Autonomous vehicles and our future

If we consider the history of American transportation in terms of an apt metaphor-a highway-we might note several so-called forks in the road where we've taken one path rather than another, and, as Robert Frost would say, "that has made all the difference."
In the early 20th century, when the automobile was morphing from a tinkerers' fad into a feasible form of transportation, the internal combustion engine wasn't the only option. The most popular means of propulsion was steam, but a boiler could take 45 minutes to heat up on a cold day. Gasoline-powered cars were noisy, dirty and hard to shift. Cars powered by electricity, however, were on the rise.
At their peak, almost 34,000 electric cars were registered in the United States, more than those powered by gasoline.
The path toward the steam-powered car was probably always a dead end, but the choice for gasoline over electric was never inevitable.
Or maybe it was. In 1912 the electric starter was invented, doing away with the difficult, dangerous hand crank. Soon, affordable gasoline-powered cars were rolling off the assembly line, and new sources of crude oil had been discovered, as well as new extraction technologies.
So America embraced the greater power and range of the internal combustion engine, which, in turn, began to reshape America and to reinforce another choice at another fork in the road: the preference for the personal, privately owned vehicle over public transportation.
This choice wasn't inevitable, either. Nearly everyone likes cars, but other countries have chosen to develop and maintain a clean, efficient, comfortable and very fast public transportation infrastructure. We could do this in America, as well-or maybe "could have done" is the right verb tense.
Our reasons for failing to do so often involve the argument that our cities are farther apart than those in Europe or that, maybe, we prize our independence more than the Spaniards do theirs. But these arguments sound more like rationalizations than reasons.
The fact is, we just like cars. Henry Ford was an American, and our nation was blessed with an abundance of hydrocarbons. And we were always willing to find ways to get more.
Now it feels as if another fork in the road looms ahead; one choice appears to lead to the self-driving vehicle.
What an appealing notion! One unacknowledged deficit of the personal vehicle is the amazing amount of unproductive time we spend driving them. According to a study by Harvard Health Watch, if you're an average driver with an average lifetime, you'll spend more than four years sitting behind a wheel doing nothing more useful or enjoyable than listening to the radio.
The dream of the self-driving vehicle is swift, efficient transportation without the tedious, unskilled work of driving, which consumes time that could be spent working, reading, watching movies, playing video games, surfing the web, eating, sleeping, drinking and whatever else you could do with four full years of extra life.
But at present the true self-driving vehicle is in the same hypothetical category as the "knowledge pill," the shortcut longed for by middle school students who are being forced to learn American history. Maybe self-driving vehicles and knowledge pills aren't impossible, but they're so far in the future that we can't afford to stop looking at alternatives that are already available.
So this is the point to which our transportation choices have led. On one hand, we have the traditional automobile, which is inefficient, climate-destroying and deadly-nearly 100 people a day are killed in car accidents.
And then we have self-driving cars.
I wonder if it's possible to backtrack a little. Those who cannot imagine other possibilities have never ridden the train from Barcelona to Madrid: it's smooth, clean, comfortable and always on time. You can read, sleep, watch movies, surf the web or walk down to the bar car. An elegant dinner comes with your choice of five kinds of wine, all while the distance is being consumed at a steady 200 miles per hour.