by Ernest Sternberg
I should have known I was becoming obsessed by driverless cars. The life of the urban planner may be glamorous, I had told myself, but the doubts and uncertainties were nothing to envy. Smart cars, smart parking, smart cities, smart pavement—everything smart, smart, smart, yet none of us smart enough to tell you what autonomous transportation would do on city streets. The corporate behemoths with their billion-dollar bets on cars of the future, they didn’t know either, I thought, as I approached my apartment building. It was the end of another exhausting day of transportation projections that had proved fruitless, because we could not project what the future would bring.
Trudging up the stairs, I could hear it in my skull: au, ton, om, ous, and again, au, ton (and when I took two steps at once) omous and again past the next landing, au, ton, and so on, until I reached my floor. In my flat at last, I stumbled toward the fridge, from which I extracted cold quinoa-salad, my humble evening meal.
Maybe my mistake was to wash it down with swigs of kombucha. In a moment, I felt lighter as if lifted by gaseous emissions. I floated from the table to my couch. There, I dropped onto the cushions, sprawled over them, and listened to the street noise, until it lulled me into languid sleep, which gave way to dreams, of urban traffic.
The First Dream
The morning sun shined cheerily through my window, when Device woke me with the news that it was 8 am. “You can dress in office casual plus sandals, my dear,” was her advice, despite my warnings to her about unwelcome endearments, caused by her recent personality upgrade. “Don’t forget to tuck your shirt in! You have to make a presentation today at 9:30 am on autonomous transportation,” she continued, and even this news did not dissuade my sudden good humor.
Promptly washed and dressed, I ventured down the stairwell. Overnight, my greying concrete walk-up had turned into a spacious LEED-certified, sustainable building that, in my dream, I could afford. At the ground floor, what had been a dank hallway was now a skylight-illuminated lobby, from which I stepped out into the morning sun. What I saw struck me with wonder.
Yesterday’s car-clogged avenue, now gone! Gauntlets of parked cars, through which I had been forced, until now, to peek out at the traffic and then sprint to the other side, where I would wait for the smog-belching bus—gone! And the two central traffic lanes had disappeared, that stretch of road replaced by a tree-lined median, on which a bike path meandered. The din, the smell, and the grime were gone too. On the two remaining lanes, vehicles hummed, merrily energized—so my dream made me understand—by solar- or wind-dispatched electrons.
At the corner intersection, there were no longer signal lights. Cars sped effortlessly across the junction, in smooth sequence barely feet apart. When gaps appeared, other cars from the perpendicular direction slipped seamlessly through and just as smoothly continued on their way. “Ah, it must be the traffic algorithm of the future!” I exclaimed to myself. The marvel, I realized, is the real-time management systems, using sensors and geographical precision to interweave the traffic streams!
Knowing my routine of the future, Device now tinkled me. “You have to go in a share-car, honey” she said. “The budget subroutine has already notified me, so don’t try to object.” I groaned. She had, after all, spent weeks warning me about my spending. I scratched my earlobe vigorously, since meaningless body motions annoyed her, but I did not fight. Device continued, “You are getting a Tanzanian-Chinese model, a Serengeti Panda 3.0, with only one other passenger today. Chances are 72.5% that a third passenger will join you closer to downtown, at the corner of Hua Way and—.” “Fine,” I cut in, “now tell me about other passenger.”
“It is a 25 year old male coder, an intern. His interests are real estate financial coding, insurance coding, theory of coding, and…” “Is it too late to cancel?” I asked Device. It was. I could see the robo-taxi approaching. “Just tell the car not to introduce me,” I whispered to Device, as the economical two-door coupe decelerated and then came to a neat stop by the curb in front of me, in the former parking lane.
Just yesterday that lane had been crammed with parked cars, squeezed in from corner to corner. Now the sidewalk extended outward onto the former parking lane to sinuously shaped bump-outs, where trees shaded park benches. They alternated just as curvaceously with bump-ins, including one right in front of me, meant for pick-up and drop-off at my building’s entrance. “Far fewer cars are sequentially serving many customers, so much less parking is now needed!” I explained to myself, as the share-taxi’s door rolled up.
