1999 Chicago Institute for Architecture & Urbanism (CIAU)
The Future of Navigation: Suburban Space and Today’s Freeway of Tomorrow

For Mr. & Mrs. Atwood, owners of a small aviation supply company in Oakland, California, the early morning hours are reserved for quality time with each other. They ease into their day with a leisurely breakfast, drink several cups of coffee, and read the entirety of the newspaper. Nothing notable, except that they do all of this having already left for work. The Atwoods’ make their two-hour commute in a 30-foot Winnebago, a comfortably sized vehicle that is not known for fuel efficiency. But the extra cost of driving a mobile home is more than offset by the reduced cost of their actual home, on the outskirts of the Bay Area.

The Atwoods may appear eccentric, but they are living out the latest version of the American dream. While the architects of the immeuble world are attempting to reintroduce what is often called a “sense of place” to the sprawling suburban landscape, the Atwoods have found that mobility itself is place enough. They are in good company. The federal government, automobile manufacturers, the communications industry, and the consumer market are collectively forging such a future, and it is incompatible with the good intensions of most urban design.

Steady advancements under the hood have pushed the automobile toward a technological revolution that, over the next fifty years, will alter our understanding of what it means to drive. The car of tomorrow for the freeway of tomorrow is no longer limited to the pages of Popular Science. It has entered the realm of government policy and corporate R&D. It is the white knight of the traffic engineering community as it struggles to deal with the safety and productivity concerns of congestion. It has even found advocates in pro-environment activists, who curiously link efficiency improvements on the nation’s freeways with sustainable design and an improved quality of life. Yet the quality of life that results from even a modest application of these technologies will be very different from that envisioned by architects, planners, and activists. Inside the car will be a new spatial experience, and outside will be a fundamentally different streetscape.

Traffic Management: Surveillance and Privacy

Traffic and weather are reported together on the radio, not as news but as phenomena. Traffic, like storm water, is seen as an unpredictable but finite quantity to be calculated and accommodated. No one ever asks why it rains, just where, when, and how much. Likewise, the great interest in traffic news never extends to its root causes.

In recent years the traffic report has moved to visual media as more people check the TV and the internet for traffic conditions. To make these reports more telegenic, the displays have borrowed from the graphic design of weather maps, as if traffic information was collected from a similarly advanced system of radars, ground sensors, and satellite imagery. This faux-tech theatricality serves as the media’s placeholder for a surveillance infrastructure gradually being put into place.

The town of Milton Keyes, UK, was one of the first to install such infrastructure. A computerized system called “Traffic Master” uses cameras at four-mile intervals along the town’s major arteries in order to identify traffic problems as they occur, then signaling to alleviate congestion. More advanced than a conventional traffic report, Traffic Master measures flow rates by reading license plates at one location and timing their arrival at the next camera down the road. At the end of each day, the system records the movement of these randomly selected people in its database.

A number of cities around the world now have these systems. Tokyo’s is the most extensive, with 14,000 sensors and 200 cameras monitoring traffic throughout the city. In the mid-80s, Hong Kong installed a similar network as a means of collecting tolls. On a monthly basis, drivers would receive an itemized bill for where they had driven and when. With the approaching handover of the city to communist China, such a sophisticated tool of government surveillance caused great public alarm, and the entire system was dismantled.

The US, by contrast, is seeing a rapid expansion of a system called E-ZPass, with six million participants nationwide. In Poughkeepsie, New York last year, information from E-ZPass was used as evidence in court to determine the where-abouts of an accused murderer.

The complexity of privacy in the public realm predates the automobile, but systemization has made the freeway the stage for modern privacy battles. Like the pedestrian world of Baudelaire’s flaneur, the automobile isolates its driver in a crowd; it is half sensory deprivation tank, half fishbowl. But the saving grace of pedestrian surveillance, so popular in the UK, is that it is not produced for public consumption. The freeway is another matter. Traffic management necessarily makes public movements public knowledge. Together with police surveillance, these systems are turning American freeways into panopticons, and they are largely exempt from the privacy legislation recently enacted for traditional telecommunication companies. Law enforcement itself has more permissive standards on the freeways. Although the US prides itself on having no national ID card, it has made the state driver’s license the de facto identification to do just about anything. Laws limiting searches and seizures have exceptions for the freeway, as do the parameters of acceptable racial profiling of criminals. The mantra of the driver’s education handbook is clear: driving is not a right. It’s a privilege.

