#172 Driving lllegal?! Transportation Expert “Gridlock Sam” Shares Future of Traffic

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, "Gridlock Sam," America's most celebrated transportation expert, describes in his book about 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. Who is "Gridlock Sam"? A well chosen name for Sam Schwartz, who has nearly 40 years of experience in the field of transportation engineering and traffic safety and is considered a worldwide authority in traffic, highway, bridge, transit and parking systems. As the former New York City traffic commissioner at the New York City Department of Transportation, he was responsible for an 8,000-person agency, $350 million expense budget and a $700 million capital budget. Mr. Schwartz is a visiting scholar at the Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management at New York University and a member of the New York Transportation Journal Editorial Board. For 25 years he has also been a professor at Long Island University and Cooper Union, where he founded the Infrastructure Institute and is the author of a fascinating look at driverless vehicles NO ONE AT THE WHEEL: Driverless Cars and the Road of the Future. https://bit.ly/SamSchwartzBook