More highways?



Imagine your next car. Maybe it will be electric. Maybe it will be self driving. Maybe it will be that cool new shade of blue. It will look nice in the driveway. Maybe. Imagine instead of buying the car, you buy into a fleet of self driving autonomous vehicles. Use your phone app and ten minutes later a nice little 2 seater appears to take you to the grocery store. Need to drive 4 kids to hockey? No problem. Use the app and ten minutes later a self driving electric minivan shows up to collect you, the kids and the gear. Where do the cars go when you are not using them? Why, they are driving other fleet owners to their destinations or charging at the fleet windmill or getting serviced by the fleet mechanics. No worries about looking after the thing. Charged and ready to take you wherever you want to go. Sounds like science fiction? Not really. We know that most domestic vehicles will be electric in the next 20 years. The same vehicles will be autonomous in about the same amount of time. This fiction will be reality soon. You will be able to grow vegetables in your driveway and never have to worry about winter tires again! Oh. Did I mention that these new fleets will be controlled by AIs and they will cooperate with each other. Your car will pick up 3 other passengers for the commute to work and will calculate the quickest route. These cars will be able to drive nearly bumper to bumper at 100 KPH with zero accidents!

This future is not imagined. Technical journals and news articles have been talking about this future for several years now. It has become embedded in our gestalt to such a degree that, unless you are a real tech nerd, it hardly warrants discussion. But if we know this future is on the horizon then why oh why are we talking about building new highways? If we are to look at greening our future then aren’t self driving electric fleets the way to go? Do we need more pavement? Or can we make better use of the pavement we already have?

The Conservatives have resurrected the already shelved plans for highway 413 and the Bradford Bypass. Surely another election stunt as they will push their half baked half truths about reducing commute time on the electorate. These highways, dubbed “sprawl accelerators” are important and deserve a little research as well as some logical thinking about the commutes in our future.

The Ontario NDP’s Green New Deal imagines a cleaner and brighter future nurtured by new technologies developed by scientists and engineers - not a future developed to sound good as some politician’s stump speech. The Green New Deal asks instead what we can do to make walking and bicycling easier? The Green New Deal talks about investing in low carbon alternatives. The Green New Deal features a Post Card From the Future that imagines a clean, bright and just future for all of us.

What is an AI? Artificial Intelligence.
Look at it this way. Our blood is controlled by one organ. The heart. It makes sure every part of our body gets the oxygen and energy it needs. But what is each red blood cell had a tiny brain and a couple of flippers? It would be chaos! There would be traffic jambs throughout your body with oxygen rich parts and oxygen starved parts. We can think of cars in the same way. If one central feature, an AI heart controlled every car on the road then slow commutes and rear-enders would be a thing of the past.

#ondp #ndpmilton #greennewdeal #climatechange #cleanenergytransition

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