Where is your car going to park after it’s dropped you off at PCMR?

Longtime readers are probably aware of our interest in the self driving car. Self driving cars don’t text like a driver does — they are always paying attention. Self driving cars optimize the distance between the car in front of them. Self driving cars maximize the efficiency of cars on the road.

We feel self driving cars are part of the long-term solution to Park City’s traffic problems. It looks like Google’s subsidiary, Waymo, is launching its fleet of self driving cars this month in Mountain View and Phoenix.

That is why we often look at initiatives proposed by the city and county as short-term. They seem to be spending a great deal of money on solutions that will work sometime in the future (i.e., when we will supposedly all park-n-ride and take the bus) but ignores that we will never use those solutions because the future will supersede those ideas (and we won’t ride the bus in mass).

Will self-driving cars be ready to handle complex Utah winters in 5 years? We’d wager it won’t.

How about 10 years from now? We’d wager that it’s getting close. Ten years ago, the iPhone and Facebook were both launched (we’d argue that those technologies have transformed EVERYONE’s lives). Imagine what happens in ten years when technology and car companies are focused on it.

How about 20 years from now? Yes (for most people). Remember 1997? The Yellow Pages were BIG and innovation didn’t move like it does now.

And that’s the issue. The solutions our government seems to be making now, based on 20th century ideas, better work now or in the next couple of years. If they don’t, we will likely have made the best buggy whip imaginable.

If our plans don’t include the extreme likelihood of self driving cars in them, then we are missing the boat.

Where is your car going to park itself after it drops you off at PCMR?

Yes! Finally a use for Richardson Flat.