The Future of Mobility is Shared — or a Disaster
It is becoming increasingly clear that in order for autonomous vehicles (AVs) to have the desired positive impact on traffic, safety, and pollution in cities, they will need to be electric and shared.
“Autonomous vehicles could be a blessing for society if they are electric and shared, a disaster if gasoline-powered and individually owned,” green tech analyst Jeff McMahon wrote in Forbes. “In the blessing scenario, carbon emissions plummet, traffic lightens, accidents and fatalities disappear, and vast expanses of roadway and parking space open to reuse.”
We have seen the alternative scenario play out in cities with ridehailing services that once promised to reduce traffic and pollution but instead have worsened both, adding 5.7 billion miles traveled on public roads in U.S. cities alone, at the same time that overall car ownership has increased. Most of those miles come from people that would otherwise use public transport.
Private AVs Double Traffic
Could this same outcome happen with AVs? A report by the University of California at Santa Cruz environmental researcher Adam Millard-Ball confirmed the private ownership of AVs could indeed prove disastrous. Millard-Ball’s research found that because parking in cities is so expensive, autonomous vehicles would “cruise” cities while empty instead of parking, or they would return home to wait for the owner to finish the workday. His model of the impact of private AVs in San Francisco found that traffic would double.
Australian traffic researcher Jennifer Kent shared similar findings. She also cited the scenario of someone that traditional drives 10 km to work and pays $10 to park. “In the world of fully autonomous vehicles, they would inevitably opt to save that $10 per day and have their car drive them to work, drop them off, take itself home, only to return when the driver summons it at the end of the day. That makes a 20km day a 40km day.” In other words, twice the traffic.
People Might Love Traffic
There is also widespread concern that life in autonomous vehicles will be so pleasant that people won’t mind sitting in traffic. “Being stuck in a traffic jam might not be such a pain if you could be working, reading, watching a movie, having a coffee with friends, playing with the dog, or starting Friday night drinks early,” Kent pointed out.
Or, as McMahon predicts, “In the disaster scenario, emissions increase, gridlock strangles cities, people become more obese and diseased as their robot cars do everything for them.”
Adopting Shared Services
Adoption, of course, is an all-important concern. Will the public embrace shared services in place of private cars? Millard-Ball and Kent suggest they might be forced to, with regulations that simply make a private auto too expensive. Millard-Ball favors congestion pricing, which means owners would pay a fee to enter a city at peak times, negating the advantage of not parking.
Researchers at ETH Zurich, the Swiss federal technical university, studied the impact of private autonomous vehicles on traffic and cities and made a more drastic recommendation — making private ownership of AVs illegal. “The possession of private vehicles will only be reduced if autonomous cars cannot be acquired by private individuals,” lead researcher Kay Axhausen said.
Will the public embrace shared cars with multiple riders? Some people point to the quick adoption of ridehailing services to suggest that if shared AV services deliver a great experience, people will use them. Lyft VP Lynn Sampson noted that with ridehailing, people at first questioned sharing rides at all. “We had to wipe out, ‘Don’t get in the car with a stranger’ and get you to getting in the car with a stranger,” she said. She sees shared AVs being so much safer and more convenient than driving that they will enjoy rapid adoption. “I envision a time down the road where if someone takes out their car keys, you’ll kind of look at them and say, ‘You still drive?’”
A Shared Future
Multiple studies of shared electric autonomous vehicles have found that shared fleets can indeed move more people with fewer vehicles, dramatically reduce congestion and pollution, and do so with faster overall ride times than with today’s private autos. The convenience multiplies as more and more private autos are off the roads due to the adoption of the shared services.
Shared electric autonomous vehicles have the potential to reshape cities around people, eliminating the need for parking lots and other car-centric infrastructure and creating room for much-needed housing and open space. Replacing private human-driven vehicles with AVs will only continue the trend launched by ridehailing businesses — making traffic worse and pulling people from public transit. Sharing is crucial for AVs to prove a blessing to cities. It remains to be seen whether they will be — either by force through regulation or by choice because people will embrace the experience.
