Driverless Cars and Jevon’s Paradox
When I think about future technologies that really excite me, driverless cars are at the top of the list. In an urban setting, the confluence of automation, collaborative consumption, mobile internet devices, and fleet electrification indicate a future where I wouldn’t need to own my own car, but instead could order a driverless taxi to deliver me to a destination without ever having to worry about parking. Without parking issues, I would not only have more time on my hands for other productive uses but I wouldn’t burn substantial energy trying to find a space nor would the city and its inhabitants need to dedicate so much public space, resources, and infrastructure that could otherwise be used for more productive purposes.
Despite Google’s engineering optimism that driverless cars are only a few years away, public sentiment and bureaucracy may not be as fast to embrace rapid technical advances:
Bloomberg: Self-Driving Cars More Jetsons Than Reality for Google Designers
NHTSA enforces vehicle safety standards that govern the minimum performance everything from the design of windshield wipers to internal trunk releases. Some of the standards date to the agency’s creation in the 1970s.
The agency would need to create standards for electronics of a self-driving car and figure out how to test them, said Dan Smith, associate administrator for vehicle safety.
“It gets to be a massive challenge to figure out how will the government come up with a performance standard that is objective and testable for so many different scenarios where failure could possibly occur,” Smith said at the SAE panel. “Part of that has to do with if we should be looking at the underlying electronics.”
The National Academy of Sciences, in a report a year ago, said NHTSA must “become more familiar with and engaged in” setting automotive-electronics standards in existing cars, without mentioning the potential of self-driving technology.
Another challenge is Jevon’s Paradox, which - according to Wikipedia - is “the proposition that technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource.” The idea being that if a technology is created that enhances energy efficiency by a factor of two, rather than cut consumption to accomplish the same amount of output for half as much energy, energy consumption would remain more or less constant and output would instead double.
So as we improve time-efficiency of car users who no longer have to be ‘present’ at the wheel of their car, do we have less need for cars or do we instead amplify problems associated with suburban sprawl? A video posted by Atlantic Cities last year depicts a world in which autonomous cars could minimize the need for any kind of traffic regulation - but to me the video reflects a world in which 12-lane highways and massive intersections could be more palatable because resistance to traffic would have been completely addressed. Furthermore, your car could become an entertainment or productivity hub that made relaxing in your car preferable to any other kind of commute (walking, biking, transit).