“I am now turning you over to your driver, Dar-Ling,” Device announced. “Good morning, Sir,” said the chipper Tanzanian-Chinese designed voice, without hint of an accent. “Why good morning Darling,” I replied, purposefully mispronouncing, to irritate Device. The software coder was sitting in the front, where the human driver would once have been. The car now shifted his seat sideways toward the right window, and slid the left rear seat forward—a nice invention, since the car only had two doors. I sat in it, wary of a conversation about coding. “Could you slide me back Darling?” I asked, wondering whether I needed an excuse. But Darling immediately shunted my seat to the rear row, which now meant that the other passenger had swung in front of me again. Realizing my risk, I immediately squeezed my knees into his seatback to discourage him from swiveling my way. These were the risks of a future of shared conveyance, I thought.
Here you are in a car of the future, I told myself silently, as the coupe’s rotating engine whirred to pick up speed, so use this time to find out how it works! “So, Darling, where do you park at night?” “I work round the clock, Sir” was the matter-of-fact but stern reply, possibly meant to discourage prying questions. I refused to be discouraged; this was a dream, after all. “What if you have no customers?” The coding guy shifted uneasily, as if thinking I was embarrassing the car. “If there are lulls in demand,” the car answered, “I stand ready at the locations where the system calculates I can most optimally respond to future patterns of demand.”
That was a conversation stopper, but I thanked the coupe anyway. It turned casually onto the freeway, where it joined a coordinated column of cars traveling at identical speeds in the left-most lane, with barely clearance between them. “Ah,” I recalled, in the lingo of transportation planners, “they’re platooning.” I kept this insight to myself. “They can platoon,” I figured, “because the system knows that these cars have the same destination.” And so it did. In minutes our convoy was pulling into downtown streets, where the cars now split apart, in synchronous mutual adjustment with the rest of the traffic. They slowed, stopped, and let off passengers in choreographed sequence that barely affected traffic flow.
Most startling about downtown was what was missing. The congestion. No gridlock, no honking, no exhaust, no haze, no energy waste, no delays, no frustration, no unsettling fear that life was being choked out of you. Yes, the downtown buildings appeared to have just as many employees, diners, and residents as they had the day before. But now, I reasoned, the inter-communicating but autonomous cars could each sequentially serve far more passengers than they could yesterday, when I had been awake. Far fewer cars were now needed!
That must be why there are now more bikes, riding safely in their lanes, next to sidewalks enriched with trees. More striking still was another lane freed from traffic. I understood what I was seeing there: rain-gardens and bio-swales, which could absorb the stormwater, letting it seep naturally into the soil, without channeling it to ancient sewers.
The city has achieved comprehensive, intelligent, shared mobility! I enthused. Instead of the million private cars, each carrying a lone, frustrated driver, each trying to insert one more vehicle into downtown’s meager space, far fewer vehicles now toured on demand, giving point-to-point mobility to each of us, cheaply. When demand dies down at night, they would, I guessed, position themselves around the city in far fewer parking spaces than were once needed. There they could recharge and wait for the next call.
Think back now, you outdated urbanist, I reminded myself, and remember the lessons of a hundred fifty years of urban history. From the time that horse drawn coaches crowded the city and horse-poop accumulated on every street, through generations grown accustomed to car-crowding, car-smog, and car-noise, the city has been plagued by congestion. For the first time in a century and a half, the clogging has been cleared. Combined with city-wide traffic management, autonomous cars have done it!
I wanted to grab on to this future. I wanted to learn more, to find out what it took to get there. “This is the dream that our city must strive for!” I was about to yell, but the image was cracking, then dissolving in front of my eyes. And I found myself in my dark room, awake, and nervous with foreboding.
The Second Dream
It was 3 AM and I felt bloated and hungry. From my couch, I stared disconsolately at the freezer. The dumb object, still disconnected from the Internet-of-Things, could not even communicate its contents. I dragged myself over, pulled it open again, and leaned in. A vulgar meat patty cut from a once-living ungulate sat in it frost-covered cellophane. Where were the lab-cultured patties so long promised? How long could one wait for guiltless meat? When microwaved, though, the burger settled my stomach and in minutes I was asleep again.
In my new dream, I was dressed in a business suit, just stepping out of my apartment. The elevator bid me good morning, and played tunes it had selected from my favorites. It was the building I had entered yesterday, but now much better appointed, and I sensed in myself a strangely proprietary feeling toward it. With dueling pangs of conscience and glee, I realized I was no longer an urban planner but a real estate mogul, and owned this building.
It was just past dawn, 6 am, overcast and grey outside, Device informed me, but stuck to the facts in a kind of sullen way. Now, I must interrupt this dream, since you are surprised to find Device again in my story, even though I’m in an entirely different dream. But, really, you should expect that by now. In sleep and in wakefulness, in all possible futures, Device is with us, all of us, now to eternity.
