Digitally-Driven Detroitification

21st CENTURY TECH SWEEPS OUT 19th CENTURY INSTITUTIONS

Remember all these taxi driver riots in places like France a little while back, and how nations like Germany and Italy, and cities like Austin banned Big U?  It is feeble to lash against an irrepressible technological wave.

 Beyond the disruption to employment within transportation lies the knock-on effects elsewhere. 

A substantial proportion (up to 25%) of the revenue of many local and state governments derives from rent-seeking on parking fines and speeding tickets.

The MV Ticket and Traffic Court system is a tremendously large income stream for all local and state/commonwealth governments. Many lawyers and bail bondsmen also will find much of their bread-and-butter work drying up.

In a world of autonomous vehicles where very few people drive, or even own a vehicle (we will have perhaps 60% fewer passenger road vehicles registered within 10 years), how will cities replace this lost revenue? Especially at a time when truckers and taxi drivers are facing irrelevance.

I have doubts as to whether many municipalities can adapt quickly enough to avoid substantial shortfalls, and the risk of Detroitification.

Autonomous vehicles will decimate that income stream and all other ancillary income streams associated with traffic enforcement (law enforcement personnel, attorneys, court staff/Judges, DMV employees, insurance industry, etc.). These institutions cannot disappear overnight, but the revenue to pay for them will. There will still be CHiPs, but they will be filled with the same; autonomous police will keep an eye on our highways, largely from the sky.

If we’re lucky, failing local government services may be usurped by the private sector. Companies that provide such services however will need to be brave and cheeky to successfully fend off state harassment.

Therefore, the example of Uber’s behaviour, as well its embrace of exponential technology, will hasten this process worldwide.

Moreover, the move away from internal combustion will lead to vehicles that last 3-5 times longer than before. Teslas, for example, can easily be driven for 200,000 miles with very little wear and tear. These same power trains can also be harnessed to provide power on the spot wherever it may be required (disasters, festivals, construction sites), taking us much more easily off grid. The grid itself will become decentralised and we will truly be able to ‘buy electrical power’ (and sell it) from just about anyone, to just about anyone, in an unbundled free energy exchange.

The oil crash of 2014 is not likely to subside meaningfully. The old circa-2008 prices are unlikely to return, as PV and battery tech supersedes the need for oil for transportation. Yes, oil is still needed for plastics and agriculture, but the greatest extent of its use is for energy. This will have broad geopolitical effects on OPEC nations, and the hegemony of the Petrodollar.

The design of machines themselves will change, as vehicles can be built more lightly, due to safety, and the lack of heavy engine and generator equipment. There is a lot less to go wrong in a solution without exploding petrochemicals and tubes, and this will have huge knock-on effects in servicing and maintenance, and total cost of ownership.

Of course, most people soon will not own their own car, they will have a subscription for a car-based service plan, somewhat like their cellphone today. This is likely to cause a consolidation whereby the tech companies become even more powerful, and have an ever-stronger gravity well in our lives. Every autonomous system is also a sensor and distributed intelligence package. En masse, providing such physical services thereby creates powerful upsides in the digital world.

Sectors that one doesn’t think of as tech per se, like agricultural, and insurance will see a shift towards new lead exponential tech players in those areas disrupting old incumbents with powerful new exponentialized tech, data, and ML infrastructure, creating de facto monopolies and duopolies in winner-takes-all market ecosystems. There will be a darker side to this as the once-industry-leaders have to face an unsustainable loss of relevance whilst shouldering vast pension liabilities from employees.

Many others will simply get by with public transit and Uber. We’re likely to see a shift in the meaning of ‘public transit’ - the trend may soon be that it is no longer provided by municipalities, but rather by private industry, an autonomous electric ‘Uber-bus’, if you will, that uses newfound efficiencies to sidestep the need for public subsidies. The old dumb public transit systems will tend to rot unused as people abandon it as quickly as possible for safer, more comfortable, better-connected, and possibly cheaper alternatives, thereby creating further shortfalls in public coffers. Maintenance of the public transit infrastructure itself may be privatised to the company most willing to pay for its upkeep (to pass the cost effortlessly onwards towards the end-consumer). The costs themselves may drop, as much road maintenance will be automated, and done at night to minimise disruption.

The extra space (‘frunks’ and such) will lead to people expecting to be able to take more with them, and trunks will become increasingly robotised (your luggage following you around on its own). With more time to relax and enjoy the ride, our free time increases. We can eat, read, etc, just as we would on a plane or train. We will experience a return to peacefulness in many cities that has not been enjoyed in over a century. The silence of electric vehicles, and the absence of fumes, combined with the almost-guaranteed safety of jaywalking, means that central reservations will be enjoyable spots for a picnic. Cities will no longer feel so broken up into blocks, since traffic flows can be so much more stochastic, adapting efficiently to the needs of the pedestrian. Waiting at crosswalks will take 50% of the time or less. Biking will be more fun in the clean air, and vastly less dangerous.

The cleanness of the air will save billions of dollars in avoided health costs alone, and motor vehicle accidents are by far the leading cause of accidental deaths of young people and healthy adults. Accidental collisions with pedestrians, as well as drivers losing control of the vehicle, will become almost unheard of. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration concluded that Tesla vehicles that have Autosteer enabled crash 40 percent less frequently than those without, and this is just the early days of this kind of tech. Just as we might question today if it’s still reasonable to ride in a 1950s Cadillac or not, soon a lack of MI-driven safety features will make contemporary cars seem like deathtraps.

This will create knock-on effects within the organ donation system, at least until bioprinting of organs can replace the lost sources.

Traffic itself will be a lot more sparse. A lot more carpooling, a lot more sharing of rides, algorithms optimising vehicle journeys, and autonomous vehicles harmlessly tailgating each other. The shipping of goods  can easily happen as silently in the dead of night as during the day. Warehousing will shift, becoming smaller and more local, and with a single building serving the needs of dozens of customers.

A fully autonomous fleet may cause us to repurpose the garages in our homes as loading bays for deliveries and casual callers, rather than a hutch for a personal vehicle. Vast acreage today used for parking lots will be repurposed also as ‘kiss and bye’ zones, or lots for new homes and parks. The primacy of having parking space with a domestic dwelling will naturally shift.

Likewise, the possession of a driver’s licence as the default ID will shift, along with the youthful rite of passage of acquiring one. Parents need to helicopter less as machines can ferry the younglings around safely, and report on the children’s location if need be. Another youthful pastime, heavy alcohol intake, may shift also. Fewer problems with DUIs or finding designated drivers may mean more potential for casual inebriation. Transit may be increasingly bundled into other products and included with the price of a day trip or a meal. 

With less drunkenness and recklessness behind the wheel, the leading cause of death of healthy people is sure to decline greatly. When accidents do occur, autonomous ambulances will whisk patients around with greater speed and care, as other traffic naturally clears the way. This aids in emergency situations. Furthermore, it will be much more difficult to escape from a crime in a vehicle, as every other car on the road is likely to narc on one’s vector at best, or collude to block the road at worst.

Finally, the vehicle itself can become a source of capital. A car that one drives taxi within is a job; a car that drives itself is an asset. Whilst you are busy, your car can be ferrying others around and earning money (maybe for you, maybe for its own personal corporation). These new economics mean that businesses are for the first time becoming wholly automated.

Ultimately, the transit revolution is going to greatly benefit our lives. But it will come at a cost to rent-seekers from the last automotive revolution.