Autonomous Vehicles Might Drive Cities to Financial Ruin

In Ann Arbor, Michigan, last week, 125 mostly white, mostly male, business-card-bearing attendees crowded into a brightly lit ballroom to consider "mobility." That's the buzzword for a hazy vision of how tech in all forms--including smartphones, credit cards, and autonomous vehicles-- will combine with the remains of traditional public transit to get urbanites where they need to go. There was a fizz in the air at the Meeting of the Minds session, advertised as a summit to prepare cities for the "autonomous revolution." In the US, most automotive research happens within an hour of that ballroom, and attendees knew that development of "level 4" autonomous vehicles--designed to operate in limited locations, but without a human driver intervening--is accelerating. Susan Crawford (@scrawford) is an Ideas contributor for WIRED, a professor at Harvard Law School, and the author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age.