Florida's Babcock Ranch and the Future of Autonomous Communities

An 18,000-acre development in southwest Florida seeks to be the model for short-range autonomous mobility and sustainable power for it all.

A population boom over the last century has transformed the landscape of southwestern Florida, adapting it to the automobile. Thousands of square miles of palm groves, wetlands and scrub have given way to highways, driveways and parking lots. Isolated from this tangle of pavement between Port Charlotte and Ft. Myers is Babcock Ranch, which has remained stubbornly green.

On an 18,000-acre tract within this green patch, a developer named Syd Kitson is pioneering a new and sustainable model for development in Florida and stepping past the century-old order of the automobile age. His mobility strategy features a fleet of autonomous cars shuttling residents on demand. While widespread use of such electric pods is still years away, Kitson predicts that within a decade at Babcock Ranch, “people will go from two cars to one. And soon after that, to none.”