Autonomous Vehicles, Car Seats and Strollers, Virtual Power Plants

Okay, okay, RantWoman WILL talk about the future of transportation, autonomous and / or electric vehicles, and renewable energy--including Elon Musk--all in one post.

First, RantWoman is still getting her brain home and necessary inspirations duly blogged about after the virtual  #ACBLeadership21. RantWoman has not gone looking on YouTube to see whether the six-hour recordings of the live-streams might have been broken down into digestible bits. Nor is RantWoman going to take that on here. There were some great sessions on autonomous vehicles. Lots of blind transportation geeks get really excited about autonomous vehicles. RantWoman is a huge skeptic for two reasons: kids and wheelchairs. 

RantWoman gets that there are a large number of technological and regulatory issues to be worked out for autonomous vehicles to be viable. And RantWoman would be much more confident that the autonomous vehicle future will meet the needs of the RantFamily and other families like RantWoman if some of the rosy demos featured any wheelchair users at all and even better, a person who has limited mobility and cannot do things like secure themselves before travel. RantWoman could even be coddled further toward enthusiastically welcoming the AV future if the products' current public faces included people with various kinds of mobility or other challenges.

And while RantWoman is at it about pushing the autonomous vehicle envelop with actual humans, let's talk about car seats and trip chaining. Trip chaining is a travel pattern that may or may not involve a commute to and from work but that definitely does involve multiple stops, perhaps to drop children at school or daycare, go to medical appointments, do shopping, and perhaps other errands. Very often trip chaining is about how women use the transportation system and is not necessarily well represented in the current data collection processes that now feed algorithm development. RantWoman would definitely much prefer realistic scenarios that might feed algorithm development reflect actual travel patterns.

The other more visible problem: what to do about car seats if the autonomous vehicles are to be shared-use. Car seats are a vital safety measure for small children. They are a pain to install or to move out of the way if for instance 4 adults are wanting to travel in a vehicle where children often travel. It is also a nightmare to expect parents who need to use rideshare or autonomous vehicles to lug around the car seats for a whole day's activities. RantWoman does not want to hear that these problems can be solved somewhere down the line. RantWoman wants to see and hear use cases about these topics mentioned in every gee whiz marketing presentation so that public comments and insights can be incorporated into design and other planning from the outset.

Readers will notice RantWoman has not mentioned blind people and service animals at all. RantWoman definitely means to broaden everyone's minds.

But wait. Tesla? Virtual Powerplants?What's Elon Musk doing here, besides showing up twice in the last couple days in RantWoman's various communications streams?

The first time Elon Musk came up, RantWoman burst out laughing. RantWoman is not actually a giant expert in all of Elon Musk's innovation concepts. What stickes in RantWoman's mind so far is some ignorant and dismissive comment Musk made about public transportation and people who rely on it. Rantwoman does not remember the comment, only that it spawned the Twitter hashtag #GreatThingsThatHappenedOnTransit, a point RantWoman is a great believer about. .

But after Elon Musk and the concept of Virtual Power Plants, distributed networks of renewable power sources came up again, RantWoman decided to give up and check out some videos.

Ta-dah!. Youtube will generously fill your virtual feed with many more sources about which, feel free, to followup on. 

And, yes, here too, RantWoman would find it encouraging if the presentations included different real life scenarios or connected people who live in multi-unit housing rather than single family homes. But tackling landuse on top of all the provocative comments already here would be too much for this blog post.