Density Is Destiny

DENSITY IS

DESTINY DESIGNS FOR SHARED EXPERIENCE IN THE COMING AGE OF AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES

ANDRÉ ORTA

Density is Destiny Designs for Shared Experience in the Coming Age of Autonomous Vehicles

AndrĂŠ Omar Orta MFA Products of Design School of Visual Arts

Density is Destiny: Designs for Shared Experience in the Coming Age of Autonomous Vehicles © 2019 André Omar Orta All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author.

Printed in New York, NY First Printing: 2019 School of Visual Arts MFA Products of Design 136 West 21st Street New York, NY 10011 To see more, visit: andreorta.com For inquiries, contact André at: thackerybrown@gmail.com First Edition

AndrĂŠ Omar Orta Author and Designer

Allan Chochinov Chair, MFA Products of Design

Andrew Schloss Thesis I Advisor

Jennifer Rittner Thesis II Advisor

Susan Matheson Editor

“When you stop doing things for fun, you might as well be dead.”

-Earnest Hemmingway

The Sunset Run

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Introduction

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Literature Review Subject Matter Experts

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Research

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History Technology/Innovation Culture Art/Aesthetics Design

27 29 34 42 43

Affinity Map

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Projects

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MobilityLab Insurii Porter

Press Release: Dream

Press Release: Nightmare

57 71 81 87 88 89 109 121 126 127

Conclusion

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Works Cited

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Acknowledgements

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About The Author

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Speculative Fiction: Dream

Speculative Fiction: Nightmare Newspaper: New Transit Times

Locale Huddle

Opposite: The VW ID Vizzion concept.

Sunset and La Brea, Los Angeles, CA

The Sunset Run

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t was an early Saturday morning and I was sound asleep when my dad shook me awake. It only happened once a year, so I knew what adventure awaited us. I pulled on some clothes and kissed my mom goodbye as my dad warmed up the car. When I hopped in, I could hear Sublime playing on the stereo and see the last bits of frost evaporate off the windshield and into the morning air.

in the High Desert of California to the heart of the city for the LA Auto Show.

I was 13, and that day we blasted out of our tumbleweed-littered hometown

The floor of the LA Convention Center was neutral ground for us. Back up in

On our way down the hill, as we desert people would say, he introduced me to music like The Smiths as I licked Hot Cheeto dust of my fingers. He let me sit up front, which he never did because the front seat was for adults only. But today was different. Today was special.

the desert we were entirely different people with entirely different lives. He grew up in a fractured immigrant family and had a rough childhood he never talked about, while I spent my time on a cul-de-sac with new toys, two parents, and an outdoor fridge full of otter pops.

golden age of the American muscle car. He told me stories about his 69’ Pontiac GTO and the red Fiat Spyder he took my mom on dates with. When I was in elementary school, he bought a vintage Toyota Land Cruiser and sometimes took me and my brother off-roading with our neighbors.

We lived in the same house and he made every effort to be a good dad, but he wasn’t around much. Sometimes he’d sleep at the dental lab he owned and I wouldn’t see him for days.

I missed him a lot when I was young, and resented him a lot when I was older. We were never alone together long enough for him to get to know me, and I could see it in his eyes. He loved the boy looking back at him, but he had no idea what made him tick.

After it broke down and he couldn’t find the right parts, he parked it in the corner of our garage where it soon became lost among a mound of yard equipment, boogie boards, and dust.

That was my first hideaway. Little by little, so no one would notice, I covered the windows with old shop towels and cleared out the cab. I hid magazines and blankets in the footwell and wiped down the seats so I could sit on them without getting my pajamas dirty.

I went there whenever I was angry, or hurt, or wanted somewhere to be at peace in the world. I still go there sometimes in my mind.

Except for cars.

Cars were the single domain where our passions converged, and the auto show was our hallowed ground. We collected car brochures like they were baseball cards and made it a point to sit in every new model we could. He took me through the Porsche room and told me about the founder, Ferdinand, and how his first cars were really just rebodied Volkswagens. I took particular pride in showing off my newfound knowledge of carbon fiber and dry-sump lubrication. It was as though we were speaking a language only car lovers could speak and I reveled in it.

We loved cars, but he loved them first. He was brought to the US as a child and came of age in the 60s–the

At the auto show, we saw a prototype for a new Land Cruiser and I secretly sized it up for hideout potential while my dad read about its engine setup.

When we had successfully weaved our way through all the crowds and taken every last brochure, it was time for us to leave. But we didn’t go home.

We headed West, down Sunset Boulevard on what my dad called The Sunset Run. It was our tradition–the grand finale. We cruised past Hollywood High School and In-N-Out, waited at lights next to Lamborghinis and vintage Corvettes, and blasted Sublime’s Greatest Hits.I wondered if I was in heaven,

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but then I saw an angel.

We’d pulled off the road to eye some cars in a small car dealer near The Chateau Marmont, but they were nothing compared to what pulled up behind us.

I heard it before I saw it. The sound of its V10 was unmistakable. My shoelaces rattled when its driver touched the throttle, and I knew it could only be one car: the Carrera GT. It was Porsche’s magnum opus and one of the fastest, rarest, most advanced automobiles ever built. Its chassis was made of the same aluminum as an airplane and had a transmission sourced from a race car. The brakes were made from a special carbon compound that made them an alien black, and the midmounded motor ran so hot that I could see the heat radiating from it in the LA sun.

My eyes, blinking in disbelief, gazed upon its carbon fiber bodywork. I looked over at my dad for confirmation I wasn’t hallucinating, and expected to find him looking down at the car as well. But he wasn’t. He was looking at me. It was as though the car had opened a window to my soul and he was peering in for the first time.

And at last, he saw me.

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The 2004 Porsche Carrera GT

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“The stuff that we do testifies to our values. It testifies to our preoccupations and the things that we care about.�

-Jonathan Ive, fmr. Chief Design Officer, Apple

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Introduction

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he ground is shifting. For the first time since the invention of the automobile in the Industrial Age, we are at the precipice of a new technological revolution.

As General Motors’ CEO Mary Barra affirms, there are 4 catalysts currently upending the automotive industry.

First, advancements in artificial intelligence are enabling the creation of fully autonomous vehicles. Second, increasing power density from batteries and more efficient electrical motors are giving rise to a generation of electric powertrains that will soon outperform the combustion engine. Third, the reinterpretation of transit as a service rather than a product is enabling new business models like ride sharing to gain traction.

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Finally, the onslaught of personal connectivity via cellular networks, handheld devices, and cloud-based computing is inspiring a new wave of connected vehicles and infrastructure.

These catalysts have already been set in motion. The future is happening underneath our feet, and the most excit-

ing time in history of the automobile is right now.

This seismic shift could not have come at a better time. The United States is speeding toward an urban transit crisis, and our cities will not be able to sustain their growth into the future without broad, bold, rapid change (Puentes). One of the major challenges currently faced by cities, and the focus of my thesis, is the problem of rider density. According to the US Department of Energy, vehicles on US roads carry an average of only 1.6 people at a time. This is a massive problem because: • Cars require vast amounts of raw material, space, energy, and time to produce, and most cars in the US go unused a staggering 95% of their lifetime. This is a huge waste of a very expensive resource (US Dept. of Energy). • Car-related infrastructure like parking, driveways, roads, and city highways take up valuable city real estate. If more people were to share cars and thereby

increase the rider density per car, we could move the same (or more) people while using fewer cars and taking up less space.

This could allow space that was once used for cars to be used for public housing, green space, bike lanes, or other sorely needed public infrastructure.

• Traffic is caused, among other things, when there are too many cars on the road at the same time. It is possible to decrease the number of cars on the road by increasing the number of people who ride together. On a system-wide level, riding together could reduce traffic for everyone.

Moreover, despite the practicality cars provide, they are actually terrible financial investments. With rare exception, all cars depreciate in value, losing an average of 52% of their value in thefirst

These statistics illustrate a very clear picture of the work to be done if the automobile is to become useful in the next century. First, we must use new technologies increase the utilization of the vehicles on the road. Next, we must offer new forms of utilization built around cost per mile traveled that negate the need of outright ownership.

Finally, we must build and incentivize human-centered ridesharing systems that privilege the experience of ridesharing, which in turn must reduce the need for an ever-increasing production of new vehicles that largely go unused.

Therefore, the question guiding my work, and the question that should be guiding the work of all automotive designers, is not: “How might I use AV and ridesharing tech to sell more cars?”, but rather: “How can autonomous technology and ridesharing reduce the need for cars in urban areas?”, and especially: “How do we

The future is happening underneath our feet, and the most exciting time in the history of the automobile is right now.

5 years of ownership (Blackley). These facts are especially painful given the fact that a car is often the most expensive thing an individual or family owns after their house, which unlike cars, tends to be an appreciating asset over a long enough period of time. This means that an expensive, depreciating asset is also taking up valuable real estate on personal property within what is often dense, valuable, urban real estate.

increase the utilization of cars and transit infrastructure while creating a better social experience for passengers?”

The world’s populations are increasing at an accelerating rate. They are also migrating to cities. If we want to sustain this growth over time as well as provide the transit infrastructure needed for productive city life, we must make better use of the resources we

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already have. This means using cars, roads, and highways more efficiently.

This means changing the way we think about car use, ownership, and personal space.

This means changing the way we think about car use, ownership, and personal space.

If humankind continues using resources the way we are now, we will not survive. Not only is our consumption of finite resources increasing, but the manner in which we are using them is contributing to global climate change.

Transit is one of the most pervasive areas of resource waste, but it is also one with the most potential to change.

When thinking about sustainability in the transportation sector, it’s crucial to think beyond simply using recyclable materials. We must increase our utilization of cars by putting more people inside them, creating a situation where fewer cars are used more often.

I believe that designing affirming, efficient shared experiences can improve rider density and therefore provide a better quality of life for city-dwelling passengers. Therefore, in order to create a more environmentally sustainable, socially equitable, financially profitable automotive future, I will explore the issues of rider density through a series of multidisciplinary design provocations.

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Photo by Ryan Searle

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Where it all begins. A 2019 Jaguar iPace “body in white”. Image via Jaguar.

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Literature Review

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y thesis process as a whole began, as every project should, with research. Before my first design sketch, I spent several months reading and annotating a vast array of books, essays, news articles, and films about the past, present, and future state of the automotive industry and urban living. Below is a sampling of my readings and annotations:

may struggle to grow in a healthy way if they’re overrun by cars. This author is an admitted cycling enthusiast, and while it might cause one to take his disdain for cars with a grain of salt, I think his perspective is especially important since all residents of cities should be listened to when designing for the urban environment–not just the people driving cars.

To Create a Truly Great City, We Have to Ban the Car

via CJ Pony Parts

By: Eben Weiss via Outside Magazine “Letting people in private vehicles run roughshod over the city causes crushing traffic jams, delays public transit, pollutes the air, creates noise, wastes public resources, and takes up an obscene amount of space in a city that doesn’t have enough of it. Oh, and there’s also all the people these automobiles kill.” -Weiss

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Weiss may have one of the more extreme arguments, but it makes sense given how cities in Europe sometimes privilege the pedestrian and how cities

Men vs. Women: The Gender Divide of Buying Cars

• 62% of all new cars sold in the US as of 2017 are sold to women • There are 1.4 million more women with driver’s licenses than men • 85% of car buying decisions are made by women There are massive discrepancies in how cars are marketed to women verses men. Unfortunately, the automotive space has long been a “by men, for men” space, but new framings around ownership, use cases, and the social

applications of cars has the potential to fracture this male-driven industry.

A Day In The Life of A Waymo Self-Driving Taxi By: Andrew Hawkins via The Verge “The company’s success hinges as much on advanced technology as it does on being able to provide clean cars and reliable service to a large pool of customers.” -Hawkins Fleet management and other servicerelated considerations will be a major source of investment in terms of brain power, capital, and time.

GM Gets Ready for A Post-Car Future By: Rick Tetzeli via Fortune “By 1930 the American horse popula-

tion had dropped to 19 million. And by 1960 the country had just 3 million horses. The horse had been fully displaced as the dominant mode of transportation.” -Tetzeli We are at the beginning of a new shift in the dominant mode of transit.

Just like combustion-powered cars replaced the horse and buggy as the dominant mode of transit, so will new electric, autonomous shared vehicles replace the outdated combustion car.

Why Carmaggedon Never Comes (Seattle Edition) By: Joe Cortright via City Observatory “Our mental model of traffic is just wrong…there’s a deep behavioral basis to travel. Human beings will shift their behavior in response to changing circumstances. If road capacity is imLeft: In 1910, a single car was in attendance at the NYC Easter Parade. Right: By 1913, cars had completely overtaken the horse and carriage, and only one buggy remained at the Easter Parade.

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Pre-production prototype Rivian RT1 electric truck

paired, many people can decide not to travel, change when they travel, change where they travel, or even change their mode of travel.

The fact that Carmageddon almost never comes is powerful evidence of induced demand: people travel on roadways because the capacity is available for their trips, when when the capacity goes away, so does much of the trip making.” -Cortright More roads are not the answer, but rather changing our behavior by instituting road diets and increasing shared services and other pedestrianfriendly solutions.

