David N. Levinson

Transcription

There's a number of things that are changing in the transportation system that we need to think about. Perhaps the most important is the rise of the autonomous vehicle, robot cars. And so, over the last 100 years, cars have been driven by people and this has its disadvantages, people's reaction times are slow which leads to potential safety problems. They space the vehicles at a pretty long distance from each other and this doesn't utilize the capacity as much as it might. So, we saw last year with the deployment of the Google car, the announcement that they have been running this on the Bay Area for over a year, over 100,000 miles where the only crash was somebody rear ended them that there's a potential and a likelihood that we'll be able to have cars that are driven by machines in the near future, in the next decade or so. And it will take some time to transition from drivers behind the wheel to robots behind the wheel, but this is going to have a lot of changes in not only driver safety, cars should become much more safe once they are driven by robots with instantaneous reaction times that don't get tired, that don't talk on cell phones and so on, but it will also lead to a rethinking of how we use the vehicle. People are going to think of cars more like trains as a place where it's transporting them, but they can do something else while they are in the vehicle. You won't have to be between above 18 years old or above 16 years old in order to drive. The robot will be able to take you even if you're a child, so you are not going to have parents shuffling kids back and forth. We don't need to park cars immediately next to buildings, so parking lots can be located in different places. Because people are going to be driven rather than driving, they are going to be willing to be in their vehicle for a longer period of time, so that they don't necessarily need to locate where they live as close to where they work as they do now. So, there's going to be a lot of changes in the transportation system as a consequence of that and no one's really given it a lot of thought. It doesn't factor into any planning that we do right now. Some people are going to want to continue to drive for the fun of it and I expect in the future people are going to be allowed to drive on Sundays and the rest of the week they're going to have to rely on the robots for safety reasons. We're not going to allow, you know, a few hot heads to be driving a car in an otherwise safe environment and messing it up. But, it's going to take a long time to get from the point where we are where 100 percent of the people drive their own cars to a point where zero percent of the people drive their own cars most of the time. The second major change is the electrification of the fleet and this of itself isn't going to change how we drive so much or how we live, but it's going to change, one, how we think about the consequences of the car because the pollution coming out of the car when we are burning fuel is going to be a lot different than the pollution that we get when we are using batteries to power the vehicle because the electricity is going to be generated away from the vehicle itself and probably away from cities. It could be generated using renewable resources. So, a lot of pollution problems that we think about now are going to be different, but it is also going to change how we finance roads because we depend a lot on the gas tax and we can't use the gas tax going forward if people aren't buying gasoline. And even if they are using hybrids and they are buying gasoline in less and less numbers, we're going to have to come up with some alternative way of financing transportation. And so, this trend is likely to lead to either reliance in general purpose taxes which I think would be a bad direction to go or some other type of user fee. And people are talking about mileage based user fees, some type of road pricing where people are charged on a per mile basis at when they drive and then they might be charged more in the peak hours and less in the off peak. And this is going to also affect how we think about transportation because right now we have a lot of congestion in rush hour because people aren't paying for the congestion cost they are imposing on others. With road pricing in some form, they'll have to consider the cost of congestion when they are travelling, not only the cost they bear, but the cost that they impose on others and this will lead them to travel in other periods of time. We've gone through this long period where nothing has changed in transportation. Since the deployment of the interstate highway system, it's really been quite stagnant, you know, the vehicles haven't changed very much since the 1940's. They have air conditioning. They have automatic transmission, but they are basically the same car. They are made out of different materials, but the same idea. We're entering a period where there's going to be a lot of change and the transportation profession is really not expecting this and really probably needs to sort of become tuned in what's going on in the--outside of the profession.