Local opinion: Self-driving cars: A better kind of wrongness

The Arizona Daily Star recently published an opinion column by John M. Crisp entitled “I have a car that drives itself; you should have one, too.” Mr. Crisp may think so, but I disagree. Thirty billion people on this planet with 30 billion cars is not going to work. Mr. Crisp highlights the annual “deadly tally” of automobile crashes resulting in injuries and death costing millions and billions of dollars.

America’s love affair with the automobile has resulted in urban/suburban sprawl (Phoenix and Tucson being two prime examples) with its wasteful consumption of land, energy and time, tending to isolate people from each other and community life. Roads, roads and more roads (think of the RTA), parking lots, Big Box stores, McMansions and our addiction to petroleum all leading to climate change, global warming, etc, etc.

Mr. Crisp is 100% correct when he says “America probably took the wrong path a century ago when it chose private vehicles powered by internal combustion engines over electrified public transportation.” And he is 100% wrong to think self-driving cars (whether gas-powered or electric) are the answer. They are what architect Paolo Soleri called “a better kind of wrongness” — a term he devised to describe so-called improvements to inherently dysfunctional systems — in this case, the automobile-defined (designed) cities of only one or a few stories high, stretching outward in sprawl mile after mile after mile.

Soleri was a professor and taught at Arizona State University in the College of Architecture in the 1950s and ’60s. In 1969, the MIT Press published Soleri’s book "Arcology: The City in the Image of Man." Arcology is a term he coined signifying the fusion of architecture and ecology. In a nutshell, Arcology is the reversal and inversion of urban sprawl toward the inner limits of compact, cooperative, multi-functional city that minimizes waste while maximizing the efficient circulation of people and resources, employing multiuser structures that exploit solar orientation for lighting, cooling, food production, and esthetic impact. A multistory habitat (with no cars) where people walk, ride bikes or take other modes of public transportation as envisioned by Soleri is the only alternative to urban sprawl.

Universal self-driving automobiles? I think not. Not having to shell out 40 to 60 thousand dollars to purchase a car… not having to recharge it or fill it up with gas every week … not having to take it in for oil changes or routine maintenance. Just think of all the water that would be saved by not having to take it to the car wash every couple of weeks. Just think of all the lives that would be saved — 6,000 injured and more than 100 killed every day, according to you.

Yes, Mr. Crisp. If 50 years ago we, as a nation, had taken to heart what Paolo Soleri envisioned our cities and towns would or could be — now we, as a nation, probably would be a more relaxed and tranquil country. But it is not too late to change course. How about building an Arcosanti/Tucson in Tucson’s downtown … and help save the planet in the process?