Memories of COVID-19 in 2025 For followers of this site and others, especially in the northern hemisphere, 2020 brought the unexpected. From those of us at CAV-Systems, not least Davius, please accept our best wishes for safe passage through the perils of the COVID-19 pandemic. Most of us will survive, but some may fall ill and some of those may succumb. During such times, transportation systems represent a background concern for all but a very few. Still, for those few, we offer a view from the future. For most of us, it would be a mixed blessing to see the future, to be a so-called “time traveler.” For Davius, it is an advantage because, for one thing, he views the future through the prism of transportation, and for another, he’s a god – his survival is not in question. He can offer insights which reflect the impact of the Pandemic of the early 2020s. His view of the future is, by his own admission, not 2020 (bad pun, but Roman gods are hardly known for their sense of humor), having seen various plagues come and go – the Antonine Plague of 165 to 180 AD and the Plague of Cyprian from about AD 249 to 262, to name just two. Davius understands that the fear, uncertainty, and general weakening of institutions and enterprises can effectively slow large-scale endeavors or halt them entirely. In the case at hand – the development of CAV Systems, pushed by the advent of CAVs and pulled by a perceived need for mass transit during the era BC (Before COVID) – Davius is able to infer a great deal, knowing that pandemics can plague development (another bad pun, which does not detract from the wisdom of this god of transportation). Davius has been kind enough to offer us the view from 2025. We welcome that perspective, because to update the old cliché, “hindsight is 2025.”
Davius suggests that, here in 2025, we first examine the demand side of the equation. The future of CAVs remains bright because, in the wake of the COVID-19 plague, those who do not drive and drivers who value the safety of driverless vehicles (e.g., CAVs) now also prefer the privacy (remember when we referred to that as “social distancing”) of automobiles rather than the group environment of buses and trains and even airplanes. Following the recent tumultuous years of focusing on the health and well-being of their citizens, state governments are once again addressing the challenge of licensing and registering CAVs. Davius reminds us that it was not for nothing that engineers in the years 2 and 1 BC studied CAV Systems and reached the conclusion that separating driverless vehicles from the jungle of human drivers was one key to unlock the benefits of traveler safety and of traffic efficiency. Davius notes that, even in 2025, roadway traffic has yet to return to the peak loadings of the years BC. Therefore, while the urgency to set aside freeway lanes for CAV travel has subsided, the opportunity to do so has never been better. With more people now working from home, peak urban traffic does not currently demand 5 regular lanes or more plus an HOV lane in each direction. I do detect a note of uncertainty in Davius’ report regarding whether we will seize the day (a rough translation of carpe diem – yes, of course, Davius is bilingual) owing to a lack of foresight characteristic of humans. Nonetheless, Davius does offer us the obvious, that if we learned nothing else from our still recent pandemic, it is that our safety and well-being are high-priority issues for all of us. Thus, the opportunity to make travel safer should be reason enough to pursue the CAV-System principles of CAV coordination through separation, system engineering, integration of CAVs and CAVWAYs, and common protocols, and to apply those principles to our rough, tough freeways (still very much in place and operational in 2025) and to our city streets.