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Rivian’s Battery-Powered RT1 Pickup Goes 0-60 In 3 Seconds, Is Designed With Storage In Mind via Equipment World “I started Rivian to deliver products that the world didn’t already have…

Starting with a clean sheet, we have spent years developing the technology to deliver the ideal vehicle for active customers,” Scaringe says. “This means having great driving dynamics on any surface on- or off-road, providing cargo solutions to easily store any type of gear, whether it’s a surfboard or a fishing rod and, very importantly, being capable of driving long distances on a single charge,” he continued.”

-R.J. Scaringe

Electric platforms can, and will, compete in the exact same segments that traditional heavy, has-guzzling trucks and SUVs have totally dominated.

Uber and Lyft Have Been Catastrophic for Public Transit Ridership By: James Brasuell via Planetizen “When Uber and Lyft enter a city, the app-based taxis decrease rail ridership by 1.29 percent per year and decrease bus ridership by 1.7 percent,” -Schmitt Shared platforms cannibalize public transit’s rider base.

4 Trends That Will Shape The Future of Transportation By: Ruth Reader via Fast Company “There’s so much software that is now on the vehicle, and, in may cases, software is replacing mechanical systems,” “There’s going to be a point where we’re going to be upgrading and improving cars as opposed to fixing them.”

“We see four major areas that are transforming the way people move today, and one is propulsion. … The next is autonomous,…The next is connectivity, …. And then the last is sharing.”

-Mary Barra These 4 major catalysts are changing everything in the automotive landscape. These are the elements with which the future will be built.

The Road to Seamless Urban Mobility By: Eric Hannon, Stefan Knupfer, Sebastian Stern, and Jan Tijs Nijssenvia via McKinsey & Company “Seamless mobility could be cleaner, more convenient, and more efficient than the status quo, accommodating up to 30 percent more traffic while cutting travel time by 10 percent.” -Hannon, Knupfer, Stern, & Nijssenvia Increasing urbanization, coupled with the 4 big transit catalysts, will have

While shared mobility and autonomy might make travel easier, it will also increase demand for cars and make congestion worse, not better. more profound effects in dense cities than suburban or rural areas.

Every city has different needs an desires; there won’t be 1 “be all, end all” solution to transit.

While shared mobility and autonomy might make traveling easier, it will also increase demand for cars and make congestion worse, not better.

If sharing and seamless door-to-door mobility grows, people are likely to travel more.

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Automotive companies will need to move from a product-based revenue model to a service-based one & redefine their metrics for success importance: the health & quality of life of citizens, the economic output for cities, the equality & personal growth opportunities for citizens.

The Top 263 Companies Racing Toward Autonomous Cars By: Jack Stewart via Wired “The hotspot for research and investment in Silicon Valley right now is the future of transport.” -Stewart

Broker, Moses clearly meant buses to serve his “little Jones Beach” in the Rockaways… While oriented mainly toward motorists…it is simply not true that New Yorkers without cars were excluded.” -Campanella The infamous anecdote of Robert Moses’ minority-deterring, low-slung highway overpasses is not true. he was a profound racist, but the bridge heights were meant to exclude heavy trucks and busses that would deter from the escapist quality of driving a car upstate.

An Integrated Perspective On The Future of Mobility

By: Eric Hannon, Colin Auto manufacturers McKerracher, Itamar and technology comOrlandi, and Surya panies like Rivian and Ramkumar via McKinTesla are not the only sey & Company companies investing heavily in new automo“Technological innovative and wider transit tions in the form of technologies. A entirely electrification, connecnew industry is emergLidar is a laser-based radar autonomous tivity, and autonomy cars use to “see”. Photo via Velodyne. ing around new automotive are on the horizon. possibilities: radar/lidar Increasing urbanization and the growth systems, battery technology, machine of “megacities” with more than ten learning software, electric motor tech, million people provide the conditions shared services, and more. for change.” -Hannon, McKerracher,

How Low Did He Go? By: Thomas J. Campanella via CityLab “There is little question that (Robert) Moses held patently bigoted views. But to what extent were those prejudices embedded in his public works?”

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“…contrary to a claim in The Power

Orlandi, & Ramkumar Private technology companies and public policy needs to mature in tandem. If technology companies continue in their laissez-faire style of growth without the boundaries and assistance that government policy provides, they may simultaneously harm citizens and stunt their own growth.

Children who get driven everywhere can’t draw how the streets in their neighborhood are connected. Photo via Getty Images.

The emergence of electric powertrains and autonomous technology is no guarantee of reduced congestion, but in fact might lead to more. Greater rider density and better infrastructure utilization will decrease congestion.

Cars make less economic and systemic sense the denser a city becomes.

Seamless (autonomous, multi-modal) mobility won’t necessarily be a job killer: it will create a new service sector as it makes the old one obsolete.

Kids Who Get Driven Everywhere Don’t Know Where They’re Going By: Sarah Goodyear via CityLab “Children who were driven everywhere weren’t able to accurately draw how

the streets in their community connected.” -Goodyear Cars disconnect children (and perhaps adults as well) from their environments. I suspect that this phenomenon may also erode one’s sense of community and connection to their surroundings.

Tesla’s Former Chief Engineer Has a New Luxury Electric Car By: Derek Jenkins via Fortune It’s “no longer necessary to choose between classes,” says Jenkins. “We’re repackaging the car like never before.” -Jenkins Electric vehicles are now disrupting long-accepted automotive ideas like

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organizing and marketing cars by segment as well as in other areas like performance, capability, and features.

Tesla Roadster via Tesla Motors “The (Tesla Roadster will be the) quickest car in the world, with record-setting acceleration, range and performance.”

-Tesla Motors Electric, autonomous cars can be powerful, beautiful, agile, and reset what we think is possible in a consumer vehicle. These are the technologies that dare us to dream bigger, and reset what people believe is possible.

Model 3 Achieves the Lowest Probability of Injury of Any Vehicle Ever Tested by NHTSA via Tesla Motors “…not only has Model 3 achieved a perfect 5-star safety rating in every category and sub-category, but NHTSA’s tests also show that it has the lowest probability of injury of all cars the safety agency has ever tested.” -Tesla Jay Leno, who is actually a famous vintage car collector and historian when not performing as a comedian, once said that in order for a new technology to be adopted, it cannot simply equal the state of the art. It must be better.

Tesla’s Model III is better. Cars like Tesla’s show that features, performance The 2020 Tesla Roadster Prototype with a paragidm-shifting 0-60mph time of 1.9 seconds and a $200,000+ price tag to match. Photo via Tesla.

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numbers, layouts, and aesthetics can not only match that of traditional combustion-engined vehicles, but in some cases, completely rewrite what people think is possible with a car. It’s a vision of the future worth chasing, and one that has already encouraged the work I’m doing on this thesis.

We Need To Talk About the Far Out Future of Cities By: Gil Penalosa via CityLab “I think the most important mindset shift would be for leaders in cities to become like guardian angels of the gentle majority: the children, the older adults, the poor.” -Penalosa How will we design for the next 100 million Americans in the next 50 years?

The answer cannot be with “more”–it will have to be “less”, with “conserving”, with “sharing”, and with “alternatives”.

If we can create a create great systems for the “gentle majority” like children, older adults, and those living in poverty, we may be able to create something great for everybody, and those edge cases may even teach us how to serve the majority.

We Designed Canada’s Cities for Cars, Not People By: Jennifer Keesmaat via The Guardian “If someone wanders into traffic – a child, a senior citizen – they don’t ‘deserve’ to die.” -Keesmaat

The electric battery array underneath Tesla vehicles (affectionately known as “the skateboard”). Photo via Tesla.

In some ways, the 20th century promise of the car has let us down. But that’s okay. We know better now. The question now is: What are we going to do about it?

The Role of Human Emotions in the Future of Transport By: Ben Bland via Medium “The main players in the sector seem to share a common objective for growth. While each of them has its own proprietary name for it, the aim is the same: to move away from selling vehicles, to providing an end-to-end mobility service experience.” -Bland We both see eye to eye here. Transit is moving from a product-based revenue model to a service-based revenue model. If current automakers don’t shift their business models

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accordingly, they will become mere suppliers of vehicles while other companies reap the benefits of shared service systems.

and cheaper forms of transit, or transit will run the risk of becoming and even larger barrier to affordable living in big cities like New York.

MTA Could Face $42B in Outstanding Debt by 2022

How Cars Divide America By: Richard Florida via CityLab

By: Ameena Walker via Curbed “the MTA’s debt service is expected to reach $3.3 billion by 2022, which signifies an increase of 26 percent in four years. This debt service will consume nearly 19 percent of the agency’s total revenue and 36.5 percent of fare and toll revenue, and outstanding debt could reach a staggering $42 billion,” -Walker Mass transit, even with a huge amount of ridership like New York City’s, still isn’t economically viable without enormous government subsidies.

I wonder: will privatized mass transit generate revenue and be affordable even if it can achieve scale in dense metropolitan cities where there are several alternate forms of transit?

Also, to what extent will more costly privatized transit services like Uber or Lyft cannibalize ridership from cheaper alternatives like public busses and subways? The New York City MTA is already operating in the red. If ridership decreases, so does revenue. If prices are pushed up in response, it has the potential of straining the city’s most economically vulnerable citizens.

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The future must have some sort of compromise between more expensive

“America is an increasingly polarized and politically divided nation, and the car both reflects and reinforces those divisions.” -Florida Biking, walking, and using public transit correlate strongly with cities where people are more highly educated; the opposite is true in cities where people use cars more.

Cars seem to do little good for cities.

They’re a major cause of injury and death, they pollute heavily, they stunt the layout of cities and push out the pedestrian and alternative modes of transit, they take up massive amounts of space, and they allow for greater social class segregation be allowing for rich suburbs.

Cities should privilege people, not cars.

They should make use of their density and allow for all of the urban benefits of having a walkable landscape.

What if we started designing cities around people, and not cars? Photo by Josh Hild.

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Subject Matter Experts

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fter learning about the major history and getting current on the state of the automotive and transit industries, I turned my attention to finding and speaking with subject matter experts in the fields of automotive design, engineering, ride sharing, urban planning, urban transit, and automotive history.

These experts came from all corners of the automotive world. From traditional carmakers like Cadillac, Nissan, and Chrysler, to automotive tech companies like Zoox and Tesla, I managed to hear a wide range of passionate, specific, and often conflicting points of view.

The invaluable and candid insights these practitioners gave me form much of the context laid out in the following chapter, and additionally has supplied much of the inspiration for my thesis projects themselves.

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Surprisingly, I found that while many automotive experts were happy to speak with me, several were incredibly selective with the information they

gave, and few were even contractually forbidden with answering some questions entirely.

I commonly found that designers and engineers in the autonomous and ridesharing fields were extremely paranoid about being interviewed, and I feel this is indicative of the current hyper-competitive battle for automotive supremacy in the coming technological age.

Indeed, one anonymous designer at a major American automaker told me that her old-guard bosses routinely “drink their own Cool-Aid” and, “don’t realize theis asses are being kicked” by start-up companies in California and China.

Meeting and chatting with these experts was one of the funnest projects I got to do in the early part of my research. Their passion, curiosity, and sometimes anger was contagious, and as I quickly learned, nobody can get you fired up about the future like the people who are building it.

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Carl Benz in white with his family and his creations: a Benz Victoria and a Vis-Ă -Vis Benz Patent Motor Car. 1894.

Photo courtesy Daimler AG

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Early armored vehicle sketches by Leonardo Da Vinci. 1485

Research

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here is debate as to who designed the first “car� as we know it today, with designs for self-propelled wheeled machines dating back to Leonardo Da Vinci in the 15th century. But the automobile is largely a product of the Industrial Revolution that took place in Europe during the late 18th and 19th centuries. French inventor Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot developed the first self-propelled, steampowered wheeled vehicle in 1769 and Scotland’s Robert Anderson introduced

his electric carriage in 1832, but the beginning of the automotive age is generally thought to have begun in 1885, when Karl Friedrich Benz (later of Mercedes-Benz) built the first gasoline-powered Benz Patent Motorcar in Germany (Library of Congress).

History Simultaneously, economists and politicians began noticing the benefits of motorized travel, and began investing and advocating for paved road tech-

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nology and other state-sponsored automotive infrastructure. As early as the 18th century, the economic philosopher Adam Smith remarked in his famous work The Wealth of Nations that: “Good roads, canals, and navigable rivers, by diminishing the expense of carriage, put the remote parts of the country more nearly upon a level with those in the neighborhood of a town. They are upon that account the greatest of all improvements.” (Smith).

Within a single generation, the world would see the spark of automotive innovation fan itself into a flame.

Scores of new car companies all throughout Western Europe and the United States began opening their doors. Companies like Austin, Citroën, and Renault in Europe as well as Ford, Oldsmobile, and Cadillac in the US began mass producing cars for the general public, making the car one of the key innovations of the Industrial Age (Brittanica).

Perhaps the largest factor, however, in the adoption of the automobile into modern life in the US was the end of World War II. The production of war machines by US auto manufacturers at one point accounted for 1/5th of the entire nation’s war output. Consequently, nearly all domestic auto manufacturing during these years ceased, causing pent-up demand for new cars following the end of the war (Foner

& Garraty). Fueling a boom in auto manufacturing was the industry-wide retooling of war manufacturing back into consumer manufacturing and the newfound purchasing power of returning GIs and a burgeoning middle class.

