Transit Will Not Die
22 January 2016
There are a lot of things going on here. Let me see if I can tackle this in some kind of order. I’ll use Chicago/Evanston for my examples, but geometry and physics are universal. I’m not going to get into the tech of how close we really are to widespread use of autonomous vehicles (AVs)—it’s sort of immaterial to the question, and I don’t know enough to say anything either way.
Something to keep in mind is that even though telecommuting continues to be on the rise, central cities are not going anywhere—we’re social animals, face-to-face is still how business gets done, and Paul Krugman’s Nobel for agglomeration economies isn’t going to be rescinded. Therefore, there’s still going to be a rush hour full of people trying to get downtown. And while an AV with wifi might let you work on your way to work, I have it on good authority (from Eitan and every other person who takes a tech shuttle to work in the South Bay) that a 60/90/120 minute commute (each way!) is soul-crushing, no matter how cushy the ride is—Marchetti’s Constant holds.
So let’s play out a few scenarios for how AVs are adopted by the public at-large.
One scenario looks a lot like today, but personal cars are replaced with AVs. Everyone in Evanston still has a car or two in their garage. People in Lake View have their cars drop them off in front of their building, then let it go circle for street parking without them. You’ve already noticed a problem: we still need a fuckton1 of parking. And, if we continue to fail to price parking adequately, cars are still circling, and we’re not lowering our vehicle miles traveled (VMT), so we’re still boiling the planet.
Or maybe public parking lots are scaled down, because each car doesn’t need multiple parking spaces—it just goes home when it’s not needed, and can be fetched at any time. For instance, the parking lot at Ryan Field can go away—Metra riders at Central St can be dropped off at the station, then the car will go back home, and then come back to pick people up in the afternoon. Congratulations, you’ve just doubled VMT—and unless we massively convert to electric cars powered by a renewable-sourced power grid, you’re still boiling the planet.
In this scenario, Uber and Lyft persist. Maybe they finally start owning their own fleets, or maybe people loan their cars to the on-demand fleet when they’re not in use. For one thing, you still end up with surge pricing—car owners aren’t going to loan their cars to Uber while they’re commuting to work, or coming home after a Blackhawks game. For another, what about all the people who either can’t or won’t own a car? I’m assuming the adoption of AVs doesn’t repeal Title VI, right?
Now, this scenario is fine for rich people who can own their own AVs and slightly less-rich people who can afford Uber. What about people who need a car, but can’t afford an AV (but can afford a regular, human-driven car) or enjoy driving themselves?2 Unless and until every single car on the road is an AV, you’re not gaining any efficiencies on the roads in terms of throughput. As long as that’s the case, you still have traffic jams, car crashes, and all the other assorted shittiness that encourages transit, walking, and bicycling over driving.
So let’s say you’re able to overcome AAA, and suddenly every single car (and don’t forget buses, freight trucks, construction pickups, etc) on the road is a safe, reliable AV. At the absolute high-end—with every car going 60mph and following the car in front of it within 4-5 feet—highways get 8x more throughput. Sweet! And at some point those cars get off the highway. Not so sweet. They are plunged into an urban street grid where blocks are 400 feet long and the lights cycle from red to green every 40 seconds—because you still have pedestrians who need to cross the street. These cars are not going 60mph—acceleration is difficult, and conservation of momentum’s still a bitch in a crash—and your throughput massively drops. If you’re lucky, you’re looking at a 1.5-2x increase in throughput—and maybe not even that, if everyone expects door-to-door service, creating loading zones on both curbs of every street at rush hour. (The Newsweek article’s “Pre-school Parking Lots” scenario sounds pretty awful right about now.) And if your regular streets aren’t more efficient, you’re going to get backups as those 8x (or 4x, or even 2x) cars that were on the highway try to get off—and those backups will spill onto the highway, eroding that original 8x. (Think about how this plays out at the corner of Ohio & Orleans. If the Ohio spur from the Kennedy wasn’t a mile long, the traffic waiting at the light would spill onto the Kennedy.)
Unless cars are remade to be massively smaller (like, say, the size of a bicycle), geometry is ruining any gains made by AVs. There’s a semi-famous picture in transportation that’s been making the rounds for a few years now, showing how much space 60 people take up depending on their mode:
The upshot here is that, within cities that have the density to support it (and I firmly believe that Krugman + Marchetti = continued high-density cities), transit will not die.
There’s one final scenario to explore here, though (spoiler alert!) the outcome doesn’t really change: what if, in addition to outlawing human driving, we outlaw private car ownership?3 Who owns AVs instead? Maybe Uber and Lyft finally decide to buy their fleets instead of relying on loans from private owners. Or maybe the government owns the vehicles and contract out operations—y’know, exactly like how Metra owns its fleet but has Union Pacific and BNSF operate some of its lines? Or maybe the government decides it’s worth doing it all in-house… like the CTA and countless other agencies do it today?
So I should go work for Uber, right? Look back at the picture above. Even if those are all on-demand taxis, you’re still not serving dense central areas with personal vehicles.4 But you know where Uberized AVs might work wonders? Solving the “Last Mile Problem” that you’ve been solving on your bike for the last 30+ years. Delivering passengers to suburban rail stations is a great use of AVs. And they would relieve the need for ugly park & ride lots. Suddenly, a thousand old-style town centers can bloom because suburban car owners aren’t demanding a parking space within 200 feet of the train platform.
In parallel with all of this: autonomous technologies will be integrated into transit. Actually, they’ve already been integrated into transit for years, with many happy returns. Remember that usually 60-80% of a transit agency’s annual costs go toward paying operators5, so reducing that number to zero lets you run a ton more transit, relieving crowding. (And if more people have a seat because trains and buses run more frequently, another argument in AV’s favor drops away.) So the economics of mass transit might change, but knowing how to design a route, how to manage a fleet (both operationally and cycling it through maintenance), and all sorts of other transit ideas—aka me doing my damn job—are not going away.
But thank you for your concern.
1 This is a technical term. It means about a billion parking spots nationwide, or a big blob in any major city.↩
2 “You can pry my steering wheel from my cold dead hands!” will one day be AAA’s rallying cry, no doubt.↩
3 Those old jokes about “in Soviet Russia, car drives you!” don’t seem so ridiculous now, do they?↩
4 This is a good time to point out that Uber is still not revenue positive. Look at their evolution: they started as just black cars—a luxury transportation option. Then, to boost their market share and cut costs, they started doing UberX. But even paying regular people a pittance to drive wasn’t enough, so they started to force strangers to ride together with UberPool. Now even those economics aren’t working so they’re trying “Smart Routes”, aka A FUCKING BUS ROUTE.↩
5 Not just operators, but conductors, too. This is why it’s so vital that Metra switches to proof-of-payment and stops overstaffing its trains. You might still need 1 conductor per train to help people in wheelchairs board, but the savings of kicking off the other conductors could let Metra double or triple their off-peak frequencies.↩