Let’s be fair – the new long-range transportation plan (LRTP) for the District of Columbia ‘moveDC’ is an impressive work that any jurisdiction would be proud of. It looks at current problems, it scans the horizon for future influences, and makes recommendations that are intended to be as robust as possible out to 2040. The good folks of Washington D.C. have been given some great recommendations for their mobility that would previously have been expected to stand them in good stead over the next quarter of a century.

Clearly none of us can know the future, and so this 2040 vision is based on the ‘forward-casting’ of historical data from the current perspective; or dare one say the current ‘paradigm’? The transportation and urban planning professions have tracked incremental changes over the decades, and their carefully considered time-proven forecasts have generally been consistent and relatively accurate and therefore trusted by the municipalities.

Wise words

But, in this context of looking forward, consider some wise words from Larry Page, CEO of Google:

"The main thing that has caused companies to fail, in my view, is that they missed the future,"

So the ‘moveDC’ authors should perhaps take some encouragement from the fact that their document is unusual in that it has paid more attention than previous LRTPs in North America to rapidly emerging technologies. It even acknowledges autonomous (driverless) vehicles (AVs) and their potential to:

Reduce traffic accidents by up to 90%

Prevent 2 million annual crash-related injuries

Save as many as 30,000 lives annually

Increase efficiency through reductions in waste related to commuting and congestion—potentially 4.8 billion hours of commuting, 1.9 billion gallons of fuel, and more than $100 billion in lost worker productivity

Reduce the size of the auto fleet by as much as 90% and increase the use of vehicles within the fleet from less than 10% to more than 75%

These are clearly some major benefits that AVs bring, and what jurisdiction wouldn’t ‘want a piece of this pie’? So the authors also make a recommendation about AVs:

"Recommendation B.11: Support autonomous vehicle implementation and connected vehicle research, using D.C. as a test bed for the nation."

Continuing to view from the current perspective

However, having identified these incredible benefits of AVs, and making a recommendation that Washington D.C. be a national leader in testing the technology out, the document moves onto all the other facets of transportation and barely mentions AVs again. The LRTP authors continue to view the future through the lens of the current paradigm.

If this were the IT or Telecoms sector, where a seasoned veteran will have experienced multiple paradigm shifts in a multi-decade career, then the alarm bells would be ringing loud and clear. They know that when software touches things then they can disrupt. Consider what happened when software transformed the cell-phone into the smartphone. How many predicted that additional software as apps would further disrupt this sector and lead to the social media revolution? Our expectations of paradigm shifts is now so enhanced that most are expecting that wearable technology will further transform our lives.

But the last paradigm shift for the transportation and urban planners was probably when horse power was replaced with horsepower over a century ago. No wonder that the planners have no direct working experience of disruptive change to act as a guide in these changing times. Yet decision-making software is about to transform our dumb cars into smart vehicle chauffeurs, and the world is never going to be the same.

So How Might AVs affect LRTPs?

There are a very rapidly growing number of research papers and articles on AVs and their socio-economic impacts. For good reason it would seem; as the ‘moveDC’ authors noted in their brief list of benefits. This writer outlined why you shouldn’t be laughing, as AVs have implications for your business, and why a municipality investing in AVs could see transformative quality of life improvements and steal a livability march on its neighbors.

Just as the move from horse to automobile changed how and where we lived and worked, so the AV has the potential to further transform society. Informed policies will be needed as we can expect both more sprawl, and more intensification in urban centers. We can expect many that are disabled, seniors, too young, too poor, un-licensed etc. to become much more mobile. We can expect shops and services to come to us, whilst some may travel to meetings and site-based work in the comfort of their mobile office; working as they are chauffeured around.

AVs can fundamentally change the need for parking in urban centers, freeing up parking lots and structures on prime real estate for re-development. Fleets of shared AVs can effectively become Transit 2.0 and provide an on-demand mobility service that challenges the car ownership paradigm that our planners may have simply assumed will continue until 2040. Such thoughts have led Uber CEO, Travis Kalanick to consider the possible impacts of AV technology on his business model:

"The reason Uber could be expensive is because you're not just paying for the car — you're paying for the other dude in the car," Kalanick said. "When there's no other dude in the car, the cost of taking an Uber anywhere becomes cheaper than owning a vehicle. So the magic there is, you basically bring the cost below the cost of ownership for everybody, and then car ownership goes away."

Back to the future

Which neatly completes a circle and brings us back to Larry Page and his focus on 'not missing the future', as Google has a considerable sum invested in Uber and Google is almost certainly leading the development of AVs. Google are also on record as intimating their aspiration to have their AV technology in the public’s hands sometime around 2017-2019.

Even if Google need double the time that they anticipate to have AVs that are certified safe for public use on US roads, then it would still be in the range 2020-2024; well within the ‘moveDC’ timeframe of 2040.

So is it fair to suggest that Google and Uber are more likely to have seen the future and therefore more likely to bring it into being? Whereas the D.C. planners have looked, but essentially ‘missed the future’ with the ‘moveDC’ as it currently stands?

Due diligence needed

If the impacts of AVs are as profound as the ‘moveDC’ document suggests, then perhaps some due diligence is needed to determine how robust the current long-range transportation plans actually are. This doesn’t just apply to D.C., but everywhere that there are concentrations of people in need of surface transportation. If AVs could impact, or even disrupt some of our plans for transit, walking, bicycling or roads then we should consider them as a possible alternative solution.

It is a simple and relatively inexpensive thing to update a planning report, or move design lines on project blueprints. It is considerably more expensive to make changes once funds have been committed, or construction has started, on infrastructure projects like transit and roadway upgrades.

Let’s heed Larry Page’s wise words and do our very best not to ‘miss the future’, but to plan and prepare for a much broader range of future scenarios and a possibly disruptive new AV paradigm.

[DISCLOSURE: The writer Paul Godsmark is CTO and Co-Founder of CAVCOE; possibly the only consultancy in North America dedicated to AVs and advising stakeholders of the potential impacts of AVs on their operational and business models.]