Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation (32 page)

The driverless future that could ease the killing and the costs, if it comes, will bring another kind of pain: lost jobs. Robots
behind the wheels of cars and trucks will eliminate millions of human jobs and billions in salaries. Disruptive technologies always create new winners and losers, but it's not clear how or if the advent of automation will create enough new jobs to take the place of those lost. This is not new. Refrigerators put the ice man and his horse-drawn carriage out of business less than a century ago. Automatic washers put the laundry business down. Kodak's entire business used to be based on people shipping their cameras to the company to have the film inside developed and reloaded, then later customers just sent in the film. Now film photography is a near-dead business. Digital photography took a thriving analog technology with transportation deeply embedded within it and replaced it with a model that requires no transportation at all once the product is purchased. And now phones have eviscerated the stand-alone digital camera business as well.

The replacement of truck, bus, and cab drivers with automation will be wrenching, particularly since taxis have become an entry point into the workforce for immigrants, and truck and bus driving have provided one of the few enduring and plentiful blue-collar jobs that still provide reliable paths to middle-class prosperity. The American Trucking Associations reports that there are about 3 million truck drivers working in the U.S.—it's the single most common job in a majority of states—and about 1.7 million of that number are long-haul truckers, who would be most vulnerable to displacement by autonomous technology. The number of long-haul truckers is expected to grow by a minimum of 11 percent by 2022.
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But the economic case for trucking fleets to go robotic is too powerful to ignore; this will happen, and likely far faster than consumer autos convert. This will be hard, but no more so than the fate of the once-robust web of smiths, farriers, horse dealers, feed stores, veterinarians,
trainers, breeders, and stables that serviced every town and city in America until the 1920s, when human-driven cars displaced horses as the king of personal and commercial transport. Prior to that, during “peak horse,” there was one working horse for every three Americans, and in New York City there were 297 horse-cart trips a year per person.
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This transition was so recent that it occurred as the parents of the baby boom generation were growing up. Hundreds of thousands of jobs and thousands of businesses were wiped out when engines replaced horses as the backbone of human, freight, and farm transportation. This is what technological breakthroughs do. That's why they call it disruption. It's hard. It's upsetting.

But so are 35,000 deaths a year. So are 2.5 million trips to the ER a year. So are 5 million collisions a year. The single greatest cause of death for Americans ages one to thirty—that's disruption, too. That's pain. How much is ending that pain worth, particularly when the same solution also can take our roads and bridges out of overload and bankruptcy, toxins out of our air, and greenhouse gases out of the climate?

Still, Americans are uneasy about such change, and polls show most trust human drivers more than machines.
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They may balk at such a transformation because cars, so long a part of the landscape and language of daily life, have become more than just transportation. We may hate the travails of transportation. We may hate the time we are stranded in traffic inside our cars. But we
love
our cars, that ultimate shipping container in which we ship ourselves and our families. We love them not as transportation tools but as objects and comforts and statements of style, the way a carpenter loves a well-made, well-used hand tool and is heartbroken when it's lost. It is the alchemy of cars we love, the interaction between hand and wheel and road, the gliding pleasure of a perfectly negotiated banked curve, the smooth and timeless
sensation of having a world to yourself while driving at night, a sweet sound system swathing you in music and the solitude of movement. And, yes, for some—those who can afford it, or at least borrow to achieve it—there is the pleasure of having a trophy car that others may envy.

Many, perhaps most, American drivers will not want to give up these pleasures, these luxuries. But would they have to give them up in a world dominated by on-demand autonomous transportation appliances?

The short answer is no. First, any shift will be slow. The most optimistic predictions put 2030 as the soonest driverless cars are likely to become dominant. This would require firm action by government and industry to help make it happen. Given the inability of the government to add even a nickel to the gas tax to keep our bridges from collapsing, this seems unlikely. Trucking and delivery fleets may transition to autonomous driving that fast, because of the incredible economic benefits, and that may push passenger cars to make the leap more quickly. The year 2040 is a good bet for the rise of the on-demand robot passenger car. Whatever the time frame, with 265 million cars on the road in America, changing out that fleet would not and could not happen quickly or en masse. There will be a gradual transition.

