Are self-driving automobiles safer than human drivers?

[ad_1] A century in the past, a deluge of cars swept throughout the USA, upending metropolis life in its wake. Pedestrian deaths surged . Streetcars, unable to navigate the choking visitors, collapsed . Car owners infuriated residents with their klaxons’ ear-splitting awooogah !

Scrambling to accommodate the swarm of motor automobiles, native officers paved over green space , whittled down sidewalks to put in parking, and criminalized jaywalking to banish pedestrians from their very own streets. Generations of drivers grew accustomed to unfettered dominance of the highway. America was remade within the vehicle’s picture, degrading urban vibrancy and high quality of life.

Right now, the incipient rise of self-driving automobiles guarantees to convey probably the most tumultuous shift in transportation since automobiles first rumbled their manner into the scene. Just some years in the past, driverless automobiles have been a technological marvel obtainable to a choose few in San Francisco and Phoenix, however now, corporations together with Waymo, Tesla, and Zoox collectively transport a whole bunch of hundreds of passengers weekly in autonomous vehicles (AVs) throughout increasing swaths of Austin, Texas ; Los Angeles ; and Las Vegas , with future service introduced in a lengthening checklist of cities, together with Dallas , New York City, Philadelphia , and Miami .

Experience-hail corporations are getting in on the motion, too: Uber just lately signed a deal to deploy not less than 20,000 robotaxis powered by the AV firm Nuro’s self-driving methods. Because the transportation enterprise capitalist Reilly Brennan just lately observed , a “stampede is afoot to autonomize rides.”

<img alt="A white self-driving car equipped with sensors and cameras on the roof waits at an intersection in a city, surrounded by regular vehicles, including a silver hatchback and a dark blue sedan. A red scooter is parked on the side of the street, and brick and glass buildings line the background." data-chromatic="ignore" loading="lazy" decoding="async" data-nimg="fill" class="mvmjsc0" style="position:absolute;height:100%;width:100%;left:0;top:0;right:0;bottom:0;color:transparent;background-size:cover;background-position:50% 50%;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-image:url("data:image/svg+xml;charset=utf-8,%3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' %3E%3Cfilter id='b' color-interpolation-filters='sRGB'%3E%3CfeGaussianBlur stdDeviation='20'/%3E%3CfeColorMatrix values='1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 100 -1' result='s'/%3E%3CfeFlood x='0' y='0' width='100%25' height='100%25'/%3E%3CfeComposite operator='out' in='s'/%3E%3CfeComposite in2='SourceGraphic'/%3E%3CfeGaussianBlur stdDeviation='20'/%3E%3C/filter%3E%3Cimage width='100%25' height='100%25' x='0' y='0' preserveAspectRatio='none' style='filter: url(%23b);' href='data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAEAAAABCAQAAAC1HAwCAAAAC0lEQVR42mN8+R8AAtcB6oaHtZcAAAAASUVORK5CYII='/%3E%3C/svg%3E")" sizes="(max-width: 639px) 100vw, (max-width: 1023px) 50vw, 700px" srcset="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/gettyimages-2233379068.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=256 256w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/gettyimages-2233379068.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=376 376w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/gettyimages-2233379068.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=384 384w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/gettyimages-2233379068.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=415 415w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/gettyimages-2233379068.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=480 480w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/gettyimages-2233379068.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=540 540w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/gettyimages-2233379068.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=640 640w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/gettyimages-2233379068.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=750 750w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/gettyimages-2233379068.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=828 828w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/gettyimages-2233379068.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=1080 1080w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/gettyimages-2233379068.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=1200 1200w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/gettyimages-2233379068.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=1440 1440w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/gettyimages-2233379068.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=1920 1920w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/gettyimages-2233379068.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=2048 2048w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/gettyimages-2233379068.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=2400 2400w" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/gettyimages-2233379068.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=2400"/> A Waymo self-driving automotive cruises down the road in San Francisco. Gado by way of Getty Photos

AVs offer some undeniable benefits : In contrast to people, they can not drive drunk, distracted, or drained. They make automotive journeys simpler, much less traumatic, extra frictionless — in a phrase, nicer . The rising availability of AVs is more likely to make many individuals reply simply as they might to some other enchancment in a product or expertise: They may use it extra usually.

