Linking up could save space, fuel consumption, and lives
When people think of robot cars, they mostly imagine taking naps, reading a book or phone, or doing work, while the car whisks you to where you want to go. It’s basically a chauffeur for everyone.
But there’s another aspect to self-driving vehicles that doesn’t get as much attention: platooning.
No, not the Charlie Sheen movie. It’s the word for when vehicles can drive in formation on a highway, like geese, via software and hardware technologies, that allow them to tailgate like crazy.
The advantage for other drivers is that it frees up a huge amount of roadway capacity, equivalent in some cases to building a whole new highway (of course, we know that extra capacity just induces more driving in the long term).
But for truckers, it can also mean major fuel savings, which produces environment gains. Mountain View’s Peloton Technology is an early leader in this field. It develops the hardware and software that allow the trucks driving behind the lead vehicle to brake and accelerate automatically to synchronize. As Carolyn Said in the San Francisco Chronicle reported:
Independent tests show the front truck uses 4.5 percent less fuel and the rear one saves 10 percent, Peloton said. Averaging those savings between the pair could result in saving a few thousand dollars per year per truck, Switkes said. Peloton’s pricing is a subscription based on a fraction of the actual cost savings that trucks achieve.
“That adds up quickly for a fleet with 30,000 trucks,” said [Josh Switkes, Peloton CEO and co-founder] said. The types of big rigs it’s targeting rack up 130,000 miles a year. “For a heavy truck, in a year and a half you spend as much on fuel as you did to buy the truck” — some $130,000 to $170,000.
Peloton’s name refers to a group of racing bicyclists who ride in close formation to reduce wind resistance, which is somewhat ironic given the dangers that trucks and other vehicles pose to biking — not to mention that biking is a far more environmentally friendly (and healthy) way to get around.
Still, our society needs trucking for goods movement. So technology solutions that can reduce fuel consumption and therefore pollution, as well as reduce accidents and the need for more highway expansion, are something we should encourage.
Self-driving cars and trucks are already here. It’s mostly the laws and regulations that now need to catch up to make them ubiquitous.
While it’s easy to celebrate the potential benefits (greatly reduced accidents, saved time, and possible emissions savings from more efficient vehicles and driving patterns, including reduced ownership), I’m concerned about the impacts to the environment. I described some solutions in a previous blog post that would reduce the risk that the technology just leads to more sprawl and traffic.
But maybe the environmental concerns are not the real story here. Instead, it may be the potential for mass disruption in employment from full adoption of complete automation technologies.
Take truck driving, which is the most common job in most states. As Joel Lee described in makeuseof.com in 2015:
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were approximately 1.6 million American truck drivers in 2014 earning a mean income of $42,000. That’s more than half a percent of the country, and $67 billion dollars in income – about 0.3% of the US GDP.
These new trucks aren’t completely autonomous yet, but the technology is going to get there sooner rather than later. And when that day arrives, those truck drivers will need to find something else to do. When you include delivery truck operators, which numbered around 800,000 in 2014, we end up with 2.4 million people who may be out of a job in the next decade or two.
And then when you factor in delivery trucks, school buses, taxis, and other driving industries, plus auto body repair shops and parking meter attendants that may not be needed anymore, we could be looking at 4 million American jobs lost, or more than 1% of the country.
For his part, Lee argues that the benefits to the economy could more than make up for those lost jobs, such as from reduced auto repair costs and pollution. But he recognizes that direct jobs created are unlikely to make up for the lost jobs.
In many ways, the arguments are similar to free trade: while we may lose some jobs, the overall benefits to the economy outweigh those impacts. Of course, that’s easy to say if it’s not your job that’s lost.
Perhaps more importantly, we just saw the political effects of voters displaced by automation, as Trump capitalized in part on voter frustration with the decrease in manufacturing jobs lost to machines (that he incorrectly blamed solely on trade policies).
Ross Mayfield puts this growing automation trend in context (it will also affect white collar workers who can be replaced by software) and warns that it could lead to a huge backlash if the tech industry doesn’t take action now to head it off:
In 4–8 years there will be a populist politician that will point the finger at the Tech Industry as enemy number one. In a way, Trump already has. This person will yield a backlash against Tech that will stunt progress and make it an instrument of her or his control far worse. This is more than stones hurled at Google Busses. When people start to feel their unhappiness is because of Tech, the post-truth era of Trump and post-ethics of the GOP elite will pale in comparison to the real movements someone could control.
He suggests the industry refocus on technology that leads to job creation, and that the industry re-focus to support worker training program for jobs in the new technology world.
