I think by 2021 we will see a lot of autonomous vehicles in operation across the country
in ways that we imagine today, like individual cars owned by individual families
but in other ways, with some of the ride-sharing services making conversions to autonomous vehicles.
Families will be able to walk out of their homes and call a vehicle to them
And that vehicle will take them to work or to school or to a doctor's appointment or something like that.
This is something that's going to transform just about every way we move.
So I think you're going to see trucks, for example, that are driverless
And you're going to see because of the technology
those trucks are running much more closely together
which will actually will have fuel savings and climate impacts on the positive end.
In the future you're going to see ships that have more self-driving features
trains that have more self-driving features
and just about everything other than walking is going to have some self-driving aspect to it.
There's another opportunity for us in this era
and that has to do with data and analytics.
You know today I drive over a pothole, and if you happen to be driving behind me
And see what happens to my car, you glean that understanding and you think to avoid that pothole.
Well, if an autonomous car runs over a pothole, will it be able to communicate and share that data?
Not only with cars of the same type, but can that information now be shared
to all autonomous vehicles, regardless of who made it?
The industry working with us, we're going to have to answer that question together
Because i want us to have as broad an imagination of how data and analytics
can help improve what we do in transportation
and frankly lift the safety advantages of autonomous cars.
I do think the age of technology and transportation that we're in
is going to revolutionize the way we think about transportation
But we don't take leaps that much.
I mean, it's been 50 years since we've taken the last big leap in transportation
and that's why this moment is so important
Back in 1956 we were a vastly different country.
We were a country that had laws of segregation.
We were a country that did not have voting rights act passed
And so there were projects that were designed in the nineteen fifties
That ultimately got built along racial lines or along economic lines
So you look at our freeways, you go to New Orleans or Syracuse or Los Angeles
And you can see those distinct lines that have been drawn
and highways that have been built and overpasses that are still there
that are actually walls between people.
Here's a challenge with self-driving technology:
I think left to its own devices any technology is going to end up
going to those who can afford it the most first.
The difference here withtransportation is that so much of the infrastructure
that driverless technologies need is coming from the public sector.
So here in this instance, the public sector actually has a lot more control
than would be the case with something like VCRs, for example
and we can create the incentive structure for the demand to wrap around
the wide swath of social economics that we have in this country
so that perhaps the existence of a staging area for rideshares
attracts new housing, new neighborhood services like pharmacies and grocery stores
into those areas and then begins to provide an underpinning of economic activity
to an area that previously didn't have as much.
We have an opportunity to press a reset button in a certain sense.
We also have an opportunity to just completely drive forward an entire global transformation
of the relationship between human beings and machines.
That's just an amazing opportunity for a society.
But we've got to seize it and we've got to be intentional about it.