Looking Back to the Future

I’ve always been interested in thinking about what the world will look like in the future. In fact, one of the things that I enjoy most about the field of urban planning is the long-range thinking. In many ways, us urban planners are futurists because we try to shape the social, political, and physical environment to meet the needs of the future.

Predicting the future isn’t easy but, in my experience, urban planners also tend to be optimists (or at least cynical idealists) and so we’re never short of opinions about how things will unfold in the coming years.

This passion for long-range thinking/dreaming is why I’m drawn to the subreddit r/Retrofuturism. It’s a collection of illustrations in pop culture and media that depict what the people in the past thought the future would look like.* The zany, wildly misplaced predictions from the past are both funny and entertaining to look at. However, I also believe that there is value to be gained in perusing this eclectic corner of the internet. By understanding how people in the past thought about the future, I believe we can better understand how our own predictions of the future might hold water or are utterly misplaced. In this blog post, I analyze how we used to think about the future and apply it to how we think about the promise and perils of future autonomous vehicles today.

To start, check out these examples of past predictions, each from a different decade in the 20^th century:

Meme, source unknown

City of the Future, Harvey Corbett, 1913

 

Kempster and Evans City of the Future 1954

Master Modemixer, Life Magazine, December 25 1965

LA in 2013, illustrated in 1988. source unknown vs. Google Street View Los Angeles Street Aug 2012

Now, I don’t have any training in analyzing art or understanding art history, so this post will skip the whole discussion we could be having on how history, culture and geographic contexts influence art styles. Let’s just focus on the transportation vision each picture illustrates.

The artist from 1900 (might not be 1900 in reality but hear me out) wrongly assumes the only way to fly is with a hot air balloon – which makes sense given the airplane wasn’t invented until 1903. Corbett’s City of the Future is one that separates travel modes into distinct spaces (a relatively new invention at the time) but overestimates the value of land in downtown cores (imagine how expensive it would be to layer all that infrastructure), land the automobile would soon devalue rapidly.  Kempster and Evans vision looks slightly more familiar but leans too heavily on the modernist fantasies of Le Corbusier’s radiant city (where do people walk in there?). Life Magazine’s Modemixer celebrates the technological prowess of the 1960s but overestimates the longevity of traffic patterns and overestimates the ability of a central authority to manage them. Finally, ‘LA in 2013’ incorrectly predicted that tastes in car design would shift more dramatically than they did and that Los Angeles Street would look like a cyberpunk techno land – completely whiffing on the bike lanes.

I believe these pictures reveal three things that people in the past have consistently gotten wrong about the transportation future: 1. They wrongly assume the longevity of current technology and norms. 2. They assume advancements will take place sooner than they actually do. 3. Predictions of the future are almost always imperfect due to unknown unknowns. Each of the futurists who illustrated what transportation would look like in the future made mistakes about what technology would last and what would be invented. The further out the projection, the more unknowable factors come into play and mess up the carefully planned vision of the artist.

However, I think there is one thing these pictures capture accurately: human desires. Sure, people might not have personal hot air balloon packs in 2000, but the desire to fly is still very much present. Sure, the future city of 1913 might be impossible to build, but people are still drawn to places bustling with activity. Sure, the modern cities imagined in the post-WWII era haven’t been entirely accurate, but people still want transportation to be efficient. All that is to say, some human desires are relatively timeless. And so, I believe that the more a prediction is framed in terms of human desires, the more accurate it is likely to be.

So now let’s pivot to autonomous vehicles. For this post, I read Planning for walking and cycling in an autonomous-vehicle future. Note that this is not an empirical study, but a literature review alongside a set of semi-structured interviews with transportation experts on the deployment of autonomous vehicles and their implications for biking and walking in urban contexts. In other words, this article wasn’t based on computer modeling, but what today’s experts think about what tomorrow will look like. Here’s the illustration of what transportation experts today think the future will look like, with paraphrased and direct quotes from the article:

·       Most experts think that autonomous vehicles won’t comprise the majority of vehicles on the road until 2040 at the earliest.

·       Experts predict that more efficient use of roadways, narrower car-travel lanes, and less on-street parking may open up more space for bike lanes or pedestrian amenities – but only once a majority fleet of autonomous vehicles has been established.

·       Some think that to facilitate widespread autonomous vehicle use, newly installed physical barriers may have to prevent pedestrians from freely walking in front of cars.

·       Some say the potential of increased safety is the primary promise of autonomous vehicles. But while optimists guarantee a reduction in automobile crashes, if autonomous vehicle technology encourages vehicle travel over active travel, it may lead to further-reaching negative outcomes for public health through reduced physical activity and the negative health effects of increased emissions and climate change

·       A majority of respondents expressed a belief that local policies will affect how cyclists and pedestrians are impacted by autonomous vehicles. If local decision makers prioritize the comfort and safety of cyclists and pedestrians, then autonomous vehicles can have an overall positive effect. On the other hand, in places where deference is given to automobiles, cyclists and pedestrians may lose ground. Most respondents predicted that cities will continue along their current trajectories; i.e. those that devote resources to accommodate and encourage a range of travel modes will continue to do so, while those that cater nearly exclusively to automobiles will maintain their priorities.

·       A majority of interviewees expected autonomous vehicle technology to be safer and more reliable than human drivers.

·       Interviewees also worried bicyclists and pedestrians may be required to carry beacons to enable autonomous vehicles to recognize them more easily. While such a measure could increase safety, interviewees expressed equity and privacy concerns.

·       Some of the experts interviewed for this study also expected that active travel could be reduced further by making driving more convenient.

·       if autonomous vehicles become commonplace, easily identifiable, and prioritize cyclists and pedestrian safety, cyclists and pedestrians may alter their behavior on roadways. If they no longer have to worry about being hit, cyclists and pedestrians may use public rights-of-way (ROW) more assertively than today, slowing down motorized traffic.

·       at some point the federal government may mandate autonomous vehicle technologies in all new cars, as it has with other technologies in the past, e.g. ESC, ABS, or seatbelts.

·       as one interviewee said – signs and laws do not produce behavior, environment does. Among the changes in street design and infrastructure that interviewees mentioned are shared streets, pavement markings, traffic lights, intersection design, lane width, and protective barriers may all need to be rethought.

·       Some interviewees, particularly those specializing in technology and automotive transport, discussed the need for mode separation so that cyclists and pedestrians do not impede the flow of traffic and cause safety concerns. Examples include separation by grade and fences or banning cyclists and pedestrians from certain intersections altogether.

·       On the other hand, planning and policy experts expressed some optimism that the promised advancements in safety will allow for shared roadways to become more prevalent.

I personally think autonomous vehicles will impact society just about as much as when automobiles were first introduced, in both ways expected and unexpected. To revisit the three ways predictions err that I presented earlier, I think we should ask ourselves what current technology and norms are we wrongly assuming will last? Are we again overestimating the pace of autonomous vehicle development? What might be some unknown unknowns that complicate their integration? Or better yet, what aspects will fizzle like a personal hot air balloon? 

Rendering from NACTO Blueprint for Autonomous Urbanism, 2017

*Other genres such as Steampunk, Dieselpunk, Atompunk, Cyberpunk and Post-cyberpunk are also interesting to look at and have their own futurisms based on themes and technology from various eras in history as well.

Bryan Botello, Ralph Buehler, Steve Hankey, Andrew Mondschein, Zhiqiu Jiang. Planning for walking and cycling in an autonomous-vehicle future. Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Volume 1. 2019. (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590198219300120)