First.. and always I want to share a note of gratitude to all who either read or read and responded to the initial post yesterday. It provides evidence that we are a very passionate group of individuals when it comes to our cars, our spaces, and the ways in which we want the future to look (even if some of us want it to look like our past). Anyway the point is
THANK YOU.
I wanted to follow up yesterday with a quick real world yet very philosophical question and some answers. Will you get my opinion in the pages of this blog? Yes! Why? Well that's simple enough.. I'm writing it and I have opinions. Will I do my best to present many sides of each topic? Of course, because it is complex and will I set this up as a debate between two sides of most ideas..... no chance... we already have a globe where we are constantly being pulled to 'choose one or the other side of something... Solutions are the goal here not victories.
Okay.. well here we go.
My temptation was to start with an entry that told of all the great things that an autonomous vehicle future might bring about and then I read several articles yesterday about "traffic jam" concerns. People are beginning to wonder what these driverless vehicles are going to do all day once they drop off the passenger at work? Some folks predict congested cities... (see the link)
https://thehustle.co/self-driving-cars-traffic-waymo-autonomous-vehicles/
Others day no worries... after they deliver three or four people to their jobs they can go deliver pizzas or flowers.... or make a visit to a charging station where they get more juice and cleaned p in a location outside the downtown metro area.
Well that is a space and policy question that people are going to have to start working on. Lower me just introduce the idea that "multi-owner
cars or subscription plans might dictate some of this.
ALSO THE FACT IS THAT EVERY CAR TODAY SPENDS 95% YES 95% OF ITS LIFETIME PARKED.
Think about that a minute... When you add up the cost of the car, the cost of the insurance, them you use to store it like a two car garage and then add in the price of parking... maybe you feel okay because parking a car is sometimes cheaper than driving it... but 95%...Wow...when it could be taking a veteran to the vet's hospital, or two blind students to college, or your sister to the doctor...but no it's sitting in a parking spot that you drove three times around the block to find?
Okay theres some food for thought for today and here's some more....
What other traffic jams are we going to talk about in the future of this blog? We are going to talk about how some of these systems have trouble seeing the road in fog or snow and we are going to talk about how these vehicles tell the difference between a plastic bag blowing across the street and a person using a wheelchair? We are going to look at these questions and hopefully learn a lot about the traffic jam that really exists which is the gap between what we know and what we fear--what risks we are willing to take and who gets to decide on the acceptable level of risk. We are going to talk about how society (all its members) can participate in this discussion and we are starting today.. because those questions are the real traffic jams in this matter not a few four wheeled machines.
Anyway... more to come....
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