Transcription
A lot has been said about the future of self-driving cars. Some people take a very negative position, claiming that autonomous vehicles are a pipe dream and will never become a reality. They're just another example of the overhyped nonsense that's typical of tech companies these days. And that may be true, but in several US cities today, you can literally open an app, select your destination, and a car with nobody in it will pick you up and drive you there automatically. So self-driving cars are here today, which leads to the other kind of commentary I often see online: that self-driving cars are real, they will be coming to more cities soon, and they will solve all of our transportation problems. They'll make the road safer; they'll eliminate traffic congestion; they'll be environmentally friendly; they'll provide mobility to everyone; and our cities will be better than ever.
I actually disagree with both of these positions, which is why I wanted to make this video. Because I do believe that self-driving cars are real and they will be in every city in the near future. The technology is getting better every day, and if these improvements continue on this track, they will fundamentally destroy the fabric of our cities. There is a cautious optimism among many urbanists about self-driving cars. After all, the majority of problems within cities are caused by cars: traffic, pollution, noise, dangerous streets, and there never seems to be enough space available for sidewalks, bike lanes, parks, or anything else because it's all been turned into wide roads and parking lots. Anybody who has tried to get around without a car in a car-centric city knows that human drivers can be really scary, especially when they're speeding or driving distracted, which happens way too often. So having cars driven by computers can't possibly be worse than what we have now, right? And it is possible that with the right incentives and regulations, that could be our future. But given the course we're on, I believe that future is increasingly unlikely, especially when you consider the history of how automobiles destroyed cities in the 20th century, but also the effects of money and capital.
It's estimated that over $60 billion has already been invested into the development of autonomous vehicles. So there is a lot of money riding on this technology and therefore a lot of pressure to get self-driving cars to market as soon as possible. When people see these vehicles cruising around the streets of San Francisco, they might believe that this technology is right around the corner. You can go there right now and see them dropping off passengers; they follow the speed limit and appear to drive cautiously, and it's amazing to see that there's nobody in the driver's seat. But that doesn't mean they're always driven by computer. As of last November, Cruise confirmed that their robo-taxis required human assistance every 4 to 5 miles. I don't know how often this is needed today, but you don't have to watch these cars for very long to see that humans definitely still need to take remote control sometimes. This stupid robo-taxi got stuck behind a construction toilet trailer until someone in the call center could steer it around. This one sat here for several light cycles because it didn't think it could turn right; the drivers behind it eventually gave up waiting and just drove around.
Now you might be wondering about these remote assistant agents who take control: Who are these people? Where are they located? How much are they paid? What are the working conditions like? But never mind all that; it's a technological miracle. Okay, just shut up and get in the car now. Of course, this technology will inevitably get better, but nobody knows how long it will take to sort out the long tail of rare occurrences that a self-driving car will encounter in a busy city. And as any experienced product manager will tell you, the first 90% of a project takes 90% of the time, and the last 10% of the project will take the other 90%. The technology is advanced, but fundamentally self-driving cars are stupid; they're mindless; they make a bunch of dumb mistakes. Recently, in this parking lot for self-driving cars, Waymo vehicles started driving in circles and randomly honking at each other. This happened for days, and this particular video was taken at 4:00 a.m. The people who live next door were not impressed.
There have been dozens of official reports of driverless cars getting in the way of rescue operations, from blocking ambulances to crashing into fire trucks. But it gets worse. Last October, a woman was hit by a car in San Francisco driven by a human driver and knocked into the path of a Cruise robo-taxi. Cruise said the vehicle "brake[d] aggressively to minimize impact," and while the robo-taxi couldn't stop fast enough to avoid hitting the woman, it still reacted faster than any human could. So that's a win for self-driving cars, right? Except that the woman then fell under the car, so as far as the robo-taxi was concerned, she was gone, so it continued to drive, dragging her underneath—a key detail that Cruise initially tried to hide from the press and regulators. It's a first for police and fire departments involving a driverless car. The victim was found to be under the left rear wheel of the vehicle. Thankfully, the woman survived, and Cruise cars were taken off the roads. But this is a scary example of how these cars will make new mistakes that we haven't even considered yet. They are not intelligent; they don't even have the object permanence of a toddler. But that hasn't stopped them from being beta tested on public roads, and the citizens of these cities did not agree to this. Several groups in California have protested against being the involuntary test subjects of multi-billion dollar tech companies, and a Waymo car was even set on fire earlier this year.
