As the founder of the Human Driving Association (HDA), people often make a number of assumptions about me. It’s generally presumed I’m opposed to autonomy, that mobility = privately owned vehicles, that I’m keen on futile rants on behalf of all Luddites, and that the HDA is as absolutist about steering wheels as the National Rifle Association is about guns. Nothing could be further from the truth. Binary thinking is slavery. The HDA exists not to propagate human driving at the expense of alternatives, but to protect it within a mobility ecosystem optimized to move people as efficiently as possible from A to B, by whatever means.

That self-driving advocates assume the HDA is their enemy is a function of their enthusiastic myopia: technology for technology’s sake. In other words technology at the expense of the logical and inevitable equilibrium between myriad modes of transportation, some of which cannot be fully automated and some of which shouldn’t be.

If the definition of mobility is the ability to move or be moved freely and easily, then a state of pure mobility will never manifest unless we stop thinking about individual modes such as self-driving cars, scooters, e-bikes, buses, cars or trains in a vacuum. We should also discourage policy makers from picking winners and losers among innovators until they’ve had a chance to gestate.

No one solution is global, nor will any single mix of solutions work everywhere. All mobility is local, and history suggests only the free market — within the constraints of local culture and infrastructure — will allow mobility to reach its modal equilibrium. Yet, as private companies seek to resolve the failures of overstressed and underfunded public transportation systems, we run the risk of improving mobility for some while tacitly reducing freedom of movement and increasing inequality for others. Modal equilibrium for a privately owned, geofenced network is not necessarily the best option for a community of living, breathing humans, many of whom live outside the fence.

There is only one solution: Universal Basic Mobility.