Waymo, Zoox, Tesla's Robotaxi, and even Uber and Lyft are jockeying for dominance in the autonomous vehicle boom. But in the near future, that increased competition — coupled with rising adoption among riders — could lead to even worse traffic, according to Vox. AVs also have a tendency to skirt traffic laws more often, adding to the gridlock potential. To avoid the problem, Vox argues cities should consider ideas like imposing their own fees on rides, especially during peak times, and strictly enforcing traffic laws to encourage tech fixes.
Two ways AVs could create mayhem for cities when they scale:
1️⃣ As has happened in San Francisco, AVs can flout traffic laws -- blocking bus stops, dropping off passengers in bike lanes, making illegal turns, etc.
2️⃣ By making car trips nicer, they will induce people to take many, many more of them -- which could cause crushing gridlock.
A few specific solutions, from the Vox story:
🔷 Charge for car trips 🔷
By imposing a fee on car journeys, cities can keep traffic flowing during peak times, even with an influx of self-driving cars. NYC's congestion pricing is a terrific model. Another option is to charge for "deadheading" miles, when robtoaxis (and ridehail) drive around empty, using street space while transporting no one.
🔷 Install Bus Rapid Transit 🔷
With BRT, cities can inoculate their bus service from slowdowns in general traffic lanes caused by a deluge of AVs. Because bus riders take up far less space than AV riders, this can make the entire transportation network more efficient.
🔷 Stop Building Parking 🔷
AVs don't need to park; they merely stop to pick up or drop off a passenger. That being the case, the very last thing cities should be doing right now is installing more parking.
🔷 Charge Market Rates for Street Parking 🔷
Cheap street parking leads to all spots being taken, which forces drivers to circle in vain. A good idea (regardless of AVs): Charge a market rate for parking, so ~15% of spots are always available. Enter AVs: They can make use of those temporarily open spots to do safe passenger drop-offs and pickups.
🔷 Use Automatic Enforcement 🔷
If self-driving companies *know* that they will be ticketed for breaking traffic laws, they're much more likely to program their vehicles to stop doing it. (Added bonus: Cities can batch AV infractions and issue a bill to the company for many at once.)
Note: AVs are still in their infancy. Many cities might handle 1,000 or even 10,000 robotaxis without much disruption, but it's another story entirely with 100,000+. That's why cities should move *now* to prepare for a self-driven deluge.
For Autonomous Vehicles to succeed in the market, they need to be cheaper and more convenient for consumers than Uber. But if they're cheaper and more convenient than Uber, they will also create worse network efficiency problems for cities than Uber did.
Uber solved a user interface problem with conventional taxis, greatly improving customer convenience. In the transportation world, however, improved user convenience often worsens system efficiency. Despite Uber and Lyft's efforts to market their products as allowing "living without a car" and to promote ridesharing, they failed. Instead, most Uber and Lyft trips siphoned away walking, biking, and transit trips, or were trips that would not have otherwise happened. In the transportation system, a walk, bike, or transit trip takes up about one-tenth the roadway space as an automobile trip -- regardless of whether it is in an Uber or an individual's own car. Shifting public transit trips to Uber and Lyft resulted in a significant net loss of capacity in San Francisco's overall transportation system and worsened congestion for all roadway users. [Analysis link in comments below.]
While AVs may have transportation safety benefits if their operations are safer than the trips they replace, current practice suggests they will have negative impacts on the ability of urban streets to move people and goods. Happily, all of these negative impacts are avoidable. Building upon David Zipper's ideas below, cities should pursue the following concepts to help capture the benefits of AV technology while minimizing the negatives:
- Protect your main transit lines from recurring congestion. If rising congestion increases transit delay by 15%, it cuts transit capacity by 15%. The reverse is also true. Transit-only lanes and other transit priority treatments are like printing cash. Make your best bus lines fast, frequent, reliable, clean, and safe. [See Muni Forward link below]
- Protect your bikeways. In SF, most AV pick-up and drop-off is in the travel lane or bike lane, rendering conventional painted bike lanes ineffective in urban corridors. Where fully protected bikeways don't fit, use modal filters to create neighborhood greenways or Slow Streets that welcome people of all ages and abilities.
- Price congestion. Congestion is what happens when the demand for driving equals the capacity of the road system. Congestion is an economic problem and has only ever been solved with economic solutions. London, Stockholm, Oslo, and Singapore have all demonstrated how to deliver an effective urban mobility system that allows continued economic growth.
AVS can create real benefits for cities and city residents, but only if we learn from the successes and failures of similar technologies in the past.