Even then, just as people who find pleasure and fulfillment in riding horses haven't had to give that up, drivers could continue to enjoy taking the wheel. The evolution of horse travel provides the road map for the future of the human-driven car, the difference between transportation and recreation. Horses were once beasts of burden. They were our motors. Oats were big business, the horse era's equivalent of gasoline today (except the oats were a form of renewable energy). Now horseback riding is a luxury, enjoyed not on the regular streets and highways
they gave up to cars and trucks, but in parks, on trails, and in equine-friendly communities. Cars will follow the same pattern. If there is a demand for it, there will be car parks and preserves and safe roads where humans can drive manually away from regular traffic. And if users want luxurious robot cars, the fleet owners will fill that demand, too. It will cost more, just as buying a regular luxury car costs more, but that's a model we're already used to. Far from denying drivers the joys they now find, the driverless scenario of the future could be the best of both worlds—cleaner, more efficient, less costly, and far less deadly.

It may be that automated vehicles' utility and opportunity will not be fully understood until they are out there in force. The smartphone experience may be instructive here. When Apple introduced the first iPhone, the design did not include open access to independent app developers. It was only when later iterations opened up the platform to outside innovators who thought up novel and new uses for smartphones that the true potential of such devices became clear. Autonomous cars are first and foremost a software product.

Google has designed with the car component maker Bosch and other partners a two-seater electric bubble of a car with no steering wheel or pedals, purpose built for short-distance city driving with a maximum speed of twenty-five miles an hour from its battery electric propulsion. It's cute and nonthreatening; the idea is to choose a city or two to test-market a robot car capable of transporting people in urban areas, and then go from there. Meanwhile, the big carmakers are focusing primarily on the highway automation feature; in the next few years, the future of door-to-door will be on display, and the next big change—as big as the first car or the first steam locomotive or the first airplane—will begin.

Google is a bit cagey about its own time frame. But it's not far off, says project leader Urmson, one of the small cadre of visionary engineers who have been driving robot car development since the first Defense Department competition in 2005 sent college teams into the desert with the first experiments in autonomous driving. Urmson has a simple goal: he says he doesn't want his son to have a driver's license.

His son turned eleven in 2015.

I
n the spring of 2015, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles—MOCA, as most Angelenos call it—cohosted an event about the future of transportation with an organization known as Zócalo. The word is Mexican in origin, for “public square,” and the partnership is intended to foster community conversations about the most vital topics of the day.

The invitation to this event was entitled: “Is Car Culture Dead?”

Ten years earlier, perhaps even five, this branding would have been more than merely provocative. It would have been ludicrous. Cars were the dominant species on the streets here, the T. rexes amid the field mice. Everyone knew that. Cars were the stars and, two decades after Missing Persons' sardonic lyrics first debuted, they seemed truer than ever: nobody walks in LA.

Yet, on this night, the auditorium was packed. In a city built for the car, where police night patrols study and sometimes question pedestrians because walking is, by definition, suspicious, people had flocked to discuss a world in which cars no longer dictated the transportation equations of daily life. At a museum. On a weeknight. Without a single celebrity in sight. The draw was a panel of eminent transportation scholars, activists, and car
experts who had arrived in the following manner: one by bus, one by bicycle, one by walking, one by car but using a traffic app to map side streets free of congestion, and one by driving the freeway old-school—the only panelist to arrive late. “Traffic,” he muttered.

Even the event moderator, Mike Floyd, editor in chief of
Automobile
magazine, who loves cars so much he based his career on extolling them, had sensed and even embraced a burgeoning transformation in transportation thinking. Not the death of car culture per se, he said, but a welling desire for more options than the four-wheel variety, and a sense that American cities were ready to welcome those options as never before.

“I do think the culture is shifting, very much so . . . a transition away from our car culture.”

And yet, consider this juxtaposition. In this same city a few months before, the
Los Angeles Times
reported a disturbing increase since 2002 of hit-and-run collisions in which cars struck bicyclists and the drivers fled the scene. Car-on-bike hit-and-runs had gone up 42 percent between 2002 and 2012 (the last year for which data was available), leaving thirty-six people dead and 5,600 injured during that ten-year span—with almost no arrests or prosecutions.
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The centerpiece of the report was the story of a man who was struck by a car while he was stopped at a red light in Beverly Hills. The driver sped off without lending aid, and the cyclist had been forced to drag his broken body to the curb, crying out for help. Eight of his vertebrae were fractured. His pelvis was shattered. Because of internal bleeding, he was kept in an induced coma for nearly a week. His medical bills exceeded $1 million, and it took him a year to recover, during which time he lost his job.

Two days after the crash, the driver showed up at the police department with a lawyer and photos of her car, admitting
she had been involved in a collision with a cyclist, although she did not produce the car itself. The police declined to pursue the case without physical evidence from the car. Only the bicyclist's dogged efforts to persuade prosecutors to act, and the private investigator he hired to track down a witness, finally led to an arrest and prosecution a year and a half after the hit-and-run. After another year and a half, the driver pleaded no contest, received a sentence of 120 days in jail, served only two days—less time than the biker's coma—and was ordered to pay $638,000 in restitution. As of the date of the
Times
report, she had paid him $24.42 and had left the state. A lawsuit was working its way through the courts.

