What Should Be in Your AV (CV, EV?) Plan?

What is a city, county, or state to do with all of the unknowns in our autonomous vehicle (AV) future? What to do when so many variables reside with private companies and consumer preferences?
Plan as if you can. If you take this route, Mr. or Ms. Government Staffer or Consultant, here are factors to consider.

Beware: Random thoughts ahead.

1. Changes to address

Be warned that the more acronyms thrown into the soup, the less chance the document will be focused. Here are vehicles that could be addressed:

Images from FastCompany.com

• Autonomous vehicles (AVs) - be specific whether partial or fully AVs or both,
• Connected vehicles (CVs) - be specific whether V2V, V2I (My opinion: Go for V2V because less money for public sector to pay for stuff to maintain), and
• Electric vehicles (EVs) and their charging infrastructure and demands.

What about them should be in your plan? That's up to you and perhaps also your state, county, regional, city, non-profit, and private partners.

2. Business model possibilities

Will one business model dominate or will there be a mix and when will all of this happen? No one knows. My suggestion: Take any confident prediction with a giant grain of salt. Two more variables in the mix will be (1) the expansion - or not - of teleworking and (2) rural connectivity, which could mean a resurgence for some small towns and quiet, isolated places. Serving rural areas with AVs is a whole different can of beans than AV options in a city.

• Shared use AVs - from transit, to pooled rides, to shuttles, to AV equivalent of traditional taxi ride.
• Personally owned and used AVs - just like today, but you will watch cat videos while going to work.
• Mobile units that are offices, homes, medical facilities, restaurants, etc. These could be owned or leased/rented.
• I see a blog post coming: AV issues of soccer, camping, and other gear, not to mention the dog.

Image from the New York Times.

3. Laws and regulations

While we have an idea of what a federal law and regulatory framework will look like, we do not know what incidents will occur that could prompt wholesale changes in the law. Perhaps only a few experts predicted, and most did not, the Sept. 11 attacks, the 2007 economic meltdown, the blossoming of New York City from the vantage point of 1975 - the year of the Daily News headline Ford to City: Drop Dead. While we can likely predict the initial federal framework, views on liability and regulation over the long term are a mystery.

Scenario planning is advisable.

Other unknowns revolve around where tort liability will lie. I can predict all I want, but be warned: I might be wrong. I predict a situation similar to airline liability. We do not have technically strict liability, but in practice, that is exactly what we have. For the sake of public relations, the airlines pay out and say they are sorry. Somehow, this makes people feel that their safety is taken seriously. I'm not sure that anyone feels that way now about the auto industry, its 30,000+ fatalities per year, and self-certification for safety standards.

Industry should heed the lesson of the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory fire. Tragedy can galvanize people, even powerless people.

(Yes, I know my NYC history because I grew up there and we did absorb the lesson that our city, well, actually, our borough of Brooklyn, was the center of the world. And we were taught to be proud of that.)

4. Data collection - fears of cybersecurity breaches and lack of privacy

People already do not like Uber, Lyft, Amazon, and Google knowing so much about them. Wait for AVs: Now your every move, inside or walking beside an AV, will be recorded and archived. What video did you watch or did you nap? Did you play a game with someone in the vehicle? Did you look out the window? Even today, transit systems have video cameras on buses and at stations, but the data collected will be ever more individualized and collated. Anonymity is key, but let's face facts; nothing will be private and everything will be hackable. We're at most a step or two in front of the hackers. Look at Yahoo and Equifax.

5. Who owns or has access to what data?

This will be a battle and scenario planning is advisable. A tug of war and negotiations to come will iron out how much access local, state, and federal government players will have access to valuable data about where people are going, when, how, and with whom.

6. Equity and accessibility

Every plan, policy, and agency assumes life-changing improvements for people with disabilities and for seniors. But pretty much none of them explains whether AVs will be accessible BOTH in terms of physical accessibility for people with wheelchairs and mobility devices and in terms of interface accessibility for people who are blind or have cognitive or sensory disabilities. Assumptions are made even though no laws are requiring more of AVs than conventional cars. Transit-like AV shuttles are already ahead on this, at least as far as people with wheelchairs.


7. What is out of your control?

Answer: Pretty much everything. Between federal and state preemption, and private sector demands and prices, many municipalities will be powerless to regulate anything when the transportation revolution comes. Sorry to be blunt, but you had to hear it. I think you will still have authority over speed limits, parking, and police. Maybe zoning.

8. Intergovernmental coordination and collaboration

Lack of power brings us to coordination and collaboration. If something does not fall within your authority, be nice and influence whoever has the power or the public's ear.

9. Police and emergency services interaction with AVs

You will not be designing the AVs and the software that controls how the vehicles respond to communications from police and emergency responders, such as ambulances. Those AVs will all be talking to each other anyway (I'm guessing).  As long as police and emergency staff are trained and have the right software, we will all be in a better situation. Right now, I can never tell when I am driving where a siren is coming from. Once I didn't even notice for a couple of minutes that an ambulance was directly behind me. Why would I expect an ambulance on the slow, two-lane road?