Hop, Skip, Go. Stephen Baker
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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
FIRST EDITION
© John Rossant and Stephen Baker 2019
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Source ISBN: 9780008309480
Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008309497
Version 2019-10-23
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To the young ones,
Alex Rossant, Sloane Wright, and Louise Craver,
who will have so many different choices
when it comes to moving around.
CONTENTS
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
1: Hit Enter to Print Car
2: LA: Crawling to Topanga Canyon
3: 800 Electric Horses
4: Jurassic Detroit
5: Helsinki: Weaving Magic Carpet Apps
6: In the Company of Hawks and Nightcrawlers
7: Dubai: Grasping for the Cutting Edge
8: Idiot Savants at the Wheel
9: Shanghai: Petri Dish on the Huangpu
10: Squadrons of Pack Drones
Conclusion: Minutes, Meters, and Moolah
Acknowledgments
Notes
List of Searchable Terms
Praise for Hop, Skip, Go
About the Authors
Also by Stephen Baker
About the Publisher
Where have you been your whole life? Think of all the places: home, school, work, restaurants, the gym. Maybe Carnival in Rio, a cheap hotel in Paris? All those memories and routines involved moving your body from one place to another. Movement is such a constant in our lives that it’s easy to overlook. It occupies hours of each day and devours a good share of our money. It’s central to our existence, nearly on a par with eating. If we didn’t move, we’d never see each other. Now, as we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, the ways we move are changing dramatically.
At about this point, as we describe this book, people often interrupt and say, “Driverless cars, right?”
What’s coming is more than just one instance of robotic navigation, and much bigger. You can see it gearing up around the world. Overwhelmed by traffic and wheezing from smog, cities are confronting the limits of the century-old automobile economy and taking steps to rein it in. Many are extending greenways and building bike lanes. Some, like Madrid, are starting to ban cars altogether from city centers. Others are charging fees to drive in congested areas while presiding over a proliferation of bike- and car-shares. At the same time, a technology explosion is unleashing a new generation of networked machines and services. And yes, it’s true, the automobile, step-by-step, is turning into a robot.
The car we all know, the gas-gulping machine we drive, has had quite a century. Our urban geography has molded itself to its demands. Its networks of highways gave birth to new suburbs, while developers carved out vast downtown acreages for parking lots. Cities grew into planned preserves for countless herds of these four-wheeled creatures, Serengetis for cars and trucks. That automotive monoculture spread around the world, from Los Angeles and Caracas to Moscow and, more recently, Beijing and New Delhi. The car reshaped the surface of the planet and poisoned the air above.
While the automobile isn’t going away, it is losing its primacy. Over the next decade, many of us will find new ways to move. This next stage of human mobility, unlike the last, will not be defined by a single iconic technology. Instead we’ll be faced with a host of choices, most of them tracked and mediated by digital networks. Where it works, this arrangement will be greener, cheaper, faster, and safer than today’s smoggy and gridlocked status quo. The financial impact, for everything from households to national economies, will be profound. Once again, mobility will reshuffle our industrial landscape, juggle the timetables of our lives, and reshape our cities. It will also weigh heavily, for better or worse, on the future of our planet.
Much of the change ahead is tied to digital knowledge—a sprouting awareness of where we are, where we want to go, and what’s available to take us there. This intelligence poses a profound contrast to the status quo of the automobile age, which has been marked by abject ignorance.
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