Self-driving cars have caused a lot of problems in San Francisco. Waymo cars in San Francisco reportedly caused a big traffic jam just as baseball fans were leaving Oracle Park Monday afternoon. A KTVU viewer shared this video, showing two self-driving cars stopped in the middle of the Embarcadero. The advocacy group Safe Street Rebel has published video evidence of self-driving cars running red lights, cutting off drivers, cutting off pedestrians, clogging up intersections, blocking streets, blocking public transit, parking in bike lanes, and, uh, what the hell is this car doing to that old woman? So the idea that these cars will always obey the rules of the road is a fantasy. Safe Street Rebel also organizes events like the Week of Cones. Since self-driving cars are programmed to avoid traffic cones at all costs, one of the best ways to incapacitate one is to put a traffic cone on its hood. This is called coning, and it's [ __ ] hilarious. I'm sure these mega-corporations will lobby to make this a criminal offense, so do it now while you still can. Safe Street Rebel does a lot of great advocacy work that goes beyond reigning in tech companies, so definitely check them out if you live in or near San Francisco. I'll leave a link in the description.
These protests may slow adoption, but let's face it: there is no way in hell we're going to stop these things from coming to our cities when there are hundreds of billions of dollars on the line. And to be clear, most of these incidents would not have even happened if the self-driving car companies still had safety drivers like they used to, but they're under so much pressure to deliver that they'd rather [ __ ] up the city and even potentially kill people rather than to admit that the technology isn't ready yet. Tech companies proudly say that they move fast and break things, and maybe that broken thing will be your spine under a robo-taxi. But that's a risk they're willing to take. Self-driving car companies have already lobbied politicians to allow them to operate based only on self-certification, and they've successfully stopped laws that require them to report extensive safety data. Recently, California passed a bill that says police can't even ticket self-driving car companies when their cars violate traffic laws. It may be that eventually, on average, self-driving cars will be safer than human drivers in the future, but it is incredibly naive to believe that they will not introduce new safety problems of their own.
A self-driving car will try to avoid hitting people and objects, and there are dozens of sensors to make sure that doesn't happen. But these sensors are not infallible, and they require interpretation by software. It's important for self-driving cars not to crash into things that are there, but it's also important that they don't stop for things that aren't—like this Tesla in self-driving mode that suddenly came to a stop on the highway and caused an eight-car pile-up. You don't want a self-driving car to stop just because there's a bit of garbage blown onto the road or it detects something that won't cross the path of the vehicle anyway. So the software needs to evaluate objects that it detects. The first person to ever be killed by a self-driving car was a woman in Tempe, Arizona, in 2018. She was crossing this road at night while pushing a bicycle and was hit by a modified Volvo SUV driven autonomously by the automated driving system developed by Uber. So why didn't all of this advanced technology prevent killing her? It's not that the car didn't detect her; it's just that it didn't think she was anything worth stopping for. The crash report from the NTSB provides a detailed explanation: The car flipped between identifying her as a vehicle to a bicycle to a general "other" category. Sometimes it detected her as being in another lane and other times as a static object that wasn't moving. The software didn't consider her to be an important object that was going to cross the path of the SUV until 1.2 seconds before the crash, when it was too late to stop without killing her. So when a self-driving car starts driving towards you, you better hope it hasn't detected you as "other."
But all this talk about sensors and self-driving obfuscates the real root cause of this crash, which is the atrocious state of American traffic engineering. This area is designed like a freeway, with a high-speed limit and almost no accommodations for people walking, despite being directly between a rail station and hiking trails. At the time of the crash, the median had a paved roadway designed only to be used by cars if one of the bridges was closed, but it clearly looked like a walking path, and it was regularly used by people crossing this road instead of any actual pedestrian infrastructure. The city just put up these used crosswalk signs that are still there today. It's disgraceful that traffic engineers put up these signs in a natural place where people would want to cross the road instead of, you know, actually building a crosswalk here. But what's worse is that in 2018 it wasn't even physically possible to walk to the crosswalk because of the trees and greenery that had been planted here. Since the crash, the solution has been to turn the brick roadway into a rough stone path that is hostile to pedestrians, but they've now cut a hole through the cacti so that it is at least theoretically possible to reach the crosswalk now, though you still have to walk over 200m out of your way, plus the time it takes to wait for your turn to cross this highway. American traffic engineers routinely bend over backward to make driving as convenient as possible while making these places actively hostile to pedestrians, then blame the pedestrians when they're hit by a car.
In the US, around 42,000 people are killed in car crashes every year, and hundreds of thousands are seriously injured, sometimes with debilitating injuries that will affect them for the rest of their lives. So it's not surprising that the most prominent feature promised by these American self-driving car companies is safety. But the US also has some of the most dangerous roads in the developed world. The most deadly kind of road in the US is the "stroad"—a road designed for high-speed travel that also tries to act as a destination. Stroads are rare in other countries, especially inside of cities, but they are all over the US and Canada. The nonprofit organization Strong Towns has been warning about the dangers of this kind of road design for over a decade, and I have a previous video about stroads if you'd like to learn more. There has been decades of research into road safety, and we know how to make roads safer, such as the Vision Zero method developed in Sweden in the 1990s. In fact, if the US had roads as safe as Sweden, they would cut their road fatalities by over 80% without any new technology at all. But many of these design changes require slowing or restricting cars, and that's a step too far for the US. There's no money to be made in making the streets safer, so the only solution to the dangers caused by the old cars has to be buying new cars.
