Worldwide, more people die from inactivity diseases than from traffic crashes. On the other hand, there’s been an epidemic of obesity in the United States, and that obesity is taking its toll in an increasing rate of people dying from diseases like diabetes, heart disease, cancer and others. “If we’re stupid, what we will do is just add more and more lanes.” But that seems to be the impetus for autonomous vehicles. But we could achieve a lot fewer traffic deaths by many of the devices that will be in autonomous vehicles, such as automatic braking, collision-avoidance systems, blind-spot monitoring and lane controls. We’re hyping the fact that there will be fewer traffic deaths, and that’s true. Schwartz: I’m really worried about the negatives.

This will be nothing short of a revolution in the way we live, not unlike 120 years ago when the car first came on the sounds like there are a lot of negatives. Ultimately, their plan is to get rid of the most costly part of that, which is the driver. They offer a service that a lot of people are signing up for, and they have been able to subsidize that service with low fares. Inactivity could rise a great deal, and that means certain kinds of diseases like diabetes and heart disease and even cancers. Another possible outcome is that people live farther away, and we encourage sprawl and intrude upon what remaining rural areas that we have. Everybody is traveling by autonomous vehicles, and they take the car to work, tell the car to go home, and then pick them up at the end of the day. The negative outcome could be if we just don’t change our behavior. We could offer a lot more public transportation through autonomous vehicles. In 90% of the United States, our public transportation is in a sorry state. It really depends upon the models that we follow going forward. It could be good, it could be bad, it could be ugly. Schwartz: It will be a revolution in how we move about. (Listen to the podcast at the top of this page.) He joined the radio show on Sirius XM to talk about the positive and negative aspects of AV and what governments should be doing now to plan for the road head. “Just as the horse and buggy became a quaint tourist attraction, the driven car likewise will become a charming relic,” Schwartz writes in his book. The technology behind autonomous vehicles is quickly advancing, which means it could take over some driving chores from humans - in some limited-use areas - before long. From driving a cab in New York City to serving as that city’s transportation commissioner, Schwartz is an expert in the complexities of transit. That’s the message in No One at the Wheel: Driverless Cars and the Road of the Future, a new book by engineer Samuel I. If we want to be ready, the time to prepare is now.

The fleets are getting ready to roll and nothing will ever be the same, and this book shows us what the future has in store.Autonomous vehicles will likely rule the roadways at some point in the future, bringing profound changes to the way we live, work and play. Right now, every major car maker here and abroad is working on bringing autonomous vehicles to consumers. And, like every other computer-controlled device, it can be vulnerable to hacking. It will cause us to grapple with new ethical dilemmas-if a car will hit a person or a building, endangering the lives of its passengers, who will decide what it does? It will further erode our privacy, since the vehicle can relay our location at any moment. It will overturn the job market for the one in seven Americans who work in the trucking industry. The ramifications will be dramatic, and the transition will be far from seamless. Sam Schwartz, America's most celebrated transportation guru, describes in this book the revolution in self-driving cars. Is this an impossible future, or a revolution just around the corner?

Driving will become illegal, as human drivers will be demonstrably more dangerous than cars that pilot themselves. The country's leading transport expert describes how the driverless vehicle revolution will transform highways, cities, workplaces and laws not just here, but across the globe.

Samuel schwartz autonomous vehicles