About a century ago, when cars began invading urban areas en masse, many cities made a disastrous choice. They reconfigured themselves to favour vehicles over people. The extreme case is the US, which now devotes more space to parking each car than housing each person, writes Henry Grabar in Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World. Cars don’t suit cities, and humans never got very good at driving them. The arrival of driverless vehicles gives cities a second chance to manage cars.
Robotaxis are already common in several Chinese and American cities. They are now hitting the streets of the late-adopting continent, Europe, from Zagreb to London, where Google’s robotaxi start-up Waymo has begun piloting its vehicles. Meanwhile, robobuses putter through some European cities.
The driverless era could work out brilliantly or terribly, depending on how cities handle it. Here are two scenarios.