There is no more salient evidence of the collapsing sphere of privacy than the 1994 chase of OJ Simpson on a Los Angeles freeway. This most personal of moments was broadcast live to the nation with video from traffic helicopters and audio from a car phone. Overpasses were crowded with voyeurs who knew exactly where Simpson would be, thanks to use of these technologies. Lest anyone believe that Mr. Simpson’s celebrity made this a unique circumstance, the footage of criminal activity taken from police cameras is now stock programming on much of reality-based television.

All that was Solid: The Demechanization of the Automobile

Up to 1980, cars had become sophisticated mechanical devices that, through the interfaces of the steering wheel, pedals, and gearshift, transferred the movements of the driver directly to the movements of the car. But as performance demands grew, circuitry was introduced into the sequence. Essential controls such as steering columns, brake linkages, and throttle cables are now commonly electronic. Like the keys of a computer keyboard, the steering wheel and pedals maintain a resemblance to the old mechanical controls out of familiarity.

Interrupting the mechanical connection to driving was the proverbial hole in the dike of automation for cars. As soon as programmability was introduced, engineers asked why these newly intelligent systems had to blindly react to input from fallible drivers. The first of these was the Antilock Breaking System, or ABS, which identifies a panic-driven “slam” on the pedal, takes control, and gradually applies brake pressure to prevent a skid. As with most safety improvements, drivers adjusted their carelessness accordingly, and accident rates among ABS cars are leveling back to average. The automotive engineers have registered this phenomenon not as a flaw in the device but as a flaw in the drivers.

This attitude is key to understanding the direction of these new technologies. Each effort to assist the driver with an automated procedure has been met with criticism from safety advocates, less out of mistrust of the technology then out of mistrust for how people interact with the technology, which then leads to even more sophisticated and autonomous systems. It is a slippery slope that reveals the manifest destiny of ever-increasing automation.

Much of the new electronics in cars are not related to mobility, but communicability. The two technological arenas that made sprawl possible—transportation and communication—are now converging. Phones and faxes have been the staple of the well-connected driver for the past decade, and televisions are already common in minivans. As personal computers are developed for automobiles, it must be asked: what will be the relationship between the physical and the electronic experience inside the car?

In their book, Converging Infrastructures, Lewis Branscomb and James Keller edited a collection of essays on systems engineering and the use of what they call the “national communications infrastructure” (NII) for “intelligent transportation systems” (ITS). This arena of research sees the task of efficient transportation as information management, including en-route driver information, central traffic control, collision avoidance, emissions testing, toll payment, roadside assistance, hazmat incident response, and precrash safety deployment both within and outside of the car. To the systems engineer, driving is an act of “navigating” through information, and just as navigation has become the metaphor for the internet, the internet may provide the best model for the new suburban mobility.

The US Military’s Navstar Global Positioning System, or GPS, is an important navigational tool for civilian watercraft and is gaining popularity in automobiles. General Motors has packaged GPS into a service called “OnStar,” now available in all of its vehicles. More than just a wayfinder, the OnStar system provides theft detection and retrieval; it will monitor the hundreds of electronic sensors in the engine and will tell you if there’s a problem; it detects when airbags have been deployed and notifies the EMS. It will even unlock the doors if you leave your keys in the car.

In this case, “it” is not actually an “it” but a “them.” The changes made to the car itself are modest—an otherwise disparate series of circuits is consolidated, connected to a cell phone, and a console is placed on the dashboard. The substance of the system is actually a central command center that monitors the car and then relays responses back to the driver. [1] Similar systems are now being developed with on-board cameras to track driver alertness. In case of an accident, video from the camera can be forwarded to the EMS to scan for injuries, and to municipalities to divert traffic from the area.

Systems like OnStar do have some self-imposed boundaries on intrusiveness. They won’t locate a wayward teenager on a joy ride, and the system can’t remotely control the car’s functions. [2] It will not, for instance, cut power to the engine when stolen or turn the hazards on after an accident. But the boundaries are fleeting. Last year, a Connecticut rental car company charged a customer $450 for speeding, which it calculated by comparing various locations from the car’s GPS device.

