Shannon McDonald, Assistant Professor of Architecture at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, is one of the key organizers of the Ancillary workshop that will be held on Friday of the Automated Vehicles Symposium. The title of the workshop is Envisioning Automated Vehicles within the Built Environment: 2020, 2035, 2050.
Shannon came up with the idea for the workshop last summer and thought people would be interested in attending. The focus of the workshop is the Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO). MPOs are federally mandated and federally funded transportation policy-making organizations in the United States that are made up of representatives from local government and governmental transportation authorities.
MPO staff members have realized that deployment of automated vehicles is going to happen much sooner than anyone had originally thought. At the Transportation Research Board event in January, several people from MPOs all over the country wanted to discuss how autonomous vehicles deployment will effect our planning of roads, environments, and communities. This workshop is a great opportunity to delve deeper into the affects of the deployment of automated vehicles.
The workshop committee includes many people from California and East Coast MPOs. Each MPO has it’s own territory. They are responsible for trying to understand how new mobility and new ideas will impact the environment in their area including streets, neighborhoods, and regional areas.
Some of the people involved in the workshop include Dan Fagnant with the University of Texas, Austin who will be speaking on “A Convergence in Shared Mobility: Demand-responsive fully automated vehicles, for car sharing and ridesharing across Austin, Texas” and Bryant Walker Smith with Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS) who will be speaking about “Government Regulation, Anticipation, and Participation”.
The workshop will cover a broad spectrum of ideas about automated vehicles, shared vehicles, automated transits, and even private automated vehicles. They will raise questions like how will automated vehicles impact parking and what’ going to happen with the way children are transported to school.
Organizers of the workshop have created specific scenarios that attendees will look at and discuss. Some of the scenarios include what will happen with freeway systems, how will transit systems change, what will happen with freight systems, and what are the absolute best and worst case scenarios that can happen with the introduction of automated vehicles. Attendees will be able to choose the scenario they want to work with and break out into small groups. Different sites will be provided along with tools including technologies, planners, and developers to create real world situations.
Shannon feels that the workshop will generate a lot of new thinking trying to figure out what can change and how it will change with the deployment of automated vehicles. It will be an interactive activity that will allow attendees to think more deeply about the impact of automated vehicles and help provide insights to the MPOs.
Shannon hopes to have a wide range of people attend but they have specifically structured the agenda to the MPOs. So far they have approximately 100 people attending the workshop.
