Where Are Autonomous Vehicles Taking Us?

New transportation or mobility technologies have the power to disrupt the social, economic, and political landscape, exemplified by the introduction of the automobile over a century ago. The resultant and accumulated impacts have significantly changed how and where people live, interact, and work today. As cities shape, and are shaped by, prevailing transportation options, the arrival of autonomous vehicles suggests a new era of mobility and therefore new influences on urban society and form. To date, most of the research on autonomous vehicles has addressed the engineering challenges of vehicle design, while the social implications have been largely ignored. Often, the new mobility technologies are launched before the social context has been analyzed and implications understood. This collection of work presents current research on these new autonomous driving technologies and how they interact with urban society.