How Self-Driving Cars will Destroy Cities (and what to do about it)

We should stop Tolerating Human Carnage. But the solution is not self driving cars. The actual way to solve the 'Carnage' is to adopt well proven well studied infrastructure changes. After 40+ years of idiotic car brain policies, some nations have started to push back and actually started to treat road safety more like aviation safety. Constant review and feedback into the profession and infrastructure updates. Vision Zero is approachable even without self driving cars. But even that is looking at the problem in the wrong way. True improvement comes from modal shift to public transport, along with increasing use in walking and biking. Those mods are saver and healthier by any possible measure, no matter how amazing these self driving machines will be in the future. This is not only good for less people dying in traffic, its also good for many, many, many other reasons. General population fitness, general health and so on. The list of effects of good urbanism and anti car policy is basically endless. Cars are the problem, and self driving cars are a solution to part of that problem, and electric cars are a solution to part of that problem. But cars are still overall the actual problem biggest problem. Instead of investing countless billions in these two sub problems, for far, far less money you could do a huge amount to change the actual structure of how transportation works. Not Just Bikes has a good video on the problem with self driving cars, even if the technology worked as advertised. Its not how we want the future to look like. ▶ this video Putting each human into an individual multi-ton pod is stupid, unnecessary and dangerous even if you plaster unlimited amounts of technology on each pod. We know how to create massively better societies in every way, its not dispute in people who research these things. Self driving cars can be a tiny part of that, but mostly in rural and suburban regions. In cities they are not needed. This hyper focus on human car crashes is to narrow and misses a much bigger discussion, but this is a discussion the car industry and the individualistically driven AI people don't want to have.

I actually hope that they do not succeed in the end. Ubiquitous self driving cars will spell the end of what's left of walkable areas in North America and bring about (in time) similar destruction of the urban fabric to Europe and elsewhere. I'm not very articulate and English is my second language but this video below is really worth watching before we all swallow as an axiom the idea that autonomous cars are going to be a good thing: ▶ this video [EDIT] Most of you seem unwilling to spend an hour to watch a youtube video (although I believe it's worth your time esp if you're from North America) so here's a summary I attempted in another comment: "Autonomous cars will clog up existing cities by cruisnig around looking to pick up rides or deliver shit and mill around endlessly or occupy every piece of parking in prime real estate to make sure they are quickly available wherever demand is high (i.e. where people want to or have to be). In time they will phase out human driven cars which will lead to higher speed limits and more infrastrcuture that supports autonomous driving. Meaning fewer "difficult" intersections, straighter roads, no bike lanes or pedestrian sidewalks. Everything optimized for autonomous cars to endlessly mill around. People will be blocked from being near autonomous cars as those will be going too fast for human reflexes to cope with so areas where cars drive will not have sidewalkss nor bike lanes. This will lead to urban areas that are even more car dependent with only pockets of urbanism that support human scale. To get anywhere one will need to hail one of those autonomous taxis and then zoom in it to a destination where it's again safe to walk in whatever pocket of human activity. Since cars need a lot more land area than humans the urban infrastructure will mostly cater to them and not to people because the expectation and argument will be that you can always get your ass shuttled to wherever you need to be."

I highly recommend watching the notjustbike video on autonomous vehicles. It outlines a disturbingly plausible path to a dystopia simply by following the lobbying incentives to logical conclusions. This feels like step 0. I'd strongly suggest that if this is coming to somewhere near you, you object, tell your city no, protest, etc. Link to the start of where he starts outlining a path to dystopia (though the first half of the video is informative too) ▶ this video

> Hypothetically, if all the cars are synced, you eliminate certain congestion effects. Sure if you also remove, people, bikes and everything else. Congratulation, you just invented a grade separation. And if you are going threw all the effort of grade separation, you know what a good idea? To push as many people as possible along that route. And you know how you do that, by not putting each human into a huge 2t box of steel. If you had the incredibly inefficiency of cars, to grade separate you would need to grade separate a HUGE space. And grade separation is incredibly disruptive. Grade separation is only worth if you can push lots of people threw. > Likewise, synchronized cars can drive closer to each other Because synchronized cars never have a mechanical failures or emergency break? Here is an idea, you create these things called 'couplers' and then you physically couple multiple 'cars' together and then you actually can be really close together. How about this, we move away from cars, and have beautiful parks for the people who live in these places. with nice restaurants having seats in what is now the road, with some nice not so fast trams going threw. And then some nice high density rail under or over on a guide-way. Here is a good video going threw all these points and how great this scenario actually would be. ▶ this video

I ride my bike several times a day, and I have very mixed views about Waymo, etc. I care immensely about traffic safety (so much I moved to the Netherlands). If you took the world as it is now and left everything the same except that every car was a waymo and there were no human-driven cars left, I would be ecstatic. Humans are horrible drivers and some of them are downright murderous. If every car were a waymo I could even imagine letting my kids bike to school in the bay (where I used to live), which I wouldn't dream of now. But I think the second-order effects of self driving cars could be terrible. It removes any incentive not to have an incredibly long commute (exacerbating sprawl), and so far every time there has been a situation where the needs of walkers and cyclists were pitted against the needs of drivers, drivers won. I think the same will happen with self-driving cars, and people will be made to wear beacons just to walk across the street. NotJustBikes discusses this well here ▶ this video But if we have proper regulation (pretty unlikely I would say) and use things like waymo to stop humans from driving (remember, drivers are the leading killers of children in the US!) that would be great.

Reminder that cars reshaped urban environments and generally for the worse, and self driving cars have a very solid chance to do the same thing: ▶ this video If you have an hour, highly recommended video. A bit too doomerist but the threat is there. Keep in mind that it's not just about tech (which can be amazing), but also about social aspects, money and politics (which can be atrocious and generally override morality and technology).

It's long, but well worth an hour of your time. He even states in the comments that he set out two years ago to make a positive video about AVs: What was most surprising to me was that when I began researching this video (two years ago!) it was going to be about some of the technical challenges that would need to be overcome in order to make self-driving cars a reality, but the conclusion was going to be that ultimately, AVs would be a good thing. By the time I was done researching this topic I was absolutely horrified of our future self-driving dystopia. ▶ this video The future he illustrates seems mostly plausible, except that it depends on all of the technology functioning flawlessly. I have a hard time believing that streets full of high-speed AVs functioning in perfect synchrony is likely. However, that doesn't change my general agreement with the conclusions he draws in that video and the rest of his channel.