I have just spent a week in Bangkok. Mostly, I travelled in taxis. Apart from the odd one or six taxi drivers refusing to turn on the meter (and me then refusing their ride), it was a pleasant, stress-free experience. I didn’t have to worry about the driving or the traffic or the time it takes. That was someone else’s problem. Much like, I imagine, a drive in an autonomous car might feel: safe, predictably slow, and I couldn’t communicate with the driver beyond showing him (never her) the point on the map that I wanted him to take me. Having just read an article that boldly states that autonomous cars will change our cities, I am wondering if they will.
Everyone in Bangkok takes a taxi. Many of the locals and most of the tourists. How will autonomous change this apart from putting a taxi driver out of work?
I never once felt a need to use taxis except for my own convenience. So I ordered them, hailed them, and went up to them whenever I wanted. Unless mine and all the other taxi-users in Bangkok change their conduct by, for example, being willing to ride-share or wait or take a scheduled stop, surely all we’re going to do is replace drivers for no drivers. Apart from parking (which no one seems to do very much of in Bangkok) spaces being freed up, it occurs to me we’ll still have the same congested streets, same numbers of vehicles, and similar sorts of problems to the ones a busy city like Bangkok has today.
Unlike, say, Rome or Lima (where everyone feels the need to sit on their horn, even when stationary), Bangkok is a very low aggression driving culture, and there’s very little noise pollution. Autonomous vehicles would be similar, I imagine. Unlike Bangkok drivers, though, the autonomous vehicle would probably not be able to do a U-turn in the middle of busy traffic to pick up a fare or because a fare suddenly changed their mind about where to go, so may be less effective at helping me achieve my desired outcome.
I will need to investigate more about the ways in which futurists believe our cities will change with self-driving vehicles because I am not convinced there will have much to motivate us to change our transportation usage habits and that feels a lot like the outcome when tug boat tows the barge up the Chao Phraya river: there may be no one in the driver’s seat but the barge is still on the river.