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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

Latham, A; Nattrass, M; (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 , 81 , Article 102539. 10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2019.102539. Green open access

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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.

Type: Article
Title: Autonomous vehicles, car-dominated environments, and cycling: Using an ethnography of infrastructure to reflect on the prospects of a new transportation technology
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2019.102539
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2019.102539
Language: English
Additional information: This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
Keywords: Autonomous vehicles, cycling, infrastructure, sharing, rules, intelligence
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Geography
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10084782
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