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In fact, I saw Cornel West jaywalk, meandering across a street midblock. In Cambridge, I witnessed many people jaywalking. I’m going to call it the “Cambridge Test” after my experience at the Harvard campus for a Strong Towns speaking engagement. This is nonsense, or stated more clearly, this is nonsensical unless we are willing to destroy the street as a platform for building wealth in a place. Adherents believe that, with AV, we will be able to move vehicles quickly and, simultaneously, improve safety and comfort for people not in a vehicle. The promise of automated vehicles is the promise of the stroad, the street/road hybrid. Streets are the framework for growing a place, a platform for building wealth where the quality of the human habitat is more important than the throughput of vehicles. Roads are connections between places where speed and travel efficiency is the emphasis. Let me be very clear: I think the fundamental flaw of the entire automated vehicle concept revolves around our confusion between a road and a street. I can be as guilty as anyone of being an idealistic dreamer at times, but I find people in that “max cognitive dissonance” zone to be dangerously delusional.
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On the other hand, they believe that tech-enlightened automobile companies will use AV to promote mass transit, give streets back to people, and make our cities the utopias we always dreamed they should be. On one hand, they believe in the entire narrative of evil automobile companies conspiring to destroy mass transit, steal streets from people, and turn our cities into auto-dominated realms. I’ve set up a Venn diagram to describe them. There is a special sub-species of tech-adherents that is particularly notable. There is so much to be gained, Chuck, so stop being such a curmudgeon and get on board with change.” Artificial intelligence will eventually fix whatever is wrong. No technology is flawless at first, but the problems will be fixed in time. “It’s better than human-operated vehicles. No matter what the critique (the latest being commentary on the woman killed by an automated Uber), there is no end to the defense of automation. It’s been fascinating to me to watch the reaction of many in our audience when I share information about automated vehicles in our social media feeds.
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I think we as a society seem all too enamored with technology, all too trusting of those pushing it, and all too forgetful of the fact that we’ve been down this street before. There are a lot of people very excited about automated vehicles and their potential to transform our cities.
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The publishing team is great, especially now that they’ve read the book and recognize how automated vehicles fit into a Strong Towns approach. If we could appear to be on the cutting edge of the latest technology, give some insights on how automated vehicles will change cities as we know it, maybe we could get a writeup in Popular Science or something. Some on the publishing team-whose job it is to sell books-assumed I would include a lot on the hottest topic in transportation, that being automated vehicles (AV). On September 8, Wiley & Sons will release the second book in the Strong Towns series: Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: A Strong Towns Approach to Transportation.