Mobility Expert: Ban Non-Autonomous Vehicles From Smart Cities

Manually driven vehicles should be banned from entering the autonomous urban highways of a future smart city.

That’s the ideal proposed by Charity Rumery, head of automotive and industrial sales-Americas region, for mapping giant HERE Technologies. While this sort of constraint on personal liberties has been voiced before, it seldom gets aired by a senior executive of a global automotive supplier to major automakers.

The result of this move could see all human-piloted vehicles, trucks, cars, motorcycles, bicycles and even pedestrians being barred from entering the city highway infrastructure. In effect, humanity would have to be herded into specific pedestrian zones while the robots take over total control of the transportation systems of a future smart city.

Rumery (below, left) floated the proposal during an online Q’d Up Mobility briefing, hosted by the North American International Auto Show organizers, to highlight the advantages 5G is hoped to bring automotive connectivity.

The briefing’s three expert speakers, also including Jeff Frantz, general manager of Verizon Location Technology, and Sameer Vuyyuru, director of business development for communication service providers with Amazon Web Services, broadly agreed that 5G coupled with edge computing and access to the cloud will play a vital role in improving road safety and accelerating the adoption of autonomous driving technology.

However, Rumery dropped her bombshell at the end of the hour-long briefing when asked by moderator Glenn Stevens, executive director-MICHauto, what she thought the autonomous future would look like.

Charity Rumery HERE_0

Earlier, the three discussed the importance of vehicle-location technologies in advancing the push toward automated driving.

“Right now the benefits (of connectivity) are in safety and convenience,” Rumery says. “When you think about driving your car, situation awareness of location technology, showing exactly where you are in the context of the roadway around you, with super low latency to communicate to provide something like hazard warnings to react in real-time. Right now, we are already seeing the safety and convenience benefits, such as self-parking, and lots of other things are unfolding because that infrastructure is coming into place.”