A Primer on the Tragic Vision.
Peter Norton's Autonorama: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving elaborates on the argument laid out in the title, and Book Review No. 6 will turn to that in due course.
The post title, however, proposes a deeper lesson. "Autonorama" is a play on "Futurama," which is probably a play on "panorama" or perhaps "cyclorama," although readers of my age will remember when "-rama" (not to be confused with the Vedas) was a suffix suggesting some sort of spectacular, such as a "bowl-a-rama" with fifty lanes, or the annual "scout-o-rama" showing the latest in projects and skits. The kind of budget busting appropriation bill that might be a "spend-a-palooza" these days would be a "spend-a-rama:" and you knew the concept had grown stale when the local gas utility, piped natural gas being a new thing, offered "Gas-o-rama" as an assembly program for junior high schoolers to tout the wonders of the new fuel, and then the valley girls had their bonarama ...
The futurama, however, is a depressingly familiar exercise in wishful thinking. "They assure us of a future in which traffic congestion never slows vehicles down, and cars never collide with anything. These promises, in turn, become reasons not to commit too much money or attention to modes of transportation that are safer today." At page 2, thus, is the promise. Don't you dare be so crass as to call for, oh, a real world prototype. "Essential to such displays are conspicuous evocations of high-tech and future-tech possibilities, which invoke the prestige of science and impart new credibility to old, unfilled promises." Thus, by pages 12-13, it's always that Bright Future Ahead of Us, never mind that the roads remain chuck-holed and congested, or that there's no bread in the stores. But that's good salesmanship, page 172. "The story begins in the present, where a hardship burdens the customer, but it unfolds in a future in which the product vanquishes the hardship. If this future is strategically timed, the seller will be gone when the product fails to fulfill its heroic role." Thus the 1939 Futurama could envision the bustling city of 1960, and the 1964 Futurama could offer the same vision, while Khrushchev's final five-year plan imagined the building of communism by 1980. Reality arrives at page 187. "Always just over an ever-receding horizon lay the high-speed, delay-free, drive-everywhere city. Highway engineers and policymakers tirelessly pursued it, routing expressways through cities and recommitting urban real estate to car storage. The harder they strove to accommodate all driving, the more they deterred all alternatives to driving, and the more they made driving a practical necessity for everyone, whether they could afford it or not. The futuramas sold motor utopia; the never-finished product was car dependency." And Cold Spring Shops never lacked for work, whether documenting the ruin of the downtowns and the creation of parking craters, or provoking people with tales of road socialism. Khrushchev's apologists wished for more computing power, World's Fair apologists suggested 1939 or 1964 information technology "wasn't mature enough," page 220.
We don't have to slag only on communism, though, there are instructive passages at pages 146-147 about opioids, pesticides, low-tar cigarettes, and even plastic pop bottles: all pushed as improvements over existing ways of doing things, which the author characterizes as "distractions from better alternatives;" and the opportunities for rent-seeking, whether by the plastics lobby, Big Pharma, or the autonomous car complex are tempting. In the case of the autonomous car, if the efforts fail, improvements on other ways of getting around have been crowded out, but if they succeed, the unintended consequences might include a more sedentary way of living, as well as additional strain on the electric power grid. Just because a few populist members of Congress say silly things about renewable energy doesn't mean we oughtn't worry. Jevons's rebound effect is real, dear reader.
Meanwhile, the rent-seekers cleaned up, page 45. "Motordom would strive, through public policy, and with public money, to destroy and rebuild American surface transportation around motor vehicle travel, in ways that deprived travelers of a marketplace of competing modes, with the express intention of promoting demand for motor vehicles. All the while, motordom would propagate the notion that public policy was merely following mass preferences, and that the entire conversion was the consequence of the free market." In the beginning, it looked good, although, like any other socialism, eventually you run out of other peoples' money, and the wisdom of Lewis Mumford's observation that the private automobile was a wonderful thing to have if nobody else had one hit home. Leaving the driving to the algorithm changes none of it.
