About this item
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. Our time at the wheel is done. Driving will become illegal, as human drivers will be demonstrably more dangerous than cars that pilot themselves. Is this an impossible future, or a revolution just around the corner?Sam Schwartz, America's most celebrated transportation guru, describes in this book the revolution in self-driving cars. The ramifications will be dramatic, and the transition will be far from seamless. It will overturn the job market for the one in seven Americans who work in the trucking industry. 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. And, like every other computer-controlled device, it can be vulnerable to hacking.Right now, every major car maker here and abroad is working on bringing autonomous vehicles to consumers. 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.
About the Author
Schwartz was educated at Brooklyn College (BS in Physics) and the University of Pennsylvania (MSCE) and first worked as a New York City cabbie before being hired by the City of New York in 1971. He served as NYC Traffic Commissioner from 1982 to 1986, and when the traffic department became subsumed by the Department of Transportation he held the second-in-command post of First Deputy Commissioner and Chief Engineer from 1986-1990. While employed with the city, he attempted to introduce bicycle lanes and public plazas. They were vetoed at the last minute by then-mayor John Lindsay. He earned the nickname Gridlock Sam during the 1980 transit strike when he developed a series of transportation contingency plans, called the Grid-Lock Prevention Program. After he left the city government around 1996, he started his own firm. He writes columns for New York City's Daily News, lower Manhattan's Downtown Express, The Queens Chronicle, and in the Yiddish News Report as Gridlock Shmuel. He also tweets, and blogs for the Public Broadcasting Service and Engineering News-Record.