The response from readers was even more revealing than the original story. Letters poured in, expressing consistent and articulate outrage at—wait for it—bicyclists. “When it comes to cyclists involved in hit-and-runs,” the paper's letters editor wrote, “readers didn't express much sympathy. Nearly all . . . expressed some empathy for the drivers.”

Readers complained that cyclists don't stop for stop signs. They take up too much road space. They break the rules. They get in the way of the cars that actually belong there. If they were getting hit by cars, it most likely was the cyclists' fault, several letter writers suggested. No one expressed concern at the unenthusiastic response from the police and courts. The story of a cyclist's tragedy had instead become their opportunity to tee off on a topic they had been stewing about. One letter writer summed up the anti-bike zeitgeist this way: “I would guess that cyclists not playing by the rules of the road may upset the motorists and their emotions lead to some hit and run situations. Would it help if cyclists were required to take bicycle driving tests?”

Never mind that this story's main character was a cyclist stopped at a red light when a car slammed into him, or that official
findings of fault in car-on-bike crashes run at about a fifty-fifty split, or that regardless of who is at fault in a collision, a hit-and-run is still a crime, not to mention an indecent and cowardly act. A man had to drag his broken body to the curb without anyone to help him, and all the letter writers could do was express anger at having to share the road with pesky cyclists, and suggest that such collisions could be avoided if bike riders would get over their sense of entitlement and be forced to pass a test. Because testing works so well in eliminating bad driving.

There you have it: one city, two very different visions of car culture; two radically opposed perceptions of what's wrong with our door-to-door system. Some crave change and more options and are hungry for the ability to use streets easily and safely without a car at least some of the time. Others abhor such change and deeply resent those who insist on what sounds like limits to their mobility, to the point that they are prepared to excuse hit-and-run drivers so long as the victim is riding a bike. One side argues that expanding bike lanes, plazas, and sidewalks to persuade people out of their cars will reduce overload simply by taking cars off the street. The other side views such notions as nonsense, for surely robbing cars of street space and giving slower bike riders and walkers travel equality can only increase congestion. How will drivers get to work on time with cyclists getting in the way? How will the police or ambulances get through during emergencies?

The same sort of divide exists between those who want to spend more transportation dollars on roads and those who favor more spending on public transit; between those who favor projects for passenger travel and those who want more spending to expand goods movement.

Where does a city—or neighborhood or nation—go from such seemingly intractable views of our door-to-door world? Is there a solution beyond hanging our hopes on the new and unproven
wonder of autonomous cars and trucks, treading water while awaiting a technology that is unlikely to have a transformative impact before the year 2040? Can't something be done now?

The answer is yes. Of course. We've known how to fix most of the stuff that drives us crazy about driving—and biking and trucking and training—for decades. And many other countries have already done them to varying degrees. But if the question is
Will we do something now?
. . . well, that's another matter.

Over time, most of us have become acclimatized to the current sorry state of our door-to-door system, according to Janette Sadik-Khan, who swept into New York City in 2007 as the city's transportation czar, where she launched a whirlwind effort to persuade skeptical New Yorkers to embrace change that seemed, on the surface, to be a recipe for disaster. Her best argument was simple:
We've been doing the same thing to fix traffic for a half century. How's that working out for you?

“For fifty years, everybody thought these are the ways our streets ought to be used. It's all about the asphalt. It's all about the cars. It's all about what happens behind the windshield . . . So initial skepticism is completely understandable. Because if your streets are frozen for fifty years, you accept them. If they're dangerous, if they're ugly, if there's no street life on them, okay: They're our streets.”
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But Sadik-Khan, New York City's Transportation Department commissioner from 2007 to 2013, had the backing of the mayor who hired her. Billionaire businessman Michael Bloomberg gave her freedom to reinvent New York traffic. And she managed to do what many said was impossible: she redesigned iconic Broadway from Columbus Circle to Union Square, launched the nation's biggest bike share network, grafted four hundred miles of bike lanes onto some of the busiest streets in the world, put up red-light and speed cameras to try to catch the nation's most
unruly drivers, built sixty pedestrian plazas across the city to revitalize street life, and, perhaps most spectacularly, closed Times Square to cars in order to restore pedestrian supremacy to some of the most valuable and recognizable square footage on the planet.

