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b'The hype about autonomous vehicles\\u2014\\u201dAV\\u2019s\\u201d for short\\u2014is often breathless. Advocates have touted the emerging technology as the key to everything that ails our cities\\u2014heck, they just might bring about Mideast peace and cure cancer!\\nAt Strong Towns, we\\u2019ve been, well, skeptical. At the core of our critique of the prevailing pattern of development in North American cities is the observation that, around the middle of the 20th century, we undertook a massive, uncontrolled experiment. We did it everywhere, all at once. In this Suburban Experiment, we totally redesigned everything about the places we live, and jettisoned tried-and-tested ways of designing and laying out human-scale places, in order to better accommodate a brand new means of transportation: the automobile.\\nLook: AVs are coming. And they\\u2019re not going to be all bad, or all good. But there is a real risk that, as a society, we\\u2019ll engage in the same sort of hubris again: redesign everything around a brand-new technology before we really understand the complex ways it will affect our society and economy.\\nWho Will Benefit Most From AVs? And Can We Do Anything About That?\\nRecently, we were interested to learn of a study by the Union of Concerned Scientists called \\u201cWhere Are Self-Driving Cars Taking Us? Pivotal Choices That Will Shape DC\\u2019s Transportation Future.\\u201d Although the study is focused on Washington, DC, its implications are relevant to every city, large and small.\\nIn this week\\u2019s episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, the study\\u2019s lead author, Dr. Richard Ezike (Twitter: @DrRCEzike), chats with Strong Towns founder and president Chuck Marohn about the study\\u2019s key findings and, more importantly, the questions that continue to bedevil the best minds working on this subject.\\nA crucial insight they both agree on: We\\u2019re not starting from a level playing field. We live in a car-dependent world, the result of a combination of past policy choices, individual responses to those policy choices, and institutional inertia in the decades since. We have inherited a world where the poor, in most places on the North American continent, must pay an expensive ante to even participate in society. You swallow the fixed costs of car ownership, or you endure an environment that, for non-drivers, is often, to use Chuck\\u2019s word, \\u201cdespotic.\\u201d\\nAVs might hold some potential to free people from this costly ante, by making it possible to just pay for the transportation you need, or to more easily access existing public transit via \\u201clast mile\\u201d connections. But Marohn and Ezike agree that we can\\u2019t just expect AVs to solve all the problems of our built form, by, say, allowing us to multi-task during long freeway commutes, or to no longer need as many parking spaces. And we need to be aware that AVs will shape that development pattern, especially if we don\\u2019t get the price right.\\nAVs actually offer great potential for getting the price of driving right: if you\\u2019re paying for a ride, rather than the fixed cost of owning your own personal vehicle, it\\u2019s possible to bundle far more of the costs of driving itself into the price of that ride. But in the car-dependent world we\\u2019ve already inherited, that means potentially punishing those who can least afford it. Ezike sees this as a policy challenge: if we grapple with what our transportation system is really costing us (including in environmental impacts), are we willing to also grapple with helping those who can\\u2019t afford those costs, either by providing better public transportation or more options to live in complete communities?\\nit\\u2019s important, urges Ezike, that people be in the room who are going to speak up for fairness, for equity, for environmental concerns, for public interest and transparency. AV technology is coming. Those who care about who will benefit from it should get in the room with the people who are already talking about these innovations, and be part of the crucial decisions that shape how we, as a society, are going to respond to them'