“Your electro-yacht won’t have enough charge to get you through the traffic,” Device told me, as soon as I stepped out to the sidewalk. I was met there by a scene both familiar and strange. As ever before except in the previous dream, every lane was packed with vehicles inching forward, emitting a dull haze that billowed over the sidewalk and up into the atmosphere. But now, strangely, on almost all the cars, the windows including the front windscreens were shuttered.
“I’m sending your diesel from the Encroacher line, the Russo-American Yeltsin model. Unfortunately, it is delayed at the exit ramp,” Device admitted. I stared at the crawling traffic. “You couldn’t have predicted the exit time from the garage?” I demanded, since I now had higher expectations of the instrument.
“Well, if you insist!” There was a momentary pause, then a ping. “I have now upgraded with the garage sensing sub-routine, and debited your account,” Device said, revealing some irritation. Over to my right, at the far end of the building, I could see the Yeltsin, the shiny, black, land-whale emerging from the basement parking structure’s open maw, tilted upward on the inclined ramp. Evidently, the car was looking for a gap in the street traffic.
It must have seen that I was walking over to it. “Welcome, sir,” it said with a male voice, as it rolled up its side to let me in. “May I remind you, my name is Boris?” The sofa that had been rested against the car’s opposite side slid forward, so all I had to do was turn my back to the car and set myself down it, at which it rolled me gently backward into the cabin.
Directly to my front, screens glowed with morning news options. At the former front window, a larger screen showed movie choices. A small refrigerator’s door displayed the special line of Yeltsin drink options. To my right, a coffee bar, next to a samovar. “I have a New Guinea, an Ethiopian, and my special Moscow blend, sir,” the car told me. Though I was a traveler from the past, I was appreciative right away. “Very good, Boris. Skip the Moscow and make that an espresso with a dollop of foam and fake sugar.” Presto, the machine was grinding the beans.
But the car wasn’t moving. “We can’t get going?” I asked. “I can enter in 30 seconds with an estimated five dollar bid, replied Boris.” I asked Boris to explain. “Sir, we are bidding against other cars to give us space to enter.” Why not? I thought, and told the car to try it. Almost immediately, a vehicle approaching to our right, no doubt the one that had accepted our bid, slowed down, opening a gap. “We won insertion for just three dollars,” the limo boasted. “Good job, Boris.” My espresso was dripping into the tumbler; the air purification system whirred gently; the car inched into traffic. This future, too, has its benefits, at least for a mogul like me, I thought.
“Could you open the windows please?” I asked, eager to see this new world of urban transportation. Immediately, the side screens rolled into the door frames, and the front monitor slid into the dashboard. From the intersection where we were idling, in all four directions to the horizon, vast herds of vehicles waited, occasionally lumbering forward in synchronized movement, a few feet at a time. Peculiarly shaped vehicles moved just a bit faster at the sides of the road, where the bike lanes had been. “Boris,” I exclaimed, “What is the little vehicle, there? The one that looks like a chair?”
“An autonomous chaise, sir, an ergonomic model” Boris replied. “It is comfortable and efficient. It carries passengers directly into the office and parks at thedesk. I believe that there are special discounts today. Would you like me to visit the showroom along our route in one hour?” I wondered whether Boris would get a cut from the chaise dealership, but had no time to ask, because an even stranger contraption had appeared, resembling a settee with no back, the rider conversing with her device while sitting cross-legged. “Never mind, just tell me what the other thing is.” “It is a new Turkish model,” Boris replied, “the autonomous ottoman, another addition to the new automotive category, the sports-futility vehicle, sir.”
Tired of the novelties outside the window, I turned my eyes back to the car itself, and noticed a frilly garment next to me, sticking out from the crevice where the seat cushion converged with the backrest. No doubt the couch would fold open into a bed if I asked it to. “Boris, why is that item on the couch?” Boris took nanoseconds to reply: “Do you mean the causal sequence that led to its being there, or do you mean the lapse in the cleaning service?”
“Boris, you must have been programmed to be a pedant, parsing my words that way. Give me both answers.” The garment had been there since my “assignation,” Boris told me, of two evenings before. “Your date, sir” the car added, presumably uncertain about my vocabulary. I wondered whether Device could hear. And I regretted that I hadn’t had my dream two days sooner. “Now to answer further, sir, the car-cleaning droid failed to pick up the garment because it could not recognize intimate apparel. However, sir, I can upgrade its intimacy-recognition functions for $49.99.” The last thing I wanted, I informed Boris, was a gossipy and nosy vacuum cleaner.
