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

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  • Latham, Alan
  • Nattrass, Michael

Abstract

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

Suggested Citation

  • Latham, Alan & Nattrass, Michael, 2019. "Autonomous vehicles, car-dominated environments, and cycling: Using an ethnography of infrastructure to reflect on the prospects of a new transportation technology," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 81(C).
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:jotrge:v:81:y:2019:i:c:s0966692318308275
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2019.102539
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Mohamed Alawadhi & Jumah Almazrouie & Mohammed Kamil & Khalil Abdelrazek Khalil, 2020. "A systematic literature review of the factors influencing the adoption of autonomous driving," International Journal of System Assurance Engineering and Management, Springer;The Society for Reliability, Engineering Quality and Operations Management (SREQOM),India, and Division of Operation and Maintenance, Lulea University of Technology, Sweden, vol. 11(6), pages 1065-1082, December.
    2. Amitai Y. Bin-Nun & Patricia Derler & Noushin Mehdipour & Radboud Duintjer Tebbens, 2022. "How should autonomous vehicles drive? Policy, methodological, and social considerations for designing a driver," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 9(1), pages 1-13, December.

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