These factors culminated in an explosion of new cars, infrastructure, and culture into the American identity in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s (Huddle).

Consequently, the car has steadily become an inextricable part of American capitalism and the mythology of the “American Dream.” In his book, Engines of Change, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Paul Ingrassia argues that: “Cars continue to provide unique personal freedom and mobility. They spawn powerful emotions, experiThe Benz Patent Motor Car. 1885. ences, memories, of family road trips, one’s first car, or one’s first sexual adventure…

The Beach Boys sang a song about a drag race called “Shut Down”, but nobody has yet recorded one called ‘Download’”(Ingrassia), underscoring the deep emotional and experiential connection cars provide that modern technology sometimes curtails.

These evolutions have allowed the automobile to shape and be shaped by the people and cities they serve.

They’ve literally driven us into the modern day, but the most exciting time in the history of cars is right now.

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Tech/Innovation In the same way that the Industrial Revolution revolutionized 19th and 20th century transit, so will the Digital Revolution upend 21st century transit.

Mary Barra, the CEO of General Motors, has said that at the center of this revolution sits 4 vectors of change that are poised to revolutionize culture, cars, and city life itself: propulsion, autonomous technology, ridesharing, and digital connectivity (Reader).

Propulsion Electric vehicles promise much more

used in a standard electric vehicle has come down from $1000 in 2010 to $130-200 in 2018 (Economist).

In the last 6 months, Volkswagen raced their prototype IDR electric race car up the famous Pikes Peak hill climb in Colorado and not only set a new record for electric cars, but shattered the all-time record by 16 seconds in a single attempt (Petrány).

Three of the most powerful road cars ever built by Ferrari, McLaren, and Porsche all feature hybrid-electric motors (Harris), and In late 2018, Tesla announced, and demonstrated, a fully-electric super sports car capable

At the center of this revolution sits 4 vectors of change that are poised to revolutionize culture, cars, and city life itself: propulsion, autonomous technology, ridesharing, and digital connectivity.

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than negating the need for fossil fuel.

A nation whose transit system is not reliant on oil and can produce energy domestically and renewably is no longer beholden to foreign bodies like OPEC, who can artificially manipulate the price of oil and wield economic influence over American economic output (Faucon & Puko). Electric vehicles, while constrained by the weight and power density limitations of current lithium battery technology, are evolving far quicker than current petrol-based engines (Economist).

of going 0-60mph in a game-changing 1.9 seconds. This car also has enough cargo room for a set of luggage, 4 seats, and can travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco on less than a single charge (Tesla).

For example, in just the last decade, the cost per kilowatt-hour for a battery

Finally, electrification promises poten-

In addition to range, performance, and emissions, electric powertrains also allow new vehicle configurations with the capability of flat battery layouts, negating the need for the common central “hump” in a car’s interior where the driveshaft goes.

The sky is the limit. VW IDR at Pike’s Peak. Photo via VW Motorsport.

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tial cost savings down the line with flexible, modular platforms, improving economies of scale, and cheaper cost per mile in comparison to combustionpowered engines (Susser).

Autonomous Technology Autonomous technology has been described by Apple CEO Tim Cook as “the mother of all AI projects”, and that in 2019 Apple and has perhaps the single greatest ability to change not only the car, but the culture it carries within it (Webb & Chang). Autonomous cars use a series of radar, lidar (a laserbased 3D-mapping technology), and visible light cameras along with complex learning algorithms to navigate through space. While still in development, there are currently over 20 autonomous pilots in the United States and another 50 throughout the world (Aspen Institute), with Tesla’s full range of vehicles having the capability to navigate freeway traffic, change lanes, and park without driver input (Metz).

In the near future, the technology community hopes that autonomous

Autonomous technology has been described by Apple CEO Tim Cook as “the mother of all AI projects”.

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vehicles will be able to move people more safely and more efficiently than

Once used to image ocean topography, lidar systems are now being developed to allow autonomous vehicles to “see” their environment. Photo via Digital Trends

human-driven cars do today. However, I am skeptical of all three of these factors. The major players in the autonomous car space, companies like Waymo, Tesla, Uber, and Rivian overwhelmingly employ mechanical engineers and software developers, not city planners, policy experts, or minority rights advocates. I feel that the future as it pertains to autonomous vehicles is undefined, and therefore at risk of creating more problems than it solves.

This concern is historically founded.

For all the economic benefits gained by the proliferation of cars and the creation of the interstate highway system in the 1950s, both had a detrimental effect on many other social and environmental systems. Roads and highways carved up cities, blocking off citizens from natural resources, causing a “white flight” to newly-invented suburbs that exacerbated socioeconomic division, and prohibiting walkability, damaging local businesses and endangering pedestrians (Downes). For all the dreams that cars gave us, they created just as many nightmares.

While safety is a key promise for au-

tonomous vehicles (AVs), user testing by companies like Uber, Waymo, and Tesla have already revealed unforeseen dangers with AVs. Transportation journalist at Wired magazine Jack Stewart frames the problem of human and artificially-intelligent cars as one where the outcomes are unknown, and the public is being asked to participate anyway, asking: “What’s the best way to handle what could become a nationwide experiment in robotics and AI, where the public participants haven’t willingly signed on and the worst-case scenario is death?” (Stewart). The change in human behavior in and around AVs is still unknown, and therefore still ripe for both life-saving and life-ending outcomes.

shipping consumer goods, reduce the need for extra lanes on highways, and reduce the need for speed limits.

Connectivity In the near future, connectivity in the automotive space will mean much more than Bluetooth for your mobile device or an integrated garage door opener. Organizations like Switzerland’s Federal Institute of Technology and the University of Michigan are prototyping advanced vehicleto-vehicle communication systems that wirelessly connect navigation systems of two or more cars in a network, giving them a far more extensive, and theoretically safer, view of the world around them.

Another major As Engadget writer promise of auWhat if cars were aware of one another in space? Photo via NVIDIA Daniel Cooper tonomous vehicle technology is explains: “If two autonomous vehicles efficiency of movement. Companies are driving down a road, then all they like Volvo are prototyping driverless can ‘see’ is the data from their own vehicles that drive in a convoy, where systems. But if you can connect your a long train of vehicles can drive at a car, say, to the one immediately behind high rate of speed mere inches away you, then both systems get a wider from one another, reducing the amount field of view and better situational of road space taken up while reducawareness. ing drag and subsequently, fuel costs (Volvo). On a systems-wide scale, this In an overtaking situation, the car becould potentially reduce the price of

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hind can use its counterparts systems to scan for hazards out in front, including cars in the opposite lane.” (Cooper). In addition to vehicle-to-vehicle connectivity, vehicle-to-infrastructure connectivity innovations are poised to shape the experience of riding in a car. One such example are “smart” traffic lights that use traffic sensors and machine-learning algorithms to dynamically optimize traffic patterns (Austin).

Finally, fringe technologies like Nissan’s brain-to-vehicle technology that interprets brain signals in order to “make the drive even more exciting” (Nissan) or the inclusion of cloudbased internet of things devices hint at a still hazy future where the car Reunault’s EZ-GO autonomous rideshare vehicle prototype.

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becomes fully integrated with one’s digitally-connected life (Ford).

Ridesharing Ridesharing is not a new idea, but it is being imagined in new ways. Traditionally, ridesharing came in the forms of things like public busses, carpooling, and car rental services. Today, though, ridesharing is being coupled with autonomous technology in dense urban contexts, creating new possibilities for shared transit and even reframing the idea of car ownership itself.

Furthermore, the paradigms by which automakers & transit companies measure themselves are destined to change. The sale and servicing

of ridesharing fleets will render the traditional “cars sold” metric unhelpful.

In the future, transit will no longer be a product-based revenue model, but rather a service-based one. Riders will subscribe to their transit just like they do content streaming services, wireless providers, and their local gym. In this way, automotive companies will use new metrics like cost per mile and rides sold to measure their new subscription-based revenue models.

Companies worth their salt will no longer be beholden to the Industrial Age notion of a car being a one size fits all solution to transit. In the near future, transportation services will adapt to the needs of the trip, with automotive and tech companies alike evolving into transit companies offering a suite of bike, scooter, car, and other servicebased offerings designed to suit trips long and short, heavy and light, and everything in between (Sisson).

Cars will increasingly exist within an interdependent ecosystem of personal transit, and will be called upon only when they are the ideal solution for a particular need (Christensen and Shaheen). Indeed, Alan Mulally, CEO of Ford, says that questions of “personal mobility” and “quality of life” were some of the “most important and exciting developments” around the world and that simply providing more and more cars was “not going to work” (Wright).

Culture The cataclysmic changes brewing in

the automotive world given the advent of electrification, autonomy, connectivity, and ridesharing are destined

As vehicles increasingly become shared and autonomous rather than owned and piloted, they will evolve into social spaces akin to coffee shops and living rooms rather than merely vehicles. to collide with a multitude of social, political, and cultural factors, necessitating the need to consider not only what technology gets built, but how that tech will affect increasingly dense geographic and social environments.

In order to build a thesis that imagines these outcomes, one must first understand 3 core ideas about the sociocultural factors shaping the future: First, social structures have and continue to evolve in large part due to the influence of automotive technology on city and suburban living.

Second, technology and policy are not maturing at the same rate, causing a number of growing pains that must be addressed.

Third, as vehicles increasingly become

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Suburbs: a white middle class fantasy.

Los Angeles, CA. Photo via LIFE Magazine.

shared and autonomous rather than owned and piloted, they will evolve into social spaces akin to coffee shops and living rooms rather than merely vehicles to transport people from A to B.

Class, Cars, and Cities

also the death of the American “main street”, the local town center where small business thrived and communities gathered.

Additionally, suburbs are argued to be far less efficient to move within, with things like schools, shops, and homes spread far outside walking distance and often accessible only by a car (Jacobs).

Following a middle-class (and largely white) diaspora into the newly-created suburbs of the late 1940s and 50s, cities saw a rapid and sudden decline in population The beginning of and investment the 21st, century, (Mohdin). This however, has seen phenomenon was a resurgence in the propelled by the interest in cities, wide adoption of with populations automobiles into once again condaily life, and the centrating in cities transition from and the majority of dense, urban livthe world’s popuing, to spread out, lation now living suburban living as in dense urban the American culareas. tural ideal. In this midcentury AmeriIt’s important to Suburban life was largely made possible by cars, which also can dream, one note that subursignified one’s status as a member of the new middle class. aspired to own ban life itself was Rancho Palos Verdes, CA. 1956. Photo via Shorpy their own home on largely a way for their own land, make an income large wealthy white families to extricate enough to support a nuclear family, themselves from the lower-income and move throughout a neighborhood people of color who lived in dense, via one’s own personal car. urban cities. This phenomenan is referred to by historians as “white flight”, In many respects, this American dream and is indicative of how transportation bought wholesale by the American and city planning can easily be weappublic was already beginning to rot. onized to As urban planners like Jane Jacobs divide and subjugate people– discovered by the late 60s and early especially the underprivileged.

70s, roads divide neighborhoods and prevent human-scale interactions from The suburbs, and later gated commuoccurring. The adoption of the car was nities, presented an economic barrier

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to entry that fewer people of color could manage in the early part of the 20th century. As a result, the suburban “Amerian Dream” was largely a white middle class fantasy that was fueled by the automobile. (Badger et al.) According to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 68% of the world’s human population is projected to live in dense metropolitan areas by 2050 (UN). This mass migration into cities, coupled with the 2.2 billion-person population increase expected by the same year, is setting the stage for massive new challenges for mass urban transit (UN).

These challenges will be centered around how cities make use of new and existing infrastructure and vehicle solutions to deliver quicker, cheaper, more enjoyable transit experiences to a rapidly growing city population. The autonomous, electric, shared cars of the future cannot exist in the current

Much like the adolescent body, parts of the maturing transportation industry are growing faster than others, causing painful growing pains along the way.

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business models of today if they are going to address the needs of future customers.

Alan Mulally of Ford explains that even for traditional car companies, it’s important to understand the current social context and begin to plan for it, stating: “I think the most important thing is to look at the way the world is and where the world is going and to develop a plan…We’re going to see more and more larger cities. Personal mobility is going to be of really ever-increasing importance to livable lifestyles in big cities.” (Wright).

In addition, the automobile industry must react to a growing awareness of global climate change and how it contributes to resource management and greenhouse gas emissions. It is not enough to produce zero-emissions vehicles. For cars to truly have a net zero effect on the environment, automakers will need to provide sustainably-sourced electricity in a readily-accessible charging network (Long). They will also need to consider the amount of resources taken up producing and selling new cars every year, and possibly consider new business models centered around services via a product and not merely the product unto itself.

Public Policies and Regulations Other factors to address regarding new automotive technology and the evolving transportation industry are policies and regulations. Much like the adolescent body, parts of the maturing transportation industry are growing faster than others, causing painful growing pains along the way. Local, state, and federal regulations have struggled to keep pace with the rate of innovation

Multi-modal transit options like scooter shares are a promising, albeit poorly regulated, new technology. Photo via Fortune.

from private enterprise, causing lapses in public trust, support, and in some cases, safety.

