My neighborhood wants to bring self-driving cars to the nation’s capital

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Giving people a hands-on experience might be one of the best ways to drive acceptance of a new and potentially scary, unfamiliar technology. Talk to anyone trying to sell electric cars and they'll tell you the easiest way to do that is with a 10-minute test drive, after all. That's a large part of the reasoning behind a plan to bring self-driving cars to Washington, DC. What made this particular proposal particularly interesting to me-someone who writes about autonomous cars on an almost daily basis-is that the idea would bring them to my actual neighborhood here in the nation's capital.

It's all down to the Southwest Business Improvement District, which recently issued the request for information in partnership with the mayor's office. (BIDs are nonprofit organizations that work with businesses to improve local communities and are relatively common here in the District.) But this isn't a proposal to turn Southwest DC into an East Coast version of Phoenix, with hundreds of autonomous vehicles testing all over the place. Nor is it asking for applications to launch a robotaxi service-at least not yet.

Rather, the idea is to use a particularly low-traffic stretch of 10th St SW, also known as L'Enfant Plaza-which runs between the National Mall and a new massive development on the waterfront-to present this developing technology to city residents and workers, as well as the vast hordes of tourists that come to visit the monuments and museums.

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