However that would show disastrous for cities, inflicting crushing congestion (to not point out widening the gulf between these fortunately ensconced of their AVs and people caught in buses crawling by gridlock). This isn't pure hypothesis: During the last 15 years, the rise of ride-hail, a service just like robotaxis, has increased total driving , thickened congestion , and undermined transit . Autonomous automobiles, which supply privateness and repair consistency that ride-hail can not, may turbocharge the variety of automobiles on the highway, making a multitude of city streets. (Waymo didn't touch upon the document for this story, and Zoox and Tesla didn't reply to requests for remark.)

AVs are coming, however they can not simply plug and play into our present transportation networks. If cities don’t replace their rulebooks, they threat repeating the errors of the final century.

Whereas lots of the insurance policies governing AV deployments are set by federal and state officers, municipal leaders shouldn't sit on their arms when their public sphere stands on the verge of a tectonic transformation. Cities can — and should — act now to extend the percentages that self-driven automobiles enrich city life quite than undermine it. Even higher, doing so will enhance present residents’ lives, regardless of how lengthy it takes AVs to scale.

Listed here are just a few steps price contemplating.

Put a worth on congestion

Right now’s robotaxi deployments are nonetheless fairly modest. Waymo, as an example, operates solely around 300 vehicles throughout all of Los Angeles County. For AVs to be universally obtainable, fleets would wish to broaden by orders of magnitude, and the price of self-driving know-how would probably must plunge (Waymo reported an operating loss of over $1 billion within the first quarter of this yr).

If and when that occurs, cities ought to brace for a lot of, many extra automobiles on their streets.

There are a number of causes to anticipate this. First, a lot of folks free of the stress and fatigue of driving will use a self-driven automotive to enterprise additional for a meal or assembly, and they're going to additionally take journeys they might have in any other case foregone. With human labor prices eradicated, deliveries are additionally more likely to skyrocket. As Anthony Townsend, creator of the e-book Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car , warned, “think about what occurs when it primarily prices as a lot to ship a package deal because it does to ship a textual content message.”

Then there's the problem of “deadheading”: automobiles driving round empty en path to their subsequent pickup, or whereas ready to be summoned. It’s already an issue with ride-hail: Researchers have discovered that Uber and Lyft automobiles are passengerless round 40 percent of the time .

Past the distress of worsened visitors jams, an AV-fueled spike in driving would improve air air pollution; even when the whole AV fleet have been electrified, electric cars shed particles from tires and brakes. They may additionally make bus journeys agonizingly gradual and unreliable (which is all of the extra motive for cities to put in bus lanes as quickly as doable).

An apparent resolution is to comply with New York City’s congestion pricing model . Since January, automobiles getting into Manhattan south of sixtieth Avenue on weekdays should pay a $9 charge throughout weekdays. In a matter of months, the coverage has quickened traffic, quieted car noise , and lowered the variety of cars on the highway.

Cities may additionally think about mileage-based charges on each AVs and human-driven ride-hail automobiles that aren't transporting any passengers, incentivizing them to reduce using visitors lanes whereas empty. Jinhua Zhao, a professor of cities and transportation at MIT, suggests going additional by imposing ride-hail and robotaxi fees that inversely scale with the variety of automobile occupants, rewarding corporations for pooling a number of journeys in a single automobile (and thereby lowering complete driving).

There are myriad methods to design highway use taxes that mitigate congestion. As soon as the coverage is in place, it could actually at all times be adjusted later to maintain avenue visitors shifting.

AVs will rework our relationship with an unrelenting nuisance of American life: parking . A robotaxi doesn't must discover a parking spot after dropping off a passenger at their vacation spot; it merely strikes alongside to its subsequent project (or plies the streets, ready to be summoned). As self-driving automobiles change human-powered ones, “the notion of parking will steadily evolve into the idea of stopping,” Zhao mentioned.

That begs the query of the place, precisely, all these AVs will cease.

“There isn’t at all times an open curb house the place an AV can do a pickup or dropoff,” mentioned Alex Roy, an autonomous automobile advisor who beforehand labored on the now-defunct self-driving firm Argo.ai. “In that case, the AV is simply going to cease in a visitors lane,” probably obstructing visitors and endangering pedestrians. Given the dangers, Roy mentioned, “the AV firm ought to on the outset ask the town the place are optimum pickup or drop zones that may be least disruptive.”

In the meanwhile, that may be a query many metropolis transportation departments would wrestle to reply. Details about loading zones and time-based parking restrictions (e.g., no parking 4 pm to six pm) could be dated and incomplete. “It’s very uncommon for a metropolis to have a correct stock of the curb,” mentioned Robert Hampshire, who oversaw several federal grants supporting curbside administration throughout his time as deputy assistant secretary of the Division of Transportation’s Workplace of Analysis and Expertise underneath President Joe Biden.