Last-mile transit companies like Bird (an electric scooter share service) have launched services in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles with little to no oversight or approval, causing both excitement and controversy (Newberry). Driverless technology teams at Tesla and Uber have on several occasions made headlines when their autonomous prototypes were involved in collisions that resulted in fatalities, raising well-founded questions about the rules and ethics around testing unproven technology on public roads (Higgins, Spector, and Colias).

Ridesharing companies like Uber and Lyft are, by their very nature, challenging the business model and often livelihoods of taxi drivers, who have responded with mass boycotts, protests, and appeals to politicians (Wodinsky).

Finally, car subscription service pilots such as Care by Volvo, where a monthly payment covers insurance, maintenance, and the use of a vehicle without legally owning it (Volvo), are being met with swift and confrontational protest from their respective dealership networks, who argue that these new offerings threaten their business models by directly competing with traditional forms of car ownership (Burden).

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Today, many (though not all) transitfocused tech companies adhere to the tech-bro platitude of “move fast and break things” (Taneja). Given the previously mentioned realities of laissezfaire policies, many would advocate for new, strict laws around the creation and implementation of new transit technologies. These concerns are warranted, with Uber often playing fast and loose with their definitions of “employee” and “taxi service” to get around employee protection and permit laws (Henley).

However, many counter by arguing that technology needs freedom to innovate, and that too much regulation too early

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on in the new era of transit will stunt the growth of this adolescent industry.

In agreement, transportation journal-

Speedy, reliable, affordable transit is often the means by which citizens maintain a healthy standard of living. ist at Wired magazine Marc Scribner argues that “Self-driving cars should be welcomed for their substantial safety Lyft, while creating a stream of income for drivers, has displaced much of the taxi industry. Photo via Wired.

and mobility gains for the traveling public…but the federal government’s failure to modernize auto regulations is already denying consumers safer and superior products, and this problem will only grow larger as automated driving systems near the deployment stage.” (Scribner).

difficult or even restrict their ability to maintain employment.

The time spent in transit can also

The solutions, then, will need to both protect the rights and safety of citizens while providing ample freedom and support for innovation.

Also needed are policies to address the current inequities in public transportation. Among the myriad challenges in the world of cars that lie ahead, one of the most interesting that is the phenomenon known as transit captivity.

Transit captivity is a state in which an individual is restricted to a particular mode of transit because of economic or class reasons (Higashide & Accuardi). In many cases, this happens when those in poverty of financial difficulty are restricted to using public transit in an area where public transit is limited and slow.

How might our relationship to cars change when they’re no longer owned nor driven?

become burdensome when the time spent in a slow-moving bus must be subtracted from the time one spends at work or with family. Transit captivity, therefore, is a very real problem faced every day by those less fortunate, and it is a problem that may be mitigated as new possibilities in the world of cars emerge.

Vehicles as Social Spaces While this may sound like a mere inconvenience, it exemplifies the fact that speedy, reliable, affordable transit is often the means by which citizens maintain a healthy standard of living.

For example, if one is restricted to the bus in a spread out, car-dominated city, it will be more difficult and take more time to do otherwise simple tasks like get to work, collect one’s children from school, or bring home groceries. If one doesn’t live or work near a subway station or bus stop, it may become more

Ever since cars became entrenched with the American Dream, we have projected immense social and cultural value on them and on our relationship with them. Cars, according to ad agencies in the 1950s and 60s, were symbols of: freedom, power, individuality, manifest destiny, success, and whatever else could loosely be defined as “American” (Heimann and Heller).

These symbols have long inspired and at times disappointed those who hope

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for a better life. Some of the major unanswered questions in the future, though, are: • How will the automobile as a symbol evolve given the United States’ rapidly changing social & technological landscape?

• Will the automobile still be a status symbol when it’s no longer owned?

• Will the automobile still stand for freedom when we submit to being driven by a computer?

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• Will the automobile remain emblematic of “Americana” if

the teams designing them are increasingly multicultural and the factories assembling them are increasingly foreign?

Finally, the car’s role as a social component in people’s lives is going to change, and in turn, so too will the social institutions built around it.

Increasingly, driverless cars are being thought of as more than mere vehicles to go from A to B. They are thought of as social spaces in their own right.

Kota Kobayashi, Head of Automotive Digital Products at London-based design firm UsTwo, explains that: “Inside a car is a quite private, intimate space…

I think people may start to consider these in-car spaces as an extension

The stuff that dreams are made of. The McLaren P1 GTR. Photo via McLaren.

of their home or office.” (Sabin). In these ways, AVs will be destinations unto themselves, “third spaces” where people live, work, and play outside the context of their home or office. One of the largest unknown domains is what might happen in these new spaces. If anything will be possible inside a car of the future, what might people do? How might the new social space inside an AV create new opportunities of interactions and experiences?

Automotive manufacturers like Toyota, General Motors, and Ford along with tech and design companies like Waymo (an autonomous technology company under the Alphabet corporation), MUJI (a Japanese home goods

company), and IDEO (a design consulting firm) have already begun imagining what people might do in cars. In contrast, I’m wondering what these new cars will do to us. The last time our culture saw a major automotive social revolution, it helped fuel the creation of an entirely new stage in life: the teenager (Imam). Given the new conditions around shared, autonomous, connected, electric transit, I wonder: how might cars change social systems in the future?

Art/Aesthetics Cars are magical. There is a mysterious yet visceral experience when seeing or riding in an especially distinc-

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tive car that transcends race, class, language, and times. Upon seeing a car as beautiful as a 1920s Duesenberg or as powerful as a Formula 1 car or as striking as a Lamborghini, the reactions are felt not in the mind, but in the heart. Cars are a convergence of history, technology, performance, aesthetics, community, and soul. They can trigger a sense of wonder with merely a glimpse or a hard rev. Cars are about experiencing something wonderful as much as, if not more than, moving from A to B. There is a rich tradition of automotive design that has morphed and evolved throughout the car’s existence. One one end of the spectrum, early cars from companies like Ford, Volkswagen, and Toyota championed ubiquitous, useful design that exalted and empowered the everyday person. On the other end, companies like Bugatti and the Italian design house Pininfarina explored car as sculpture, sometimes divorced from reality, but always in pursuit of wonder.

Dreams have long been manifested through cars in films like Rebel Without A Cause, The Italian Job, Le Mans, and my favorite, Gone In 60 Seconds.

These films put cars center stage in fantastical dramas about adventure and friendship and struggle. Indeed, anything worth pursuing can be pursued with the help of a car.

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The style, passion, glamour, and joy that cars have brought the public for over a century ought to be remembered as we forge ahead into the new

era of automotive transportation. In my thesis, I plan on taking those dreams along for the ride.

Design To the lay citizen, the thought of driverless, pod-like cars in shared subscription services powered by fully electric powertrains connected seamlessly to their digital lives may sound futuristic and fantastical. It is. But it’s also a lot closer to reality than the car sales lots of today might suggest.

There is an entire ecosystem of new and existing companies invested in designing, engineering, and manufacturing the next generation of automobile.

At the moment, it is difficult to categorize the myriad players in the space since the rate of acquisition, partnership, creation, and insolvency is frantic.

However, if one theoretically wants to bring some form of electric/autonomous/shared car to market, there are several skillsets one will have to have in their arsenal:

Technology While the first cars were invented in an industrial revolution, the next cars will be invented in a digital revolution. Cars of the near future will include hyper complex machine learning systems aided by sensors like radar, lidar, cameras, accelerometers, and GPS (global positioning system). They will be connected to digital devices and must be reliable enough to work all

The Bugatti Chiron. Photo via Bugatti.

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Opposite: More than a glitzy prototype, a robust manufacturing capability indicates a start-up’s ability to bring a new car to market. Photo via Business Insider.

the time, everywhere.

Engineering While electric cars and petrol-powered cars were invented at nearly the same time in the late 19th century, petrolpowered vehicles were more powerful and had a more accessible energy source. Not until electric battery technology began to catch up in the late 90s did electric cars once again become a viable alternative. Toyota had early success in gasoline-electric hybrid cars like the Prius, but it wasn’t until Tesla that electric vehicles became the clear path into the future.

Electric cars carry a massively different set of engineering challenges than traditional petrol-powered cars: they use no oil, have no transmissions, emit no by-products, have few moving parts, and behave much differently when driven.

Production As automotive upstarts like Tesla have learned the hard way, designing a vehicle and manufacturing a vehicle are two very different skillsets. In order to bring a car to market, an automaker must have the factory space, tooling, trained workforce, production methods, and supplier network in place to produce cars rapidly and at scale.

Investors often point to manufacturing capability as the most defining characteristic of a sound automotive futures investment.

Indeed, as automotive incumbents like

Ford, Toyota, and Volkswagen compete with automotive tech start-ups, one of their primary advantages will be these robust manufacturing capabilities and supplier networks.

Conclusion Surrounding these categories are several unanswered questions in the realm of automotive design (both product design and systems design as it relates to cars): • How will ridesharing in cities create revenue and what might incentivize automakers to transition to an entirely service-based revenue model rather than making money by selling vehicles?

• What will the relationship between public and private transit look like in cities of the future?

• What sort of legislation, if any, will need to be passed in order to both encourage investment and growth in new technologies while maintaining the safety of pedestrians and the privacy of users?

• To what degree will users need to sacrifice their personal data in order to use autonomous ridesharing services of the future, and how might users be empowered to leverage the value of their own transit data?

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A luxurious past: the magnesium-bodied Bugatti Type 57 Atlantique. Photo via AutoWP. 48

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A luxurious future: the Mercedes F 015 driverless prototype. Photo via Mercedes.

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Affinity Map

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aving spent the summer getting current on the state of the automotive technology space, and spending the early part of the fall having conversations with myriad designers, city planners, engineers, and historians, I wanted to lay out all the different factors shaping the industry and begin to find a framework which would help me understand better how each idea related to one another. I began by writing down all of the different factors I could think of.

Every independent contributing technology, key player, policy, organization, social movement, and technological challenge I jotted onto sticky notes.

tive space. While this was useful as a shorthand of the industry, its real value was in helping me to discover connections where I didn’t see them before, and in showing me that that this landscape is wildly complex and interrelated–such that one could draw a line between any two factors on the map and find a meaningful relationship.

I set to work grouping these different factors according to the patterns I saw between them. Quickly, seven core groups emerged: ridesharing, powertrains, connectivity, autonomous technology, infrastructure, social systems, and stakeholders.

Therefore, the two key areas I chose to focus on for my thesis are: passenger density and user experience in shared autonomous vehicles.

I then spent some time organizing these groupings into an affinity map that visualized the relational hierarchy of the major themes in the automo-

The map, in addition to overwhelming me, show me that the mobility space is much too large, detailed, and interrelated to possibly attempt to “solve” the future of transit. In order to make any meaningful contribution to this space, I would have to drill down on a few key areas and solve for them.

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Projects

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obility Lab is a cocreation workshop designed to explore how passengers might reconfigure shared autonomous vehicles to suit specific situation and user combinations.

This workshop is meant to explore how users of the future might regain a sense of agency and connection to vehicles they no longer own nor drive.

Additionally, it is meant to provide clues as to the current wants and needs of future automotive products and services.

Context In the near future, electric vehicle layouts will allow car interiors to have flat-floored cabins (O’Dell), and driverless capability will negate the need for steering wheels, center consoles, and traditional seating layouts (Edwards).

Additionally, the increased popularity of ridesharing will mean that passengers will no longer own the vehicles they travel in, but rather subscribe to them like they might a music streaming service (Singh).

Passengers of tomorrow will neither own nor drive the cars they use to get around. They will, however, have a newfound sense of flexibility to reimagine how the vehicle as a platform might meet their needs.

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To this end, there is a tremendous opportunity (and a tremendous need) to prototype new vehicle layouts and gather data around what might be pos-

sible when the automobile becomes as infinitely reconfigurable as one’s smartphone. For example: if a group of four friends were to take an autonomous vehicle out for a night on the town, how might the interior seating layout, lighting, and infotainment differ than if a family of four were using the same vehicle to go on vacation?

Function For Mobility Lab, I created a set of scenarios that might involve the use of a vehicle. After the group selected a scenario, they drew features onto a laser-etched whiteboard mock-up of a shared autonomous car.

Occasionally, the moderator would introduce “added factors” that we then had to take under our design considerations. These factors included things like our occupants being blind, using a wheelchair, or having young children.

Once the vehicles were sketched out, we stood back and ranked the top values that influenced the designs in the first place. These commonly included values like: safety, comfort, connection, and utility.

However, we were surprised to learn that despite the added convenience and proposed safety of a driverlesscapable car, in high-stress situations, participants routinely wanted the ability to regain manual control over the vehicle, signaling a user behavior trait inconsistent with many propsed level 5, steering wheel-absent vehicles.

The Mercedes F 015 autonomous prototype, indicating the future layouts of AVs.

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Key Learnings & Reflections When reviewing the designs afterward, we noticed several common themes independent of scenario or designer.

