Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation (29 page)

That might sound dramatic, but focusing on it, using it to posit a longer-term shift that will drive transformation in transportation, is yet another risky prediction. And it distracts from a much larger and more far-reaching distinction: Millennials have embraced the app-driven sharing economy that really is disrupting the transportation world. It's calling Uber instead of driving home drunk, or relying on the crowdsourcing of the traffic app Waze. It's not about Millennials loving buses, bikes, or trolleys more than cars. The trends more suggest a tendency to be transportation omnivores in ways that car-centric older generations are not. Ride services such as Uber and Lyft are alluring because, with a simple app, a car can be summoned to take you where you need to be, without parking concerns, without car payments—other than the fare for that one trip—or insurance costs, or responsibility to navigate. If your road travel needs are below 10,000 miles—the average nationally is about 13,400—dumping your car and taking a ridesharing service may save you money. The inefficiencies of owning a car, of having it sit idle twenty-two hours a day even as it is Americans' second largest expense after housing, is especially grating on a generation that has been burdened with a flagging economy and shortages of jobs, not to mention unprecedented educational debt. It is as Ted Trepanier's son explained: Why would Millennials love cars? They're too damn expensive for what they bring to the table. Mobility agnosticism is the Millennial superpower that is truly disrupting transportation—that and the emergence of a few key technologies.

President Obama's secretary of transportation, Anthony Foxx, is hanging an entire national policy on this shift, a policy he has dubbed “Beyond Traffic.” His report of the same name calls for a reordering of priorities more in line with the Millennials' mobility tendencies. Assuming the country gets over being stuck on an inadequate 1993 gas tax and makes transportation funding
sustainable for the first time since Jimmy Carter was president, Foxx envisions making mobility, not cars, the center of a balanced approach to transportation policy. He says the country must embrace new technology, particularly automation and connected cars, for safety, congestion reduction, and efficiency. Continuing current policy will bring disaster within the next twenty-five years, according to Foxx, whose report provides a grim summary of the current transportation picture:

Foxx's report is understated and diplomatic, 316 pages of reasoned argument, history, and prediction. But it accurately describes a system overloaded and failing, with grave consequences for safety, the movement of people,
and
the movement of goods that sustains our economy. This is not a cheery picture. It is a picture
of a transportation system still capable of delivering incredible results that make life and work better and more prosperous, that takes us and our stuff door to door better than any other civilization has dared to imagine. But it's also a system living on borrowed time and showing the strain. It is a system that has become unsustainable.

T
he good news: there are five important trends that will bring change, in some cases massive change—if they continue.

Three of them affect the goods-movement side of the door-to-door machine. First, there is the transformation of China from a low-wage factory sweatshop economy into a true economic powerhouse, where workers are demanding—and getting—better wages, benefits, and working conditions. The ready supply of rural peasants who flocked from the countryside to keep China's factories moving has begun to dry up. Higher wages in China make offshoring of jobs and manufacturing less attractive to American companies. They have also roiled China's economy and relentless growth. This is driving the second trend, still nascent, of “re-shoring”—a resurgence of manufacturing in the U.S. that would have been offshored in the recent past. The more likely scenario is not a large-scale return of existing jobs to America but the increased likelihood that new technologies and products that emerge and create jobs in the future can stay in the U.S., sucking miles out of the door-to-door system for the first time in many years.

The third trend, also related to the other two, is the emergence of the fledgling 3-D printing industry as one of the major disruptive technologies on the horizon.
³
The promise of this “factory-in-a-box” technology is the ability to manufacture products locally at a competitive cost, even in small quantities. The latest 3-D printers are being used to produce increasingly complex products,
from aerial drones to prosthetic limbs to car bodies. It may take a decade or more of development for the technology to mature sufficiently, but the possibilities are revolutionary. Imagine ordering a product online and instead of it being physically shipped from factory to store to customer, the proprietary design is shipped as a digital file via the Internet to your neighborhood 3-D print shop, where you pick up your purchase later that day once the printing is complete—transportation virtually removed from the process, “streaming” products as we currently stream video.