That's all second nature to people who think economically. It's essential, all the same, that others be reminded "complex webs of interdependencies make interventions to master or control particular nodes of the web invitations to trouble," and "a zeal for perfection may do more harm than good," pages 215-216.
To what end? The holy grail, or white whale, of the autonomous car is in taking the driver error out of tailgating. It's called platooning, although "vehicle platooning at speed emulated a railway train -- but the most inefficient train in the world, with just one or two passengers per train car, and each car requiring its own engine and high tech systems." The claimed benefits to ride-sharing might also be illusory. "If a car were smart enough, it wouldn't need a smart highway. It could perform its feats on ordinary roads, even driving itself." The sop to the sort of environmentalist who sees social waste in all those individual cars stored in individual garages, or left outside on driveway or street, is in the possibility of those autonomous cars being in action the rest of the day, doing the school runs as well as the office runs, or being available for errands ... but will those be maintained and serviced in latter-day car-barns, and would suburbanites go for such facilities, rather than the detached houses with cars garaged therein? I suspect that the resulting "disruption" (a business buzz-word suggesting Something Good) would look more like the traditional sense of "disruption" meaning a nuisance, or worse.
Meanwhile, the more boring approaches, such as treating roads as productive assets, languish. Turn to page 236. "Their gasoline taxes cover only a fraction of the expense, and the payment is disconnected from the value of the road capacity used." Perhaps when toll collection involved a lot of human labor and dropped coins, that was efficient, These days, though, "expanding toll-free road capacity in response to congestion is like a big-box store charging by the pound, and continually ordering more high-end electronics to keep its shelves stocked." (And - amusing story - tolling individual cars and trucks precludes the kind of fudges that can mess up store inventory control!)
Mr Norton concludes that replacing status quo car dependency with autonomous car dependency is still car dependency. "We are asked to believe, on scant evidence but plenty of fanfare, that the next generation of technology will finally deliver car dependency that works. Not for all the rare earths in China.
(Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.)
The post title, however, proposes a deeper lesson. "Autonorama" is a play on "Futurama," which is probably a play on "panorama" or perhaps "cyclorama," although readers of my age will remember when "-rama" (not to be confused with the Vedas) was a suffix suggesting some sort of spectacular, such as a "bowl-a-rama" with fifty lanes, or the annual "scout-o-rama" showing the latest in projects and skits. The kind of budget busting appropriation bill that might be a "spend-a-palooza" these days would be a "spend-a-rama:" and you knew the concept had grown stale when the local gas utility, piped natural gas being a new thing, offered "Gas-o-rama" as an assembly program for junior high schoolers to tout the wonders of the new fuel, and then the valley girls had their bonarama ...
The futurama, however, is a depressingly familiar exercise in wishful thinking. "They assure us of a future in which traffic congestion never slows vehicles down, and cars never collide with anything. These promises, in turn, become reasons not to commit too much money or attention to modes of transportation that are safer today." At page 2, thus, is the promise. Don't you dare be so crass as to call for, oh, a real world prototype. "Essential to such displays are conspicuous evocations of high-tech and future-tech possibilities, which invoke the prestige of science and impart new credibility to old, unfilled promises." Thus, by pages 12-13, it's always that Bright Future Ahead of Us, never mind that the roads remain chuck-holed and congested, or that there's no bread in the stores. But that's good salesmanship, page 172. "The story begins in the present, where a hardship burdens the customer, but it unfolds in a future in which the product vanquishes the hardship. If this future is strategically timed, the seller will be gone when the product fails to fulfill its heroic role." Thus the 1939 Futurama could envision the bustling city of 1960, and the 1964 Futurama could offer the same vision, while Khrushchev's final five-year plan imagined the building of communism by 1980. Reality arrives at page 187. "Always just over an ever-receding horizon lay the high-speed, delay-free, drive-everywhere city. Highway engineers and policymakers tirelessly pursued it, routing expressways through cities and recommitting urban real estate to car storage. The harder they strove to accommodate all driving, the more they deterred all alternatives to driving, and the more they made driving a practical necessity for everyone, whether they could afford it or not. The futuramas sold motor utopia; the never-finished product was car dependency." And Cold Spring Shops never lacked for work, whether documenting the ruin of the downtowns and the creation of parking craters, or provoking people with tales of road socialism. Khrushchev's apologists wished for more computing power, World's Fair apologists suggested 1939 or 1964 information technology "wasn't mature enough," page 220.