These themes included: • communal interior layouts • prioritizing convenience • a desire for control in highstress scenarios • the idea of the vehicle as a safe place • machine guns (For reasons still unclear, most participants at one point or another found it useful that their imaginary vehicle would feature roof-mounted, gatlingstyle machine guns.

For fun, one particular scenario asked participants to build their ideal getaway car for executing the perfect bank robbery. It seems that several participants may have taken liberal inspiration from the infamous bank robber, John Dillinger.)

In addition to these common themes, we found 3 core realizations about the future we were designing:

1: When you liberate people from needing to drive, the trip can become an event unto itself.

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Removing the element of driving while

in a car seems to have a much deeper social effect than simply not concentrating on the road. When a passenger is no longer driving, they no longer play the role of “pilot”. They instead become “occupant”, removing the subtle hierarchy of driver as “captain” of the domain.

When one adds several occupants to the mix, one begins to see the emergence of a third space. If one is able to change the layout to encourage community, like adding a table or having seats face each other, they become able to create the setting for any number of non-transport related events to happen. A question that arises then, is: under what conditions would occupants want to be in community with others during a shared AV ride?

When cars cease to be merely transit devices and start to become social spaces, one has the opportunity to make the time spent inside a vehicle an event unto itself.

2: Self-driving cars make people feel less in control The loss of control was one of the most unexpected results of a shared, autonomous future. Participants noted an uneasiness to the thought of a car driving itself, and in many cases still included steering wheels in their designs.

I wonder to what degree AV skepticism is due to unproven technology, and to what degree it is due to an inherent human desire for control.

3: The inside of a car is often treated as a personal space Another quality I had overlooked in the present world of privately-owned cars is how the inside of a vehicle is often an extension of one’s personal space.

Participants often thought of the inside of a vehicle as if it were their house, a quality that owning a car no doubt provides.

This makes me wonder what the consequences of no ownership might be. Will ridesharing vehicles face the tragedy of the common in the future, succumbing to all types of abuse and neglect because nobody using it has any personal stake in it? Additionally, I wonder what might happen to the sense of intimacy and familiarity

of getting into one’s car. We noticed during our sketching process that car often acted as a cocoon of sorts, a walled-off area of safety in an unfamiliar world. Will shared transit lose this quality, and can it be replaced by something else?

Significance Throughout automotive history, the experience of owning and interacting with a car has been a deeply personal, often joyful, intensely memorable experience for individuals and communities. Cars are also at the precipice of a cataclysmic reinvention. Mobility Lab seeks to understand how the meaning and passion and joy of cars might be reimagined in the coming era.

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nsurii is a multi-sensor device that dynamically adjusts one’s insurance rates according to their mode of transit. It works by magnetically docking onto any “vehicle� one might encounter in a multi-modal journey and using real-time GPS, accelerometers, and a 360-degree camera to gather situational data. The device then feeds this data into a cloud-based machine-learning algorithm that sets rates according to situational factors like mode of transit, location, and the individual themself.

Context In the near future, driverless ridesharing and the proliferation of microThe growing populatrity of micro-mobility solutions like bike and scooter shares is likely to add to the record number of pedestrian deaths by car each year. Photo via Snapwire.

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mobility options like bike shares and dockless scooters will revolutionize the way people move through cities These changes will alter user behaviors and increase the already escalating problem of pedestrian fatalities. In response, I set out to design a product that would incentivize safe pedestrian behavior while providing insurance to satisfy future multi-modal behaviors of riders.

Three major factors influence Insurii: the increasing rate of pedestrian fatalities by car in the US, new opportunities in multi-modal transit, and the creation of the insurance tools like dynamic pricing and telematics.

Increasing Pedestrian Deaths A study by the Governors Highway Safety Association found that 6,227 pedestrians were killed in traffic in the United States in 2018–the highest rate in almost 30 years. This trend is largely thought to be due to alcohol use, speeding, unsafe infrastructure and the prevalence of SUVs (Caron & Chokshi).

While driverless vehicles may reduce these numbers in the distant future, micro-mobility solutions like bike and scooter shares are adding to the number of vulnerable pedestrians on city streets (Becker).

New Opportunities In MultiModal Transit In the midst of the current explosion of ride share, AV, and micro-mobility offerings, one often overlooked subfield is safety. Ori Blumenthal, CTO of the Israel-based startup RideWatch, argues that: “This whole industry will rise and fall with the basic infrastructure of safety”, adding: “I think insurance is another part of that. Otherwise cities won’t allow it.” (Bliss).

In this near future where one might use several different kinds of transit (both driven and autonomous) in a single journey, I wanted to understand how new, multi-modal transit behaviors might affect insurance.

In particular, I wanted to imagine how personal health insurance and car insurance might be reimagined in a multi-modal transit future. For ex-

ample: Might one have some sort of personal insurance in lieu of car insurance? Should one have a broad form of transit insurance?

Dynamic Pricing & Telematics Traditionally, actuaries calculated insurance premiums based on historical data and commercial models that did not take into account actual customer behavior. However, a new technology called dynamic pricing allows insurers to measure the true individual risk of their customers more accurately and predict their behavior after they receive a particular policy offer (de Koo). In a study published by Deloitte, researcher Daniel de Koo remarked that: “Dynamic pricing allows insurers to adjust individual pricing swiftly, in line with changing customer behaviour or market circumstances.” (de Koo).

As explained by Insure the Box, a UKbased car insurance agency, “Black box insurance (also called telematics) is car insurance where a small box is fitted to your car. The black box measures various aspects of how, when and where you drive. This data can be used to calculate a personalised renewal quote, or in services like the Accident Alert and Theft Recovery.”, or essentially, a device that facilitates situational-based insurance rates (Insure the Box).

Function The Insurii device is a small yet highlyvisible puck-like object that users must manually click into a vehicle-based mount whenever they switch modes of

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transit. This is an intentional behaviornudging design choice, where the ritual of docking Insurii signals to the user that the device is switched on and “aware” of their actions. Since Insurii factors driving habits into its rate algorithm, users will be incentivized to pilot their vehicles in the safest manner possible.

Key Features

(It should be noted that although the job of this device could easily be done with a smartphone, doing so would negate the ritual of mounting the brightlycolored device in a highly-visible place, which reminds users to drive carefully.)

Challenges

The device itself features sensors like a 360-degree camera, GPS, and an accelerometer. The data from these tools, along with information about the user, is then sent to a cloud-based dynamic pricing model, which in turn readjusts insurance once every minute.

Finally, a wrap-around magnetic docking bezel allows for easy mounting, charging, and vehicle type data.

• 360-degree camera, GPS, accelerometer • dynamic pricing • magnetic docking bezel

Surveillance & Privacy With a device like Insurii, third-parties like insurance companies would be privy to the location, transit mode, and personal habits of every individual using the product. They could then easily track the movement of mass populations and sell that data to advertisers or worse.

Most distressingly, they could invent new loansharking tactics like charging higher insurance rates for people who travel less often, charge higher rates for those who travel in historically more dangerous (and likewise

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often poorer, ethnic-minority) cities, or charge higher rates for those who go too long between traveling. These potential futures indicate a reality that is present across the entire new mobility landscape: technology is morally agnostic, and it will ultimately be up to those implementing it to decide how it will be used, who it will be used for (or on), and to what end.

Individual vs. Fleet Pricing After completing my initial idea sketch for Insurii, I contacted an insurance underwriter to work out the feasibility of my idea. This is the point where it all crumbled to pieces.

First of all, I did not understand the core tenant of insurance: that an insurance policy is a calculation of risk that you will not be in an accident.

Insurance companies try to maintain a healthy ratio of low risk individual to high-risk individuals so that claims made by people in accidents can be funded by the premiums paid by those not in accidents while still hopefully making enough of a margin to be profitable. It is unclear how dynamic insurance pricing might affect this business model.

Next, insurance differs between single vehicles and fleets. When speaking to the underwriter, I asked him what might happen if a pedestrian was in an accident where the vehicle involved was part of an autonomous fleet belonging to a ride sharing service.

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He drew a comparison from maritime insurance, in which he is an expert: he

explained that for companies operating a fleet of vehicles, insurance, and therefore risk, is built into the cost of the service.

An insurer will calculate a rate to insure the entire fleet depending on risk factors and type of coverage, and the company will pay a particular fleet rate. This rate can be thought of as an operating cost, which a company will then factor into the price of the service they provide. In this way, if an accident occurs with a vehicle (autonomous or otherwise) that the passenger does not own, then the insurance paid out in a claim will be from a plan paid for by the transit service itself.

This means that in a future reality where transit is a service provided by a company like Uber, travelers will not need their own “transit insurance”– it will be built into the cost of the service already. The underwriter’s explanation made me realize that the problem I thought Insurii might solve was actually solved already in the shipping industry.

Significance For the reasons previously mentioned, I believe Insurii in its current state would fail as a product, but I believe it succeeds in provoking the question: What social consequences might we face for pursuing convenience & safety at the expense of privacy and personal agency?

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orter is an automated, last-mile concierge service for personal luggage. This service employs driverless technology to streamline a traveler’s journey from primary transit modes like planes and trains to secondary modes like shared AVs. Porter operates in a speculative future where the cost of travel has decreased and the cost of living in cities has increased to an extent where nomadic lifestyles become common living arrangements.

a city, a more routine part of people’s lives. In doing so, I decided to study current edge cases of user groups who, either by choice or not, make lengthy journeys. Some of these user groups included: • Immigrants to America via Ellis Island during the 19th and early 20th centuries • Nomadic groups like the Bajau Laut of SouthEast Asia and the Kazakh of Eastern Europe • Political and climate refugees

Context According to a recent study by Ryan Hagemann, a civil liberties policy analyst at the Niskanen Center (a Washington D.C-based think tank which advocates on behalf of environmental causes among other things), the proliferation of new transit-related innovations like driverless cars, electric vehicle powertrains, Hyperloop technology (a new type of mass transit system, akin to bullet trains, that uses pods traveling through tubes in a near vacuum (Hyperloop One)), and drones will dramatically reduce the cost of travel. Hagemann adds that: “Whatever form the future of transportation takes, it’s likely to be of immeasurable benefit to ordinary people.”, emphasizing how these technologies hold promise for the general public (Hagemann).

To explore the potential of these “benefits”, I imagined a future where technological progress in the transit space makes travel, both within and outside

• Foster children • “Digital Nomads” & gig-economy professionals of 21st century industrialized nations While learning about these user groups, I began to notice a common pattern among each of them: disorganized, unsecured luggage. Following this thread further, I began researching the history of luggage itself and found, to my surprise, that whenever there was a major advancement in the way people traveled, there was also a major advancement in their luggage (Gross).

Indeed, professor Susan Harlan of North Carolina’s Wake Forest University remarks in her book, Object Lessons, that the “history of luggage is the history of travel, how we travel, and why, and where”, highlighting the luggage piece as the key product in a travel-centered existence (Harlan).

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Framing Having conducted early research on several people groups with nomadic lifestyles, I made four key assumptions among each group:

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Having already found the first theme (when travel evolves, luggage evolves), I also found that when passenger vehicles are involved, luggage often occupies the second largest cubic area in vehicles after passengers. Like seating space, I suspected that luggage space often goes underutilized as well. If that’s the case, it presents an opportunity to redesign such that more space

in a vehicle can go to the passengers.

Third, I assumed that theft would increase the more time that luggage was left inattended near strangers.

Finally, I learned that a porter was a concierge of sort that was responsible for sorting and moving luggage.

I realized that owners and porters have different needs, and assumed that if I were to design a product that reimagined how luggage was moved, it wouldn’t have to meet the same specifications as personally-owned, handheld luggage. It could become something else entirely.

Ellis Island, 1907. Photo via Library of Congress.

Luggage evolves when travel evolves. How might luggage evolve in the coming age of autonomy? Photo via TripSavvy.

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Speculative Fictions As an ideating exercise, I wrote two speculative fiction pieces in the form of newspaper articles in order to illustrate both a dream and nightmare scenario for the future for which I would be designing.

These pieces formed the foundation of a fictional newspaper I call The New Transit Times, a speculative collection of headlines designed to give a snapshot into a near-future world where AI rules, multi-modal transit is commonplace, and the automotive industry has seen the full extent of the coming technology shift.

Dream In the year 2060: Humanity has made an abrupt change in the way it uses its resources and interacts with the natural environment.

World governments have instituted up-cycling and zero-waste policies in every industry. Cultures now see the environment as a precious rather than limitless natural resource..

Citizens now understand their actions have immediate consequences. A culture of sharing, conservation, and enjoyment has superseded outdated notions of wastefulness, ceaseless work, and capitalism at any cost.

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Hyper connectivity and mass migrations to cities have rendered the daily

commute nearly extinct. Automation and optimization allow citizens to work 20 hours per week with more output than 40 hour/week workers in the previous century. Public and last-mile transit have taken over the majority of daily transit needs. Cars are now used for enjoyment.

The burden of car ownership has been solved, with cheap, enjoyable, consistent multimodal transit services being provided jointly by governments and private enterprise.

Citizens now pool their resources and sponsor massive nonprofit and government-sponsored shared transit networks. Travel in and around cities is now cheap, fast, and easy. Consequently, this has led to a spike in diversity in urban communities and greater wealth distribution, since people can now choose where they want to live with few transit penalties.

