The promise of autonomous cars has struck an especially jubilant chord with a chorus of futurist urban thinkers.
The big transformative hope: We can break the death grip of car-centric urban design and planning, which has been something of a disaster for most American cities in the 20th century.
In the near future, self-driving cars will simply circulate through cities, freeing road space and liberating millions of acres of parking lots for more useful purposes. Combine that with the ongoing electrification of the vehicle fleet, and it might look as if we are nearing an urban transportation utopia.
But the dream of cheap, clean mobility in cities might run up against some harsh realities—soaring energy consumption, supercharged sprawl, and intensified traffic congestion—if AVs are simply deployed to encourage more driving.
That’s one message from a new report prepared by the University of California Davis’s Institute of Transportation Studies and the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), a nonprofit organization that develops bus rapid transit systems and promotes environmentally friendly urban planning. They’ve been crunching the numbers on how to avert warming the planet with carbon emissions while also reducing gridlock and increasing mobility.
The report looks at three possible scenarios for vehicle use by 2050 and compares their energy demands. Option one: We continue with privately owned internal-combustion cars the way they are. Or, there’s a “two revolutions” model, where both electric and automated vehicles come into common use by 2030 and 2040. Then there’s the triple-revolution scenario, which introduces widespread ride-sharing by 2030, as explained by this handy infographic.
First, the energy and emissions angle: If we continue using gas engines in vehicles, we’ll dump 4,600 megatons of CO2 in the atmosphere by 2050. The second scenario combines electric and autonomous vehicles and results in 63 percent fewer emissions with 1,700 megatons of CO2 total. That math figures in the fact that the combination of two technologies will not reduce the 2.1 billion cars expected to be on the road in 2050. By the ITDP’s estimates, introducing AVs might increase vehicle travel by 15 to 20 percent.
The press release for the study outlines how many megatons each big global emitter’s urban vehicles stand to contribute, emissions-wise, by 2050. Here’s a table of CO2 megatons under each scenario.
In implementing the Paris Agreement, countries need to cut their CO2 emissions in half in order to achieve the goal of preventing a 2-degree Celsius increase in global temperature. Consider those changes in the context of the United States in 2015: The EPA estimates that the United States was responsible for about 659 gigatons of carbon (a gigaton is 1,000 megatons) with transportation overall producing about 27 percent of those emissions compared to other economic sectors.
Read more of the original article at CityLab.
