A brilliant red Barchetta…

I listen to a podcast call 99% Invisible, created by Roman Mars, that discusses all sorts of design. The name comes from the idea that good design is (mostly) invisible; things just work the way you expect them to. Having done some web design, I can tell you that this isn’t as easy as it might sound!

This episode, Johnnycab, is the second of two parts about the Paradox of Automation; the first episode, Children of the Magenta was about automation in commercial airliners include auto-pilots and fly-by-wire systems. Johnnycab is about self-driving cars; it is named for a scene in the 1990 movie Total Recall. They talked with various folks who are trying to build cars that don’t need a human driver; Roman and the people they talked with believed that self-driving cars would eventually replace regular cars; while they did discuss the pros and cons, they all felt it was inevitable.

The show (and the folks who put it on) is pretty liberal so the model they assumed would prevail is that private car ownership would disappear in favour of a roaming fleet of self-driving cars. One would summon, Uber style, a car and one would show up, deliver you to your destination and go its merry way to the next customer; who owned those cars wasn’t discussed. One of the pros was that we could have denser city centers because we wouldn’t need parking lots for all those private cars. One of the cons was that “sprawl” might increase because people could just read or do work in a self-driving car so the longer commute from outside the city wouldn’t bother them.

Implicit in all of that is that dense urban areas are both good and where all the jobs are and less-dense or smaller towns were “sprawl” and bad. Well, then.

They did touch on the issue of liability; what happens if a self-driving car has an accident that a human might have prevented? They fell back on the stat that 30,000 people die per year in motor vehicle-related accidents now so losing a few here and there to self-driving cars would still be a net gain. I do wonder, though, how someone suing the crap out of Google, say, will impact their desire to continue making cars.

The podcast prides itself on finding good music to play, NPR-style, in the background while folks are talking. What struck me about this episode is that they didn’t use the obvious (and popular) song; I’ll bet it is because the song doesn’t agree with their conclusion.

Of course, I’m talking about the Rush song Red Barchetta from their album Moving Pictures.

“Fire up the willing engine, responding with a roar! Tires spitting gravel, I commit my weekly crime…”

Read the Car Lust Blog (which is where the image is from) for some history of the song.

I don’t think I want to give up the ability to drive myself and feel the wind in my hair and I hope others feel the same!