City Celebrates As Homelessness Officially Declared Over from The New Transit Times, April 18th, 2060 Mayor Vanessa Garcia, along with nonprofit leaders and city planners celebrated today with residents of the newly constructed Thomas Park Residences, the final project in a years-long push to redevelop disused parking and road infrastructure to house the city’s homeless population. “This is a momentous day in the history of our city. For the first time, we can say that every man, woman, and child in Los Angeles has a roof over

their head and a chance to put down roots.”, says Mayor Garcia.

The redevelopment project, called End Homelessness 2080, has been a decade-long collaboration between city planners, taxpayers, and transit authorities. After the massive shift toward ride sharing and public transit in the last 20 years, the once-ubiquitous public streets and mega highways have seen a steep decrease in utilization.

Privately, parking structures, lots, and even driveways have seen fewer and fewer cars filling them up. As a result, both the city and private citizens have long pushed to rezone and redevelop the newfound land in the once overcrowded city.

Citizens and local municipalities have built parks, additional housing, new businesses, and other much-needed infrastructure in key areas that were once used only for vehicle-related activities.

Having long been a problem in the city, homeless became a “moonshot” project for city officials, and, with the support of local voters, city officials have now confirmed the final 250 un-housed residents within city borders who have requested housing have now had their wishes fulfilled.

Nightmare In the year 2060: The practice of transcending social class is extinct. Wealth gaps in the world’s major countries will become

extreme and solidified, with each class oppressing the one beneath it to maintain their own standing in the social hierarchy.

Nowhere is this more evident than in transit. The strain on natural resources due to population increase and the effects of global warming have led to austerity laws limiting the sale of new cars; citizens now fight over access to transit, which has become a valued commodity.

Vehicles, infrastructure, and technology are now fully privatized, and citizens must pay exorbitant fees to belong to “transit castes”. People in higher castes travel in on-demand luxury and separate themselves from the lower castes, who subsist on dilapidated infrastructure.

These transit castes are self sustaining, with poverty perpetuating itself and the lack of transit abilities keeping citizens from organizing or accessing resources outside their immediate areas. Upper castes horde private roads, cars, and energy.

Class Riots Ignite As Austerity Measures Go Into Effect from The New Transit Times, April 18th, 2060 Riots & looting broke out all across LA County on Wednesday as citizens of the so-called “lower transit castes” protested a 40% fare increase for the city’s Tier 3 Multi-transit subscriptions.

“What the city is doing is unethical.

This tyrannical price hike is effectively

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imprisoning us in our own neighborhoods. With fares like this, people won’t be able to travel to other parts of the city for work, send their kids to the good schools, or even escape the unbelievable smog and heat that now concentrates in the asphalt deserts of the lower caste areas.”, explains Adam Martinez, community advocate at the St. Joseph rescue mission in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles.

The New Transit Times

Arrests have been made all across the eastern section of the city, with peaceful protests often devolving into the looting of local businesses and the chat “tier 3! tyr-rany!” being echoed by mobs collecting in front of city hall.

The Times imagines metropolitan life in the United States in the year 2060, and includes headlines such as:

This month’s new austerity measures have taken place in addition to measures enacted in January, when Mayor Garcia enacted a ban on all self-driven vehicles as a way to combat city-wide gridlock, massive excesses in the city Co2 limit, and energy shortages.

• End of An Era: Ford to Close Final US Factory

Opponents to these measures say that despite the rules being enacted citywide, it unfairly targets those of the poorer castes since those populations rely far more heavily on the services banned in the measures.

Advocates argue that the measures selectively oppress the lower castes intentionally, since those populations are far greater than those of the higher castes and would presumably have a larger net effect on the city if restricted.

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Porter exists in a near future when ridesharing, autonomy, electric vehicles, and hyper connectivity have become part of daily life. To imagine this world more fully, I wrote and designed a speculative newspaper I call The New Transit Times.

• Waymo Granted Exclusive Transit Rights in Landmark Deal

• New UC Berkeley Study Shows Nomad Lifestyle on the Rise • Cyberstalker Sentenced to 5-Year Digital Shunning • Car Owners Clubs Protest New Restrictions • Lightning Strikes Cause Car Outages, GridlockFunction

Function Porter is an autonomous micro shipping container–not a piece of luggage itself. This is done in recognition that autonomous technology will make it possible to do away with carrying one’s luggage on their person at all times.

Instead, luggage will take its own,

The New Transit Times VOL. CLXVII

LOS ANGELES, FRIDAY, APRIL 11, 2019

$4.50

WAYMO GRANTED EXCLUSIVE TRANSIT RIGHTS IN LANDMARK DEAL End of An Era: Ford To Close Final US Auto Factory

LA Mayor and Waymo CEO Make Joint Announcement

By ANDRÉ ORTA

By SCOTT SMALLS

LOS ANGELES – In a joint press conference yesterday afternoon at City Hall, LA Mayor Jennifer Perez and Waymo CEO Casper Smith announced that after an 18-month competition, Waymo has been awarded exclusive rights to all multi-modal transit operations in the City of Los Angeles.

DEARBORN, MI – Beleaguered automaker Ford today closed its last car-producing factory and the last remaining American car manufacturing facility, marking the end of the domestic American automotive industry. Investors point to a sharp decline in autonomous car fleet sales due to increased rider density. In addition, a decades-long evolution toward walkable, pedestrian-friendly cities have led to the decline of car use as a whole.

Mayor Perez announced that: “Angelenos of the past have suffered from crippling traffic, heavy smog, and an ever-increasing cost of living. As Waymo has proven over the past 30 years, their multi-modal approach to shared, autonomous transit has cleared our roads, brightened our skies, and allowed the unnecessary burden of car ownership to become a thing of the past. I am proud to announce a new era of cooperation with Waymo and the City of Los Angeles to become the most mobile, healthy, enjoyable city in America.”

The new deal is expected to expand Waymo’s footprint into all remaining transit systems in the city, including school transit, bikes, and scooters. The deal is expected to grant Waymo a monopoly on LA transit in exchange for an allegedly lower average cost of service to residents as well as a more well-integrated experience in economically depressed parts of the city.

Opponents argue that private enterprise like Waymo should not be allowed to “own” public infrastructure Continued on Page A5

In addition to closing its factory, Ford announced they will begin shuttering its Ford Motors division

Photo Courtesy of Waymo

Renderings for End-to-end transit services in Compton reflecting Waymo’s plans to expand into new areas.

New UC BerkeleyStudy Shows Nomad Lifestyle On the Rise

By HAMILTON PORTER SAN FRANCISCO – A new study by the University of California, Berkeley shows that the car-based phenomenon known as “Nomading” is on the rise. Figures show a 15% increase in Nomads over the last 3 years, and signal a new lifestyle emerging as a result of higher rent costs and the increased accessi

bility of shared, autonomous pods.

Nomading, as explained by advocate David Colby, is the practice of living entirely in shared autonomous pods. Nomads forgo traditional stationary homes and offices in favor of hopscotching from pod to pod, traveling permanently, and making a living in the remote-work gig economy.

As Colby explains: “Nomads are no longer bogged down by rent or the same dreary commute. We work when we want and go where we want .” , vocalizing a growing sense of transience among young pro-

Cyberstalker Sentenced to 5-Year Digital Shunning

By MICHAEL SQUINTS PALLEDOROUS

M. Mertle for The New Transit Times

Car Owners Clubs Protest New Restrictions

By WENDY PEFFERCORN SACRAMENTO – Carbon-producing car ownership clubs across California held demonstrations yesterday morning in front of the state capitol building to protest a new bill that would ban the sale and purchase of all carbon-producing automobiles within the state of California.

This bill, if passed, would reduce California’s yearly carbon emissions by 8%, thereby meeting the state’s federal sustainability goal and triggering billions in federal tax breaks for Californians.

Critics argue that the bill is discriminatory, burdening a minority of car-lovers with the majority of Continued on Page C4

LOS ANGELES – Peter Edminston, the notorious cyberstalker known as @peekaboo, was sentenced today in a Los Angeles courtroom to a 5-year digital shunning without the possibility of limited access.

The new punishment, which became available to courts last May, refers to a state in which the guilty individual is stripped of all digital rights and privileges. Currently, the sentence is defined by the District Attorney as: “No access to transit (shared or private), no digital communication, and no use of public infrastructure (including but not limited to: smart shops, connected parks, and AI assistants). Under this sentence, Ed

fessionals throughout the country.

Autonomous Shared Pods Are Fueling A Rise In Permanent Nomadic Citizens A recent poll by Pew Research Center found that over 70% of self-identified Nomads are between the ages of 20 and 45.

Additionally, these citizens commonly cite disillousionment with overconsumption, anger at their Continued on Page A2 minston will effectively be a 19th century citizen in a 21st century world, eschewing most of the rights and privileges of modern society.

Many are criticizing the Edminston ruling, with some arguing that the punishment is draconian and inhumane, and others maintaining that the ruling was not harsh enough to match the severity of his crimes…

Continued on Page B2

M. Mertle for The New Transit Times

The Ford factory, now closed in order to focus entirely on Ford Main Street, its urban mobility arm focused on AI-based transit solutions for rural and suburban areas.

When asked for comment, Ford CEO Amanda Ford remarked: “Today is a proud but bittersweet chapter in the continuing legacy of the Ford Company. Ever since my great-grandfather founded this company, we have stood for providing our customers with the transit technology to work and live better. Increasingly, that better way forward has meant a shift toward new solutions and new opportunities, and we look forward to the road ahead.”, echoing statements made later in the day by other senior members of the Ford team.

Reaction in the markets has been swift and severe, with Ford Continued on Page B7

Lightning Strikes Cause Car Outages, Gridlock

By BENJAMIN FRANKLIN RODRIGUEZ LOS ANGELES – A freak lightning storm Tuesday evening caused scores of electrically-powered AVs and smart signal systems to surge, resulting in software crashes and rampant gridlock traffic across the LA basin.

The event sparked frustration and sometimes panic among travelers, with many complaining of not being able to reach home and others fearing that electrically-powered delivery, security, and emergency services would be interrupted Meteorologists at Pepperdine University stated that the growing Continued on Page B2

ARTS

INTERNATIONAL

SCIENCE

Historic Banksy mural sets new PAGE A3 record at auction

Tesla, Rivian compete for booming African truck market PAGE C1

Plastic-eating bacteria deployed in Pacific Ocean PAGE C5

BUSINESS

OPINION

Lyft expands services on Mars colony PAGE B2

Is 0-technology, “analog parenting” child abuse?

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optimized journey from point-to-point in a Porter autonomous droid, arriving at a traveler’s destination independent of its owner. The core product facilitating the service is the droid itself, which features a top-loading cargo bay that fits a standard-sized piece of luggage.

Once loaded, the droid docks into a dedicated AV cargo vehicle, which then travels to a transit hub like an airport or train station. From there, the droid uses sensors embedded in the ground (similar to the RFID tags in current Amazon fulfillment centers) to sort itself into the appropriate plane, train, or ship to reach its destination (Lanxon).

As a micro shipping container, the droid is not a consumer product, but rather a product owned by the Porter company to execute a service. It is therefore standardized in size and rugged enough to handle repeated long journeys between multiple vehicles. It is built with aluminum space frame, similar to that of high performance sports cars. This is done to both reduce weight as well as ensure its contents are secure and protected.

Finally, it is fitted with wrap around tank treads, allowing for precise movement and maximum traction in tightly packed cargo bays and transit hubs.

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With Porter, passengers using shared vehicle transit need only pack their luggage and schedule a pickup. At the individual’s specified departure time, an autonomous cargo vehicle will arrive and deploy Porter to collect the luggage. Travelers will then load their suitcase into a standardized interior cargo bin, and send it on its way.

From there, it behaves like one’s personal luggage concierge, loading itself back onto the AV cargo vehicle, arriving at the airport, dock, or train station, finding its way onto the appropriate mode of transit, and repeating the process in reverse until it meets you at your hotel or other final destination. This service streamlines travel by eliminating the need to carry luggage entirely. It makes use of autonomous driving capability and connected IOT devices to improve the experience of traveling–especially during the first and last-mile stages of the journey.

Key Features • top-loading storage compartment • tank tread drivetrain • high-strength outer body • smart lock mechanism • app-based tracking Other features include radar & lidar sensors for driverless capability, bottom-mounted RFID scanner for transit hub navigation and sorting, and low-volume horn to announce its presence to nearby pedestrians.

Process Porter was easily one of the most time consuming projects throughout my entire thesis. Early on, we spent several weeks ideating and sketch-

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ing product ideas related to our thesis domain. I found this particularly challenging given my very limited illustration capabilities at the time. However, I had no idea how much harder it would get once I had to actually fabricate the product I set out to build.

Before I gathered a single material, I had to measure, everything. I began with the volumetric dimensions of the smallest standard size for a piece of checked airline luggage. I then built a plywood box that could snugly accommodate said size.

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From there, I sourced several sheets of thin-gauge aluminum and cut them on a band saw to later epoxy over my plywood box. Finding the right

method of cutting the aluminum took several attempts, since something too weak like tin snips would either not cut through or bend the material, and something too powerful like a skill saw ripped and warped the thin aluminum.