Self-driving car companies do not care about road safety; they care about selling cars and technology. They care about safety in so much as it allows them to sell cars. The moment they can convince regulators and the general public that their cars are safe enough, they will stop caring about safety. So you can expect the messaging to pretty quickly go from preventing road deaths to being, "Yeah, sure, they kill people, but our marketing department says it's less often than human drivers would, so it's fine." And even if they are safer than American drivers on American roads, the rest of the world is going to get these cars whether we want them or not. And that's an interesting thing to consider because right now these vehicles are being trained in some of the most car-centric places on Earth. The first locations were undoubtedly chosen because they have very good weather, but I guarantee you that Phoenix, Arizona, was also a top choice because it is literally like driving on easy mode. The roads are insanely wide; there are almost no restrictions on where cars can go; it's made up of square grid blocks a mile on each side; and pretty much everybody drives everywhere all the time already. To say that Phoenix is car-dependent is a massive understatement. If anthropomorphic cars could design cities, they would design Phoenix. It's also one of the most dangerous places for pedestrians in the entire developed world. But don't worry about that; self-driving cars will fix everything.
San Francisco is certainly more urban; there are people who walk and cycle, and there are public transit vehicles as well. But I've lived in the Bay Area, and I can tell you that even San Francisco is pretty car-centric and car-friendly compared to most cities in Europe, which I think is going to be a problem when this technology is rolled out internationally. These cars are trained to drive like Americans on American roads, where cars are considered superior and above all other forms of transportation. Have you seen an American when they try to drive in Europe for the first time? It's not pretty. Of course, these tech companies could spend years retraining their vehicles to drive like Europeans on European streets, but you and I both know that's not going to happen. They're going to set American-trained cars loose on European streets. I hope I'm wrong, but I wouldn't be surprised if European cities are pressured to Americanize their streets to make them more self-driving friendly, which brings us to another potential issue with these cars: They are not so much programmed as they are trained. They learned how to drive by monitoring what real human drivers did through millions of miles of driving. So let's say that in the future a city wants to change the way their streets work to improve safety, to speed up public transit, or to make more room for walking and cycling—whatever. It won't be enough to just put up a sign and update the rules of the road. Governments will need to convince every self-driving car company to retrain their cars, and given that these are multi-billion dollar international corporations with an army of lobbyists, how likely do you think it is that those changes will go through? This could result in our cities getting locked into what they are today, with any new changes being dictated by car companies, which I guarantee you is not going to favor anything that results in fewer cars.
Of course, there are a lot of problems with our current transportation system, but I am skeptical that self-driving cars will truly solve any of them. Because apart from the supposed safety claims, when you boil it down, self-driving cars are really just promising to be cheaper taxis. Yeah, they're not driven by a human, or at least not driven by a human who is currently in the car with you, but otherwise, they're just cheaper taxis, right? Like, do you seriously believe that all of our urban transportation problems would be solved tomorrow if only taxis were cheaper? And I'm even skeptical about the cheaper part. We saw this happen with Uber and Lyft. When app-requested taxi—sorry, I mean ride-sharing—was introduced, Uber was cheap; that is, when the venture capitalist money was flowing in. In fact, it was so cheap that several cities in the US reduced investment in public transit in favor of subsidizing ride-share rides. And it worked for a while, but taking an Uber isn't cheap anymore. And I'll leave a link to this great article with an analysis of why those price increases can't be explained by an increase in costs, ride-share legislation, or inflation. They raised prices because the owners and investors of those companies wanted a big return on their investments. The exact same thing is playing out now with self-driving cars. Hundreds of billions of venture capital are flowing into the development of autonomous vehicles, and companies like Waymo are using that money to make robo-taxi rides price-competitive to traditional taxis. And I find it wild that people online will unironically say things like, "In the future, AVs will be cheaper than taxis because there's no driver to pay." Like, do you honestly believe that the prices that companies charge are based on what they cost to deliver? Of course, they aren't; they charge as much as possible to maximize profits, and once they've eliminated or colluded with the competition, they can charge whatever they want. And I shouldn't even need to say this, but turning your transportation system over to a handful of multi-billion dollar corporations does not result in good outcomes for anybody except the owners of those corporations.
It's commonly claimed that self-driving cars will reduce the amount of cars on the road and eliminate parking lots. The idea is that you will be dropped off at the door by a self-driving car and you won't need to park. And that's true, but you can literally do that today, right? You could just take a taxi to work every day instead of owning a car, but very few people actually do this. Sure, it's expensive to take taxis everywhere, of course, but even wealthy people don't do this because people just like owning their own stuff and being in their own car. There's this vague promise that your car could earn extra money for you as a taxi while you're at work, but how many people want their private car to end up looking and smelling like the inside of a taxi? So those cars are going to need to park somewhere, and their owners will want them parked nearby so that they don't take too long to arrive when they're ready to go. And you can forget about ever charging for parking because if it's cheaper to just let your car cruise around the block while you're shopping or at work, then that's what people will do.