The Network Vehicle

A consortium of companies including IBM, Netscape, Sun, and Delco has completed a prototype of what it calls a Network Vehicle. It would be unfair to describe this “smart car,” as it is nicknamed, as a personal computer inside an automobile. It is more a hybrid of the two products. With IBM’s voice recognition technology, Delco’s windshield projection displays, Netscape’s internet software, and Java’s script wireless data transference, the interior space of this car has evolved in two remarkable directions. The Smart Car is a totally electronic environment from which to navigate the physical world, but it is also a totally physical environment for navigating the electronic world; not a box on a desk but an interface that one enters. In no other space is it conceivable that one might, while dictating an email, also tell a computer to turn up the music, lower the temperature, and adjust the seat. Combined with Daimler-Benz research on integrating the existing automotive electronics into a client / server architecture, it would be possible to control all of the essential functions of the car through this interface. So thorough is the concept that it is impossible to say whether the Network Vehicle is a car that talks or a computer that moves.

The commercial possibilities of a networked vehicle can already be seen in that microcosm of suburban sprawl, the supermarket. A few years ago, high-tech couponing debuted in stores in the form of a small wireless printer attached to the handle of shopping carts. As the cart approached certain privileged product displays, a signal would be sent from the display to the cart, and a coupon for that product would print out. Such surveillance-driven advertising would not shock any user of the internet. As the automobile becomes more networked, driving will surely see the same fate. Through existing devices, it is already possible to locate the nearest Pizza Hut, call and place an order, and be directed along the best route to get there. But what if such an impulse was in response to an unsolicited advertisement that popped up on the car’s windshield, perhaps as it approached the exit to said establishment? And by the way, this “it” is also a “them.” The McDonalds Corporation has already developed a partnership with E-ZPass for its use as a method of payment at two drive-throughs on Long Island, New York, and the OnStar system can search the databases of major hotel chains to find an available hotel room at the nearest exit.

The true profitability of the telecommunications industry and in particular these in-car devices is not the product itself, but its ability to deliver a captive market share. The commercial sign, once an attachment to the commercial building, has over the past fifty years been moving closer to the road, as the “shed” it was signifying ducked first behind parking lots, then behind greenery. [3] With Netscape projected onto the windshield, and OnStar communicating one’s location, it seems clear that the sign will soon be moving inside the car. At that point, it may not matter how far back from the road the actual building is, since the “sign” will take you there, or at least give you directions.

The suburban commercial district, once organized for browsing at 45 mph, has already started this reconfiguration. Pro-green zoning regulations in newer, more progressive suburbs mandate generous landscaping on the aprons of roads and freeways, often with land berms and high concrete walls and not a billboard in sight. As a result, newer shopping centers can be as enclaved as the gated communities they were built to serve. These municipalities’ efforts to beautify suburbia by purging it of all visual clues of commerce may produce a streetscape so a-spatial as to conjure nostalgic longings for the urbanity of the shopping strip.

The Automated Highway

The key to the automobile’s early victory over locomotion in the US rests in the steering wheel. While the train is navigated by the rail system, moving wherever the track switches determine it should move, the car navigates itself within the road system. From this simple difference, American politicians and corporations have long forged a moral connection between driving and no-less-than democracy itself. Yet that clarity blurs with invention of the limited access freeway, an oxymoronic term that hints at some of the complexities of the modern “open road.”

On the freeway, the relationship between mobility and freedom relies on an illusion of absolute personal control, despite the fact that freeway driving is a rote and predictable task and that the government has located the freeway by a set of not-altogether transparent political decisions. There’s a joyous faith in highly systematized behavior that has made the freeway’s automation a popular feature in any vision of a techno-topia. Norman Bel Geddes’ “Futurama” exhibit for General Motors at the 1939 New York World’s fair offered one of the first glimpses of the automated freeway. A model entitled “Motorway of 1960” showed a system with separate lanes for 50-, 75-, and 100-mph traffic. Radio towers located at five-mile intervals controlled lane transfers and even the distances between cars centrally. Since 1939 the American freeway system has been constructed faithfully to these fanciful images. Short of complete automation, the Motorway of 1960 arrived on schedule, particularly in the west where high-speed interchanges are preferred over the cloverleaf model. The ramps of the high-speed interchange between I-10 and I-610 West in Houston are so generous in their banking and smoothness that it is not completely necessary to have ones hands on the steering wheel while changing from west-bound to south-bound.

