How Cities Can Influence Autonomous Vehicle Ownership Models
One of the hot topics in transportation and urban planning circles is the impact on cities, traffic, and the environment that autonomous vehicles will have when they arrive and completely change the economics of driving. Will more people move to denser cities, with lower vehicle miles traveled (VMT), as cities infill all of the space currently allocated to parking and owning your own vehicle becomes economic insanity? Or will the ease and comfort of autonomous drive — Higher speed limits! No worries about DUIs or falling asleep at the wheel! Etc. — erode the benefits of public transportation and lead to even greater sprawl and traffic?
Personally, I believe that the economics are so strongly in favor of the shared asset model of car ownership — whether the cars are owned by individuals as they are under today’s TNC model, or by fleets directly owned by Uber, Lyft, etc — that this shift is inevitable, but that doesn’t mean that cities and governments can’t influence or accelerate the outcome. Nonetheless I have yet to see suggestions that strike me as both concrete and feasible, so I came up with one of my own.
First of all, cities will need to view ride sharing companies, or TNCs, as allies rather than enemies. The exciting part about working with ride-sharing companies is the level of data they have and the analyses they are capable of generating. By leveraging these capabilities, cities can develop dynamic tolls that provide far more finely grained financial incentives than are currently possible [1]; TNCs, for their part, serve to gain legitimacy and even to be privileged — at least over personal automobiles and even, potentially, over legacy taxis — in the municipal transportation system through their cooperation. We can now award or penalize for specific transportation impact while in the city, not merely for entry, exit, or vehicle type. We can incent for participation in a ride-sharing program, or get even more fine-grained than that.
For example, cities might charge a toll for every car that enters the city center, but at the same time waive the toll for a TNC’s drivers under certain conditions designed to reduce traffic, car ownership, or VMT (depending on the policy-maker’s goal). They can design experiments in particular districts or times and empirically measure the results. Some possible criteria that they might try waiving tolls for:
- drivers who drive for a TNC and are on the clock for that TNC x% or more of their time on that trip to the city and accepting rides according to whatever is the TNC’s minimum criteria for being considered “active.”
- drivers who are providing pooled rides;
- drivers who complete a minimum # of fares in a day (either total fares or shared fares). The TNCs would love this because it would force some amount of loyalty to a single platform;
- during times of surge pricing (to increase transportation availability and affordability);
- if the TNC agrees to share certain data (potentially a powerful carrot for TNCs to do so);
The beauty of the above is that the driver could enter and/or leave the city as the sole occupant of the car, but the system would still recognize the contribution he or she made to shared mobility that day.
These are only a few brainstormed ideas to illustrate a paradigm. As long as the city and the TNC can integrate their technology, any such incentive scheme can work and provide powerful policy levers. For some of these criteria, such as completing a minimum number of fares, the benefit to the driver might have to be in the form of a refund, since the toll would have already been charged on entry, but that should not be a problem. The TNC can even advance the money to the driver and absorb the working capital gap itself, as it is clearly the entity more capable of doing so.
From the above, it is a short step to tolling autonomous vehicles, once available, according to their ownership model. Charge a toll to privately owned, non-shared vehicles, while allowing shared vehicles to enter free. Track which vehicles are actually being shared on any given day — or even in any given hour — and charge or refund accordingly. If unshared autonomous vehicles are to be the bane of cities’ existence, then ban them from the city center, or charge them so much as to make it economically insane to commute by car. How will the city know which vehicles are shared? Its integration with the TNCs will already tell it.
[1] Even if ride-sharing services are not coordinated by the TNCs that we see today, but rather by municipal transit authorities powered by the likes of Via or RideCell, by mobility services owned by the car companies, or any other model, it seems clear at this point that the basic service model pioneered by Uber is here to stay: mobile e-hailing; cashless, in-app payments; and complete tracking of all drivers, rides, and payments with a robust analytics system for pulling and analyzing data.
