Autonomous Vehicles Can Save Emerging Markets from Gridlock
But it may be a bumpy ride getting there
It’s been more than five years since I last drove the streets of Nairobi, Kenya. But memories of the massive traffic jams I endured there still haunt me. Monday through Friday, between 3–7pm, you fight for every meter. You weave among a symphony of horns, hyper-aggressive matatu drivers and hawkers shuffling to-and-fro, trying to make a shilling. You pray it doesn’t rain, knowing that will add at least an hour to your journey. And, after a while, you forget what you learned about physics, and give it hell both on- and off-road until you finally reach your destination (or drive firmly into a ditch). It is a harrowing experience that tests one’s nerves, and ultimately costs the city $600,000 per day in productivity and over 10,000 Kenyan lives each year.
Nairobi isn’t the only place I’ve encountered obscene and unproductive gridlock. Traffic is grinding many of the world’s emerging hubs to a halt. I’ve experienced road congestion in places like Dakar, Delhi, Dhaka, Istanbul, Lima and Sao Paulo that makes rush hour on California’s I-880 (which isn’t fun either) feel like a cake-walk. And the worst may still be ahead. The United Nations estimates that 70 percent of the world’s population, up from 50 percent today, will live in cities by 2050. That trend combined with a growing middle-class who covets car ownership (e.g. two cars are added to the road for every birth in Mexico City) makes the future of ground transportation in the developing world seem daunting.
Given the above, I read articles like John Zimmer’s The Third Transportation Revolution with great excitement and anticipation. Self-driving vehicles offer emerging markets a solution to road congestion without the need for savvy government planning or investment (which are often in short supply). Here’s how:
- As Zimmer writes, autonomous ride-sharing will take cars off-the-road. Why go to the hassle of owning and maintaining a vehicle(s) when it costs pennies on the dollar to hail an on-demand, always-available, low-stress, driver-less taxi? Fewer cars means less congestion.
- The autonomous cars left on-the-road will communicate with each other and the environment around them. This means they will be able to more effectively route through intersections and other urban bottlenecks that traditionally bring cities to a standstill.
- Finally, and perhaps most importantly, self-driving vehicles will remove the human-error responsible for the rush-hour fender-bender. Less accidents means less lanes lost and more free-flowing traffic.
Self-driving fleets also offer a slew of other positive outcomes for developing economies and their growing hubs. To name but a few, they will reduce public costs (e.g. less traffic policing, fewer traffic lights, decreased road maintenance), create improved logistics channels and spur new power-grid development. Driver-less vehicles can improve social equity, too. For example, a common occurrence in Nairobi is that the well-off call a taxi, get picked-up and are on-their-way in no time. However, people of less means travel to bus stops and must wait on (sometimes large) buses to fill before they depart. This can take a significant amount to time, costing them economic opportunity. Shared-ride autonomous fleets will be a lot smarter, enabling no-wait options even for those who can’t afford their own vehicle.
Before crowning self-driving automobiles a global panacea for traffic, though, there are significant challenges ahead. Many are the usual suspects that derail solutions in the developing world all the time; such as rampant government corruption, insufficient infrastructure, accelerating climate change and immature banking systems. In addition to those, however, there are others specific to autonomous transportation worth mentioning:
- Out-of-work, nothing-to-lose — Everyone is talking about technological unemployment. What happens to drivers (e.g. taxi, bus, matatu, CNG, rickshaw, etc) when their jobs are automated? I have some confidence the US government will fund and promote a macro-solution to that question. However, my experience tells me that the governments of Kenya or Bangladesh will not do the same. Accordingly, I wonder how the technologically unemployed in those countries — facing poverty, with few prospects — will coexist with driver-less vehicles. Constant vehicle sabotage (physical or virtual) and/or attacks on passengers are plausible, and could derail an autonomous movement.
- Sharing the road — I noted above that drivers must be (very) aggressive to be a successful in Nairobi. Just like the pharmaceutical industry spends its R&D on serving mature markets first and foremost, you might expect the same from folks designing self-driving algorithms. Consequently, will those algorithms be safe in places where human drivers follow different rules-of-the-road? If not, how long will a community allow autonomous vehicle-caused casualties before chucking the entire idea?
- Stiff competition — I’ve journeyed long distances on less than a dollar during my travels in Africa and Asia. And, I still probably paid a premium as an uninformed foreigner. The low price-point for transportation in some developing countries may delay the adoption of driver-less services. This, especially if autonomous vehicles become the target of sabotage, making them more expensive to maintain and drive than other local transport options.
I am rooting for a future with autonomous vehicles here, there and everywhere. It can’t come quickly enough. Driver-less vehicles will save lives and time, and create tremendous knock-on effects as drivers are able to do other things while in transport. They will also create new consumer markets and the new companies/jobs that go along with that. Finally, they will free-up crowded cities to be increasingly pedestrian- and community-friendly.
But the transition to self-driving cars may be a slow and bumpy one, especially where it’s needed most — in the fast-growing, but traffic-choked urban centers of the developing world. Not only will traditional challenges like poor infrastructure slow autonomous vehicle adoption, but issues related to vehicle sabotage, human-autonomous driver conflict and low-cost competition will impede acceptance, too. My hope is that the entrepreneurs behind this technology, as well as those building businesses around it, take a broad-purview as they design their solutions. The sooner self-driving cars can safely navigate me though downtown Nairobi, the better.
