Our Automotive Dystopia and the Hope of the Self-Driving Car

About eighty years ago a classic science fiction short story painted a dystopian picture of a nightmare world where cars made possible vastly bigger cities, after which, as the ratio of cars-to-humans approached one-to-two those cities "choked" on those cars, with "[s]eventy million steel juggernauts, operated by imperfect human beings at high speed" proving "more destructive than war" of property and human life, obscene insurance premiums, and of course, the squandering of a finite oil supply.

The solution the story envisioned was a colossal solar-powered public transport system launched as a public works program.

I can imagine that a good many readers are sneering at this story as some "socialist," "hippie" vision. But it was actually the furthest thing from that. The story is "The Roads Must Roll," by Robert Heinlein, published in the science fiction magazine Astounding when John Campbell was running the show--and in its depiction of a power grab by "Functionalists" a (very) thinly veiled right-wing attack on organized labor and Marxism.

The result is that its looking like a leftie vision is a matter of how times have changed, with our attitudes toward cars, oil, solar energy and public works sucked into the "culture wars" rather than treated as objects of rational appraisal--and it has to be acknowledged also, our having come to take what the story presented as a dystopia utterly for granted--so much so that it seems worth discussing the costs of that "way of life." Back in 2010 a study found that car crashes cost the U.S. economy some $1 trillion a year. (Putting it another way, if the cost of those crashes were a whole national economy by itself it would likely be in the top twenty globally--and one could guess that the figure has only gone up in the past decade.) That same year the country saw nearly 4 million injured in such accidents, 33,000 fatally. (More destructive than war, indeed!) Lest it need saying, all this has given us a $300 billion a year car insurance industry whose premiums weigh heavily on the budgets of the motorists that very few can escape becoming, while the problem cars pose from a natural resources standpoint should need no elaboration these days.

Yet anyone who questions that this is the best of all possible worlds is apt to get a hostile reaction, even when no one mentions anything anywhere near so radical as solar-powered moving roadways--as we see in the wildly exaggerated sneering at the prospect of self-driving cars, or the turn to Transportation-as-a-Service that this might make possible, or even the electrification of the automotive fleet (with, par for the course, the media generally treating the weakest arguments on these scores with great respect and their opponents with none). However, I for one am prepared to declare that a world where we move beyond tens--hundreds--of millions of gas-powered steel juggernauts driven at high speed by imperfect humans as our default way of getting about is likely to be a better one. Indeed, I look forward to a day when people look back at our era and shudder at the insanity of a society that actually relied on the alertness, reflexes and judgment of human beings who were so often sick, tired, distracted, irascible, angry or worse to control such juggernauts crowded together on superhighways as a default mode of transport.