A giddy optimism once underlaid visions of the freeway’s role in a bourgeois utopia. Yet present conditions tell of a more Faustian struggle, as engineers and planners grapple with the endless congestion produced by the self-renewing, self-defeating freeway. Far from utopian, freeway congestion drains approximately $100 billion from the US economy each year. Auto accidents drain $150 billion. These figures once sounded the call to construct additional lanes to increase capacity, but that is rarely feasible today as many rights-of-way have been filled. The federal government’s new goal is to increase the capacity of the existing roadways. In 1991, Congress funded the National Automated Highway Consortium, a seven-year long, $1.47 billion project to study the feasibility of taking the driver out of the loop. Before it was terminated, the Consortium fleshed out a complete vision of what automated highways would look like.

The Automated Highway System concept, or AHS, employs the previously mentioned technologies to create dedicated high-speed lanes in freeways, similar to HOV lanes. Magnetic spikes shot into the asphalt at regular intervals would guide a car as it drove, keeping a safe distance between itself and other cars (a skill human drivers have yet to master). Reduced reaction time would allow up to 50 cars to “platoon” together safely at 100 mph with only six feet from bumper to bumper. Parallel lanes for acceleration and deceleration would be used to automatically join or break from these platoons as exits approached.

Converting existing freeways to the AHS would cost $10,000 per lane mile, about 1/100 the cost of adding conventional lanes, and with more than four times their capacity. The cars themselves would require an expensive conversion, with the addition of sensors and a central computer. But the shear convertibility is notable. So much silicon has been added to the car that its total automation is the equivalent of minor surgery.

To see the potential of augmenting manual driving with periods of automation, one need only to look at the impact of flight management systems (autopilot) on aircraft. Here, initial advancements in the efficiency and range of the aircraft were usurped by the fatigue of pilots in the increasingly complex cockpits. The integration of radar and gyroscopes with robotic aircraft made automatic navigation possible. Human pilots are still better at take-off and landing, but on the fixed routes of the airways autopilots perform more efficiently and allow the pilot to monitor more of the aircraft’s systems, or even to read, sleep, or conduct other business. In military aircraft, that typically means combat.

Many of the technological advancements in automating the freeway are coming from the US military, the original proponent of the interstate. Unlike GPS, in which military technology trickled down and was dumbed down for civilian use, components of the AHS systems were developed simultaneously for the Departments of Transportation and Defense. Warfare being merely an aggressive form of transportation, this is not without logic. Researchers like NAVLAB at Carnegie Melon studied the automated highway in tandem with Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) for the Pentagon. The UGV surely had the ultimate feature in automobile safety: remove the driver and passengers altogether.

One of the members of the AHS consortium was General Motors. Critics questioned the appropriateness of GM’s involvement in the research, particularly in the wake of a previous GM consortium that successfully dismantled the rail systems of numerous transit companies throughout the country. “With no trains or subways and lots of expensively equipped cars riding on highways improved through public funding, GM’s technology looks like just the kind of mass-transit system a major auto manufacturer could get behind.” [4]

One need only to envision five busses “platooning” down the freeway at 100 mph to see the impact of these technologies on mass transit, and the threat to traditional metropolitan rail corridors. Public and private vehicles of all sizes would be able to link and unlink on the AHS, continuously weaving and reweaving impromptu communities of people, units joining and breaking off while the platoon continues indefinitely. To ask how mass transit could compete with the AHS is to miss the point of their convergence. The same technology that could allow a bus to platoon down a fixed guideway could also allow trains to subdivide and break off into an infinitely complex network of routes. The Automated Highway System may not simply be the logical advancement of the freeway. It may be the logical advancement of mobility. If implemented, it will provide a true network of omnidirectional routes and be the nail on the coffin of the traditional transit corridor.

