Will Transit Agencies Fight Or Yield To The Self-Driving Revolution?

Transit operators and transit fans have, since almost the beginning, cast a wary eye on the arrival of the self-driving car, and in particular the robotaxi. It is common to think of the car — and thus the self-driving car — as the enemy of transit, or at the very least the evil force for which transit is the antidote. The arrival of transport innovations like UberUBER
and micromobility have been sometimes seen as complements to transit, but just as often they have been seen as competition.

Recently, the International Association of Public Transport (UITP) issued a policy paper on their view of self-driving vehicles in the future. While not fully one sided, the gist of the paper is that the right answer is for self-driving vehicles to be integrated with public transit, and in particular, that the transit agencies be in charge of this integration. We had a debate about this question at the Transportation Research Board’s automated vehicles conference near Anaheim in July.

The relationship between traditional public transit and self-driving is going to be complex. This is particularly true if transit operations view robotaxis as “competition.” The UITP is fairly European in orientation, where competition is more often seen as a bad thing, while in the USA, competition is a good thing which drives all players to improve. The last thing you want to do is have any entrenched party be in charge of the arrival of something they view as their competition. Indeed, while it’s rarely so overt as that, the danger is already strong when incumbent non-governmental players fear competition and have power to sway regulators. If the new force threatens the regulators themselves, the public interest will not be served.

As such, public transit agencies should be kept away from any influence over the rise of the robocar and robotaxi, other than on an equal footing with the new players.

Transit advocates generally feel the car is the enemy, and self-driving cars are still cars. Their objections to cars are primarily for the following reasons:

1. They need parking, which means not just street parking and lots, but also that homes get set back from the road, people circle for parking, and parking gets subsidized
2. They pollute and make noise
3. They are expensive
4. They appear to be energy inefficient (though transit is often worse)
5. Drivers behave badly
6. They trigger induced demand
7. They are dangerous to other road users (and their drivers and passengers)
8. They disrupt life on the streets
9. They cause congestion
10. They enable low-density housing

It is worth noting that the electric robotaxi eliminates most of these problems, except the last 3, and there is the potential to even fix the issue of congestion.

It’s also possible that the smart shared robotaxi can also reduce the disruption and congestion. That leaves only #9 — city planners have reasons to hate low density, but city dwellers love it, and that battle deserves its own article.

Robocars as last mile

It is common in transit circles to imagine robocars should be directed to being “last mile” service, shuttling people to and from transit stops. This is a a nice, non-competitive use that actually enables transit, which suffers from the problem that many people don’t live near transit stops and need a better way to get to them than walking. In reality, riders are going to not want to take a robocar to a bus, wait for the bus, then ride the bus, pausing at each stop, until they get to another bus stop to transfer to another last mile shuttle. They won’t even want that for the train, even though the train is often given a private right-of-way to bypass traffic. They won’t want to take a vehicle that can offer door-to-door service and use it only as a shared local shuttle.

The final form of transportation in the 21st century has not been settled, but it won’t look like conventional hub and spoke train/bus transit with robocars used only for the last mile

The goals of transport and what is transit?

Robocars and transit will come into conflict. To resolve this, I feel the best approach is to come to agreement about what goals we have for transportation and transit. This is a mix of the goals of the traveler (Quick, predictable, reliable, available, safe, pleasant, cheap, easy, with parcels, non-destructive and ideally green) as well as the public good goals (high throughput, pleasing, popular, cheap, safe, green, equitable, accessible and fitting city plans.) These goals are detailed at the link and comment is welcomed on any additional goals.

We must come to agreement about the goals, and then work to meet these goals, rather than get wedded to means. Transit, cars, robocars and bicycles are not goals, they are means — but people often treat them as goals in and of themselves.

With the goals in mind, one can get a better appraisal of how transit fits them, and even what it is. While it is commonly thought of as group transportation run by the government, there are private transit lines in the world, often very successful ones, so being run by the government is not a necessary condition — though perhaps it is a sufficient one. Though there are government run private transportation modes, including some paratransit and some on-demand systems. A more broad definition might be transport run to meet a public good.

Private companies certainly are working on more efficient group transportation though that is normally a hallmark of transit. This even includes carpooling, which is done using the private car of the driver, yet does much of what public group transport tries to do.

Responding to threats

Two cases stand out in recent times. In San Francisco, a private company named Chariot, later bought by Ford, began operating a private van service for commuters. The services were more direct, and more expensive, and higher quality than regular bus service, and as such, they attracted riders of transit lines to take the superior van. The transit lines saw this as competition. They have a reason for thinking that — transit needs a critical mass of riders to work. While it usually doesn’t need it for money (fares usually provide only a small portion of the operating cost) it is harder to justify a line, or running it at a good frequency, if ridership drops. If you drop frequency, ridership drops even more since service has deteriorated.

This makes the transit line want monopoly power, and it did, telling services like these vans not to operate along the main transit lines where they competed for passengers. As a business, though, it was not reasonable for Chariot to have to avoid the routes with the most demand, and the service was shut down.

We’ve also seen competition between transit agencies and shared scooter and e-Bike services. While there is no doubt that many of the scooter services came into towns without paying much attention to disruption of the sidewalks, the bigger problem transit agencies had was people were using the scooters for short trips rather than take the bus, and Covid made that even worse after people got over being scared of sharing handlebars. But it should be noted that these scooters use less than 20 wh/mile to move a person, though one must in some cases triple that to cover the cost of moving them to be recharged. The most efficient US transit line, New York MTA subway, uses 165 wh/passenger-mile and many systems are far worse, as much as 6 times worse. So the transit agencies, out of fear of competition, had the instinct to push away a form of transportation that is vastly more energy efficient than they are, even though energy efficiency is supposed to be very high on the list of goals that transit should be good at.

That’s why, to set transportation policy for the future, neither robocar companies or transit agencies should be in charge. Instead, policymakers should decide the goals, and appoint independent parties to set policy based only on these goals and never wedded to particular means.

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