As the projects took shape, they were roundly condemned for creating a traffic Armageddon, Sadik-Khan recalls. “If you got your news from the tabloids, it was game over . . . And then the reality was, it actually made streets work better.”

Like Carmageddon's transformation into Carmaheaven, the changes to New York's transportation bedrock defied expectations. After Times Square was closed to cars and converted to pedestrian plazas from Forty-Second to Forty-Seventh Street, many expected a traffic and safety disaster. Instead, she says, traffic on the surrounding streets either improved or remained the same, while accidents dropped 63 percent. Meanwhile, the business community's fears that retail sales would suffer proved to be unfounded: sales went up, and within two years 70 percent of retail managers supported the changes and wanted them made permanent.
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It's common sense, really, as Sadik-Khan says. In a city, people on foot are customers. People in cars are just passing through.

The pattern was repeated throughout the city. Adding bike lanes and reengineering traffic flow for a calmer, steadier pace around Union Square improved traffic flow there 14 percent. A protected bike lane—not just a stripe on the road but a physically separated place for cyclists, the first in a major American city—led to a 50 percent reduction in congestion. The city has hard evidence to support this, using GPS data culled from the ubiquitous Yellow Cabs that ply the streets of Manhattan. The data showed, for example, that before a bike lane was placed on Columbus Avenue, it took four and a half minutes, on average, to drive from Ninety-Sixth Street to Seventy-Seventh Street. After the bike
lanes came in, the transit time dropped to three minutes—with the same number of cars.

That sounds unbelievable, as it violates all the traditional rules of traffic. But Sadik-Khan and her new age traffic engineers always accompanied bike lanes with clever street design. Columbus Avenue was a one-way street with five lanes: three for traffic, one hybrid lane that was for traffic during rush hour and parking the rest of the time, and one for parking. Those lanes were all twelve feet wide, the standard width for 65-mile-per-hour freeway lanes. Lanes on city streets don't need to be so wide. By shrinking them to ten feet, enough room could be claimed for a six-foot protected bike lane and a five-foot buffer with landscaping between the parking lane and bike lane. The old configuration had drivers make left turns from traffic lanes but the new setup included pockets for left-turners so traffic didn't back up behind them. And so bike lanes don't speed up traffic by magic. They do so when combined with smart engineering. It just
looks
like magic.

Perhaps Sadik-Khan's most controversial move was the decision to install red-light cameras at 150 intersections citywide, plus speed cameras, some fixed, others roving, to catch (or deter) speeders and red-light runners. Decried as a plot to generate revenue rather than safety, similar systems are being dismantled as politically unpopular in communities nationwide. But Sadik-Khan says New York's data makes clear that the cameras are highly effective at curbing unsafe driving on city streets. At New York City intersections with red-light cameras, serious injuries dropped 56 percent and pedestrian injuries dropped 44 percent.
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Areas near speeding cameras saw injury crashes drop by nearly 14 percent.

“It's absolutely a plot,” says Sadik-Khan. “A plot to save lives.”

When Houston removed its red-light cameras from intersections in 2010, crashes of all types at those intersections rose 116
percent, major crashes went up 84 percent, and fatal crashes rose 30 percent.
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“I can't think of a single other health issue where there is this much death and this much lack of concern,” says Sadik-Khan. “Red-light cameras work. That's the plot.”

New York's experience suggests that long-elusive, seemingly unattainable goals—safer and more prosperous streets, better traffic flow, and a (relatively) peaceful mix of walkers, cyclists, and cars, all moderate rather than massive infrastructure expenses—have been waiting there all along. In the past, traffic design and planning have been all about connecting two dots, giving politicians a sexy ribbon-cutting moment on a project that may or may not be worth the massive investment, and then flushing as many vehicles through as possible. Street designs have long been rated primarily by their LOS, their level of service, meaning that the more cars that can flow through a given intersection in the shortest amount of time, the better. LOS is why so many urban environments are indifferent, hostile, or unsafe for people on foot or bike. LOS gave us the stroad. And loss of LOS is why everyone expected Sadik-Khan to fail with her bike lane and pedestrian projects.

But after many years of pursuing LOS as traffic nirvana, the system is still chronically overloaded, dysfunctional, decaying, and nowhere near ready for the future. This was Sadik-Khan's pitch, and it was what allowed her to turn convention on its head to pursue her ideas and goals, furthered not through epic and costly projects as much as by shattering myths and using relatively simple off-the-shelf methods and technology to do better. Now other cities are adopting her template. Sadik-Khan started a movement.