Once I found the right method, it then took longer that it might normally since I had never used a band saw and first had to practice.

Next, I set out to build the tank treads.

I laser cut over 200 individual pieces of 1/4in thick pieces of chipboard into a thin radiused rectangle shape with 4 pre-drilled holes.

Since the laser couldn’t cleanly cut all the way through the chipboard without burning it, I then had to finished cut-

ting out each of the 200 pieces with an Exacto knife by hand.

1-inch nut and bolt sizes, which I find particularly amusing.

Next, it took me 3 attempts to figure out how to color the treads black.

Acrylic paint ate through the material and spray paint would not adhere and quickly rubbed off. Eventually, I realized going low-tech was best, and I wound up finding great success by simply coloring them with a black sharpie. This was time consuming, as I had to color all 200 by hand.

Upon linking the bike chains in two sets of tandem chains and handscrewing over 600 nuts and bolts, I completed the tread assembly and moved onto the sprocket design and fabrication. I knew that the radius of Porter’s distinctive chassis was exactly 3.75 inches. I also knew the gap distance between treads on my chains and the thickness of the treads themselves. This gave me enough information to calculate the radius of my sprocket as well as the size, shape, and distance apart of the teeth on said sprocket.

Afterward, I spent several days acquiring 6 single-speed bike chains and over 600 1-inch bolts and 600 corresponding nuts to secure the treads to the bike chains. I bought out 3 local hardware stores of their entire stock of my

I used the Law of Cosines to figure out

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exactly how far apart the teeth would need to be in order to grab properly onto the gaps between the tank treads.

This was difficult.

Once I had successfully made my calculations, I laser cut an acrylic prototype, and after several small adjustments, laser cut 16 identical sprockets.

I later spray painted each sprocket, and painted the outer fins of the chassis black with acrylic paint.

After assembling the chassis, treads, and sprockets, I designed, printed, and adhered my branding, completing my fabrication process.

Challenges Would this solution provide a meaningful improvement over current methods of personal luggage transportation?

Beyond a smart-lock mechanism, how might Porter reduce the risk of theft?

Significance Following Professor Harlan’s ideas to their logical conclusion, I designed Porter as a speculative object to ask the question: When travel is readily available to all and vehicles are shared and autonomous, how might luggage facilitate new user experiences?

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ocale is a collaborative sensory experience where ridesharing passengers configure their ideal in-car ambience for different social scenarios.

Passengers use “sensory toolkits” to configure what they see, hear, smell, and feel via changing the interior lighting, selecting different sounds, altering the smell, and other sensory inputs.

Context Locale began with the realization that the manner in which we use cars today cannot continue if we hope to improve traffic, reduce emissions, and lower the cost of transit.

One of the key factors necessary in improving all of these problems is rider density, or the number of occupants per vehicle. Ridesharing has the potential to improve rider density, but presently, many people dislike sharing vehicles for any number of reasons, including the in-car experience they share with other riders.

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In order to help crack the rider density problem, I decided to design around one of these reasons: in-car experience. Anecdotally, many people dislike the experience of riding with strangers or riding in an unfamiliar environment.

Locale is designed to flip this notion on its head. Locale asks: what if shared vehicles were a place people wanted to spend time in? What if shared vehicles became shared communal spaces akin to hotel lobbies or public parks?

Finally, how might passengers create a desirable sense of place while inside a shared AV? For Locale, I borrowed heavily from the urbanist movement known as Placemaking. As defined by the Project for Public Spaces, a New York-based urban design nonprofit, Placemaking is a hands-on approach to inspiring people to collectively reimagine and reinvent public spaces (PPS).

While Placemaking is a term that gained popularity in the 1990s, its ideological roots began in the 1960s with urban planning pioneers like Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte, who introduced a human-centered approach to city design.

Jacobs famously rallied against vehicle-dominated cities and the creation of a highway that would have sliced through much of lower Manhattan.

In her famous work, The Death and Life of Great American cities, Jacobs argued that cities ought to be designed around people, not cars, and that building vibrant social life in public spaces was the key to a vibrant community (Jacobs).

Whyte and his Street Life Project, a study of pedestrian behavior and city dynamics, laid out why some public spaces are successful in attracting the community and other are not. He found that the more one added places to sit, adding tree canopies, water features, sculptures and other “key features”, the more people tended to gravitate toward public spaces. Indeed,

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on of his key learnings was that: “What attracts people most, it would appear, is other people.” (Whyte).

For Locale, I sought to borrow ideas pioneered by Jane Jacobs and William Whyte relating to the design of community-oriented public spaces and applied it to the inside of shared autonomous vehicles.

Function Locale is an in-car laboratory where passengers use sense-making materials to configure their ideal in-car environment for different social scenarios.

Upon entering the branded vehicle, users are prompted to select one of several scenario cards. These cards describe common social scenarios like: play, fight, rest, and work. Once passengers select a scenario, they curate their in-car environment around it by selecting elements in the 4 sensory categories of touch, sight, sound, and smell (taste was excluded since cars should not be eaten).

For the “touch” category, passengers convey the tactile feeling of their environment by choosing from an array of material swatches. These swatches do not necessarily correlating with the interior upholstery, but rather metaphorically convey the “feeling” of the car interior (i.e: a soft felt for “rest” or an abrasive sand paper for “fight”).

“Sight” consists of choosing from among a series of colored transparent tubes backlit against an array of LED lights. For “sound”, passengers select

a particular song or ambient noice via an iPad connected to the car stereo.

Finally, “smell” is selected by sampling a series of essential oils and placing them in a mixture of a scent card.

Key Learnings & Reflections 1. Senses are attached to memories While listening to our passengers discuss out loud which sense elements fit with their scenario, we found that they often built their environments around a memory that contained the mood they were trying to convey. For instance, one man who chose “rest” for his scenario chose the scent of cinnamon for his environment because it reminded him of the food back in his native Sweden.

2. Passengers had very specific sense elements in mind that weren’t included in the exercise When designing Locale, we thought that choosing an edited array of sense materials would help passengers make choices easier. In practice, we found the opposite to be true. Usually, passengers has very specific sense elements in mind for their scenarios, and they would commonly write something down that wasn’t a presented option.

One such example was when an older couple selected ambient ocean noises as opposed to a song for their “sound” sense element. It had never occurred

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to us to include ambient noises as a selection, and we were surprised.

3. Similar elements often evoked different ideas for different people Whereas a smell like coffee might convey “rest” for one person, it might also convey a mood of “work” for another.

This made us wonder: how might we create shared AV environments that established a common sensory mood among different people? Do people even need to be feeling the same thing in order to have a pleasant interaction in a shared space?

4. The choice to ride share is made from a complex set of factors Among the people we interviewed we found that the decision to ride share was made from a set of factors that included: convenience, cost, time, experience, and activity. Usually, convenience was the top factor for deciding whether or not to use ridesharing as opposed to another form of transit. We wonder if these factors might change in hierarchy or change altogether if we were to conduct Locale in a different geographic area, like a suburban neighborhood, car-centric city like Los Angeles, or a rural area.

Significance

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While MobilityLab was an exploration of what the shared AV could do for the individual, Locale sought to understand what it could do for the community.

This project was designed to demonstrate that although current public transit systems often force strangers to interact in a negative way, shared AVs have the possibility of enabling positive, affirming social experiences.

Locale is intended to show that individuals can exert a sense of ownership over their shared space in the same way public park patrons might rearrange furniture to enable particular social interactions.

The experience uses the typology of a “sensory toolkit” to reframe passenger expectations around what a shared AV trip might be. In this new framing, passengers are not passive individuals sitting in a vehicle waiting to arrive, but rather active participants in a community event. In the spirit of the Placemaking urban design movement, Locale encourages the creation of a sense of “place” within a shared AV by enabling passengers to sculpt the environment around them.

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uddle is an autonomous ridesharing service designed specifically for schoolchildren in dense urban and outlying suburban areas. This service uses machine learning to automatically pool young riders in driverless vehicles and deliver them to pre-scheduled activities like school & extracurricular activities.

By taking advantage of pooled, autonomous ridesharing in a specific use case, Huddle alleviates parents’ burden of needing to provide afternoon transportation for their children while simultaneously reducing the net number of cars in afternoon traffic.

Context The problem of student transit is a daily concern for many of the over 37,000 families across the United States (US Census Bureau).

In a 2017 report by the educational advocacy nonprofit Bellweather Education Partners, the organization found that: “School districts struggle to provide efficient (transportation) service in the face of escalating costs and increasingly complex education systems where more and more students attend schools outside their (immediate) neighborhoods. Stagnant state funding streams force districts either to sacrifice service quality and forego system upgrades or divert funds from other purposes.” (emphasis added), adding finally that: “Federal and state regulations concerning student safety and special student populations’ edu-

cational rights are at odds with strategies to improve (transit) efficiency.”

(Schiess & Burgoyne-Allen).

Since the early 1900s when labor unions successfully advocated for the 8-hour work day, the typical school day has failed to follow suit. According to The Atlantic: “On average, US students are in school for six and a half hours, five days a week.” (Voght), leaving a discrepancy of several hours in the late afternoon that must go filled. While a common solution for this issue is to enroll children in after-school programs or sports, parents must commonly find transit to and from these activities as well.

In addition, rush-hour traffic exacerbates the challenges in getting children to school, activities, and home again in a timely fashion. Compounding this problem is the reality that a child’s home, school, after school activity, and parent’s workplace can often be spread across a wide geographic area, increasing travel times further.

The problem that these negative transit conditions create go far beyond inconvenience. For working parents, picking children up from school often means having to leave work early, which can result in decreased wages from lower hours worked, difficulty securing promotions over no-child colleagues, or even the loss of one’s job. For schoolchildren, difficult or unreliable transit often means a limited or even no ability to participate in extracurricular activities. This transitinduced handicap can limit one’s ex-

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posure to potential career fields, stifle one’s academic or athletic progress, and even hinder one’s college resume in relation to other students.

These negative effects of unreliable school/after school transit are only magnified in single-parent situations, multi-child families, and low-income or car-free households. The problem of school-related transit can be largely as a logistical issue, with the central challenge being: how might we most efficiently & safely move schoolchildren to school, activities, and home again?

After that, the challenge becomes about creating a supervised, social, and enjoyable end-to-end experience for young riders.

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Speculative Press Releases In order to help identify possible long-term benefits and problems of Huddle, I wrote a pair of speculative press releases imagining both an ideal scenario where the ridesharing service is wildly successful, and a nightmare scenario where everything goes spectacularly wrong (as is often the case with start up companies), Interestingly, both revealed that some benefits and drawbacks only become evident at scale, making me realize that I often overlook the long-term repercussions of the solutions I propose.

Dream Scenario FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Huddle Services Expand To All Government Employees: New study shows youth ridesharing service increases parent work productivity LOS ANGELES, CA: In a landmark partnership, Huddle, the autonomous ridesharing service designed specifically for schoolchildren, is announcing today a new partnership with the federal government. Under this deal, all school and extracurricular-related transport will be provided free to K-12 children of government employees.

As internal and 3rd party studies have shown, the convenience provided

by Huddle’s scheduled autonomous ridesharing services to school, activities, and home have not only increased community participation by 35%, but have decreased truancy by 25%, creating revenue for local service providers as well as a spike in school funding for schools with Huddle services.

Additionally, studies have shown that on average, parents using Huddle spend an additional 90 minutes at work and increase their daily productivity by 30%. For the 2 million US families with a parent working as a federal employee, this represents an astonishing gain of 930,000,000 productive hours.

Students from the Academy for Academic Excellence in Apple Valley, CA offered me feedback on Huddle, my ridesharing app for schoolkids.

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This vast gain in federal productivity quickly recoups the cost for Huddle services currently paid for by families.

immediately cease pending a solution to the recent data breach perpetrated by domestic terrorists.

As a result of these studies, Congress has included a provision to fully subsidize Huddle and other youth ridesharing services for the upcoming fiscal year. Other details include:

In this data breach, the personal information of over 15 million families and 23 million children was stolen and distributed through an elaborate hacking operation. This information includes the name, age, home and school addresses, daily schedule, and parent contact information of every child currently active on the Huddle ridesharing platform.

• Free transit for up to 5 school children until the age of 18 • Weekend services for special needs school children • New emergency evacuation services in partnership with FEMA ABOUT HUDDLE: Huddle is an autonomous ridesharing service providing scheduled rides to school & extracurricular-related activities for children ages 5-18. This service is active in all 50 states and has been operational since 2030.

Nightmare Scenario FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Huddle TO CEASE ALL SERVICES EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY License to operate revoked after data breach & subsequent child abduction

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LOS ANGELES, CA: After an external probe conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation with which Huddle cooperated fully, Huddle is announcing today that all ridesharing services currently provided by the company will

Early reports by the FBI indicate that leaked Huddle data was instrumental in over two dozen child abductions that have taken place nationally over the past 10 days. Consequently, Huddle desperately urges all families to take extreme caution when transporting their children along their weekly routes.