The technology is not there yet, but it's hard to imagine a greater disruption in the door-to-door universe if the range of materials it can fashion becomes broad enough, and the costs low enough. Such a technology would revolutionize goods movement . . . by eliminating the movement. And the overload.

The other two emerging trends are more about moving people than goods, although they could have profound implications for the have-it-now e-commerce economy as well. The first is the sharing/crowdsourced world of traffic apps and ridesharing. They are disruptive in their own right, demonstrating alternatives to car ownership never imagined before the rise of smartphones. But their greatest impact may be as a test case and as a necessary first step on the way to the most disruptive transportation trend on the horizon, the one that could inspire as much change as the invention of the car itself: the driverless car.

T
he most startling thing about riding around in a driverless car is just how ordinary, even boring, it can be—once the shock passes of seeing a steering wheel move by itself. It takes about a minute for my brain to turn self-steering from stunning conjurer's trick into something commonplace. That's when I notice the other standout feature of driverless cars: everybody else on the road is passing us by. One vehicle zooms close up from behind, the classic sign of an impatient driver ticked off at the slowpoke in front. Once it becomes clear that the autonomous car won't be intimidated by the tailgater into speeding up, the car behind swerves into the passing lane and zips by. A human driver would probably take this affront personally. The robot car? Not so much.

The reason why all the other cars are passing the Google driverless car—or rather, the self-driving car, to use the search company's preferred nomenclature—is simple. It's the only car on the road obeying the speed limit. And obeying the law is one of those things it does scrupulously, which will eventually raise an interesting safety issue down the line. Another thing it does—rather jarringly, given its usual non-daredevil driving style—is react like a cat.

I saw this behavioral change happen halfway into my ride, as we were driving down a tree-shaded street that cuts through the
Google campus in Mountain View, California. All the buildings on this street house Google offices, labs, meeting rooms, and cafeterias where the food and coffee are shamelessly tasty, but the feel is more college campus than tech titan. Amid a steady stream of pedestrians and cyclists, the Google car pokes, smooth as butter, laser turret on top spinning and watching. I'm chatting with the test driver and her partner, who is tapping on a laptop displaying the stylized virtual reality of differently colored moving squares, circles, and vectors that represent the objects the car “sees.” Suddenly the robot driver jams on the brakes. Did I say driverless cars are boring? I look up and see a bearded fellow walking in front of the now stopped car. He is balancing his own full-sized laptop on one palm and forearm while typing away with the other hand, staring at the screen intently as he jaywalks right in front of the car. He finally looks up, vaguely surprised to see the Google's Lexus SUV test car with the sensor array bolted on top, then gives a little wave before resuming his diagonal course across the street, back to typing and staring at his screen. Coders. They're all over the campus, it seems, focused on task, oblivious to environment. I can't help but think that a human driving the same street, maybe distracted by a conversation or taking a quick peek at a cell phone or just leaning over to tune the radio, could have been slower to react than the robot car, and the result could have been very different. Flying laptop. Flying nerd. Ambulance rides. Or worse.

Welcome to the brave new world of autonomous vehicles, where rules are followed, at least by the nonhumans, and where, if Google has its way, nobody will ever die in a car crash again.

Can that happen? Absolutely. Will it happen? That's uncertain. But
should
it happen?

That's my question to Ron Medford, the former number two at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, now safety director for the Google Self-Driving Car Project. We speak
after my ride, after the requisite marveling at the gee-whiz technology, after Google has shown off what this car can (and, just as important, won't) do. Can and should are very different things, after all, and Medford has been a car guy—a human-driven car guy—all his life. So I want to know: Why does he think we should all follow this path Google is pursuing, this odd yet compelling deviation from its core Internet-search gravy train?

Medford's response is adamant that we absolutely should. His explanation boils down to two points: If you (1) care about your kids, your spouse, your parents, your siblings, the elderly, the infirm, or the lives of innocents, and (2) if you ever saw a human driver do something stupid, dangerous, or deadly (which is to say, if you've spent more than five minutes on the road), then you want self-driving cars to happen.