Another common claim is that these cars will allow universal mobility to everyone, especially the disabled. But many people with disabilities require help from others to get in and out of a vehicle or to secure a wheelchair, so an attendant will likely be needed on board anyway. And given that you need a credit card and a modern smartphone to book a robo-taxi, this puts it out of reach of many people. Sure, the rich boomer with a bad hip will be taken care of, but they can already take a taxi today. This is really just an extension of the often-repeated myth that cars are the only transportation that works for disabled people, and that as long as you have cars, disabled people are taken care of. This is a great article by disability advocates about how self-driving cars are a distraction to the solutions that they actually need, and I'll leave a link to it in the description.
But of all of the claims made by proponents of self-driving cars, the one that I find most ridiculous is the idea that they will reduce traffic congestion. There is absolutely no reason to believe that this is true, and lots of historical evidence to suggest that it is not. Every single time that we have done anything to make transportation cheaper or more convenient, the inevitable outcome is that people travel more often and they travel longer distances. There is decades of well-documented evidence that every time we widen roads or build new highways, it increases the amount of driving. And I talked about that in more detail in my video about induced demand. When Uber and Lyft came to cities, they also claimed that they would reduce traffic congestion, but the exact opposite happened, and vehicle miles traveled increased significantly. This will only become worse with robo-taxis because people will take them even more often than they do Ubers today, especially while they're heavily subsidized. I've seen some people claim that robo-taxis will reduce the number of cars in cities because they will park in parking lots on the edge of town and only come in when they're requested, but I don't believe that for a second because one of the major competitive factors between robo-taxi companies is going to be how quickly they can get to their customers. Consider how impatient people get while waiting for an elevator; there is no way in hell that people in the future will want to wait 14 minutes for a robo-taxi pickup, which is why the self-driving car parking lots today are right in the heart of San Francisco. But the future could be even worse. There's no cost to driving around most cities; gas taxes are usually the only thing that even comes close to a user fee for city streets. But regardless, the robo-taxis of the future will be electric and charged at private facilities. As long as the roads are free to use, there is zero incentive for these companies not to have robo-taxis constantly circling the block so that they can respond to customers as quickly as possible. And when these cars are significantly less space-efficient than buses or trams, that alone will result in less space available in our cities. But it gets worse. Consider today a suburban parent who drops off one child at elementary school, another at high school, and then drives to work. With self-driving cars, those kids will be sent in their own robo-taxis, so that one car trip today will become three car trips in the future. This is already happening in San Francisco, and it will only get worse. It's great for kids to have independent mobility, but we need to do that without just putting more cars on the road.
In an earlier video, I talked about the problems that many European cities have already experienced after the introduction of 10-minute delivery services, and there are stories today from DoorDash drivers who were called to pick up trivially small orders like a single tube of toothpaste. As robo-taxis become cheaper and more convenient, this is only going to become more common. They're going to be delivering anything within a few minutes, with a car for every delivery. When cars became common, people didn't need to live near their work anymore, and cities started to sprawl as more car-dependent suburbs were built on the periphery. This resulted in huge volumes of traffic funneled into arterial roads and highways because there were more cars driving longer distances. Self-driving cars will only make this worse. When people are freed from having to pay attention to the road, they'll be able to go through their emails or take conference calls from their autonomous vehicle. So why live in a suburb at all? Why not live in a cottage in the middle of nowhere, where land is plentiful and taxes are cheap? This will result in an exponential increase in the amount of vehicle miles traveled, with millions of cars driving very long distances regularly and putting even more strain on our transportation system. And it's going to make the existing problem of financing suburban infrastructure even worse. See my Strong Towns series to learn how suburbanization and car-centric development is literally bankrupting North American suburbs already.
But if you believe in the marketing of autonomous vehicles, then this technology will advance exponentially. Vehicles will communicate with each other to travel efficiently; autonomous pods will merge seamlessly onto high-speed self-driving highways for even higher throughput and speeds; and vehicles will be more efficient than ever through platooning or whatever. In this vision of the future, the transportation problems of today will seem laughably archaic, and we will achieve levels of efficiency we could only dream of. Here's a marketing video from Ford showing what they think the city of the future will be like. Look at all these problems with a modern city. Of course, these problems were...
The problem wasn't caused by people using their cars in the first place, but don't worry about that, because buying their new cars will fix everything. So it's fine. Look, there are ebikes and parks, futuristic trains, less parking; people can cross the street wherever they want, and magic crosswalks will appear. There are vacuum trains, pedestrian plazas, blue skies, and lots of trees. Every single problem will be solved. What's not to like?
But before we get too excited about our utopian self-driving future, it's worth looking back at previous promises of the automobile industry. At the 1939 New York World's Fair, General Motors presented Futurama, the high-tech city of the future in the year 1960. This exhibit was absolutely huge; they had a ride that would take you over the city and even a life-size model of an urban neighborhood. In Futurama, car traffic would be eliminated completely with advanced motorways. These would be separated from all other traffic and allow cars to drive faster than ever before. Pedestrians would be able to comfortably walk through the city on elevated walkways while car traffic was safely whisked away on the roads below.