Different countries have different motives for their own ITS research, from Canada’s concern for safety to Japan’s pursuit of productivity. The US government warns of the social and environmental impact of a clogged highway system. Under the Clinton Administration the Department of Transportation argued that the reduction in congestion from the AHS would reduce emissions by 20 percent per vehicle. Yet, in a display of great cognitive dissonance, the DOT did not address the possibility that a freeway system of quadrupled capacity would also see quadrupled use. While the DOT’s “Livable Communities Initiative” encouraged denser pedestrian enclaves clustered around mass-transit systems, the DOT’s AHS research stood to become the greatest pro-sprawl program since the interstate system itself. Federal budget cuts have forestalled the issue, but the interest of both the public and private sectors is so focused on how to get from A to B that little attention has been paid to either A or B, and particularly to their even-increasing distance from one another.

Conclusion

In the next fifty years, freeways will become heavily monitored and highly managed thoroughfares. Their capacity and efficiency will rise as a result of a fully networked dashboard. The still increasing drive time will demand ever-expanding forms of communication and entertainment to be integrated with the car. Electronic driver safety devices will compensate for reduced concentration, which will itself reduce the need for concentration. Browsing for goods and services will be through the virtual as much as the physical landscape, and urban geography will reorder itself accordingly. A substantial amount of driving may be completely automated, specifically that which traverses the greatest distances. With the hands removed from the steering wheel, and the increased size of vehicles, the car becomes a fully architectural space.

The bodies of research described here challenge such basic distinctions as those between car and train, car and computer, car and street, and car and home; and the character of suburban spaces are becoming more similar even as the spaces themselves move farther apart. That is what is unspoken yet absolutely implicit in all of these advancements: you will drive more. The more lucrative job, the cheaper house, the better school, the nicer mall, will always be a bit farther away. And you make the drive happily, because it is not simply that you will go farther, faster, but that you will do so while performing any number of activities previously limited to the office, pub, or boudoir. So your home is an hour from your office, but it doesn’t matter because your office is your home, not to be confused with your home office, which is at home. And besides, your car is your office and your car is your home.

As mobility takes another leap forward, the response of many architects and planners has been to retreat into traditional roles designing traditional places. Yet if we continue to ignore the urban impact of these new transportation technologies, then we may be as ill prepared for the next phase of suburban growth as we were for the previous one.

Notes

[1] Located in Livonia, a suburb of Detroit, Michigan.

[2] A police report of a stolen car must be filed before a search is done.

[3] Venturi, Robert et. al, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972).

[4] The Dallas Morning News, August 7, 1997, 1A.

Bibliography

Branscomb, Lewis M. and James H. Keller. Converging Infrastructures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.

“Coming Up Fast: The Futuristic Smart Car is No Longer a Dream.” Sunday Times, April 26, 1998, Features.

Congress, Nita. “Smart Road, Smart Car: The Automated Highway System,” Public Roads 60, no. 2 (Fall 1996.): 46.

“Footloose and Hands-Free: High-Tech Cars Go with the Flow, Steering, Braking Automatically.” The Dallas Morning News, August 7, 1997, 1A.

“Future Shocks: Auto Drives Itself.” The Arizona Republic, December 15, 1997, 1A.

Hadfield, Peter. “Smart Cars Steer Round Traffic Jams.” New Scientist, April 26, 1997, 22.

Hauss-Fitton, Barbara. “Futurama, New York World’s Fair 1939-40.” Rassegna 16, no. 60, (1994): 55–69.

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems, Piscataway, NJ, 1997.

NAVLAB Group. Carnegie Melon University, July 18, 1998.

“OnStar Global Positioning System.” The Toronto Star, November 22, 1997, G2.

Parkes, Andrew M. and Stig Franzen, ed. Driving Future Vehicles. London: Taylor & Francis, 1993.

Port, Otis. “Your Car May be Smarter than You.” Business Week 3584 (June 29, 1998): 85.

Selingo, Jeffrey. “It’s the Cars, Not the Tires, That Squeal.” The New York Times, October 25, 2001).

“The Brains of the Operation: Engineers study Whether Drivers Can Match Wits with their Technologically Smart Cars.” Chicago Tribune, November 13, 1997, N1.

“The Cutting Edge: Road Scholars.” Los Angeles Times, January 12, 1998, D1.

US Department of Transportation. “Intelligent Vehicle Initiative.” July 18, 1998.

Whelan, Richard. Smart Highways, Smart Cars. Boston: Artech House, 1995.