Imagine trying to ride a horse on the highway. It’s legal, but quasi-insane. In the future, we’ll likely feel the same way about letting humans drive cars (although we may still race cars on tracks). Nearly 25,000 people die in car accidents each week worldwide, the equivalent of a 9/11 scale tragedy every day. Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are projected to decrease auto fatality rates by 80%. The economic arguments for AVs are also compelling. According to research from Columbia University, if even 10% of driving switches to AVs, $250 billion of annual economic output could be unlocked.
Combine the potential to save millions of lives with the massive financial rewards of automating transportation (a case of Gekko’s Law) and the multibillion dollar race for AVs makes perfect sense. With that in mind, here are a few ways the world may change when we make the shift.
Space
The magical thing about Uber is not that you don’t need to drive, it’s that you don’t need to park. Ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft provide an excellent roadmap for understanding the AV revolution. Picture Uber without the driver, and you have a window to the future. Many leaders in autonomous driving are working on shared autonomous vehicles (SAVs) to do exactly this.
Parking spaces typically take up 50-60% of the land area of American downtown areas. Worse, the average personal car is unused for 95% of the day. With a network of SAVs, you could use far fewer cars and drive constantly, freeing up space used for parking. This means wider walkways, larger lawns, more parks, and major new urban development opportunities.
Parking needs for SAVs awaiting maintenance will be minimal. UBS analysts project car ownership will decline by 70% as people join AV ridesharing networks. If you’re skeptical, check how many DVD’s you’ve purchased since subscribing to Netflix.
The increase in downtown space will also allow new homes to be built, increasing supply and making cities more affordable. 55% of the world’s population already lives in cities, and the UN projects that will jump to 68% by 2050, making any extra urban space vital.
Congestion
While there are likely to be fewer cars, congestion may worsen as SAVs remove the hassle and expense of transportation. The San Francisco County Transport Authority concluded that half of the 60% increase in the city’s traffic between 2010 and 2016 came from Uber and Lyft. Ridesharing is cheap and easy, so more people opt for a private car, rather than walk or use public transit.
On the other hand, congestion may be mitigated by connectivity, our next topic.
Connectivity & Edge Computing
Self driving cars have the potential to be a city’s nervous system. While most of the focus today is on cloud computing, AVs will depend on edge computing. With edge computing, thousands of small servers on street corners or in cars themselves will process the data AVs generate as they drive. It takes far less time to send data to a nearby server than to upload it to the cloud. As anyone who’s tried to stop a car on ice knows, braking a second later could mean stopping twenty feet farther down the road. Simply put, AVs can’t afford to wait for the cloud.
Connectivity also enables cars to communicate with each other and the environment. Vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communication will allow cars to travel faster and know exactly when a light is going to change, whether the car in front intends to turn, and if there is a faster route to take. Picture Waze on steroids for the entire city, and you have a rough idea of how this will feel. As with the current version of Waze, this may have the unintended consequence of disrupting previously quiet streets with diverted traffic.
Besides allowing cars to perform rapid calculations, edge computing networks will also enable cities to absorb the staggering amount of data that AVs generate. Current AV prototypes can generate up to 20 TB of data per day. 20 TB of text, if printed out on single-sided pages, would form a 40 mile high stack (over 7 times the height of Mt. Everest).
AV data could be used to take the pulse of an urban area: block by block variations in weather and air quality are possible. It could also be used to track population movements and economic activity. Imagine if Amazon makes a deal with Lyft to get the data from its SAV network, and then serves you a Whole Foods ad. Its algorithms can then track car movements to see which users and demographics the ad resonated with, and better target you in the future.
Even if data is anonymized, population movements can be tracked in aggregate. For example, as David Zipper has suggested, police departments could see a large cluster of people traveling to a house they don’t usually frequent to plan a protest, and then reverse engineer where potential dissidents lived. Questions like these are already emerging in the legislative battle over the Mobility Data Specification (MDS), a California law which gives cities wide access to rideshare data.
Other Economic Impacts
Aside from the economic benefits already mentioned, SAVs have several other implications for the economy. It’s still unclear whether traditional car companies (OEMs) will create separate self-driving systems, or if they’ll all buy AV capability from a software provider like Google or Uber. It’s also unclear if people will opt to buy their own cars or share them. A network of SAVs seems more likely given the long-term trend away from ownership (which I’ll cover in detail in an upcoming post) and towards services.
SAVs are also much more economically rational for consumers.
This chart from ARK reveals two interesting (and horrifying) stats:
- Taxis are almost three times as expensive per mile as private planes.
- Shared autonomous vehicles are projected to be cheaper than walking.
The projections compare the cost per mile of SAVs to the cost of the calories in a Big Mac that would fuel a human to walk the same distance. Even if SAVs are twice as expensive as ARK projects, they’ll still beat walking. Some people may still elect to own personal cars, the way some people still download rather than stream songs and movies, but the majority will use SAVs.
The shift to SAVs will affect more than just OEMs, it also threatens car insurance industry. KPMG predicts that autonomous cars will lead to a 90% reduction in accident frequency by 2050, resulting in a $137 billion decrease in premiums.
AVs also promise to disrupt millions of jobs. There are 3.5 million registered truck drivers in the US, another 5.2 million people who work to support the trucking industry, and an estimated 1.5 million rideshare drivers. If all of these jobs were eliminated (unlikely, but possible), roughly 6% of the U.S. workforce would be unemployed.
Some of these are service jobs that would still exist without truck driver, including restaurants that cater primarily to truckers, roadside motels, and mechanics. However, the above does not include delivery jobs, which are also likely to be automated.
If labor statistics aren’t your thing, this 2014 chart from NPR helpfully shows the most common job in each state:
While economists often point to the new jobs created after factory work displaced artisans during the Industrial Revolution, finding new, fulfilling work for disrupted drivers remains a poorly addressed challenge.
Environmental Impact
The environmental impact of self-driving cars rests on whether we make the switch to electric vehicles. Currently, cars looking for streetside parking travel two thirds of the length of the US per parking space per year. If an all-electric future becomes a reality, the emissions cut by not hunting for parking spaces are enormous. However, if regulation and economics don’t bring an electric AV future, we face a massive increase in pollution as self-driving cars drive nonstop.
Urban sprawl is another consideration often downplayed by AV enthusiasts. When transportation becomes easier, urban sprawl increases. For an example, check out this timelapse of Paris’s footprint as road networks develop. The same effect has been shown with the spread of the interstate highway system in the US.
While long commutes have made us desire downtown real estate close to career opportunities and urban amenities, people may opt to live further away if they don’t need to do the driving.
Finally, even if AVs are fully electric, current battery technology has a significant environmental impact because of lithium mining. Alternate batteries will need to be developed to ensure a sustainable future.
Conclusion
Given the undeniable potential that self-driving cars have to save lives and increase work and leisure time, all signs point towards the widespread use of AVs. We need to begin designing infrastructure and policy to meet the needs of an autonomous future.
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