But the reality was quite different. The motorways promised by Futurama were built, but they just induced demand for more driving and more car ownership, which was the car industry's real purpose in the first place. Of course, they wanted to sell more cars. Instead of being the salvation of the city, elevated freeways divided and destroyed neighborhoods. They flooded city streets with car traffic, increased pollution, and left municipalities with massive tax burdens and maintenance liabilities, to the point where many cities have spent billions to remove urban freeways in an attempt to repair the damage. There are many accounts online that show the destruction that happened to American cities because of car infrastructure, and I'll leave some links in the description.
My point here is that new transportation technology can and will fundamentally change our cities, especially if there's money to be made. So we need to seriously consider how AVs could negatively affect cities so that we can prepare for them today. As AV technology improves, it will start to arrive in personal vehicles. Just like with cars, the first mass adoption will happen in suburbia, especially in the US and Canada. Suburbanites spend too much time sitting in traffic as it is, and it will allow those people to live even farther away from the city where property is even cheaper. So it will definitely be worth the cost for any reasonably wealthy suburbanite. And designing AVs for suburban roads is a much easier problem than for busy cities, so they'll be faster to market, too.
AVs will be proven safer than human drivers, so AV companies will lobby to have AV-only lanes installed on highways and throughout the suburbs. For those who can't afford their own autonomous vehicle, suburban municipalities will subsidize robo-taxis in place of public transit. Entire suburban neighborhoods will be built that are only accessible by autonomous vehicle, which has the added benefit of keeping any, um, undesirable people out. This is the next logical step to the gated communities that are already common across the US. Suburbs will rapidly expand to consume even more valuable land; power lines, water pipes, sewage pipes, and all other infrastructure will become even longer and more spread out. But there will be so much money and debt flooding into suburbs on the promise of building the city of the future that nobody will stop to think about it. And besides, the bills to maintain it all are decades away. In other words, literally exactly what happened in the post-war suburbs of the last century.
Autonomous vehicle companies may be making record profits from suburbanites, but the line must go up, so they'll look towards the cities. Their primary objective will be to eliminate the competition. In the 1920s, Los Angeles had the largest electric streetcar network in the world, but service declined significantly as the streetcars got stuck in traffic behind cars. The streetcars couldn't compete with a heavily subsidized road and highway system. Private streetcar companies were bought out by National City Lines, a company that was financed by General Motors and related companies and was specifically founded with a goal of tearing up streetcar lines throughout the US, because well-functioning public transit is a threat to car companies. History is going to repeat itself here. The companies who finance autonomous vehicles are going to do everything in their power to cancel transit projects, lobby against funding for public transportation, and replace public transit with their private robo-taxis.
There will be autonomous bus concepts promised, and some of these will go into operation to replace today's buses and BRTs, but the real money will be in private AVs and robo-taxis. Robo-taxis will be pitched as a more efficient form of transportation by offering door-to-door service, and any train or transit lines will be converted to AV lanes. But there's nothing more space-efficient than a train. This 18-lane freeway in Toronto is over 100 m wide, but it moves fewer people per day than this single subway line, because trains are so much more space-efficient than cars. In the early 1900s, the Brooklyn Bridge in New York moved over 42,000 people per day, but in the 1950s, the trolleys were removed to make way for cars. Since then, the Brooklyn Bridge has never moved more than 180,000 people per day, well under half as many as when there was public transit. The same thing is going to happen to our cities with AVs. The decrease in space efficiency moving from shared transit to private transportation, coupled with the massive increase in demand for cheap subsidized AV rides, will result in a massive increase in the number of vehicles in our cities.
AV companies will lobby for some roads to be designated as autonomous only. This will be pitched as a way to increase safety and efficiency, but the ultimate goal will be to eliminate public transit and human driving and get everybody to sign up to an AV subscription instead. Here's how a concept of this, called Loop NYC, was pitched by a New York engineering company a few years back. In this video, they assigned certain streets in New York to be self-driving only. They claim that this will be so much more efficient that other streets could be blocked off to cars completely and turned into a giant linear park. But, but AV companies aren't going to be happy giving up any roads, as their success is dependent on offering door-to-door service. So AVs will be required to go everywhere. They'll even argue that AVs should also be allowed in pedestrian areas because they're safer than human drivers and will offer an important service for people with mobility issues.
When there's no price put on driving, competing robo-taxis will circle the block in order to have the quickest response times. Private AVs will drive around automatically to get the cheapest parking rates while their owners are at work. The parking lots that we were told would become obsolete will be converted to solar AV charging stations for both private AVs and robo-taxis, and they'll jump between stations for whichever one has the cheapest prices. So, despite what the car company propaganda might show you, AVs are not going to let us replace roads and parking lots with parks. Autonomous vehicles will demand even more space in our cities, and they're going to get it.
