Image credit: Lucy Fisher / CC BY 2.0Instead of wholeheartedly embracing advances in technology, presenters and attendees at Urbanism Next (a workshop sponsored by UO Portland and the Sustainable Cities Initiative) cautioned that city planners and policy makers should address how autonomous vehicles and ecommerce might affect the growth of a city.

Among the topics discussed at the workshop were the far-reaching implications of autonomous vehicles resulting in the potential unemployment of five million transportation workers and the increase in e-commerce potentially shuttering physical businesses. According to presenters, the effects could be the loss of fuel tax revenue, decreases in brick-and-mortar retail shopping and loss of property tax if a physical store were to close.

“There is great agreement that these issues span well beyond transportation and we need to stop focusing on autonomous vehicles as a new and shiny technology and more on the secondary effects it will have on city form, design and development,” said Nico Larco, associate professor of architecture in the School of Architecture and Allied Arts and co-director of the Sustainable Cities Initiative. “If we are not prepared, it will have deep and likely detrimental, if not catastrophic, economic effects.”

Attended by over 60 urban designers, architects, city planners, transportation engineers and developers, presenters urged cities and governments to have conversations about what these new technologies could mean for the future. According to one presenter, if the planning begins immediately, other solutions could be determined that would prevent future layoffs.

But, it isn’t all bad news. According to research, the introduction of autonomous vehicles would dramatically decrease the number of traffic-related deaths in the U.S., which stands at about 30,000 per year currently.