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Enticing though they are, such arguments conceal a logical flaw. As a classic 19th-century theory known as a Jevons paradox explains, even if autonomous vehicles eventually work perfectly — an enormous “if” — they are likely to increase total emissions and crash deaths, simply because people will use them so much.
This is a fundamentally flawed argument.
First of all, if people are getting to where they want to go faster, easier, and happier, that is a good thing. If you want to argue that everyone needs to be a hermit who never leaves home and orders everything on Amazon then you will never get your way because people fundamentally want to travel to see the outdoors and nature around them, to see their family and friends, and just to adventure. Eliminating vehicle deaths by making travel impossible is not a noble goal.
Secondly, it’s based on the idea that people even can drive more than they already do. Road congestion in most major cities is already the limiting factor that pushes people to bike, walk, or take transit. Even if AVs make it easier and cheaper to take car, you’re still not going to do it during rush hour when you can bike.
Thirdly, it’s based on the idea that AVs are only going to be slightly safer than human drivers. We have no reason to think that’s the case. Humans are fucking terrible drivers, and it’s highly likely that AVs will be several orders of magnitude safer than the average human driver.
Fourthly, it ignores other secondary effects to AVs, like suddenly not needing nearly as much parking, freeing up both parking lot real estate, but more importantly, freeing up on street parking, creating more room for actual traffic to move, and their increased patience not causing constant traffic jams because they tailgated someone and then slammed on the brakes.
Eliminating vehicle deaths by making travel impossible
And here we see decades of automobile industry propaganda in action. There is only the car, or no mobility whatsoever. You remember how everybody was just trapped inside their houses for centuries until the Ford factories started cranking out Model Ts?
Cars will never be a sustainable solution to mass transit. The immense amount of waste in materials, energy, and land use will not be offset with AVs. I don’t think AVs are a bad idea in and of themselves. But, as the article points out, they’re not going to solve any major problems.
I had never really considered how induced demand would apply to AVs…
The argument against cars also holds that people should live in places where cars aren’t necessary to avoid hermitude in the first place. You don’t need cars to socialize if you can walk to where people are, you don’t need cars for supplies if you can walk to where stuff is.
Long distance travel can have non-car solutions but also it shouldn’t be the default distance to be away from society.
And here we see decades of automobile industry propaganda in action. There is only the car, or no mobility whatsoever.
Please cite where I said that.
You remember how everybody was just trapped inside their houses for centuries until the Ford factories started cranking out Model Ts?
Um, yes. Obviously not remember directly, but that is what is in history books.
Most Americans lived in small rural communities and seldom left their farm and immediate community. When they travelled at all it would be by horse and buggy, and would take forever to get to the nearest train station, and then forever from the end of the line to wherever they had to go. If people lived farther away you would see them once every couple of years and otherwise letter write them. Cars fundamentally changed how much the average person travels in their life by huge orders of magnitude, and society is now oriented around individual families and communities being much more spread out. I think this is flawed, but I also think it’s unlikely to change given the realities of basic things like housing costs making it unaffordable to live where your parents did.
We should build out robust train networks to reduce as many cars as possible, but at the same time the idea that you’ll eliminate cars completely is quite frankly, completely divorced from reality. I personally do not own a car and have spent a used car amount of money on a cargo bike to avoid having to buy a car. But guess what? There is still a very clear limit on the size of object I can transport (smaller than virtually any piece of furniture), it’s unpleasant to infeasible to use in the rain depending on the load, and it is flat out unusable in the winter with snow and ice, so I end up using a car share service semi-regularly. I’ve thought about putting on bigger wheels, extending the bed, adding better suspension, a roof, and another set of wheels for balance, but now I’ve invented a car. And that’s not to mention driving out to nature preserves for camping, hiking, rock climbing, mountain biking etc. nor visiting family and friends who live out in the country not near any bus stops or train stations.
As long as cars exist, AVs will be better than human drivers, and literally no one has ever presented a remotely feasible and practical plan for eliminating cars.
As long as cars exist, AVs will be better than human drivers,
this is at obvious odds with the current state of self-driving technology itself–which is (as i noted in the other comment) subject to routine overhyping and also has rather minimal oversight and regulation generally. Tesla is only the most egregious example in both respects; even stuff like Waymo is pretty much entirely reliant on taking their word for it that the technology would be safer than humans (which meshes awkwardly with well publicized problems and efforts to hide robotaxi safety records).
this is at obvious odds with the current state of self-driving technology itself–which is (as i noted in the other comment) subject to routine overhyping and also has rather minimal oversight and regulation generally
All cool tech things are overhyped. If you judgement for whether or not a technology is going to be useful is “if it sounds at all overhyped then it will flop” then you would never predict any technology would change the world ever.
