Readers React: Autonomous vehicles right around the corner? Maybe not.

To the editor: When evaluating predictions about the world of tomorrow, such as Steven Strauss’ bullish view on autonomous vehicles, it is a good rule to consider that the future will be very much less different from the present than you imagine. (“As the age of autonomous vehicles nears, why are policy wonks focused on the past?,” Op-Ed, Nov. 8)

Recall the magazine ads in the 1950s showing families happily relaxing in their cars while the automated highway whisked them on their way. It was supposed to happen within 20 years. It didn’t.

Remember around 1980 when the media discovered the microchip and there was endless pondering about what would we do with all our leisure time when computers do all the work? Where are our jet packs, our flying cars?

Advances in developing autonomous vehicles have been small steps in dealing with specific tasks. There has been no breakthrough in artificial intelligence to deal with the major obstacles in the way.

There is no need to sell our Volkswagen shares just yet. Or maybe there is.

Rory Johnston, Hollywood

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To the editor: Here’s a different message on the prospect of autonomous vehicles: Embrace the technology and the driverless applications will arrive. Let’s let these systems adapt to urban infrastructure and keep calm about expectations. Beware of anything that promises to rid our cities of traffic and congestion.

I am reminded of the conflation of technology into oversimplified visions of futuristic cities. In the 1950s and ‘60s, entire city plans embraced regional mobility via the private car. We got highway widening, sidewalk shrinking, less buildable urban land and freeways.

Traffic engineering and free flow technology became false promises. They eviscerated more granular urban systems and created barriers and voids we are still overcoming.

Equally insidious, the obsession with individual freedom of movement and no traffic became embedded in city planning language and thought, then statutes and regulations, and worse in the public’s expectation of what makes cities livable. It is really a mess to deconstruct this paradigm.

John Given, Santa Monica

The writer is a city planning consultant.

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