Jitney Jeremiad: Prepare Ye the Ways!

Abstract

This paper addresses the public's and the private sector's distraction from the hard work of infrastructure planning and implementation coordination, as they hope instead that IoT + AI + 5G = guaranteed achievements in mobility in dense urban areas. Not so fast, citizens. This paper identifies four fundamentally false suppositions about the state of play in transportation infrastructure planning meriting healthy skepticism if not outright rejection by the public and elected officials alike. Alternatively, stakeholders can let 'er rip and watch the Facebook "re-run" applied to mobility pathways of congested urban areas – when technologies' gurus ask regulators to help them solve runaway problems caused by their conjoined good intentions and tunnel-visions. There's time to prepare municipal infrastructure and accompanying land use regulation for the advent of even the most modestly-scaled numbers of autonomous vehicles. In the fashion of Paris and other cities implementing bike lanes during the novel coronavirus pandemic, why not do exactly that?

Note: This paper was prepared in connection with the Smart Cities Conference at the Sandra Day O'Connor Law School on February 22, 2019 sponsored by the ABA Section on Science and Technology Law, where the author participated in the conference's panel on Smart Transportation.

Keywords: artificial intelligence, 5G technology, internet of things, IoT, transportation planning, transportation coordination, land use planning, infrastructure planning, intelligent transportation systems, autonomous vehicles, self-driving vehicles, driverless vehicles

JEL Classification: R14, R41, R42, R48, R52, R53, R58