Can Robotization of Transportation Make Istanbul Livable?

It is a fact that the individual use of technological applications has revolutionized our perception of space in every area of our lives. So how can all these systems operating on different logical platforms be connected and integrated in cities where people, vehicles and information constantly circulate and collide with each other? New technologies that are set to be part of our lives soon will be providing new opportunities to plan cities in an environmentalist framework, and to improve the quality of life in general.

It is obvious that the changes in near future will come from the technologies used in transportation rather than the form of transportation itself, and these changes will make life easier, while also offering some advantages on the basis of infrastructure. For instance, it is strongly anticipated that the use of electrical vehicles will dramatically increase in transportation in the next 20 years. This shift in the technological paradigm will lead to a gradual abandonment of the carbon-based fuel infrastructure, and instead turn the tide towards the development of battery technologies and wider use of charging stations on private and public scales. “The Trojan Horse” that will cause the main structural change, however, will not be the progress in fuel technologies alone, but also the assembling of a network of autonomous vehicles without drivers that are created by the integration of secured artificial intelligence applications with transportation vehicles. These “robotized” networks will decrease the number of both private vehicle owners and vehicles in circulation, reducing the act of owning a car to the act of subscribing to a transportation service. A safer and more efficient traffic network will be possible thanks to the systems consisting of sensors and tools in constant communication with each other, and are supported by artificial intelligence.

This is why companies like Uber and Lyft, which develop personal taxi applications, want to invest in autonomous vehicle technologies. These mobile taxi applications, in a bid to become transportation services, are cooperating with automotive companies such as Tesla and General Motors in efforts to develop software and hardware systems for mutual use. By integrating personal mobility vehicles with pre-launched or planned public transportation systems, these computer-aided transportation logics will produce new means of transportation. As the recent pilot project in Helsinki shows, networks enhanced by mobile phone applications will efficiently reduce the number of vehicles, the surface area designated for parking lots, and the time spent by users to travel within city limits.

Our project “The Impact of Autonomous Vehicles on the Urbanization of Los Angeles”, which we are currently running in the tech-labs at the UCLA with the support of Tesla Motors and Los Angeles Municipality, reinforces these technological predictions. Research based on the city’s general demography, population density, usage of lands and transportation models, predicts that in the case of autonomous vehicles reaching 35% of use in the next 20 years, the traffic jams will be reduced in half and the surface of parking areas will decrease by 47%--even as the total number of the vehicles remains the same. These numbers pave the way for regulations that ban drivers from parking in city center areas, and prevent streets from being occupied by parked vehicles. Such regulations will make the application of pedestrian-oriented design principles possible, thus maintaining the social and economic vitality of public spaces. A network of robotic vehicles that are fewer in number and are in use for common services, with temporal returns to the parking lot only to recharge, will offer new alternatives to the old robes of cities that have been for years organizing their urban patterns by focusing on automobiles.

The integration of public transportation systems with personal vehicles on the main roads, downscaling of vehicle sizes and reducing the number of private vehicle ownerships, with autonomous transport technologies, give way to valuable opportunities in solving the traffic problem in fast-growing cities like Istanbul; where complex structural problems reside, with historical and demographical situations blocking any possible change in the city-form. In addition, it simultaneously holds the potential to reintroduce to the city life and economy the vast passive areas and buildings that are only used as parking spaces. These new technologies, by cutting down the need to invest in infrastructures on a local scale, will allow for more financial resources to be employed for building new systems which will carry more people to further away destinations, as well as inspiring new architectural typologies. Robotization of municipality services such as garbage collection or road cleaning will make these services more stable and cost-efficient, and improve the quality of life in the city without causing any interruption to it.

With the new opportunities that these technologies bring to the table, crowded cities such as Istanbul, where an order of disorder dominates, can solve their transportation problems that are in direct relation to the quality of life in the city by avoiding heavy investments in infrastructure. By forcing us to reconsider the architectural reflections of traditional transportation methods, autonomous transport technologies allow for the removal of any sense of threat from density of activities in city centers even in mega cases like Istanbul, and make it possible instead to enhance social and economic dynamics by contemporary architectural and city planning principles.