But in the meantime, we may be facing massive economic and environmental disruption on a scale not quite seen before.
Self-driving cars are already here. Automakers and software companies are testing them like crazy, and people like Elon Musk predict that they could be the norm within a decade.
There’s a lot to like about the technology: it can potentially make car accidents a thing of the past, allow us to avoid the pain and stress of driving and instead do something productive with that time, and potentially free up a lot of space in our built environment that is presently dedicated to parking cars, particularly if we switch to on-demand type ownership models (the “Netflix of cars” approach).
But from an environmental perspective, there’s a huge potential downside. If driving is made easy, the technology could encourage more driving and therefore more traffic. Just imagine how convenient it might be for people to live far from their jobs if the commute can involve a robot driving for them while they nap or work on a laptop.
So what can policy makers do to head off this dystopia? The solutions look a lot like what we need to do to address traffic and sprawl anyway, even without the new technology taking over:
- First, we should stop investing in highway expansion projects and instead use available dollars to maintain existing roads and highways. We shouldn’t build more capacity to accommodate endless self-driving traffic, which will only encourage more sprawl and congestion.
- Second, we should build more alternatives to traffic, such as bus-only lanes, bike and pedestrian infrastructure, and rail transit. When we do build highways, we should include congestion pricing features, with the revenue reinvested in mobility options for that corridor. With viable and plentiful alternatives to driving, people won’t opt for self-driving cars as readily.
- Finally, and most importantly, we need to price transportation better to reflect the true costs. If people truly want to live far from job centers and use self-driving to navigate long commutes, that’s fine. But they should then pay for the costs to us all from the increased traffic and environmental degradation. That means switching from a gas tax to a vehicle miles traveled, or fee-per-mile, tax. As cars get more fuel efficient and transition to battery electric models, gas tax revenue will decline. Self-driving car owners will then need to help pay for the infrastructure they’re using.
There are other policy options to consider, but these three would be a great start to heading off a potential nightmare scenario of self-driving traffic and sprawl misery. And in the meantime, we can encourage the environmentally positive features of self-driving technology by encouraging more car- and ride-sharing business models and the development of “right sized” vehicles that fit the vehicle size to the trip.
In the end, it’s always better to be prepared for the future than overwhelmed by it.
Driverless cars, or autonomous vehicles, have been making headlines recently, as companies as diverse as Google, Tesla, GM, Lyft, and Uber are making big bets. These companies foresee a future with vehicles that can drive themselves, leaving the driver to do anything but drive. The autonomous capability could also allow people to summon vehicles that they “rent” like a Netflix subscription, instead of owning and parking for most the of the day.
We already see the technology introduced in Teslas and other vehicles, starting with smaller features like self-parking and automatic braking.
But as we move to a world of full autonomy, the future could either be very bright or very dark. On the bright side, a reduction in car ownership could lead to freed space for more housing and pedestrian spacing. Car accidents could be a thing of the past, while vehicles could be “right-sized” for each trip and more efficient and lighter without the need for safety features.
On the dark side, autonomy could lead to a significant uptick in driving miles, as well as more sprawl and congestion. This could lead to more pollution and loss of open space.
To discuss these issues, I’ll be hosting City Visions tonight at 7pm on KALW 91.7 FM in the San Francisco Bay Area. Joining me will be:
- Dorothy Glancy, J.D., Professor of Law at Santa Clara University
- Gerry Tierney, Associate Principal at Perkins + Will
- Susan Shaheen, Ph.D., Co-Director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center and Adjunct Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley
For those not in the Bay Area, you can tune in via live streaming. Hope you can join, and feel free to call in or email with your comments for us to address on the air.
UPDATE: audio is now posted here.
KQED in San Francisco ran an excellent piece on self-driving cars, including interviews with automaker representatives, industry analysts, and skeptics. Worth watching in full:
The authors of one new study out of University of Michigan seem to think so. As someone who suffers from nausea via virtually anything that moves, I find this to be a depressing prospect for what could otherwise be an environmentally beneficial technology (reducing car ownership and improving vehicle efficiency).
I’m in the minority though:
The results indicate that, for example, 6%-10% of American adults riding in fully self-driving vehicles would be expected to often, usually, or always experience some level of motion sickness. Analogously, 6%-12% of American adults riding in fully self-driving vehicles would be expected to experience moderate or severe motion sickness at some time.
I guess reading a book or checking email while a self-driving car jerks you around in unpredictable ways is not a recipe for keeping down your lunch. At least for the unlucky 6-12% of us.