And no, quite frankly those assertions are objectively false. Waymo and Cruise’s driverless programs are both monitored by the DMV which is why they revoked Cruise’s license when they found them hiding crash data. Waymo has never been found to do so or even accused of doing so. Notice that in the lawsuit you linked, Waymo was happy to publish accident and safety data but did not want to publish data about how it’s vehicles handle edge cases, which would give their rivals information on how they operate, and the courts agreed with them.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/12/human-drivers-crash-a-lot-more-than-waymos-software-data-shows/
Since their inception, Waymo vehicles have driven 5.3 million driverless miles in Phoenix, 1.8 million driverless miles in San Francisco, and a few thousand driverless miles in Los Angeles through the end of October 2023. And during all those miles, there were three crashes serious enough to cause injuries:
In July, a Waymo in Tempe, Arizona, braked to avoid hitting a downed branch, leading to a three-car pileup. A Waymo passenger was not wearing a seatbelt (they were sitting on the buckled seatbelt instead) and sustained injuries that Waymo described as minor. In August, a Waymo at an intersection “began to proceed forward” but then “slowed to a stop” and was hit from behind by an SUV. The SUV left the scene without exchanging information, and a Waymo passenger reported minor injuries. In October, a Waymo vehicle in Chandler, Arizona, was traveling in the left lane when it detected another vehicle approaching from behind at high speed. The Waymo tried to accelerate to avoid a collision but got hit from behind. Again, there was an injury, but Waymo described it as minor. The two Arizona injuries over 5.3 million miles works out to 0.38 injuries per million vehicle miles. One San Francisco injury over 1.75 million miles equals 0.57 injuries per million vehicle miles. An important question is whether that’s more or less than you’d expect from a human-driven vehicle.
After making certain adjustments—including the fact that driverless Waymo vehicles do not travel on freeways—Waymo calculates that comparable human drivers reported 1.29 injury crashes per million miles in Phoenix and 3.79 injury crashes per million miles in San Francisco. In other words, human drivers get into injury crashes three times as often as Waymo in the Phoenix area and six times as often in San Francisco.
Waymo argues that these figures actually understate the gap because human drivers don’t report all crashes. Independent studies have estimated that about a third of injury crashes go unreported. After adjusting for these and other reporting biases, Waymo estimates that human-driven vehicles actually get into five times as many injury crashes in Phoenix and nine times as many in San Francisco.
To help evaluate the study, I talked to David Zuby, the chief research officer at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. The IIHS is a well-respected nonprofit that is funded by the insurance industry, which has a strong interest in promoting automotive safety.
While Zuby had some quibbles with some details of Waymo’s methodology, he was generally positive about the study. Zuby agrees with Waymo that human drivers underreport crashes relative to Waymo. But it’s hard to estimate this underreporting rate with any precision. Ultimately, Zuby believes that the true rate of crashes for human-driven vehicles lies somewhere between Waymo’s adjusted and unadjusted figures.
Secondly, it’s based on the idea that people even can drive more than they already do.
they can. induced demand is omnipresent in basically all vehicular infrastructure and vehicular improvements and there’s no reason to think this would differ with autonomous vehicles
Fourthly, it ignores other secondary effects to AVs, like suddenly not needing nearly as much parking, freeing up both parking lot real estate, but more importantly, freeing up on street parking, creating more room for actual traffic to move, and their increased patience not causing constant traffic jams because they tailgated someone and then slammed on the brakes.
okay but: literally none of this follows from mass-adoption of autonomous vehicles. this is a logical leap you are making with no supporting evidence—there is, and i cannot stress this enough, no evidence that if mass-adoption occurs any of this will follow—and in general the technology is subject to far more fabulism and exaggeration (like this!) than legitimate technological advancement or improvement of society.
they can. induced demand is omnipresent in basically all vehicular infrastructure and vehicular improvements and there’s no reason to think this would differ with autonomous vehicles
Yes, I have no doubt there would be induced demand, but that extra demand wouldn’t be at the cost of anything. Induced demand is a problem when we, for instance, build new roads or widen existing ones, because then more people drive and they clog up the same as they were before. That’s a bad thing because the cost of adding this capacity is that we have to tear down nature and existing city to add lanes, and then we have more capacity that sits at a standstill leading to more emissions.
