A century ago, a deluge of automobiles swept across the United States, upending city life in its wake. Pedestrian deaths surged. Streetcars, unable to navigate the choking traffic, collapsed. Car owners infuriated residents with their klaxons’ ear-splitting awooogah!
Scrambling to accommodate the swarm of motor vehicles, local officials paved over green space, whittled down sidewalks to install parking, and criminalized jaywalking to banish pedestrians from their own streets. Generations of drivers grew accustomed to unfettered dominance of the road. America was remade in the automobile’s image, degrading urban vibrancy and quality of life.
Today, the incipient rise of self-driving cars promises to bring the most tumultuous shift in transportation since cars first rumbled their way into the scene. Just a few years ago, driverless cars were a technological marvel available to a select few in San Francisco and Phoenix, but now, companies including Waymo, Tesla, and Zoox collectively transport hundreds of thousands of passengers weekly in autonomous vehicles (AVs) across expanding swaths of Austin, Texas; Los Angeles; and Las Vegas, with future service announced in a lengthening list of cities, including Dallas, New York City, Philadelphia, and Miami.
Ride-hail companies are getting in on the action, too: Uber recently signed a deal to deploy at least 20,000 robotaxis powered by the AV company Nuro’s self-driving systems. As the transportation venture capitalist Reilly Brennan recently observed, a “stampede is afoot to autonomize rides.”
AVs offer some undeniable benefits: Unlike humans, they cannot drive drunk, distracted, or tired. They make car trips easier, less stressful, more frictionless — in a word, nicer. The growing availability of AVs is likely to make many people respond just as they would to any other improvement in a product or experience: They will use it more often.
But that could prove disastrous for cities, causing crushing congestion (not to mention widening the gulf between those happily ensconced in their AVs and those stuck in buses crawling through gridlock). This is not pure speculation: Over the last 15 years, the rise of ride-hail, a service similar to robotaxis, has increased total driving, thickened congestion, and undermined transit. Autonomous vehicles, which offer privacy and service consistency that ride-hail cannot, could turbocharge the number of cars on the road, making a mess of urban streets. (Waymo did not comment on the record for this story, and Zoox and Tesla did not respond to requests for comment.)
AVs are coming, but they cannot just plug and play into our existing transportation networks. If cities don’t update their rulebooks, they risk repeating the mistakes of the last century.
While many of the policies governing AV deployments are set by federal and state officials, municipal leaders should not sit on their hands when their public sphere stands on the verge of a tectonic transformation. Cities can — and must — act now to increase the odds that self-driven vehicles enrich urban life rather than undermine it. Even better, doing so will improve current residents’ lives, no matter how long it takes AVs to scale.
Here are a few steps worth considering.
Put a price on congestion
Today’s robotaxi deployments are still quite modest. Waymo, for instance, operates only around 300 vehicles across all of Los Angeles County. For AVs to be universally available, fleets would need to expand by orders of magnitude, and the cost of self-driving technology would likely have to plunge (Waymo reported an operating loss of over $1 billion in the first quarter of this year).
If and when that happens, cities should brace for many, many more cars on their streets.
There are several reasons to expect this. First, lots of people freed from the stress and fatigue of driving will use a self-driven car to venture further for a meal or meeting, and they will also take trips they would have otherwise foregone. With human labor costs eliminated, deliveries are also likely to skyrocket. As Anthony Townsend, author of the book Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car, warned, “imagine what happens when it essentially costs as much to send a package as it does to send a text message.”
Then there is the issue of “deadheading”: vehicles driving around empty en route to their next pickup, or while waiting to be summoned. It’s already a problem with ride-hail: Researchers have found that Uber and Lyft vehicles are passengerless around 40 percent of the time.
Beyond the misery of worsened traffic jams, an AV-fueled spike in driving would increase air pollution; even if the entire AV fleet were electrified, electric cars shed particles from tires and brakes. They could also make bus trips agonizingly slow and unreliable (which is all the more reason for cities to install bus lanes as soon as possible).
An obvious solution is to follow New York City’s congestion pricing model. Since January, cars entering Manhattan south of 60th Street on weekdays must pay a $9 fee during weekdays. In a matter of months, the policy has quickened traffic, quieted car noise, and reduced the number of automobiles on the road.
Cities could also consider mileage-based fees on both AVs and human-driven ride-hail cars that are not transporting any passengers, incentivizing them to minimize the use of traffic lanes while empty. Jinhua Zhao, a professor of cities and transportation at MIT, suggests going further by imposing ride-hail and robotaxi fees that inversely scale with the number of vehicle occupants, rewarding companies for pooling multiple trips in a single vehicle (and thereby reducing total driving).
There are myriad ways to design road use taxes that mitigate congestion. Once the policy is in place, it can always be adjusted later to keep street traffic moving.