In accordance with FBI recommendations, Huddle asks parents to consider altering daily routes, petitioning for activity time changes, or the safest option: switching the child’s school and activities altogether. Other recommendations provided by the FBI include: • Filing for inter-district school transfer • Petitioning local schools for armed guards to accompany all field trips • Destroying the child’s phone and withholding all geolocation services

ABOUT HUDDLE: Huddle is an autonomous ridesharing service providing scheduled rides to school & extracurricular-related activities for children ages 5-18. This service is active in all 50 states and has been operational since 2030.

well as a block feature to prevent possible situations of bullying)

Function

• on-time arrival (Huddle optimizes vehicle deployments to be arrived at venue when activity concludes

Huddle works by gathering a child’s weekly schedule from their parent’s phone and then matching the times and locations to other children with similar information. Using machine learning algorithms, it then automatically creates carpools based on common schedule data and where appropriate, ages & genders.

The key difference between Huddle and other ride-hailing services like Uber or Lyft is that Huddle is a pre-scheduled ride pooling service, not an on-demand one. This is done to minimize the time vehicles spend “roaming” for riders in an on-demand model, to match the predictable use case of a child’s weekly schedule, and to more easily allow for pooling among multiple children.

Key Features • automatic rider pooling (with ability to filter preferences for like ages & gender identities as

• no-touch functionality (young riders need only a Huddle RFID bracelet to access the vehicle, no phone necessary)

• parent hand-off feature (parents can selectively “hand off” app functionalities from the parent Huddle app to the child Huddle app as child matures) • total transparency (parents can view vehicle’s location which child is in transit, along with who their child is riding with, their basic information, and their parent’s contact info)

Challenges While designing Huddle, I came across so many unforeseen challenges that I was able to group them into 5 major categories: utilization, pricing, safety & trust, logistics, and user experience.

Safety & Trust When gathering feedback from several parents, the first concern they always

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brought up was with how safe the service would be. Some parents rejected the idea outright, stating that they didn’t trust driverless cars and would never trust one with their child. Since Huddle is a service intended for the near future when driverless technology has progressed and earned credibility with the public, I took these pieces of feedback with a grain of salt.

However, there were several safety concerns beyond the capability of driverless cars that Huddle had to address in order to create a safer experience for children. One such feature was an emergency response protocol where the location of child-carrying vehicles would appear on the GPS maps of all nearby police officers, and in the event of a medical emergency or collision, children could press a button both inside the car and on the app that simultaneously dispatched an emergency vehicle to the location and called all parents of the children onboard.

Another feature was nicknamed Walk Me Inside, where the Huddle vehicle would minimize a child’s time between the car and the venue by pulling up at only front entrances and using the vehicle’s onboard driverless camera/ lidar/radar systems to monitor the child walking into the venue. Only once a child was safely inside would it then depart.

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After designing several such solutions, I realized that even if Huddle was a safe product, it also had to appear safe if it was to be trusted. Therefore, a common design question I referred

back to was: how might design be used to signal trust?

The answer, I found, was transparency.

I was inspired by the original iMac and how designer Jonathan Ive and his team used literal transparent panels in order to show users the cathode ray tube that lay inside the device (Hustwit). The effect of doing this was that the device signaled to the user: “This is how I function. I am hiding nothing from you. You can trust me.”. I replicated this in small ways throughout Huddle’s user experience by emphasizing the algorithm that matched kids for pooled rides, explaining how and why each group was formed.

I also built features like live tracking and “Walk Me Inside” that provide real-time, visual data to parents about where their child is, who they’re with, where they’re going, and when they should arrive.

Finally, I used banner notifications to signal to parents every time there was a state change in their child’s trip. For instance, in the course of a trip, they would receive a notification when their child’s vehicle arrives, when they set off, and when they arrive. These, of course, could later be shut off in preferences.

Finally, I borrowed a feature from the burgeoning kid ride hailing service HopSkipDrive where drivers and young riders are given a codeword that they match to one another to ensure the child is entering the right vehicle.

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I updated this interaction by placing a small LCD screen near the B-pillar (the middle roof support brace next to the front passengers’ shoulders) of the vehicle and randomly generating a picture that will appear on the child’s phone and the vehicle as the child approaches. I call this feature the “secret knock”.

Utilization One of the major benefits for any ridesharing service is the idea that if one can achieve a high rider density in a vehicle, they are increasing the utilization of that vehicle. This spreads the cost across several users, reducing the ridership costs, but crucially reduces the amount of vehicles needed on the road to meet demand. However, this only works if cars are full and if they are being used.

Huddle, if it were to operate exclusively as a child-transit service, would almost exclusively operate during the morning before-school hours and the afternoon hours between the afternoon bell and dinner time. This leaves the remaining hours of the day with almost no user base for which Huddle can provide services.

To meet this challenge, I imagine that a percentage of Huddle vehicles could be diverted to other users with similar logistical needs during these lean hours. User groups like the elderly, lunch patrons, and non-emergency hospital services remain interesting candidates.

I envision an alternate situation where, to reduce cost and avoid underutilization, Huddle vehicles would be dynamically leased by a driverless vehicle manufacturer, who earns revenue through leasing vehicle fleets to different AV service providers rather than operating AV services themselves.

In this way, Huddle would only rent vehicles to meet demand throughout the day, and “share” vehicles with other service providers as needed.

Pricing From a business perspective, I was unsure which metrics might determine cost effectiveness. Since the app is a car service rather than a product, the typical goods sold metric does not apply. I vacillated between metrics like rides/day, rides/hour, cost/mile, and riders/car. I remain unsure. However, I am fairly certain that pricing can vary according to geographic location and the demographics of that area.

Logistics The key component to moving anything from one place to another is the question of how you might do it most efficiently. For Huddle, that meant moving kids during specific windows of the day in the most cost-effective way possible while creating a joyful social space and pleasant user experience.

Early on, I found the key to this was a mixture of pooled, pre-scheduled rides and a customizable interior layout, allowing for both trip optimization and an enjoyable social atmosphere.

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User Experience Throughout the design process of Huddle, I discovered that in addition to transit logistics, user experience became the second major design challenge to solve for. I quickly learned that to design a driverless ride pooling service for schoolchildren was design a new child-only social space. This presented several opportunities, only some of which I built features for.

One such feature was in response to the possibility of bullying. In an “unsupervised playground”-like atmosphere, I realized that Huddle would present a social setting where some children might be emboldened to bully others. While I don’t know if one can ever design cruelty out of people, I sought to mitigate it by installing a 360-degree camera surrounded by a black glass shroud atop the ceiling of the vehicle.

This camera would be accessible in real-time to parents, however the intention is for the suggestion of surveillance rather than actual parent monitoring.

As for the mix of children being grouped, I learned from parents that in some instances, they might be uncomfortable with differences in age or gender, and would want the ability to have the matching algorithm match children who are like in age or gender.

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One such use case a mother told me was that she would be uncomfortable having a 16 year-old boy whom the family does not know and/or trust placed in a vehicle alone with her 11

year-old daughter. For instances like this, I designed a feature that allowed parents to select preferences around age range and gender, with the caveat that strict preferences might hinder the algorithm’s ability to find available pooled rides.

Significance Huddle is intended as a design provocation into how solving for a particular user and use case might provide benefits for cities as a whole. By pooling students going to the same or nearby locations at similar times in the same car, Huddle can reduce the cost per trip per person, alleviate parents’ need to leave work early, and increase rider density which in turn reduces the number of cars on the road at crucial rush-hour periods of the day.

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Photo by Grey Villet. Moline, Illinois, late 1950s.

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Conclusion

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n order to design a more environmentally sustainable, socially equitable, financially profitable automotive future, I used MobilityLab, Insurii, Porter, Locale, and Huddle as design provocations to explore how increasing rider density in the new automotive area might enable new human benefits to emerge.

MobilityLab investigated how the individual passenger might be encouraged to use ride sharing services through imagining ways a shared AV might mold itself around specific user needs on the fly. Insurii imagines new possibilities for insurance when the shared vehicle is coupled with a multimodal transit lifestyle. Simultaneously, it provokes once to question what social consequences we might face for pursuing convenience & safety at the expense of privacy and personal agency.

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Porter illustrates a possible near future when the vehicle interior privileges passengers and interaction and laborious, frustrating tasks like organizing and hauling luggage is solved through a logistical network of autonomous

luggage caddies and driverless luggage cars. Locale builds off the learnings of MobilityLab, and asks how shared AVs might transcend the label of vehicle and become a place unto itself, enabling new types of shared community to emerge.

Finally, Huddle leverages both ridesharing and autonomous technology to allow parents to safely and enjoyably transport their children, creating a streamlined pathway to community involvement for kids while simultaneously saving parents from lost wages and contributing to an overall increase in resource utilization.

The challenges we face in the automotive arena are vast, but so too is our ability to confront them. Now, more than in any time since the invention of the car, we have the chance to build the change we want to see in the world. New technologies, new ways of thinking, and new goals are allowing us to fundamentally rethink how the automobile should fit into our lives. The future is happening, the road is wide, and the possibilities are limitless.

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An apt visual metaphor for the coming times. The Maserati 250F. Exploded view by Fabian Oefner

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Acknowledgements

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I

would like to thank my thesis advisors: Allan Chochinov, Jennifer Rittner, and Andrew Schloss for their guidance, support, and brutally high standards,

Susan Matheson, my editor, for leaving no stone unturned, my fellow MFA Products of Design classmates: Eugenia Ramos Alonso, Benjamin Bartlett, Rhea Bhandari, John Boran Jr., Zihan Chen, Evelyn Cheung, Gustav Ole Dyrhauge, Kevin Cook, TzuChing Lin, Micah Lynn, Sophie Carrillo Miranda, Phuong Anh Nguyen, Ellen Rose, Hannah Rudin, Carly Simmons, Antya Waegemann, Qixuan Wang, Runshi Wei, and Yangying Ye, for their companionship throughout the late nights in the studio and their life-saving, vast range of expertises, my incredible professors: Paola Antonelli, Brent Arnold, Hlynur Atlason, Emilie Baltz, Ayse Birsel, Matthew Borgatti, Bill Cromie, Steven Dean, Andrew Dent, Marc Dones, Elizabeth Galbut KT Gillett, Claire Hartten, Kenneth McFarlin, Sigi Moeslinger, Toshi Mogi, Daniel Perlin, Rebecca Silver, Sinclair Smith, Rebecca Stern, Cordy Swope, John Thackara, Richard Tyson, Masamichi Udagawa, and Rob Walker for sharing their hard-won knowledge and providing boundless support, feedback, and encouragement,

the industry experts: Andrew Bates, Matthew Canaran, Alexandra Dymowska, Lindsay Ellerby, Tom Gardiner, Mark Henry, Cindy Juette, Leslie Kendall, Larry Lenkin, Adam Miller, Megan Neese, Jos Santiago, Bibi Seck, Kern Sharma, Michael Sorkin, Daniel Sturges, Sara Thompson, Maria Grazia Verardi, and Josh Westerhold for their unbelievable candor and for taking the time to chat with a wide-eyed grad student, my friends: the AAE Ambassadors of 2019, Vanessa Brogna, Theresa Dowd, Lassor Feasley, Nicholas Hartman, Michelle Kang, Carol Lam, Rick Piercy, Carolyn Rodeno, Tony Rosenthal, Sebastian Gonzalez Arboleda, and Manako Tamura, for taking me further in life than I would ever be able to go alone, my brother, Adam Orta, my fathers George Orta and Steve Garcia, and my mother, Josanna Garcia, without whom this book and my life’s accomplishments would have never been possible, and my savior Jesus Christ, to whom I give all the glory.

John Heida, Oya Kosebay, Kristina Lee, Marko Manriquez, Krithi Rao, and Alisha Wessler, for enabling me to produce my best work, 162

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The Products of Design. New York City, May 14th, 2019.

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About the Author

I

’m a designer, creative strategist, and storyteller passionate about people and the complex challenges they face.

I grew up in Southern California, arguably the world’s epicenter of car culture. Throughout my childhood, I was exposed to vintage cars, off road trophy trucks, import tuners, low riders, exotics, and ordinary passenger vehicles of every persuasion. I saw firsthand how experiences, relationships, and aspirations could all be facilitated through the automobile.

I also saw the damage they caused.

Before I ever learned that most vehicles go unused 95% or more of the time, or that only 1.6 people ride in a vehicle on average, I saw how automobile infrastructure could cut up communities, how cars could isolate people from one another, and how transit-related expenses could place unfair financial burdens on the most vulnerable people in my community.

The dichotomy between the joy and the damage cars have on those around me became crystalized in an epiphany

I had early on in my research: I love cars, I believe in the good they can do for people, but the way we’re using them has to change.

Like all technology, I believe transit systems, and more specifically automobiles, are morally agnostic. They’re not inherently “good” or “evil” on their own. It’s up to us, the users, designers, voters, and policymakers, to decide how we’ll use them, and who will use them, and to what end.

The thought that encouraged me during every failed prototype, late night, and steep learning curve was that the most fertile moment for change in the history of the automobile is right now.

My aspiration for this thesis, and all the work I’ll do after, is to demonstrate in some small way that the future doesn’t have to be like the past, and that little by little, we can design into existence the good we hope to see in the world.

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“Knowledge dispels fear.”

- Andy Green, O.B.E