A leading transport technology expert is calling for manually driven vehicles to be banned from entering the autonomous urban highways of a future smart city.

Wards Auto reports that Charity Rumery, HERE’s head of automotive and industrial sales-Americas region, made the suggestion during an online auto show discussion in the US. Wards Auto notes that while “this sort of constraint on personal liberties has been voiced before, it seldom gets aired by a senior executive of a global automotive supplier to major automakers”.

The suggestion is for all human-driven lorries, cars, motorcycles, bicycles and even pedestrians being barred from entering the city highway infrastructure set aside for driverless vehicles. In effect, it says, “humanity would have to be herded into specific pedestrian zones while the robots take over total control of the transportation systems of a future smart city”.

It quotes her as saying, ““You can close it [the city] off for non-autonomous vehicles and then manage the autonomous vehicles seamlessly through the orchestration of the infrastructure and the V2X communications. You can also plan things like public transportation around that, so that you do have a mobility graph for each and every city footprint that’s unique to that city but also optimised for the end consumer.”

(Picture – Yay Images)