Get a handle on the curb
AVs will transform our relationship with an unrelenting nuisance of American life: parking. A robotaxi does not need to find a parking spot after dropping off a passenger at their destination; it simply moves along to its next assignment (or plies the streets, waiting to be summoned). As self-driving cars replace human-powered ones, “the notion of parking will gradually evolve into the concept of stopping,” Zhao said.
That begs the question of where, exactly, all these AVs will stop.
“There isn’t always an open curb space where an AV can do a pickup or dropoff,” said Alex Roy, an autonomous vehicle consultant who previously worked at the now-defunct self-driving company Argo.ai. “In that case, the AV is just going to stop in a traffic lane,” potentially obstructing traffic and endangering pedestrians. Given the risks, Roy said, “the AV company should at the outset ask the city where are optimal pickup or drop zones that would be least disruptive.”
At the moment, that is a question many city transportation departments would struggle to answer. Information about loading zones and time-based parking restrictions (e.g., no parking 4 pm to 6 pm) can be dated and incomplete. “It’s very rare for a city to have a proper inventory of the curb,” said Robert Hampshire, who oversaw several federal grants supporting curbside management during his time as deputy assistant secretary of the Department of Transportation’s Office of Research and Technology under President Joe Biden.
Creating a current, digital map of all curbs should be a top priority. Doing so can help cities now, too, because those with the ability to collect real-time information about curb use could reduce double parking while collecting revenue from delivery and ride-hail companies. Philadelphia, for instance, in 2022 piloted “smart loading zones” that vehicles could reserve through a smartphone app. It’s an approach that can help manage today’s delivery trucks as well as tomorrow’s AVs.
Stop building new parking (and charge market prices for existing spots)
As AVs proliferate, the demand for car storage will plummet. For cities where parking devours 40 percent or more of available street space, that is a thrilling opportunity. “You can drastically reduce the number of parking spots and reuse them for housing, parks, or any other purpose,” Zhao said.
That’s all the more reason for cities to jettison archaic zoning policies known as parking minimums, which require new housing, retail, and other real estate projects to include a fixed number of parking spots. In recent years, dozens of cities, including Austin; Raleigh, North Carolina; and San Jose, California have already implemented reforms, like scrapping parking minimums, to reduce housing construction costs and encourage travel modes that are more space-efficient and less polluting than driving, like walking, biking, and public transit. Those reforms will also lay the groundwork for a smoother AV transition.
Municipal leaders could go further by charging a dynamic market rate for street parking, creating pickup and dropoff spots that AVs can use throughout the day. “Pricing is how you create availability,” said Jeffrey Tumlin, former director of transportation of the Municipal Transportation Agency of San Francisco, the city that has been ground zero for robotaxi deployments. “The right price for parking is the price that ensures 15 percent availability at all times of day.” Those spots can provide easy and safe places for self-driven cars to pull over when collecting or depositing a passenger, paying the city a fee for the privilege.
San Francisco has already experimented with dynamic parking pricing that adjusts to real-time demand. Even at peak times, a spot can be found for those willing to pay a premium to avoid the joyless ritual of circling the block for an opening (an activity that contributes to street traffic and produces emissions).
Automate enforcement
In the Bay Area, self-driven cars have sown confusion on public streets by interrupting emergency response vehicles, randomly freezing in intersections, and pulling over in no-stopping zones. Since the infractions are often brief and police officers are scarce, AV companies can get away with it. Tumlin said that limited enforcement has led AV companies to program their vehicles to simply ignore the law: “The AVs’ business case says that it’s best to do a pickup or dropoff in the bike lane or in traffic, rather than inconvenience the passenger by having to walk a block or two.”
Humans, of course, also routinely flout traffic laws. Cities should use technology to fine illegal maneuvers reliably, regardless of whether a person or an algorithm is at fault.
In many countries and US states, automatic cameras that identify cars running red lights or breaking the speed limit are common and effective; studies have repeatedly shown that the resulting fines deter recurrence, and that a healthy majority of urban residents support their deployment. Automatic enforcement could be particularly useful with autonomous vehicles, allowing public agencies to batch a company’s infractions before issuing a bill. Raising the expected cost of breaking traffic laws would encourage AV developers to place a higher priority on obeying them.
At the moment, many cities can’t employ automatic enforcement at all, because their state legislatures, wary of driver opposition, have strictly limited the use of cameras to issue citations. Loosening those restrictions should be a top priority for city officials lobbying their state capitols.
Solving for the present as well as the future
There is a world of difference between a city where self-driven cars number a few hundred and one where they run into the tens of thousands. As currently configured, city streets may be able to handle the former, but the latter invites disaster.
Autonomous vehicles might be universally available in a few years, as some believers predict (though such forecasts have been wrong before). Or maybe that moment is still 20, 30, or 40 years away.
But city leaders need not strive to become Nostradamus, speculating about the evolution of a technology whose future remains wildly uncertain. The problems posed by self-driving cars are not so different in kind from those created by conventional, human-operated ones — and cities that make judicious policy choices now will enhance urban life regardless of how quickly an autonomous future arrives. There is no need to wait, and every reason not to.
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