Will Driverless Improve Accessibility for People with Disabilities?

The US National Council on Disability is frightened that the concerns of people with disabilities are not being taken into account in the development of driverless technology, vehicles, and infrastructure.

NCD issued a report listing its concerns and making recommendations so that people with disabilities will be involved in the creation of a driverless industry that is universally designed and fully accessible. Well, the report is somewhat incomplete in that it only conceives of driverless cars and does not adequately address driverless transit and other shared-use modes. But the report does rightly poo poo some legislators out there who believe we should stop funding transit improvements because driverless is around the corner. 

What is obvious is that NCD wants to avoid yet another generation of common vehicles that people in wheelchairs, people with visual or auditory impairments, and people with cognitive disabilities are unable to use. Continued isolation of people with disabilities is what NCD is seeking to avoid.

Main concerns

The report focuses on:
Accessibility
Affordability
Privacy
Federal funding
Division between state and federal regulation


In terms of the current capability, the NCD report is a bit behind, which is unavoidable in a technology world in which improvements happen week to week and reports go through several layers of review before being issued. Still, the report points out valid concerns.

Privacy and affordability are universal topics of interest. We should all be concerned about privacy, but, arguably, that ship has already sailed, as it were, when most of us are carrying smartphones that have information about our whereabouts at any particular moment. As for affordability, I would have preferred that NCD had acknowledged that the best opportunities for driverless affordability will be transit and shared-use taxi bots. The report does not focus enough on the developments in urban mobility that demonstrate that traditional car ownership and large transit buses are not the only options.

Recommendations

It is worth just looking at the report's recommendations because that is the heart of this publication. The report calls for some kind of Congressionally-mandated process of consultation between the Access Board, representing people with disabilities, and manufacturers/developers of driverless technology and vehicles. NCD also calls for a non-discrimination policy and it makes some federal-funding-related requests.

NCD wants to change a system in which only those physically and mentally able can be designated as operators of vehicles. In the driverless world, perhaps the whole idea of human operators will be outmoded. Humans will be choosing destinations and even changing minds on the destination during the ride.

What the report is best at illustrating is the second-class transportation that we currently make available for people with disabilities and it declares out loud that we need to avoid this same mistake with driverless technology and vehicles, be they private cars, taxi bots, or large transit.

Currently, many people with disabilities are unable to drive, leaving them out of the most available and convenient mode of transportation in the US - the privately owned car in which each person travels alone. There are many things wrong with this model, including inaccessibility and unaffordability. NCD should be hailed for being sufficiently forward thinking to make its recommendations BEFORE driverless travel becomes publicly available and even manufactured.