The next problem will be pedestrians. As AVs become more common, people will realize they can cross the street wherever they want because AVs will always stop. And there is no way that AV companies are going to put up with that. They'll claim that people crossing the street are crippling the transportation system, and they'll demand that fences be put up along important streets and roads. Bamberg is a small town in the US state of South Carolina. Like pretty much every American town, they had a traditional Main Street, but this Main Street also became the main highway through town, and all of that downtown activity, and especially all those people crossing the street, was interfering with the flow of car traffic. So they decided to widen the street and install fences along the sidewalks to prevent people from crossing mid-block. After construction was done, car traffic moved much more efficiently, and within a few years, every single shop in downtown Bamberg went out of business. And today it looks like a ghost town, because believe it or not, people don't enjoy being on a cramped sidewalk next to high-speed traffic. This was a monumentally stupid idea, of course, but I bring this up because before the project, the director of the Chamber of Commerce said that the project would, quote, "be a major boost to the economy for the county and downtown Bamberg." There are a lot of people who genuinely believe that if car traffic moves more efficiently, then businesses will thrive, when the exact opposite is true. Cars don't buy things; people do. So if you make a place inhospitable to people, nobody will buy anything.
Expect the same thing to happen with autonomous vehicles. As the fences go up, there'll be no reason for AVs to drive slowly, so they won't. Streets everywhere will be just like downtown Bamberg: inhospitable places where people won't want to be, and street life will slowly die. With public transit, human drivers, and pedestrians out of the way, AV companies will demand an end to speed limits. They'll argue that these restrictions, designed for human drivers, are irrelevant for vehicles driven by a computer. This will result in a huge increase in vehicle throughput and will be considered a tremendous success. But when AVs are driven faster, pedestrian and cyclist fatalities will increase. AVs may have lightning-fast reaction times, but at high speed, the laws of physics win every time. Now there will be outcries when someone is killed, and people will demand to slow down AVs to make them safer. But history will repeat itself again.
Today, cars are a reality that we deal with just about everywhere. But when automobiles were first introduced, people did not want them in their cities. Cars were clogging up city streets and killing thousands of people every year. By the 1920s, the general public was very anti-car. Several cities had plans to require speed governors on all cars entering the city, and they introduced high fines for dangerous driving. But the automobile industry was not about to go down without a fight. They fought to get car-friendly politicians elected and voted down any anti-car legislation. And did they do anything to make their cars less likely to kill people? No, of course not. They invented and spent millions promoting the concept of jaywalking to make it the fault of the victims for not looking where they were going. This changed cities almost overnight. Streets went from being a common place for everyone to a place exclusively for cars. Just a few decades later, the jaywalking of the 21st century will be the transponder that everyone will be required to wear when walking outside if they want to avoid being killed by a car. When someone is hit by an AV, people will ask, "Well, were they wearing their transponder?" and the news will report the victim was not wearing a radar reflector.
These faster cars will also create more pollution and noise. Cars are a major contributor to pollution within cities. Air quality will improve as cars transition to electric, but electric cars will not solve this problem because a major source of local pollution from cars comes from the erosion of the tires, brakes, asphalt, and road markings. And all of these emissions increase as cars get heavier and drive at higher speeds. Cars also create a lot of noise pollution in cities, and that is not just uncomfortable; it literally creates a stress response that leads to physical problems. And I've talked about that in a previous video. There's a common belief that electric cars will solve this noise problem, but that's not really true because once a car goes above about 50 kmph, the sound of the tires becomes louder than the sound of the engine, and this gets worse as cars get heavier. Plus, the faster the car goes, the louder this noise becomes. Many cars in Oslo are electric, but it's still very loud on this pedestrian bridge over the highway. With all of the extra electronics and computers, AVs will be heavier than today's cars, and they're going to be driven faster, too, which will make the air toxic near autonomous vehicle highways, and the noise from the tires on the road surface will be deafening, making these areas uncomfortable and dangerous for anybody walking nearby.
Eventually, AVs will consume every street in the city and push out every other form of transportation. The final step will be to remove traffic lights. About a decade ago, I saw this video produced by the University of Texas at Austin. They proposed a future protocol called AIM that would provide autonomous intersection management for high-speed intersections without traffic lights. This is the animation that made me really think twice about the future of self-driving cars, because when I looked at it, the first thing that crossed my mind was, "Huh, it would really suck to have to cross this intersection while walking or cycling." Of course, there will be people who protest and complain; they won't want their neighborhood being cut in half by an AV highway. But we can't have these luddites denying us our transportation utopia. As a compromise, we'll be promised pedestrian bridges to keep neighborhoods connected, though due to cost-cutting, only a few of them will actually get built.
