I’ve been having an interesting go-around with several people who have taken the position that there’s no need to have rail transit in their community because soon everyone will have access to self-driving electric cars that show up on demand, and they’ll be smart enough to eliminate traffic congestion.
(Not said directly, but what I’m reading between the lines is A) they don’t want to spend the money to invest in the rail corridor because they won’t use it, and B) they want to believe in the autonomous cars because it won’t force them to make any changes in their lifestyle. Also, at least one of them has a direct interest in this and is a true believer. And C) — they just think it’s a bad idea.)
They have an existing rail line; current plans for it include restoring the line to serve for transit purposes, along with construction of a parallel trail for biking, walking, etc. This isn’t about entirely new construction — this is about capitalizing on an asset they already have.
I’m not going to get into the specifics of the debate here — instead I’d like to talk about the autonomous electric car concept. They can have a role to play, but they are NOT the one size fits all solution that is being claimed. To summarize:
The self-driving electric car is being touted by some as the answer to cutting carbon emissions and curing gridlock. It is being promoted as a way to have a clean future without sacrifice or change. Zero emissions (more about the that below), personal convenience, safer travel, and the car will automatically find the fastest route. And if ride-sharing services have their way, you won’t even need to own that car. Call a car when you need it, get to where you want to go, and then walk away (having paid, of course.)
There are a more than few problems with that scenario though.
1) The technology is still not there yet, and will take years to prove out, including the transition from 'dumb' vehicles to 'smart' vehicles. How well will a mix of smart and dumb vehicles on the roads work out in practice? No one knows. What kind of emergent behavior will appear if a critical threshold is crossed? The Boeing 737 MAX scenario shows how automated systems can create new problems while attempting to solve others.
2) It will require supporting infrastructure changes – roads changed to make it easier for smart cars to navigate them, charging stations, and things that won't become apparent until a critical mass of vehicles is reached.
3) Who will pay for the transition - and how will it happen? Will individuals buy their own vehicles, or will companies replace private ownership with fleets of them? Uber and Lyft are hoping that’s the way things will go. The dirty little secret of the autonomous electric car is that it’s being hyped by those who see it as the means of gaining a transportation monopoly. Anyone who is familiar with the history of railroads in the 1800’s should understand how that works.
4) People who think this is a great idea and reject mass-transit because they like the idea of on-demand transportation are not thinking it through. Here’s a few points to consider.
- The only way to be assured of instant availability is to have you own vehicle, negating the advantage of giving up ownership.
- If you are not going to own your own vehicle, the only way to be sure of getting one just when you need it is for there to be enough vehicles to meet peak demand at all times. In effect, it’s creating a mass transit system made up of individual components. Think of it like replacing every single personal vehicle with a robot taxi.
- This creates a new set of problems. The cost of using one of these vehicles has to be spread across the cost of supporting all of them – including the ones that sit idle during non-peak usage hours.
- If there is a limit on the number of vehicles available, then the choice is waiting for one to become available – at a random time. Mass-transit may have less flexibility on availability, but it runs on schedules making it predictable.
- If there are going to be enough vehicles available to meet individual demand at peak times, then this is not going to reduce traffic congestion at all. It may make it worse. Studies have found drivers using navigation apps on smart phones who are alerted to congestion on highways try to find alternate routes. The end result is traffic diverting to roads not built to handle the number of vehicles now clogging them. Smart vehicles risk automating this scenario.
- If a service allows for people to share the same vehicle in order to spread out demand and reduce the number of vehicles needed, this means finding people going on the same route as you for at least part of your trip, and accepting the presence of randomly selected persons sharing the ride with you. Effectively, this is just another form of mass transit, unless you are willing to pay a premium to ride alone.
- On closer examination, it appears autonomous electric cars have the same problem mass transit faces everywhere. If the vehicles are not owned by individuals, but by companies selling transportation services, how much population density is required before it becomes financially viable as a business. If it is to be run like a public system, how does it get paid for – and by whom?
- If this is going to be a commercial system, what about the range problem? How often will cars take themselves out of service to charge, to ensure they will have enough range to handle the next trip? Will that actually increase the power demand, versus owners who pretty much know ahead of time how much travel they will do, and can plan charging around it?
5) Purely on the basis of their carbon footprint, expecting autonomous electric cars to ‘solve’ the climate crisis all by themselves is not reasonable.
- Yes, they can be better than fossil fuel vehicles on a one-to-one basis as far as emissions go. At least they may be – but no one actually has a fully autonomous vehicle yet, and saying “Real soon now” is not a basis for making serious policy decisions. Efficiency gains from the autonomous feature have yet to be established. (See above about reducing congestion.)
