Like many New Yorkers, I often use Via, a ride-sharing app which—for five bucks—will transport you between any two points in Manhattan below 125th Street. They’ve got their algorithms in a row and, in general, the system works very smoothly. But it’s clear, when the car pulls up, that something’s slightly off. The trip is almost completely automated, and computers organize the pickup, drop-off, journey, and payment: the anomaly is the driver. Watching the route unfold—following the instructions of that anodyne, robotic, female voice from the GPS—I catch the sad whiff of impending obsolescence. The self-driving car is about to arrive.
The implications are profound, and not just for the employment prospects of the immigrants and “shared economy” operatives who drive the vehicles. Something radical looms, both for the fundamental nature of our mobility and for the form of the cities in which we circulate. Just as earlier technological innovations, like streetcar lines, railways, and horseless carriages, had transformative effects on urban morphology and life (exponential growth, suburbanization, corridorization, and other dramatic physical and social changes), so the advent of the autonomous vehicle—autonomobiles—will transform our cities decisively.
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