“As soon as possible,” he says. “As fast as we can.”

M
ost major carmakers are working on driverless technology, along with Google, a few smaller car technology companies, the major automotive parts makers Continental, Bosch, Delphi, and Tesla (where chairman Elon Musk predicts that human driving will be illegal someday), the rideshare leader Uber, and possibly Apple, although that company, as usual, isn't talking. Almost all the automotive powers have large outposts in Silicon Valley now, a clear indication that the future of mobility will be guided by software, not hardware. Behind this extraordinary pursuit of new technology, two very different philosophies have emerged, one evolutionary and more comfortable for consumers and car lovers to accept, the other revolutionary and more disruptive, but with the bigger potential payoff.

The mainline carmakers' approach is to treat autonomy as a feature, something to be introduced gradually without eliminating
the standard car-owning and driving experience. Their autonomous cars leave drivers very much in the loop. First there's highly adaptive cruise control now on the market that can automatically respond to highway conditions and brake to avoid collisions automatically—when drivers decide to switch it on (studies show many don't). Then there's parking assist, a real blessing for the parallel-parking challenged, one of the main reasons new drivers fail their driving tests (leading at least a dozen states to drop parallel parking from their tests). These technologies are already available in some cars. Next might be lane-following technology, so you could turn over control to the car while on a free-flowing freeway, but not in stop-and-go city traffic. It would be like a traditional car with an autopilot function, with the human driver expected to remain vigilant and ready to take over at any time. In fall 2015, Tesla transmitted an over-the-air update to its 2014 and later models that enabled such an autopilot feature, with warnings that the technology was still in its early phases and so drivers should keep their hands on the wheel and be prepared to take over at any time. The user reviews were mixed, because a system that requires constant supervision from the driver is more curiosity than useful tool. But it did hint at the potential of such technology.

Eventually, full autonomy on all types of streets and roads could be introduced by the big consumer carmakers, but with redundant controls for the human driver to use whenever he or she felt like driving. The closest analog would be jetliners with autopilots doing ordinary tasks but with human pilots supervising and in control at critical moments. Such cars are being tested in Europe, the U.S., and Asia. Volvo is using a ring road in Sweden's second largest city, Gothenberg, where it expects to test one hundred cars in this mold with volunteer car owners by 2017. The University of Michigan has built a thirty-two-acre fake city to
use as a test bed for the driverless products of Ford, General Motors, Honda, Nissan, and Delphi for safely testing both city and highway driving by robots. And Bosch is road-testing something it calls the “highly automated” vehicle, which is driven manually to a highway, where the driver can either continue at the wheel or switch to autopilot. When the car reaches the exit, it asks the driver to resume control; if there is no response, the car pulls over and stops. This approach has another advantage: automated driving on limited-access freeways with divided traffic lanes, off-ramps instead of intersections, and no traffic signals poses a significantly simpler technical challenge than surface street driving. That level of autonomous technology is virtually off-the-shelf at this point, as Tesla proved with what amounted to a customer beta test.

Carmakers plan to pitch such systems as the best of both worlds, a car, much like today's cars, with a really cool set of high-tech options. These options might improve safety when engaged, make drive time more relaxed and productive, and get people used to the idea of automation without the potentially off-putting discomfort about giving up total control to a machine. No one would—or could—be forced into giving up driving in these scenarios. We'd still enjoy the “freedom” of driving—as well as the freedom of driving drunk, distracted, or over the speed limit. In this scenario, while it might be true that such technology will take drivers out of the loop someday, it would be many years in the future, so there's little point in pushing hard now. With 265 million cars, pickups, and other passenger vehicles on the road in the U.S., nothing changes overnight.

