moving, risk adverse monolith of hundreds of people loathe to adapt to new technology that would solve current problems. Also, the shuttles themselves were kind of expensive and while the ride-sharing companies were running at a breakneck speed to solve urban transit one ride at a time, there really wasn’t any VC fueled company tackling the micro transit world.

Meanwhile the technology kept improving. AI, LiDar, and sensors keep getting better and cheaper and other ways that a “driverless” vehicle could solve problems kept cropping up. Amazon had its autonomous warehouse robots…