When highways came to New York City, they completely destroyed some neighborhoods and separated others. A handful of pedestrian bridges, like this one, were built to reconnect neighborhoods. These bridges are awful; they require walking up long ramps; they feel like dirty concrete trenches, and they're really ugly. The chain-link fence separates you from the high-speed traffic below, but the noise and pollution from cars are unbearable. These were clearly built to benefit drivers by keeping pedestrians out of the way and not for the benefit of people walking. In the AV city, you won't be able to cross the street; you'll need to go out of your way to the nearest pedestrian bridge, walk up the ramp, cross the bridge, and walk back down to where you want to go, all while enduring the deafening sound and toxic air of the high-speed traffic below. This will be the city of the future: streets that are completely consumed by autonomous vehicles, intersections that are impossible to cross, cities that are carved up by self-driving expressways, creating islands that are infeasible to leave on foot, with air and noise pollution so bad it makes travel outside unbearable. We'll have a transportation system that consists entirely of autonomous vehicles, so that you won't be able to do anything—go to work, go to school, even buy food for your family—without paying an AV company to get you there. And once every other form of transportation is either eliminated or infeasible, the autonomous vehicle companies will ramp up prices. They'll be able to charge whatever they want because we'll have no alternatives.
So what can we do about it? Well, this brings me to my fundamental issue with the entire concept of self-driving cars. I grew up in a car-dependent city called London—London, Ontario, Canada. And despite its Thames River, Oxford Street, and Covent Garden Market, it's nothing like real London—a kind of fake London, if you will. When I arrive in Fake London by train, I'm on the side of a high-speed thoroughfare across from a surface parking lot. There isn't much left of downtown, and my only option to get anywhere is a taxi. The city is very spread out and designed almost exclusively for cars. Bus service is highly unreliable and slow, and there's no way I would feel safe enough to ride a bike here. I have to drive pretty much everywhere to do pretty much anything, which I got to say, kind of sucks. Too many people drive really dangerously, and there are regular news stories about people being killed in car crashes. So when I'm sitting on a giant thoroughfare stuck in traffic, the idea of having the car take care of all this boring, dangerous driving seems pretty great.
But then I think about Utrecht. Utrecht is a city in the middle of the Netherlands, and I have to go there fairly regularly for one reason or another. The population of Utrecht is very similar to that of Fake London, but otherwise, these cities are very, very different. So you're probably thinking that it's almost comical to compare Utrecht to London, right? I mean, it seems ridiculous because these cities have almost nothing in common. And yet, 100 years ago, they were pretty similar. Sure, the architecture was different, but the fundamental design of the city was pretty comparable. Both were compact, walkable cities full of mixed-use neighborhoods and connected by streetcars, because both cities were founded long before automobiles were invented. Over the 20th century, both cities embraced the automobile, and both cities built wide roads and highways. Utrecht filled in a canal in their city center and turned it into a highway, and London bulldozed a neighborhood to build a wide road straight into downtown. Utrecht and London both even bulldozed part of their city center to build a suburban-style shopping mall, and these malls were both the first of their kind in their respective countries. Utrecht was about a decade behind London, but otherwise, these cities were on exactly the same path—that is, until about the 1990s, when Utrecht decided to change course.
Due to growing concerns about the negative impact of car-centric development, they made a fundamental decision to make the city friendlier to people walking and cycling, to reduce car traffic, and to create better public spaces. The highway around the city center was turned back into a canal. You'd never know that this used to be a highway. And today, that downtown shopping center is connected directly to a new train station via a pedestrianized area and closely integrated with the rest of the city. On the other side, it's such an incredible difference to arrive in this place by train compared to Fake London. Despite having almost the same population as my hometown, it hosts the busiest train station in the Netherlands, transporting over 200,000 people per day, with over 1,000 daily departures on national and international trains. There are hundreds of destinations within walking distance of the station, and there are great connections to other forms of public transit, including this new tram system. Underneath the station is the world's largest bicycle parking garage, with spaces for over 12,000 bicycles, and I can pick up one of the hundreds of rental bicycles using my transit card and cycle to any destination. I can cycle anywhere I want quickly and easily, and because of the high-quality infrastructure, I never feel unsafe. It also helps that car volumes are low, and so are the speed limits. Near the train station is this street accessible only to walking, cycling, and public transit. This is one of the busiest cycling paths in the world, and I probably see more people cycling in 5 minutes here than I have in my entire life in Fake London. Walking around the city is also convenient and comfortable; the streets are lined with interesting shops and restaurants, and there isn't a surface parking lot in sight anymore. There are many nice residential neighborhoods, and it's remarkably quiet, too, because as I've realized over the years, cities aren't loud; cars are loud. I don't feel unsafe walking and cycling here, so the safety promises of autonomous vehicles don't really seem to matter much. There isn't a lot of traffic because there are viable alternatives to driving. People aren't forced to drive here, so the only people in cars are those who need to drive or those who really want to drive.