The Google approach is different: the company's goal is to perfect the technology, then bring it to market whole hog, with completely autonomous cars that don't even have steering wheels or gas pedals. Just a start/stop button and an interface to tell the
car the desired destination. The faster that transition happens, Google suggests, the better off the world will be. They started with stock Lexus SUVs as test beds for the autonomous technology, but in mid–2015, they began road-testing their own design for little electric pod cars designed from the ground up for autonomous city driving. This approach dives into the discomfort of ceding control to a computer and pitches it as a new freedom: freedom from having to pay attention. So you want to text in your car? Get distracted? Doze off? Feel free! A major cause of death and destruction in regular cars—distraction—is a welcome feature in Google's driverless reality.

“We think ours is the correct approach,” explains Medford, the former number two at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration before coming to Google. The handoff from robot to human is potentially the most dangerous moment when cars are partially automated, he says, particularly if a person who has not been paying attention to driving conditions is asked to take control in an emergency, as some of the early partially automated systems require. Google is more interested in reinventing driving than in adding features to existing cars. If safety is the overriding goal, along with helping the disabled and the elderly who can't drive become mobile, then, Medford says, Google's way is the right way.

The safety gains of full and ubiquitous automation are clear. Robots don't drink and drive, or get distracted, or get drowsy at the wheel, or speed, or randomly cross the centerline, or blow through stop signs or red lights. The main causes of traffic death and destruction simply go away. Robots' reaction time is close to instantaneous. Their radars and lasers have pinpoint accuracy and allow them to “see” 360 degrees simultaneously, through hedges and leaves, to identify pedestrians approaching crosswalks. The most powerful autonomous car sensor is the lidar, which sounds
like a type of radar but is a completely different animal. The spinning scanner emits bursts of illumination at a rate of nearly a million flashes per second, a flickering light invisible to human eyes that bounces off everything in the environment—people, cars, buildings, curbs, squirrels. The process is something like insanely fast photography, but the result is a kind of three-dimensional machine vision that allows the car to perceive its environment in incredible detail in real time, with measurement of objects and their height, width, depth, and distance accurate to the millimeter. Lidar makes it possible for the driverless car to calculate a collision course with a wayward oncoming vehicle when it is still comfortably distant, and shift course so smoothly that no one even notices. Nothing can sneak up on the Google Car. In a world full of human drivers doing stupid things, autonomous cars are the ultimate defensive drivers.

But when it's all robots on the road, then the need to defend lessens and the real magic begins. When driving with their autonomous brethren, these cars are capable of cruising bumper to bumper on the narrowest of lanes at high speeds without a hiccup, driving in tight formation like precision aircraft teams, never wavering. It's as if they are on invisible rails, steady as trains. This is what robots are good at: precision, predictability, consistency. That's why they can drive so much better than imprecise, unpredictable, inconsistent humans.

“This technology can prevent drunk driving. Distracted driving. Drowsy driving,” says Medford, who spent his career in government advocating auto safety technology. “And there's the issue of accessibility, too.”

Medford is a polished, reserved guy with a great poker face, a survivor of multiple White House regimes, but this is one time during our chat when he shows his emotional investment in the Google driverless project. He recounts the story of his neighbor
in Bethesda, a woman in her eighties, long divorced, her children living in other cities. She depended on herself and did so magnificently, leading a full, active, and independent life. Her car was her freedom. An avid bridge player, she drove her less-independent friends over to play cards. She picked them up to go shopping. She drove them to attend events, making sure they, too, could get out and stay active. Then one day she was in a minor fender bender at the library. The police came and she received a ticket. A week later, she received a notice from the Department of Motor Vehicles that she would have to take a full driving test, including parallel parking, to retain her license. The worried woman begged Medford for help: she hadn't parallel parked for years, she confessed. So he did what he had done for his teenage daughter years before, taking his sweet neighbor to a parking lot, setting up cones, and watched her try, and try, and try to do it. But she no longer had the range of motion in her neck to look back over her shoulder and steer and park at the same time. It was torture for her. Finally she got out of the car, weeping, and said, “I can't do it anymore, Ron.” And she handed Medford the keys.

“That was the end of her independence,” he recounts quietly. “She stopped playing bridge. She stopped going out. She tried to use public transit, but she had a fall stepping down from a bus, and that was it. She ended up in a nursing home. It broke our hearts.”