There is a traffic problem

It almost doesn’t really matter which city or country around the world I am referring to when I say this, there is a traffic problem. And with all the politics and elections around the world, no candidate has proposed a solution or even really acknowledged as a problem. The finger-in-the-hole to stop the water we apply comes in the form of adding more roads, paving more lanes, and digging tunnels. We add millions of cars to the roads each year, in some places more than newborns and immigration combines.

In Toronto, it costs around $9,000 a year to keep a car, and on average it drives around 16,000 km/year. That’s about two kilometers for every dollar, not including the cost to the environment, and the time it spends just sitting around. It also doesn’t include any traffic tickets, parking tickets, accidents, and other randomness you can think of. Cars in Toronto account for about a quarter of all Ontario emissions, and they are responsible for many lost lives. There have been close to two million cars added to Canadian roads each year in the last few years, adding to congestion. There is also no good other alternative solution for transportation, and that’s without counting disabled and elderly people and special needs. Remember the last time you twisted an ankle and had a hard time walking down stairs?

Cities around the world are taking steps to balance the varying needs of their people. More green spaces, more walkable cities, more bikeable cities with less fear of getting hit by a car, and in certain cases banning cars altogether. Paris bans old cars on certain days, Madrid is banning cars for non-locals, Oslo plans to make sections of the city car-free, Chengdu in China has a plan to only allow vehicles on half their roads, and some German cities are also moving in that direction of car-free, or at least highly limited. The over-population of cars on our planet is slowing down.

I think it needs to go one step further. There is no need for a personal vehicle inside large urban areas. This is not the case for rural areas, where there are fewer people and the distances are greater. The abrupt proposed solution is complex and requires a lot of unpacking to understand the ramifications. It is the sort of solution that at first read will seem crazy, far out beyond what is possible or should be done, but think about it more and you will understand the changes it will cause.

There are multiple steps to this proposal, as it encompasses cross-discipline ideas. The overall change will take place of the course of short years of implementation, to remove all private vehicles from a large urban area of the city, reclaim land diverted to roads and parking back to green spaces, and improve the overall quality of life. In the process, public transportation will be upgraded to a new level, dependency on fossil fuels will be reduced, air quality will improve, new technologies will be developed and possibilities emerge. I don’t have it all figured out, it is an emerging idea that would need to be vetted out better and developed, but the key here is the vision and the concept, so bear with me and keep it constructive.

To get started, we need to agree on the issue to solve. The problem is moving people around, at volume, and the data needed is related to those movements. There are trains - above or below ground - that move thousands of people, bus moves about 50, and cars average single passengers. Space is limited inside cities, so adding more lanes is not easily possible. Tunnels can be dug, but that is difficult and slow and expensive, and require structural integrity preserved. Digging a few feet only - think half a tunnel - is easier, and the cover won’t need to support as much weight if it doesn’t pertrude under existing structures. In other words, dig shallow and cover it up with the dirt you dig, and hide away the vehicles in the underground tunnels, reclaiming the above-tunnel area as green walkable spaces. This is not to be done everywhere, but certainly should be encouraged in neighborhoods and communities that can be car-free zones. Think about making zones accessible within 15 minutes of walking radius, and roads surround such zones.

The vehicles traveling underground and all around would be electric vehicles. Pollution inside tunnels is an issue otherwise, and the framework of all this change is to reduce air pollution. The vehicles should also travel by themselves, all human drivers should be banned from inside the urban area. One artificial intelligent system guiding all cars within the city, connected to its citizens using a public utility app that supports summoning a vehicle to your location and delivery to your destination using a combination of modes, within that 15-minute radius mentioned above. All for the same low price of public transportation today, with the upgraded door-to-door style service.

One AI system to guide them all requires new technology, but not such we don’t already have. The existing autonomous driving capabilities are beyond what is needed, especially if we cheat the system by eliminating the human driver variable, and replace it with added sensors across the urban area delivering more information to the AI system. Replacing all the existing traffic lights with better sensors can track pedestrians and alert approaching cars. It can also be combined with a few other sensors (while we’re at it) and provide more data about air quality, noise levels, and more. Self-driving cars, acting as a single hive, can communicate better with each other and become much more efficient. Vision Zero, the global idea to reduce road fatalities to nothing, might actually come true.

The steps to get there require a plan, and sacrifices. Those that say they enjoy driving and don’t want that to be taken away, I hear you. I don’t think this is taking anything away, and no one enjoys driving in traffic, we even call it “sitting in traffic” because it’s not really driving. If you enjoy driving, I would imagine it’s the driving down the open highway, or road trips across long distances. It’s not daily commute to work alongside millions of other vehicles. Perhaps some sacrifices will be nothing more than a change in perspective, state of mind and how we see the world around us.

The plan will require a commitment, the kind that survives changing governments and officials, because it will take years to complete. Steps can run in parallel, require engaging local colleges and universities, try methods that were not tried before. Add sensors to intersections, ask citizens to provide data about their whereabouts (anonymously), order or build vehicles. At the same time, this will impact city operations in the future. No private cars mean no revenue from parking tickets and no jobs for parking officers. Police and other emergency operators will require special equipment, or special priority within the AI system. I don’t think they need special privilege to continue operating a vehicle when they can just as easily get to their destination without operating one, perhaps only sitting in a different type of automobile. Same can be said about transporting other people to custody or hospitals, a self driving car can do it without the human operator. It also means less speeding tickets, traffic courts, traffic lawyers, body-shops and mechanics, and all their related parts.

The value of cars would take a dive. I don’t think it will be possible to sell most cars, they won’t be worth anything. Then again, if you had a horse-drawn carriage when cars started rolling out of factories you’d be stuck with it also. We can’t simply wake up one day 10 or 20 years from now in a new world, and the transition is difficult. But waking up 5 years into the process, when air quality is improved by over 60% as it did in Spain, noise levels drop, green spaces reduce stress and heat levels within cities, as happened in Singapore, will make us question not starting sooner.