The land beneath the streets is a city's greatest asset

In 2004, DARPA sponsored a road race for robotic cars, to test how far along robotics research had come towards operating in real world conditions. Universities around the country put together their best software and sensor packages to try to teach the cars, SUVs mostly, how to recognize objects, avoid pitfalls, and navigate in the offroad terrain of the road course. It was an utter failure. Most of the cars barely made it past the starting point before freezing up in glitches, getting tricked by shadows into thinking there were unpassable chasms ahead, or failing to steer around obstacles, then turning over and crashing. The best car made it eight miles out of a 200 mile course at a pace of less than 10 miles an hour.

As of 2010, the best robotic drivers in the world, based out of a Stanford-Google joint project, are able to drive around regular city streets in normal driving conditions, following traffic laws, avoiding collisions with stationary and moving objects, and safely driving around the Bay area. They have a human in the drivers seat paying attention to road conditions and able to override the robot at any time.

At this rate, sensor-laden cars that can drive themselves more safely than human reaction times will ever be able to manage should be available in the lab in the next five years and be ready for market around 2020, just when my nearly new Civic is starting to kick the bucket.

I joke that Miriam, now almost two, will never need to get a drivers license. By 2025 when she turns 16, we'll either be out of oil or we'll all be driven around by hyper-efficient robot chauffeurs. I prefer to believe in the latter.

People love to own their own cars and drive them around, here in LA as much as anywhere in the world. But cars are expensive. Personal ownership is inefficient, with your car sitting around most of the day so you can drive it for an hour or two. The car you have (even if you have three or four) is probably not the optimal car for your current trip. It's too big or too small, too slow or too hard to park. You spend a few minutes every trip finding parking and walking to your destination. You need to insure it and you worry about getting in an accident every time you get behind the wheel (or at least you should). You feed it gasoline and oil and take it on regular trips to the mechanic and a good chunk of your home and property is dedicated to its storage.

Corporate ownership of robotic cars would change that. ("Corporate" here is merely standing in for non-personal. The corporate body might be private, non-profit, or municipal.) Imagine a ZipCar fleet that drives itself around, that comes to your house just as you are stepping out, with a vehicle that fits the number of people who are going on your trip and your stuff and nothing more, and takes you right up to the door of your destination before driving off to pick up the next passenger. Imagine highways with cars that can talk to each other and drive at a hundred miles an hour a few feet from each other, signaling to change lanes by exchanging trip plans and negotiating the optimal speeds and timing to keep everyone moving without slowing. And all with fewer accidents per trip than the safest human drivers.

The vast infrastructure we dedicate to cars could be more efficiently used or repurposed. You could replace your driveway with a garden. You could turn your garage into a guest apartment. The downtown parking garage gets turned into an office building, and the ocean of asphalt around Walmart reverts to forest. Perhaps the biggest infrastructure gain would be a more efficient use of roads. When cars can drive within inches of each other, parked cars are unheard of, roads blocked by stopped cars are just obstacles to reroute around, and cars sized to fit just the passengers, most roads need not be much larger than bike paths.

Which means a seven lane behemoth like the road I'm parked out at right now, with 12 feet per lane, two lanes of parking, four lanes of driving and a turning lane in the middle becomes a huge piece of unused, extremely valuable real estate. Owned by the city. In the middle of a valuable neighborhood surrounded by well established businesses, comfortable residential neighborhoods, and all the amenities of city life. In a world without cars getting people around more efficiently than our current system, the land beneath the streets is a city's greatest asset. One that can be converted to parks or sold to developers or turned into permanent street fairs and pedestrian malls and outdoor markets. What's your dream for a 40'x10,000' lot in the middle of Los Angeles?

This is easily 15 years from now, if ever. But 15 years is about the right amount of time to establish the framework for setting the patterns of post-personal-car land use of municipally owned roads. So talk to your city counselors and planning authorities and get those principles in writing. And enjoy your robotic chauffeurs.

Yesterday's run destination: Montana Ave.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: eggs and toast
lunch: vegan chili at Trails Cafe in Griffith Park
dinner: scallops and stewed tomatoes, garlic bread, rice, and oven roasted asparagus