A little different from the usual post on Shoegnome, but don’t worry it all connects…

So there’s a problem with people getting distracted while driving. They start looking at phones and replying via text, e-mail, or some other function that requires eyes and hands to be on the phone and not focused on driving. The problem keeps getting worse. So what’s the solution? Because we need a solution.

Laws that prohibit texting while driving

How’s that going? I always found those funny because is it illegal to look at a map on a phone? What about a big paper folding map? Seems like a lot of tricky gray areas.

Well let’s look at the problem backwards. We’ve got a problem with people texting and driving. And we can’t get them to stop texting. Why don’t we get them to stop traveling by car? That seems like a great idea. We all want to live in Paris where we can take subways everywhere instead of our cars. But we can’t all live in Paris or similar dense cities. And it’ll be decades before cities like Houston and L.A. can build enough trains and bus lanes to make a big difference. And that’s not even scratching the surface. We’ve got distracted drivers in little old Windsor, Connecticut and middle of nowhere Ranchester, Wyoming. Build all the public transportation you want, but it won’t reach everywhere. And besides people love traveling by car. It’s so convenient. Especially if you have little kids.

We’re not going to radically redesign our cities fast enough. But something like the ideal Broadacre City could exist in the 21st Century and be built upon our existing infrastructure with not much additional societal changes.

Let’s try again, but this time let’s look at the problem upside down. We’ve got a problem with people texting and driving. We can’t get them to stop texting. And we can’t get them out of their cars. What’s left to do? Keep the texting, keep the car, get rid of the driver. Google and many others are working on this. And we’ve come a LONG way since the 2005 DARPA grand challenge. Self-driving cars are the answer and they can’t get here soon enough. And once we have self-driving cars maybe then we can tackle getting rid of everyone having to own one.

Why do I want a self-driving car?

Simple, I waste too much time doing nothing but getting from point A to point B without hitting stuff and killing myself and my family.

Here’s a thought…

Let’s go a step farther and have communal self-driving cars. What if every trip took five minutes longer, but you never had to own a car again. Because you’d just call a car to where ever you are. You wait five minutes, the car arrives, takes you to where you want to go, and then you call another when you want to return home. If you’re smart enough and have some magic device in your pocket to track the cars, you could plan ahead and not even lose those five minutes. I know that is just a fancy description of a taxi. But it’s much more. An autonomous fleet of car-drones. Always there, waiting. Like a public utility. Or a subscription service. Do you know how many times a month you drive your car? Or how many miles you drive? I bet if you signed up for a service of self-driving cars, the company that owns and operates those cars could tell you those numbers anytime you wanted to know them. And knowing those answers, knowing the direct cost savings to you of cutting out a trip or getting below a certain level of subscription cost, odds are you’d change your behavior. For the better.

But wait, there’s more. Since your phones are location enabled and tracking you (which they are already doing today), the car fleet knows whether it just dropped you off at work, at home, or somewhere else. It can calculate and predict when you’ll need another car. Or you can tell it. Whether you live in New York City or Warroad, Minnesota. It’s just a math equation to make sure there are always cars available for everyone with minimum waiting.

So which would you prefer? Paying for a car and spending thousands of dollars a year on insurance or paying a subscription service for access to shared, autonomous public cars.

Oh and think about this. If you had a big group, you’d call a van. If you needed to go to the hardware store, you’d call any car to get there and a pickup truck for the return trip. This is coming. Are you excited or scared?

UPDATE 03/18/13
Check out these statistics on texting while driving. More proof we need to leave the driving to the robots.

Follow Shoegnome on Facebook and Twitter for more on being an Architect in the 21st Century.