Smart Cars: A Really Dumb Idea
COMPUTER-EQUIPPED cars driving themselves on automated highways. A scene out of "The Jetsons?" Not exactly. Smart cars and highways have quietly emerged as the latest and most-expensive proposal to solve the nation's traffic problems.
Government spending on the little-known Intelligent Vehicle and Highway Systems program is expected to exceed $40 billion over the next 20 years. (By comparison, in the first 10 years of the Strategic Defense Initiative, Washington spent $30 billion.) Even more astonishing is the total lack of organized opposition to the idea, despite evidence that smart cars and highways may well exacerbate the very problems they are supposed to solve.
IVHS would put computers in charge of everything from timing the traffic signals to deciding which route each car should take - and, eventually, to doing the actual driving.
In the early stages, a dashboard screen would display maps while a synthesized voice would purr directions to the driver. Later would come the crowning glory of IVHS, the Automated Highway System. Once commuters keyed in their destination, they could just sit back and enjoy the ride - maybe even take a nap. Cars would hurtle along, bumper to bumper, at speeds measured in miles per minute.
It sounds like bad science fiction but in fact it is all very real.
Federal funding has skyrocketed from $2 million in 1989 to $218 million in 1993 - making smart cars and highways now the single largest item in surface transportation research and development. President Clinton's "Rebuild America" fund proposal would funnel an additional $155 million to the Automated Highway System. The nation's primary transportation legislation, the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 (ISTEA, pronounced "ice-tea"), mandates putting a fully automated highway into operation by 1997.
News stories about IVHS faithfully repeat the standard promises made by universities seeking funds for the research and by corporations trying to market the equipment. Invariably, smart-car schemes are extolled as a way to expand highway capacity without pouring more concrete.
Unfortunately, IVHS is unlikely to live up to its splendid claims. The goal of increased safety is far from guaranteed. Drivers of smart cars may be distracted by all the messages flashing at them. A system-wide failure of a data-processing network controlling a highway full of smart cars would give new meaning to the phrase "computer crash."
The vast potential for lawsuits over accidents is not lost on IVHS proponents, who devote much of their effort to grappling with liability risks. And though some experts say smart cars could save 1,000 lives by the year 2000, the same target could be met far more cheaply by switching less than 1 percent of annual car travel to transit, which has considerably lower accident rates.
Any decrease in fuel use and emissions gained through reducing start-and-stop driving could easily be wiped out by higher speeds and increased traffic.
The national strategic plan for developing IVHS prepared for the Department of Transportation in 1992 acknowledges, "There is some concern that any congestion relief may merely encourage more travel, thus negating most if not all gains in reduced energy consumption and pollution."
In any case, existing public-transit technologies have far more energy-saving potential than the smartest automobile; in fuel used per passenger, buses and trains get three to seven times better mileage than cars.
If smart cars and highways do ease congestion, it probably won't be for long. Dashboard computers can't divert drivers onto less-crowded roads if no such options exist. People who live on side streets near thoroughfares can attest that even without help from computers, drivers are quick to beat an alternate path.
And suppose that the full-blown automated highway (with the robot-like convoys) does manage to squeeze in several times the current amount of traffic. This invites the unsettling question of what happens when all those cars reach their exits. Electronic traffic management would extend to some nearby streets, but it certainly wouldn't blanket an entire city; once the smart highway downloaded its vehicles, roads of average intelligence would be more jammed than ever. Hardly an advance beyond road-building, IVHS could require new roads for spillover from smart ones.
It is also hard to ignore the price tag. As a 1991 report from the General Accounting Office on IVHS acknowledged, "Cost appears to be a looming concern to the viability of the entire program."
In a 1991 hearing on transportation-research priorities, chairperson Rep. Tim Valentine, D-N.C., was more direct about the cost. "Isn't it perhaps one of the most expensive initiatives that the mind of man could conjure up?" he asked.
In view of its obvious flaws, one might ask why IVHS - and particularly the automated-highway scheme - has gathered so much momentum.
The reasons have less to do with transportation policy than with the influence of the people behind it. The chief promoter of smart cars and highways is a Washington-based coalition called IVHS America. It is comprised of more than 500 organizations from the public and private sector - nearly 40 percent of which are from non-transportation industries. Members include such heavyweights as IBM, AT&T, Rockwell and, of course, the Big Three automakers. As an official advisory committee to the Department of Transportation, IVHS America will help devise the federal government's strategy for developing smart cars and highways.
Its sales pitch is familiar: Smart cars and highways are crucial to competitiveness and defense conversion. Without IVHS, it is said that Japan and Europe will leave our semiconductor industry in the dust. Defense contractors have disarmed the advocates of peacetime-conversion by offering to use smart-bomb technology in smart cars.
But transportation is an economic sector unto itself, an integral part of virtually every business activity. It would make more sense to design transportation policy first, and then see how the semiconductor industry could fit in. Similarly, if defense companies are to be enlisted in the effort to improve transportation, a more-effective role for them would be to help implement the landmark policy shift that supposedly occurred with the passage of ISTEA in 1991 - when the stated goal was to steer us away from our excessive car-and-highway focus toward one that includes rail and public transit.
A number of IVHS projects do in fact address alternatives to driving, including smart buses, smart fare-cards for transit and even smart traffic lights that give priority to buses and van pools.
But these play a minor role. Michael Replogle, co-director of the transportation project at the Environmental Defense Fund, notes that if such ideas were at the heart of the IVHS program, it would have a shot at meeting its goals. As priorities now stand, however, any improvements in public transit or other options are doomed to be erased by the much-larger effort aimed at cars.
There is much more at stake here than tax dollars. James Howard Kunstler, author of the recent book "The Geography of Nowhere," describes how the American penchant for automobiles over the last half-century has degraded our surroundings and impoverished our culture.
"We've turned American towns and cities into auto-storage depots that only incidentally contain other things," Kunstler says. "By subordinating so many aspects of our lives to the car, we have created places unworthy of our affection."
Smart cars and highways risk magnifying the mistakes that we're already making. A nation of highways packed bumper to bumper can lead only to a 21st-century hell - no matter how fast traffic moves. Marcia D. Lowe is a senior researcher at Worldwatch Institute.