Of self-driving cars, and the non-existence of jaywalking
Also this week: the unexpected indeterminacy of rivers; and a barcode map of the UK.
The forgotten American slang term “jay” referred, around the turn of the last century, to a rube, a naïf, a country bumpkin who lacked the sophistication for life in the big city. In the early years of the motor car, when the first traffic accidents were greeted with public outrage, some evil genius in the US motor industry began a publicity campaign concerning “jaywalking”, the actions of the sort of rustic idiot who didn’t know not to step into a road without a dedicated crossing.
It worked. In 1925, Los Angeles became the first city to make jaywalking – the simple act of existing without a two-tonne metal box, in a space that belongs to cars – illegal. It wasn’t the last. What had once been the fault of a driver was now the fault of the person they’d just run down.
I’ve been thinking a lot about such things as I rush to finish my new book, tentatively titled The World As We Built It, a brief history of all the many things we’ve done to reshape our environment around ourselves.1 But it’s been particularly on my mind this last week, thanks to the news that US driverless car firm Waymo is hoping to inflict its robotaxi service on the streets of London as soon as September. The British government is considering changing some regulations; there’ll be a pilot scheme in April. Very well.
I am not, in fact, convinced it’s going to do any such thing. Self-driving vehicles work best in cities with wide and easily legible streets – grid systems are ideal – with a bare minimum of distractions from things that aren’t cars. London, as anyone who’s ever set foot in the place could tell you, fits precisely none of those criteria. As an English-speaking world city with big finance and tech sectors, it may seem, from afar, an ideal market. Its streets, though, are narrow, messy, and packed with wildlife, cyclists and pedestrians whose movements a computer will struggle to predict. Only from behind a spreadsheet in Silicon Valley could this move possibly make sense.
But surely the biggest issue is we simply have a different legal relationship with our streets from that of almost any major US city. It’s not so much that jaywalking is legal here, as that it’s an entirely non-existent concept: because it’s never been otherwise, describing jaywalking as “legal” feels as baffling as saying that it’s legal to drink tea. The result is that Londoners simply don’t respect cars’ rule of the road in quite the way Americans do, and will happily nip through stationary or slow moving traffic with just a wave of the hand, assuming everything will be fine. The moment driverless cars arrive on the streets of London, teenagers will be playing chicken with the things, making them stop for a laugh and almost daring them to run them over.
But let’s imagine it were possible. Let’s imagine none of those barriers were there. Then, this would be good, right? New technology! Wave of the future! Exciting!
Well, no. For one thing, driving an Uber may not be the most glamorous or best paid of jobs, but it nonetheless provides flexible income of the sort many people would feel the loss of. It is not obvious to me that replacing that with handing yet more money to big US tech firms is actually an improvement.
Worse are the questions of safety. In the US, UCL science professor Jack Stilgoe wrote in the Guardian on Monday, self-driving cars have yet to cause any major accidents, but have caused lesser problems like “impeding emergency services, causing traffic jams and, in one case, running over a much-loved San Francisco cat”. Get enough of them on the streets, and more serious accidents, inevitably, will happen. When they do, who will be to blame, and how do we make sure they are liable? Given our record of holding big tech responsible for the chaos wrought by its algorithms of late, do we really want them in charge of missiles on our streets?2
There’s one more thing worrying me here, which is perhaps a little less obvious: what if they do work? What if driverless cars genuinely do become a cheap and easy way of travelling? If so, everything we know about induced demand suggests that usage will go through the roof. That means more journeys, more traffic, more competition for scarce urban space. If you want a picture of the future, imagine an empty car driving aimlessly around looking for somewhere to park, forever.
We don’t have to do this, you know. The lesson of “jaywalking” is surely that, even when a tech company comes up with a self-justifying buzzword, we can still tell them no. But it’s going to be much easier to do that before they reshape the entire urban world and legal system around themselves than it’s going to be afterwards.
Self-Promotion Corner
Hey, remember Paper Cuts? I know, I miss it, too. Anyway, we’ve done a sort of pretend one: an episode of sister show The Bunker in which Miranda and I chat about the maddest columns of the last month with Andrew Harrison. All being well, it’ll be a regular feature. You can listen to Hot Take Time Machine here.
How long is a piece of string? On the uncertainty of rivers
In 2007 a team of scientists spent two weeks on an expedition to the mountains of southern Peru and came back with a conclusion that may, in some quarters, have seemed a little surprising. “The Amazon is longer than the Nile,” Guido Gelli, a director of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics told the press, in a widely reproduced quote. “I have no doubt in my mind.”
The reason Gelli’s comments may have raised an eyebrow or two is that, on much of the planet, everyone who’s ever given the question even half a second’s thought was under the impression that planet Earth’s longest river was the Nile: according to Britannica, that’s 6,650km (4,132 miles), compared to the Amazon’s 6,400km (4,000 miles). The counterintuitive finding was perhaps rendered slightly less surprising by the fact that both Gelli and the brave team of explorers hailed from Brazil, the country which encompasses most of the Amazon’s route and its associated rainforest, and if a nation can get all misty eyed and patriotic about its power outlets or variety of cheeses then getting all puffed up about an enormous river system seems almost normal.
Nonetheless: the figures the team came back with seemed to bear this out. Their measurement put the length of the Amazon at 6,800km (4,225 miles), a whole 150km longer than the Nile. It’s not even close.
The thing is, though, hardly anyone seemed to believe a word of this. Look at almost any source today, and it’ll still tell you the longest river in the world is the Nile. About the only place people are likely to say otherwise is (shocker, this) Brazil.
How can this be? Rivers are enormous, and whether or not something is one is surely the sort of thing you should be able to tell at a glance. So why the disparity? Was it just Brazilian propaganda? Bad science?
Well, possibly. But at least as likely is the fact that rivers are surprisingly difficult to measure, making this one of those questions to which there may be no right answer. And since I love those, let’s dive in.
