Driverless Cars. Image with appreciation to Stanford University at http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/.

In 1902, there were 17 million horses and only 23,000 cars in the United States but six years later, Henry Ford rolled the first Model T off the production line at the Piquette Avenue Plant in Detroit. By 1921, 387,000 miles of paved roads transformed the United States to a driving economy. The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 continues to finance improvements, including Boston’s Big Dig. Was Henry Ford prescient in calling his invention an “auto-mobile?” Will we soon be a nation of driverless cars? Should Nafta be expanded to link autonomous smart highways from South to North, in a new Via Panam?

Building the World Blog by Kathleen Lusk Brooke and Zoe G Quinn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.