Self-driving cars are supposed to provide mobility to children, the disabled, and the elderly, and yet I see all of those people getting around just fine in Utrecht. Because universal access to mobility isn't a fundamental issue; it's a problem caused by car dependency. Would this guy be better off in a self-driving car? Maybe. I didn't ask him, but it's not like he's unable to get around independently here, like would be the case where I'm from. Now, Utrecht isn't perfect, and the city still shows the scars of that 1960s car-centric development, but it also just doesn't have most of the problems that autonomous vehicles are supposed to solve. And yet they did it without any advanced technology, without spending hundreds of billions of dollars, and without letting their city be controlled by the whims of multi-billion-dollar corporations, either. If everybody here was in self-driving cars, this place would be much, much worse. So it seems what we really need is not driverless cars; it's carless drivers. I think Utrecht and cities like it can provide a template for what we should be doing to prepare for self-driving cars.
We need to limit where cars can go, and that includes autonomous vehicles. Utrecht has many places that are off-limits to cars, but motor vehicles are still extremely useful sometimes, so access is still provided for delivery trucks, emergency vehicles, and people with disabilities. We need fewer cars in cities, so we should definitely tear down urban freeways that divide neighborhoods and turn the space into parks, shops, and houses. Cars should go around cities and not through them. We should make it impossible to drive through the middle of the city by car; the most direct route should only be accessible by walking, cycling, and public transit, enforced by modal filters. We also need to lower speed limits—now—to make the streets safer today, but also to reduce noise and pollution. Lowering speed limits can sometimes be controversial, but after it's done, there is nearly universal support to keep them low. So let's do it now, before AVs take a foothold. We need to remove parking, especially surface parking lots. We're never going to be able to charge for parking once cars can drive themselves, so let's start removing parking spaces now and turn them into something more useful. And let's stop building any new parking garages, too. After all, they tell us they won't even be necessary once we have autonomous vehicles, right? So let's not build them at all. Instead, let's build more mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods, so that the places where people live, work, and shop are closer together, making it easy to get where you're going without needing a car at all. And safe sidewalks and bike lanes should be part of the standard street design guidelines, so they're built automatically with every new construction. We need to invest in functional and viable public transit, especially infrastructure that is difficult to remove. History has shown us that bus routes will get overrun by cars, so we need more trams and trains and a lot more dedicated transit lanes. And we have to ensure that public transit remains under democratic control, so that it can never be captured by private corporations.
And most importantly of all, and I cannot stress this enough, we need to put a price on driving. We absolutely must keep AVs from circling around and clogging up our streets. The gas tax is going away as cars transition to electric anyway, so let's replace it with something better. Cars should be charged based on how much they drive, but also when they drive, with a higher price during periods of peak congestion. If we do all of these things to fortify our cities, then we might just be ready for the onslaught of autonomous vehicles. Then we can allow AVs into the city on our terms, to provide transportation where it's genuinely needed, not just where it profits tech companies the most. And if the naysayers are correct that self-driving cars really are just a pipe dream and they never reach mass adoption, then I guess we'll do all that work and just be left with beautiful, functional, efficient, and sustainable cities, accessible to all. And that might just be the best outcome.
If you'd like to learn more about great cities or just want more urbanist content, there are lots of relevant videos here on Not Just Bikes. But I can also recommend several other channels, such as City Beautiful, City Nerd, and RM Transit. Like the City Beautiful video, "How to Remove a Highway," about the strategies that several cities have used to remove urban freeways. And the absolute best place to watch all of those channels is on our streaming service, Nebula. Nebula is the fastest-growing independent streaming service on the internet. It's got thousands of unique, interesting, and thoughtful videos from hundreds of talented creators. Think of it like Netflix, but for people who love trains. On Nebula, you can watch all of my videos early before they're available on YouTube and without any ads or sponsorship messages. Nebula also produces exclusive content that's not available anywhere else, like the highly entertaining series The Getaway or Abigail Thorne's latest film, Dracula's Ex-Girlfriend. My favorite part about Nebula, though, is that it's owned and operated by creators, including me, so it's designed to benefit creators and their fans—not advertisers, venture capitalists, or media conglomerates. Nebula allows creators like me to tell better stories and with better production values. Taking creators to the next level is what Nebula is all about. There is no way I could have afforded to make this video with custom 3D animations and high-quality video footage on location without the support I get from Nebula. So if you want a streaming service with lots of original, high-quality videos that's also dedicated to creators to make great content we never could have made before, then sign up to Nebula. A yearly subscription to Nebula is $60, but if you sign up at go.video, Nebula now has guest passes; every Nebula user gets one guest pass per month to share, so that…
Anybody you want can get a week of free Nebula access. Just click the blue balloon in the Nebula interface to get started. If one week isn't enough, then you can buy an annual Nebula gift card for friends, family, or even yourself. And my Dutch viewers will be glad to hear that you can buy them with iDeal. To get access to Nebula without a credit card, so check out Nebula at go. or follow the link in the description to sign up to Nebula and support a Creator-owned streaming service dedicated to making independent creators the best that they can be.