How do you envisage ‘the future’? Robots strutting around zapping people with inbuilt ‘phasers’ for parking on a yellow line? Moving pavements (just what’s needed for the obesity problem)? Invincible Cyborgs coming back from the future to settle old scores? Or some dark and sinister Blade Runner world with no joy to be had?

I like the Fifth Element version. Just the cars. Which, having run out of two dimensional space just take the logical step and move upwards into the third. So Bruce Willis cab has to negotiate right, left, front, back plus up and down. I can see ‘down’ as being the real problem, unless you have glass-bottomed cars. But it illustrates a point. That we’re reaching maximum point, possibly for people, definitely for cars.

Personally I would just get rid of all the shitty drivers, the lane hoggers, the wide-berthers, the terminally slow, the old, the stupid and those who lack the wherewithal to drive in manic fashion. But I fear my ideas may not be taken into the law. So we need something else. We need driverless cars.

Apparently.

And although I can see massive benefits of this, in reality it will not affect congestion at all. If anything it could make it worse. It will benefit parking. Because you don’t need to park them. So don’t go buying shares in NCP any time soon. Though it does make you wonder where they’ll all go, like just after the presumable rush hour maximum usage time, for the next 8 to 10 hours. Will they shrivel up and fold themselves away, like Transformers? Or will we have driverless car mountains in Aldgate and Kennington as they wait for the next call?

Why I think congestion may increase is because there are many people (I can only speak for London here, firstly because I live here and secondly because I don’t care about anywhere else) who would drive in to work every day but don’t just because of parking costs and availability. So if driverless cars are cheap (as they must be) and fares keep getting more expensive (as they must do), then in fact more people will opt for ‘driving in’, albeit driverlessly.

Toyota have just invested half a billion into Uber for driverless technology. Toyota already have the technology but Uber have all of us hooked up to them already. Which is why they’re so valuable on a corporate level.

And yet, as the driverless wave continues, people keep dying. I know, its all for progress, but tell that to the woman who got hit crossing the road in Arizona. Well, you can’t, she’s dead. Or the guy whose driverless car decided that the massive truck it was just about to hit was ‘just a reflection’ that it chose to ignore. Brown bread.

Driverless technology is here, its inevitable and it will be massive. But the testing? That’s (quite literally) the killer. Never mind, they’ll all become ‘martyrs’ to the driverless cause.

Happy Wednesday

The Luddite
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