Could driverless vehicles open a door to safe, car-lite lifestyles?

There are two big reasons you shouldn't ignore the latest developments in autonomous vehicle technology.

Technologists have been claiming self-driving cars are just ahead…just a few more years ahead…maybe just a decade ahead for a hundred years. The entire “intelligent transportation systems” (ITS) industry is constantly playing defense with the public because of the unmet promises and predictable excuses.

Professor Peter Norton has done a ton of important work on this subject. He’s my favorite historian because (1) his work is based on genuine curiosity, (2) he probes the land use implications of transportation decisions, and (3) he has excellent pattern recognition skills. While I’m gushing over Norton, be sure to read Fighting Traffic and Autonorama. He and I bonded many years ago over our shared interest in human flourishing and curiosity about the evolution of cities. That’s my way of saying I have zero interest in a Jetson’s future or having neighborhood streets overrun with machines instead of people. 

Motordom has been encroaching on our space for a few generations. And as someone who’s constantly jumping in the street fight against Motordom, I stopped scrolling to read carefully when I saw this post from Waymo’s co-CEO on my X/Twitter feed:

Since I’m a Vision Zero evangelist, I asked one of Waymo’s engineers if they’d done any human-vs-software safety comparisons. Here’s what he shared:

New data shows that the Waymo Driver continues to make roads safer. Over 14.8M rider-only miles driven through the end of March, it was up to 3.5x better in avoiding crashes that cause injuries and 2x better in avoiding police-reported crashes than human drivers in SF & Phoenix.

100,000 trips per week and significantly safer than a human driver.

Sure, the data came from Waymo, but this is the type of research that should be part of Vision Zero conversations. There’s more than enough publicly-available traffic volume and crash data for third parties to do their own evaluations. You don’t need special connections to transportation departments, just a connection to the internet. 

Some prominent city planners and bicycle/pedestrian advocates have been writing about autonomous technology as if it’s pure fantasy, which is going to cost them credibility. It’s easy enough to see videos of randomly stopped robotaxis and dunk on the technologists or manufacturers. Robotaxis are not ubiquitous and they probably never will be, but Waymo is real. Perhaps it’s miles ahead of the competition, but even if it’s only giving 100,000 software-driven trips per week in a few cities, that’s one hundred thousand trips per week in a few cities. They’ve logged 14.8 million miles without a human in the driver seat.

Even though Waymo is currently a robotaxi (a software-driven car), I’ll challenge you to think about autonomy as a technology with applications beyond the personal automobile. Don’t get sucked into the mindset that this tech is only good for multiplying the amount of motor vehicle traffic on public streets. Any technology can be used to make life better or worse.

For a host of reasons, AV technology has become as polarizing as politics. It’s been framed to the public as either a sign of inevitable progress or a harbinger of the apocalypse. “This is the way” or “go away.” It’s a silly binary choice.

There are two major reasons that I’m encouraged by advancements in driverless vehicle technology: 

1. Eliminating life-altering traffic crashes (Vision Zero).

2. Enjoying car-lite lifestyles.

Reason #1: Eliminating life-altering crashes (Vision Zero)

Self-driving technology can help save humans from themselves. We get impatient, angry, distracted, and sleepy behind the wheel, causing thousands of life-altering crashes every day.

Whether it’s Waymo or some other brand, autonomous vehicle case studies should be part of any serious Vision Zero conversations. After all, Vision Zero action plans typically have multi-year horizons. There’s no reason to kick the can down the road because the technology isn’t fully matured.

Human drivers can’t be bothered to drive the speed limit, and speed is the fundamental factor in life-altering crashes. Even in car-on-car traffic violence that doesn’t involve someone walking in the crosswalk, speed is a life changer and life ender. The kinetic energy of a car crash at 45 MPH is the equivalent of falling off the roof of a 5-story building. Even if you’re buckled in and the airbags deploy, your body takes a beating. It’s especially dangerous for seniors, because the body gets weaker with age. 

Software-operating vehicles are programmed to…well, follow their programming. They adjust their speed to the safest possible level, factoring in road conditions, weather, and the proximity of other road users. You know, all those things driving instructors tell 16-year-olds that are ignored for the rest of their life after getting a license. 

Humans tend to ignore posted speed limits, but AVs don’t. The software isn’t thinking its time is more important than someone on a bike, or thinking a speed limit is artificially low. An autonomous vehicle is simply going to follow the script: 25 MPH in a suburban neighborhood, for example, even when the human operators are driving by at 40 or 45 MPH. 

Without emotional or political trappings, computer programs can follow street design concepts as old as human civilization. The baseline setting can be that cities, towns, and villages facilitate the exchange of goods, services, and ideas — human interactions. Automated transportation doesn’t have to be a race to see how fast a vehicle can deliver its contents. (You know, the way we humans treat transportation.) 

Waymo (and others) are improving their ability to predict the future. Not the 20-year fortune telling that traffic engineers do, but the second-by-second prediction of people and machines surrounding the AV. They’re anticipating that a person on a bike is going to pass a car waiting to turn left, that a child is going to dart out from behind a parked truck, and that a human driver on a side-street is not going to stop at the red light.

People are posting videos shot from the backseats of driverless Waymo cars, and it’s wild to see how much more technology is protecting human life than humans.

Reason #2: Enjoying car-lite lifestyles

Public transit is one of the obvious applications for autonomous technology. Waymo is propelling small robotaxis, but there’s no reason the same technology couldn’t pilot larger vehicles carrying groups of people.

If a family with three cars had access to reliable transit—fixed route and point-to-point service—they could save a fortune by only having two vehicles. Maybe just one van or SUV. 

There are two specific age groups who’d benefit tremendously from a car-lite lifestyle: teenagers and seniors.

Teen drivers are notorious for being high-risk due to inexperience, distractions, and a tendency to engage in risky behavior. Drivers aged 80+ had more than 6x the death rate of drivers aged 30-49 and nearly double the death rate of teens. We're expecting a 50% increase in the number of 80-year-old drivers from 2020 to 2030. 

The US is sprawled out, and most Americans don’t have access to public transit. Autonomous vehicles can become that transit option, rather than putting the high-risk populations in the driver’s seat.

We can flourish while driving less

The USDOT says that human-operated cars average one crash every 165,000 miles. Based on crash reports involving Waymo, the software-operated cars are 600% less likely to cause a crash than a human.

I don’t trust any auto manufacturer to be completely honest about their product, its safety performance, or its go-to-market strategy. Be a skeptic of Waymo and any other corporation’s claims. Part of skepticism means asking good questions and connecting dots. Sometimes autonomous vehicles will behave erratically or honk their horns at each other. (Who does that remind you of?) 

Maybe Waymo isn’t 600% less likely to crash than humans. Maybe they’re only 300% less likely to crash.

It’s absolutely possible that driverless vehicles can play a major part in eliminating life-altering crashes and giving the most danger-prone human drivers a safe way to get around. Maybe those outcomes only happen in a few cities. But how great would that be?!