Autonomous vehicles, car-dominated environments, and cycling: Using an ethnography of infrastructure to reflect on the prospects of a new transportation technology

Alan Latham and Michael Nattrass

Journal of Transport Geography, 2019, vol. 81, issue C

Abstract: With growing concerns about air pollution and congestion, getting more people to move around cities by bicycle is gaining more attention than at any point over the past 50 years. At the same time, the spread of autonomous vehicles (AVs) is being positioned by some as a solution to these same problems. This raises interesting questions about the possible trajectories AVs could take when they become part of the traffic landscape of a street. Will they entrench existing hierarchies of use? Or will they help facilitate the expansion of cycling and other non-motorised forms of mobility? To begin to think about this question, the paper considers what a street is and how different users within a street environment share and cooperate. It then moves on to explore the technologies involved in the development of AVs and the challenges involved in their use on environmentally complex urban streets. With rules being central to how AVs operate, the fact that rules can mean different things to different people, and that they are both formal and informal, matters. To show why this matters, examples from an ethnography of infrastructure involving 81 adult road users are used to illustrate the ambiguities involved in making sense of the appropriate way to make a right-hand turn when cycling in a country that travels on the left. How AVs are programmed to deal with such ambiguities will have profound effects on the kind of infrastructural settlements that come to dominate how people share the street. These are judgements that will have important consequences for the development of cycling in the many places with car-dominated transport environments.

Keywords: Autonomous vehicles; Cycling; Infrastructure; Sharing; Rules; Intelligence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0966692318308275

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jotrge:v:81:y:2019:i:c:s0966692318308275

DOI: 10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2019.102539

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Transport Geography is currently edited by Frank Witlox

More articles in Journal of Transport Geography from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().