In this part, I want to introduce the daily life of one Swedish sdboy, John, to show the change that self-driving would bring to the future lifestyle. Using this interesting and novel way to show my ideas is to let people better understand and experience the changes of lifestyles in the future.
In Friday morning. John is going to school alone by a driverless aircraft. In the past, his mother had to drive him to school in person for half an hour. Today some of the course are held in the suburbs. The teacher has booked several flying boxes to form a temporary camp, which is convenient for study, work and relax. After school, he went home with his classmates. Such residential streets now become comfortable, which make more people are willing to stay in the streets and enjoy their leisure time. In the evening, because the family has decided to come back to hometown and visit his grandparents this weekend, so his father order a driverless room vehicle. John can arrive their hometown after a nice dream.
Sounds good, right? However, will everything really be as good as I expect? People can go directly to where they want to go, even directly inside the building. Pedestrians on the street are getting fewer and fewer because people don’t “need” to walk on the street anymore. The dull streets, in turn, make people even less want to stay on the streets. In the end, there will be no one would stay and walk on the street as before. Street, once an important social public place in the city, will slowly die in the future.
This thesis aimed to discuss what would the future streets and lifestyles be in the context of Self-driving technology and I two typical streets in Gothenburg are chosen and designed to show my research and thinking about this issue. There are many different characteristics between these two streets, which is conducive to a more comprehensive view of the future streets and people’s lifestyles.
As I mentioned at the end, I am not sure whether Self-driving will eventually lead to the ‘death of the street’. This question is interesting and important, so future studies could research on this issue through questionnaire survey, experimental simulation and other methods.
To be honest, it is not easy to discuss things that have not happened and the development of things often exceeds people’s imagination. However, history has proved that people’s fantasies and imaginations sometimes will promote the development of the society and that’s why I think it is interesting and valuable to research such a topic. I’m not saying that the changes mentioned in the thesis will happen in the future, I just want to discuss some possibilities and make dialectical evaluation of them.