When robots take the wheel

'Driverless Cars and the Road of the Future' is the first comprehensive analysis of what that will mean on the ground

An appalling statistic appears toward the end of No One at the Wheel, Samuel Schwartz’s valuable primer on self-driving cars: In the century since the automobile arrived on the scene, 70 million people have been killed by it, and four billion injured.
 
Mr Schwartz, who served as New York City’s traffic commissioner in the 1980s, was nicknamed “Gridlock Sam” for his devotion to the conundrum of traffic (and for coining the loathsome term). He knows everything about how cars and people don’t get along, having been on the front lines.
 
This book — written in an earnest, conversational