We don't have to slag only on communism, though, there are instructive passages at pages 146-147 about opioids, pesticides, low-tar cigarettes, and even plastic pop bottles: all pushed as improvements over existing ways of doing things, which the author characterizes as "distractions from better alternatives;" and the opportunities for rent-seeking, whether by the plastics lobby, Big Pharma, or the autonomous car complex are tempting. In the case of the autonomous car, if the efforts fail, improvements on other ways of getting around have been crowded out, but if they succeed, the unintended consequences might include a more sedentary way of living, as well as additional strain on the electric power grid. Just because a few populist members of Congress say silly things about renewable energy doesn't mean we oughtn't worry. Jevons's rebound effect is real, dear reader.
Meanwhile, the rent-seekers cleaned up, page 45. "Motordom would strive, through public policy, and with public money, to destroy and rebuild American surface transportation around motor vehicle travel, in ways that deprived travelers of a marketplace of competing modes, with the express intention of promoting demand for motor vehicles. All the while, motordom would propagate the notion that public policy was merely following mass preferences, and that the entire conversion was the consequence of the free market." In the beginning, it looked good, although, like any other socialism, eventually you run out of other peoples' money, and the wisdom of Lewis Mumford's observation that the private automobile was a wonderful thing to have if nobody else had one hit home. Leaving the driving to the algorithm changes none of it.
That's all second nature to people who think economically. It's essential, all the same, that others be reminded "complex webs of interdependencies make interventions to master or control particular nodes of the web invitations to trouble," and "a zeal for perfection may do more harm than good," pages 215-216.
To what end? The holy grail, or white whale, of the autonomous car is in taking the driver error out of tailgating. It's called platooning, although "vehicle platooning at speed emulated a railway train -- but the most inefficient train in the world, with just one or two passengers per train car, and each car requiring its own engine and high tech systems." The claimed benefits to ride-sharing might also be illusory. "If a car were smart enough, it wouldn't need a smart highway. It could perform its feats on ordinary roads, even driving itself." The sop to the sort of environmentalist who sees social waste in all those individual cars stored in individual garages, or left outside on driveway or street, is in the possibility of those autonomous cars being in action the rest of the day, doing the school runs as well as the office runs, or being available for errands ... but will those be maintained and serviced in latter-day car-barns, and would suburbanites go for such facilities, rather than the detached houses with cars garaged therein? I suspect that the resulting "disruption" (a business buzz-word suggesting Something Good) would look more like the traditional sense of "disruption" meaning a nuisance, or worse.
Meanwhile, the more boring approaches, such as treating roads as productive assets, languish. Turn to page 236. "Their gasoline taxes cover only a fraction of the expense, and the payment is disconnected from the value of the road capacity used." Perhaps when toll collection involved a lot of human labor and dropped coins, that was efficient, These days, though, "expanding toll-free road capacity in response to congestion is like a big-box store charging by the pound, and continually ordering more high-end electronics to keep its shelves stocked." (And - amusing story - tolling individual cars and trucks precludes the kind of fudges that can mess up store inventory control!)
Mr Norton concludes that replacing status quo car dependency with autonomous car dependency is still car dependency. "We are asked to believe, on scant evidence but plenty of fanfare, that the next generation of technology will finally deliver car dependency that works. Not for all the rare earths in China.
(Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.)