- As well, it needs to be kept in mind: electric vehicles are only as clean as their energy source. An electric generating plant burning fossil fuels to charge electric vehicles is easier to make more efficient and cleaner than thousands or millions of internal combustion engines, and can focus air quality issues at one point – and that is a gain. Shift to clean methods of generating power and the picture improves even more – but that’s not the only consideration.
- The shared carbon footprint of people in a bus can be even smaller – especially if that’s electric. Reducing the number of vehicles on the road reduces congestion, saving even more. It also reduces the need for parking everywhere. All of that makes a difference.
- But there’s still more room for improvement. The most efficient vehicle rolling rubber tires on pavement takes three to four times as much energy to move people or goods as steel wheels rolling on steel rails, whether it’s zero carbon or not.
- Electrifying a rail line with fossil fuel power is still cleaner than running trains on diesel – and as with cars, once the line is electrified, it can switch to clean power as it becomes available. Further, it’s a lot easier to electrify a rail line than a highway system, and Positive Train Control is a lot farther along than autonomous cars.
- One more thing: replacing the current fleet of fossil fuel vehicles must take into account the resources needed to create a fleet of electric vehicles: the energy costs and resource constraints involved. While they make a difference, it has to be balanced against the gains that could be obtained by alternatives.
6) While the climate crisis aspects of autonomous electric vehicles need to be evaluated and considered on the basis of their actual merits, something else needs to be kept in mind.
The drive to adopt them is driven in part by hype and short-sighted thinking. Billions of dollars are being invested in developing and selling autonomous electric cars – because the people backing them expect to make even more billions. (See 3 above)
Ridesharing services are very interested in autonomous cars because that would allow them to eliminate paying drivers — and it forwards their larger agenda. They have set their sights on eliminating mass transit systems, because they see that as key to establishing a transportation monopoly. Once they do, expect prices to balloon because they are currently underpricing their services to build market share.
Uber’s business model is to subsidize fares and flood streets with taxi-like cars in order to grab market share and eventually market pricing power. Most customers who love Uber don’t realize that the company actually subsidizes about 50 percent of the cost of every ride. So every time a passenger gets into the car, they are only paying half of the actual cost. The other half is paid by Uber’s wealthy venture capital funders.
When railroads were the only serious transportation choice on land, the operating principle was “All the market will bear.” The late 1800’s saw railroad wars as financiers raced to build railroads to establish transportation monopolies, and spectacular collapses as lines built on speculation and outright fraud collapsed. Railroads ended up as regulated monopolies because systematic abuse of their customers drove reform. The same market forces are at work today, and they are having a corrosive effect.
...Ridership on public mass transit is down in nearly every major U.S. city, including in New York City (which recorded its first ridership dip since 2009), Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin (a 12 percent decline), Washington, D.C. (10 percent decline), and more. But can this ridership decline be attributed to ridesharing, even in part?
Most definitely. A study from the University of California Transportation Center found that nearly half of respondents said that if a ridesharing service hadn’t been available, they would have taken a bus, train, bike, or simply walked. Another study found that, if rideshare users did not have that option, up to 61 percent of their trips either wouldn’t have been made at all or would have been done via mass transit, bike, or foot. Still another study found that ridership declined significantly on San Francisco’s new BART train line to the airport as Uber and Lyft saw their ridership to the airport rise almost six-fold. The ridership decline led to BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit, the regional mass transit system) revenue falling under budget for the year by $3.6 million. It took San Francisco a decade to secure the billions in state and federal funding to extend this line to the airport, and now its usage is being undermined by ridesharing.
Destruction of, and de-investment in, mass transit exacerbates inequality. Cars are expensive to own and operate. So are private car-based services. More from the American Prospect article:
Who uses public transportation in the United States? Governing magazine summarizes the research, which shows that “in nearly all urban areas, data indicates public transportation commuters tend to be disproportionately poorer than those driving to work.” They also tend to be disproportionately people of color. In New York City, the median earnings of public transit commuters is about $35,000 per year, and only a third of those commuters are white. In Los Angeles, the disparity is even greater. The median income of public transit commuters is only $15,000 per year, 71 percent Hispanic and only 11 percent white. Houston has a similar profile as L.A. So any new policy or technology that impacts public transportation always results in a vastly disproportionate impact on minority and working-class communities.
This is not a blanket condemnation of electric vehicles or even autonomous vehicles. They have a place in the future we need to build — but they’re not the perfect solution to every transportation problem some are trying to make them appear. We need to get off fossil fuels ASAP; but replacing them with snake oil is not a good idea.
Thoughts?
UPDATE: Here’s more from the UC study on the effects of ridesharing on public transportation, traffic, and other negative consequences. Uber is trying to go international with this too, getting into countries that have yet to develop transit systems.
It looks like ridesharing is creating more problems than it solves, and it’s not good for climate.