We now went through a dull spell, as the car crept. How, I wondered, could I keep myself occupied for the rest of the ride? Roll up the screens again and watch a movie? Do online shopping? Ask the car to make me breakfast? Try the Yeltsin cocktails? Have a teleconference with my friends? Bring up my office work? Use the exercise cycle in the car’s rear?
After the short silence, Boris dinged a small tune, as if clearing his throat, to get my attention. “Your office schedule today, sir. You are expected to close on the property acquisition contract with the attorneys by 9am. But we won’t arrive till 10:12 am. And by then, the young coding intern is due for a job interview.”
“Forget the coding guy and tell me how we can get to my work faster,” I demanded. Boris took only a moment. “At current prices across the 2,539 cloud-connected vehicles that we would impact, with 560 bidders competing, our cost for free-flow movement would be $1,953 and 9 cents, within a 10 percent moment to moment price fluctuation in either direction. At this free-flow rate we would now purchase, our ride will take a half hour.” I pondered this. “But, sir, if you are satisfied getting in within one hour, the medium-flow option costs only $999 from a road-space scalper and gets us to the office by 8:45 am.”
I might be a mogul, but spending a grand to make it through traffic seemed too much. “I am proud today to propose a new service, an in-car conference” Boris then offered. “The lawyers’ vehicles and I could converge in 25 minutes. Our cars would synchronize movements, allowing your colleagues to step over into my cabin. All chairs can swivel to our center coffee table for your meeting. I can hard-copy print the legal documents in my dashboard and have them ready for signatures. But we will need a special speed-synch software upgrade. The new release is available this minute for a subscription cost of $998. That’s a monthly charge.” Boris went on to say that the upgrade would calculate several million simultaneously varying factors to bring my car and the three lawyers’ cars through respective traffic clogged roads to our conjunction. While our in-car conference was proceeding in our cabin, the lawyers’ cars would follow along meekly, quite empty of passengers.
Now I understood this new world. While empty limos took up highway space, millions of commuters would put up with longer commutes than ever before, because after all you could keep yourself endlessly busy in your car. Was this worth it? Did I have to buy the extra software from Boris? Did I really care about this real estate contract? Did I even have to stay in this dream? I sank back in my cushion, but it wasn’t the limo’s couch any longer, it was my own couch in my own sad apartment.
Waking Up
“Good morning, honey,” said Device, shocking me back to reality, in syrupy sweet tone, that immediately made me nervous. “Rise and shine! Though it’s, hee-hee, overcast.” Was Device sniggering? “The city is waiting, lol.” What could that mean?
“Device, stop it! I’ve had enough of your artificial personality, your excellent memory, your syrupy female voice.” Even as I was saying these things, I knew I was confused and disoriented, and would regret my cruel words. But I had to stop Device from pushing me into another day. I needed to think, to reflect, on what my dreams meant. Maybe with foresight and careful laws, the city could move toward my green dream, not the grey dream. But device did not answer. “Device, can you understand I’m just anxious? Can you forgive me?” I pleaded. “I didn’t mean to hurt you? I just need to understand, to think ahead, and figure out what a planner should do.”
Then a roar rattled the window. The floor shook, the refrigerator thudded, and curtains screeched open slowly, as if they were connected to the Internet-of-Things. “What’s happening, Device?”
“Just look outside, darling,” she answered, with triumph in her voice. I was giddy as I approached the window. My heart thumped like an ancient piston engine. I gasped, then saw, and understood, as a column of autonomous passenger drones, their rotors whirling, rose from the sidewalk, casting shadows over my window, and crisscrossing the sky in vast mechanical flocks.
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
The foregoing story is an exercise in near-future scenario-setting. Since it is fiction, and it has already escaped my pen, I hold no interpretive monopoly over it. But in my mind, it points to the imminence of two transportation futures, of which the first dream’s sequential car-sharing system holds out by far the finer urban vision. The driverless luxury system and then the sky-polluting drone are speeding our way. The future is holding its breath; there is now an opening for public choice but it’s evanescent.
Ernest Sternberg
Department of Urban and Regional Planning
University at Buffalo, State University of New York
ezs@buffalo.edu
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