Out-of-the-Box Keynotes Bring New Ideas to IBTTA's Managed Lanes, AET and Technology Summit
Get set for two provocative, out-of-the-box keynote speakers when you attend IBTTA’s AET, Managed Lanes & Technology Summit, April 22-24, 2018 in Charlotte, North Carolina.
“Our members don’t attend our summits or conferences because they want to be comfortable,” says IBTTA Executive Director and CEO Patrick Jones. “They expect to learn and be challenged with new thinking that they may or may not like and may or may not agree with.”
The keynote addresses Sunday afternoon by Alex Roy, Editor-at-Large for The Drive, and Tuesday morning by Andy Boenau, Director of Mobility Strategy at the Gotcha Group, will give participants some keen and unexpected insights on where the evolution of surface transportation may—or may not—be headed.
‘From My Cold, Dead Hands’
Alex Roy, an award-winning rally race driver who’s set or broken multiple endurance records, will come across as a contrarian to the transportation professionals who are looking ahead to an era of all-autonomous vehicles. His Human Driving Manifesto is illustrated with a steering wheel and the words: “From my cold, dead hands.”
It isn’t that Roy doesn’t see a future in autonomous or electric cars. He actually thinks the transition is inevitable. But he’s certain those emerging technologies will co-exist with internal combustion vehicles and augmented human driving for a very long time.
“It’s not about speed,” Roy writes. “It’s about freedom. It’s about choice. Car in the garage. Keys in hand. Hands on wheel. We choose where we go and when we go, and we choose how we get there.”
As autonomous vehicles gain prominence and momentum, “an army of experts would have us believe freedom and choice are a bad thing,” he adds. “From behind the banner of safety, they claim autonomous technology will save us from the tyranny and danger of human control.”
But if safety were really the concern, he contends, “the billions invested in self-driving cars would have gone to subsidizing free professional driving school, raising licensing standards, and making critical safety technologies like seat belts, airbags, ABS, and automatic emergency braking (AEB) standard as soon as they were invented.”
The Most Basic Forms of Travel
In some ways, Andy Boenau comes from the opposite side of the house. He helps his clients plan and implement bikeshare and rideshare systems, serves on advisory bodies in New Urbanism and transportation planning, and is the author of a 114-page primer, Emerging Trends in Transportation Planning.
Boenau sees walking and bicycling as “the basic forms of travel,” but states that “modern methodologies for predicting future travel patterns, traffic congestion, parking demand, and funding priorities are based on assumptions that are incompatible with walking and bicycling.”
That creates what he sees as a “critical dilemma” for transportation professionals: “either go with the flow by prioritizing car traffic, or protect human life even if it means inconveniencing car traffic.”
After teaching thousands of professional planners and engineers how to improve the “safety and vitality of transportation systems” by shifting their design philosophy, Boenau sees hope on the horizon. “Communities are eager for experts to embrace strategies that protect human life,” he says. And “transportation professionals have the tools and resources to improve public health and safety, restore the freedom to choose travel modes, and revitalize towns and cities.”
Sign up today for IBTTA’s AET, Managed, Lanes & Technology Summit, April 22-24, 2018 in Charlotte, NC.