I sat before a huge filing drawer, elbow-deep in forgotten paperwork in the city archives.
By random chance, I pulled out a stack of paper with a brown cover, stamped in all lowercase Helvetica type.
The title instantly grabbed me, so I leafed through the document to discover flashy ’70s-style airbrush artwork depicting a futuristic mode of transportation.
The title was, “Downtown People Mover.”
I had heard of this before. In the late ’60s, there was a brief surge in urban transit innovation where cities attempted to come up with newer, cleaner methods of transportation. One such innovation was an automated monorail system known as the downtown people mover (DPM). These systems were like next-gen streetcars that could be operated from a central location with no drivers.
The federal government’s newly formed Urban Mass Transportation Administration (UMTA) held a national competition for cities looking to adopt the new technology. Thirty-five cities applied, and a handful were approved.
Ultimately only four DPMs were built: the reference design at West Virginia University, one in Detroit, one in Miami, and one in Jacksonville, Florida.
I was holding in my hands one of the winning designs that was eventually abandoned. It showed all the places in Baltimore that could be connected, how many people it could shuttle, and how much it would cost. Over 40 years later, it still looked like a solid proposal.
History, however, tells us how this abandoned project probably would have gone. The DPMs that were completed have been nothing short of a resounding failure.
Detroit’s system, designed to carry 15 million riders a year, averages only 2 million a year and at a cost of over $4 per mile per rider (Detroit’s bus systems are less than $1 per mile).
Jacksonville’s system, known as the Skyway, expected 100,000 riders a month but peaked at less than one-third of that. In 2009, it only drew in $431,000 in revenue.
Okay… So What?
This story is important because these failed projects were our first major forays into driverless transportation systems. With the world’s leading tech innovators promising driverless cars in the next couple of years, we’re living through the second chapter of the same story.
Drivers are a liability. Look at the Germanwings Flight 4U9525 crash, or the May 12th Amtrak derailment that killed six. Across all forms of transportation, the driver is the crucial point of failure.
Car manufacturers are incrementally automating car actions: Driver assist systems and automated parking are already features on the market. Computer companies are working on sharpening the sensors of the driverless car.
And general tech companies are building the platforms upon which driverless cars will exist, Google and Apple being the most notable examples.
The pace at which we are striving to replace human error is shockingly fast, and it promises to revolutionize all kinds of ancillary aspects of automotive culture.
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Without a human deciding the route, speed, and response of a vehicle, how will insurance issues be handled? With automated pace control, how will municipalities handle speeding violations? Will speeding violations even exist? Will long-haul trucking — the most common job in much of the United States — disappear?
There are so many potential disruptions in this space, and it hasn’t even begun yet.
The first to market with a massive disruption are the biggest winners.
Chinese search company Baidu (NASDAQ: BIDU) is reportedly preparing its own driverless car for launch as early as the end of this year. Baidu has already done joint research on driver-assist technologies with German manufacturer BMW. That partnership had a goal of developing a “semi-autonomous vehicle” in as few as three years.
While this latest rumor doesn’t name BMW (XETRA: BMW) as the partner, it is possible that this research agreement has yielded fruits earlier than expected.
If these two companies launch a driverless vehicle in China — the world’s largest auto market in sales volume — within the next two quarters, they will become the first real leaders in the space.
Good Investing,
Tim Conneally
For the last seven years, Tim Conneally has covered the world of mobile and wireless technology, enterprise software, network hardware, and next generation consumer technology. Tim has previously written for long-running software news outlet Betanews and for financial media powerhouse Forbes.
