Another consideration to make before self-driving cars are fully deployed – how can we make sure their use is equitable?

“There are three key areas that we need to focus on: policy making, data sharing, and technology deployment,” Dr. Corey Harper, an Assistant Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, told Freethink. He explained that policy could promote self-driving car-sharing companies to equally distribute cars so that no matter where you are, whether you are downtown, in the suburbs, or in low or high-income areas, your wait for a self-driving car is about the same…

“We make a lot of decisions without considering some of these under-served populations,” Harper said. “Moving forward, policy data in the technologies we’re deploying is going to be very important for us to get towards that more sustainable, smart city that we all envision.”