Making a present, digital map of all curbs needs to be a high precedence. Doing so can assist cities now, too, as a result of these with the power to gather real-time details about curb use may scale back double parking whereas gathering income from supply and ride-hail corporations. Philadelphia, as an example, in 2022 piloted “good loading zones” that automobiles may reserve by a smartphone app. It’s an strategy that may assist handle right now’s supply vans in addition to tomorrow’s AVs.

Cease constructing new parking (and cost market costs for present spots)

As AVs proliferate, the demand for automotive storage will plummet. For cities the place parking devours 40 p.c or extra of obtainable avenue house, that may be a thrilling alternative. “You may drastically scale back the variety of parking spots and reuse them for housing, parks, or some other goal,” Zhao mentioned.

That’s all of the extra motive for cities to jettison archaic zoning insurance policies often known as parking minimums , which require new housing, retail, and different actual property tasks to incorporate a set variety of parking spots. Lately, dozens of cities , together with Austin; Raleigh, North Carolina; and San Jose, California have already applied reforms, like scrapping parking minimums , to cut back housing development prices and encourage journey modes which might be extra space-efficient and fewer polluting than driving, like strolling, biking, and public transit. These reforms can even lay the groundwork for a smoother AV transition.

Municipal leaders may go additional by charging a dynamic market charge for avenue parking, creating pickup and dropoff spots that AVs can use all through the day. “Pricing is the way you create availability,” mentioned Jeffrey Tumlin, former director of transportation of the Municipal Transportation Company of San Francisco, the town that has been floor zero for robotaxi deployments. “The correct worth for parking is the worth that ensures 15 p.c availability always of day.” These spots can present straightforward and secure locations for self-driven automobiles to tug over when gathering or depositing a passenger, paying the town a charge for the privilege.

San Francisco has already experimented with dynamic parking pricing that adjusts to real-time demand. Even at peak instances, a spot could be discovered for these keen to pay a premium to keep away from the joyless ritual of circling the block for a gap (an exercise that contributes to avenue visitors and produces emissions).

Within the Bay Space, self-driven automobiles have sown confusion on public streets by interrupting emergency response vehicles, randomly freezing in intersections , and pulling over in no-stopping zones . For the reason that infractions are sometimes transient and law enforcement officials are scarce, AV corporations can get away with it. Tumlin mentioned that restricted enforcement has led AV corporations to program their automobiles to easily ignore the legislation: “The AVs’ enterprise case says that it’s greatest to do a pickup or dropoff within the bike lane or in visitors, quite than inconvenience the passenger by having to stroll a block or two.”

People, after all, additionally routinely flout visitors legal guidelines. Cities ought to use know-how to high-quality unlawful maneuvers reliably, no matter whether or not an individual or an algorithm is at fault.

In lots of nations and US states, computerized cameras that establish automobiles operating pink lights or breaking the velocity restrict are widespread and efficient; studies have repeatedly shown that the ensuing fines deter recurrence, and {that a} healthy majority of city residents assist their deployment. Automated enforcement could possibly be notably helpful with autonomous automobiles, permitting public companies to batch an organization’s infractions earlier than issuing a invoice. Elevating the anticipated price of breaking visitors legal guidelines would encourage AV builders to put a better precedence on obeying them.

In the meanwhile, many cities can’t make use of computerized enforcement in any respect, as a result of their state legislatures, cautious of driver opposition, have strictly limited using cameras to problem citations. Loosening these restrictions needs to be a high precedence for metropolis officers lobbying their state capitols.

Fixing for the current in addition to the longer term

There's a world of distinction between a metropolis the place self-driven automobiles quantity just a few hundred and one the place they run into the tens of hundreds. As presently configured, metropolis streets could possibly deal with the previous, however the latter invitations catastrophe.

Autonomous automobiles may be universally obtainable in just a few years, as some believers predict (although such forecasts have been wrong earlier than). Or perhaps that second continues to be 20, 30, or 40 years away.

However metropolis leaders needn't attempt to change into Nostradamus, speculating concerning the evolution of a know-how whose future stays wildly unsure. The issues posed by self-driving automobiles aren't so totally different in sort from these created by standard, human-operated ones — and cities that make considered coverage selections now will improve city life no matter how shortly an autonomous future arrives. There is no such thing as a want to attend, and each motive to not.

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