SELF-DRIVING CARS AND GRIDLOCK
Traffic will worsen, be we won’t care
DAVID BOOTH
God save me from mush-minded futurists predicting a new urban utopia thanks to the wonders of the self-driving car.
Their prognostications are always the same: Cars, now computer-controlled, will cause traffic to flow more freely, our daily commutes will be shorter and driverless vehicles will do our bidding without the slightest attention from the person behind the steering wheel.
Even their reasoning is the same. They trot out the tired old rhetoric about millennials not being as interested in cars, factor in their adoption of the so-called “sharing economy” and, presto, the end of all traffic congestion. In this urban utopia, they promise, there’ll be fewer vehicles on the road and more efficient use of traditionally idled cars. Traffic jams, once the No. 1 irritation in a typical commuter’s day, will be a thing of the past. It all sounds so very wonderful. It’s also a load of horse manure! While it’s a given that cars will be safer — Time’s March 7, 2016, edition makes a convincing argument for the almost complete eradication of the car accident if people are willing to give up driving — the predictions of car sharing and reduced car ownership would seem, shall we say, a little dreamy. In fact, there is a good chance this burgeoning era of self-driving will result in longer commutes and even worse traffic jams.
Let’s look first at the cornerstone of these predictions, namely that our kids aren’t buying cars. That would seem wishful thinking on the part of the anti-car crowd; evidence now suggests that Millennials have just been delaying rather than eschewing buying new cars. They may not have got their driver’s licence as soon as they turned 16, but according to J.D. Power & Associates, Millennials have now passed Gen X in buying new cars. In 2015, they accounted for 27 per cent of U.S. new car purchases. That’s up from just 18 per cent in 2010. And Deloitte says this trend will continue, Gen Y predicted to buy 40 per cent of all new cars by 2020, passing even Boomers in their importance to automakers.
What are the kids doing with all these new cars they’re buying? Why, in perfect replication of their parents, they’re moving to the burbs. Yup, millennials — the very same ones futurists claim are committed to their tiny condos in ever-taller skyscrapers — are moving to our cities’ nether regions. According to the Wall Street Journal, 66 per cent of young Americans are planning to pick up and move to the suburbs. By comparison, only 10 per cent want to remain downtown. Closer to home, a recent Angus Reid study revealed 45 per cent of 18to 34-year-old Torontonians were considering leaving the GTA.
There’s no mystery as to why this is happening. Indeed, for those who credit the modern Millennial with an idealism beyond any generation before, it must be a shocker to find out they’re doing it for the same base reasons that we Boomers did: money. As Romana King and Mark Brown detail in the February/March edition of MoneySense magazine, it costs almost $70,000 a year more for a family of four to live in downtown Vancouver than an hour’s drive away in Abbotsford. The picture their numbers paint for Toronto and Calgary aren’t any prettier. Simply put, our kids are now parents themselves and are moving to the suburbs for the same reason we did; they can’t afford not to.
Now here’s the kicker: Selfdriving cars are going to help them get there.
While most discussions about self-driving cars focus on their (illusory) inner-city advantages, where the fully autonomous automobile will really shine is on the long, interminable slog in from suburbia. Even the simplest of sensors can recognize that the vehicle in front has moved and the car will be able crawl forward another 20 feet completely unaided.
When things open up, adaptive cruise control will maintain a set distance to the car ahead all by itself. Want to move into the fast lane? No problem, the darned thing will even signal its intentions on its own. As long as there’s distinct lane demarcations and a target destination, an autonomous automobile will be able to drive you all the way from Langley to downtown Vancouver, Hamilton to Toronto or SaintSauveur to Montreal.
Thus will the morning commute be completely transformed. Crawling along at five kilometres an hour is no longer the repetitive drudge it once was; it’s now more productive use of our most precious commodity — time. Freed from the shackles of the steering wheel — and, of course, hooked up to the in-car 4G wireless hot-spot — drivers can use what was once never-ending tedium as the best time of the day to brush up that important PowerPoint presentation or respond to those pressing emails.
If you’re one of the poor folks still driving themselves to work, you’ll probably curse their very existence, but autonomous automobiles promise to do for the suburban commute what jet aircraft have done for intercontinental travel.
And all that high-tech will fit their already-stretched budgets, by MoneySense’s estimation. Honda’s lowly Civic, for $21,190, now boasts all the technologies (adaptive cruise control, forwardcollision warning, and automatic braking) that are the precursor to completely autonomous driving.
Self-driving cars are not going to reduce traffic congestion; au contraire, commutes may become longer as young people, searching for affordable housing, are driven deeper into the hinterland. The good news is that — as long as you’re in an autonomous automobile — you won’t care. You’ll be conference-calling Beijing or spread-sheeting the latest monthly accruals, all from your commute-lengthening, trafficincreasing self-driving car.