How will automated vehicles change cities? That’s the wrong question
Here’s a non-random sample of headlines from news articles and blog posts exploring what cities will look like in the future as robot driving technology takes off:
- How Self-Driving Cars Will Reshape Cities
- How Driverless Cars Will Change the Feel of Cities
- Infographic: How driverless cars will transform our cities
- How Self-Driving Cars Will Transform Urban Living for the Better
- Self-Driving Cars Will Transform the World as We Know It—Including Where We Live
- Autonomous Vehicles and Ride Sharing Will Reshape Our Buildings, Our Cities, and Our Lives
- Driverless Cars Will Shrink Our Roads and Radically Reshape Urban Space
- Why self-driving cars will cause sprawl (according to an Italian Physicist)
- Self-driving Cars Will Kill Transit-oriented Development
- ‘Driverless cars will fix Sydney’s transport mess’
- Self-Driving Cars Will Fill the Streets With RATS, Zipcar Co-founder Says
- Why driverless cars will mostly be shared, not owned – The Economist explains
- Why the Rise of Self-Driving Vehicles Will Actually Increase Car Ownership
- Redefining travel: How self-driving cars will give power back to pedestrians
- Humans will bully mild-mannered autonomous cars into submissions on the roads
- Automated Vehicles Will Make Our Streets Worse
I’m not a grammarian, but one thing that stands out for me is that those headlines are in the future tense, in the indicative mood. They’re declarations about what will happen, not what may happen.
The following are more cautious, inquiring about what will happen:
- How Will Self-Driving Cars Reshape Our Cities?
- Transportation disruption will dramatically redraw the urban landscape. What will your city become?
- How will driverless vehicles change cities?
Whether they’re in the indicative or the interrogative mood, what all of the headlines above have in common is that they talk about what self-driving technology will do to cities or people. This suggests a tendency—among some headline writers, at least—to adopt a technologically deterministic attitude when thinking about how automated vehicle technology will change cities. There, I just did it myself. Asking how automated vehicles will change cities frames humans as passive passengers on a wild ride into what is yet to come, sitting back captive as Technology ushers us to the predestined Future that awaits, which perhaps some clever futurists can predict for us.
My point is not to lament the state of the art in headline writing (I’m certainly not criticizing this juicy example: How Fast Will Autonomous Cars Go? 200 MPH); rather, this is a brief reminder to stress our capacity to shape the future of cities. Focusing on the role of humans as agents who make choices about technology, we can ask questions like “How can we use automated vehicles (which, by the way, can be vehicles other than cars) to make cities better places to live?” The cliché holds true: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”