But if AVs add more capacity to our roads, that will be entirely because they are driving more efficiently. We’ll have the same amount of cars on the road at any given time, they’ll just be moving faster on average rather than idling in traffic jams made by humans. Which means that there will be only relatively minor emissions increases during peak times, fewer emissions emitted during non peak, and we won’t be tearing anything down to build more giant highways.
okay but: literally none of this follows from mass-adoption of autonomous vehicles. this is a logical leap you are making with no supporting evidence—there is, and i cannot stress this enough, no evidence that if mass-adoption occurs any of this will follow
You’re asking for something that does not exist. How am I supposed to provide you evidence proving what the results of mass adoption of AVs will be when there has never been a mass adoption of AVs.
and in general the technology is subject to far more fabulism and exaggeration (like this!) than legitimate technological advancement or improvement of society.
Again, it’s never actually been rolled out on a mass scale. It’s a technology still being actively developed. Neither of us know what the end results will be, but I put forth plausible reasoning to my speculation, if you have plausible reasoning why those things won’t come to pass I’m all ears. For instance, what is your reasoning for believing that AVs could never be fundamentally safer than human drivers who are frequently tired, angry, distracted, impaired, impatient, etc?
Yes, I have no doubt there would be induced demand, but that extra demand wouldn’t be at the cost of anything.
But if AVs add more capacity to our roads, that will be entirely because they are driving more efficiently.
you are literally doing what i mean when i say you are making assumptions with no evidence. there is, again, no reason to believe that “driving more efficiently” will result from mass-adoption of automated vehicles–and even granting they do, your assumption that this wouldn’t be gobbled up by induced demand is intuitively disprovable. even the argumentation here parallels other cases where induced demand happens! “build[ing] new roads or widen[ing] existing ones” is a measure that is almost always justified by an underlying belief that we need to improve efficiency and productivity in existing traffic flows,[1] and obviously traffic flow does not improve in such cases.
but granting that you’re correct on all of that somehow: more efficiency (and less congestion) would be worse than inducing demand. “efficiency” in the case of traffic means more traffic flow at faster speeds, which is less safe for everyone—not more.[2] in general: people drive faster, more recklessly, and less attentively when you give them more space to work with (especially on open roadways with no calming measures like freeways, which are the sorts of roads autonomous vehicles seem to do best on). there is no reason to believe they would do this better in an autonomous vehicle, which if anything incentivizes many of those behaviors by giving people a false sense of security (in part because of advertising and overhyping to that end!).
You’re asking for something that does not exist. How am I supposed to provide you evidence proving what the results of mass adoption of AVs will be when there has never been a mass adoption of AVs.
you asserted these as “other secondary effects to AVs”–i’m not sure why you would do that and then be surprised when people challenge your assertion. but i’m glad we agree: these don’t exist, and they’re not benefits of mass adoption nor would they likely occur in a mass adoption scenario.
For instance, what is your reasoning for believing that AVs could never be fundamentally safer than human drivers who are frequently tired, angry, distracted, impaired, impatient, etc?
the vast majority of road safety is a product of engineering and not a product of human driving ability, what car you drive or its capabilities, or other variables of that nature. almost all of the problems with, for example, American roadways are design problems that incentivize unsafe behaviors in the first place (and as a result inform everything from the ubiquity of speeding to downstream consumer preferences in cars). to put it bluntly: you cannot and will not fix road safety through automated vehicles, doubly so with your specific touted advantages in this conversation. the road designs that create bad driving behavior don’t cease to be an issue because people switch to an automated vehicle.
take for instance “Tackling Traffic Congestion,” Transportation Quarterly 40, no. 2 (1986), which states “growing congestion [in the Bay Area] […] is the result of development that comes with an improving economy compounded by a lagging expansion of freeway and transit capacity.” ↩︎
see for instance Leonard Evans, “Future Predictions and Traffic Safety Research,” Transportation Quarterly 47, no. 1 (1993): “although congestion impedes mobility, it increases safety, as measured by serious injuries and fatalities.” and Arnold Vey, “Relationship between Daily Traffic and Accident Rates,” American City 52, no. 9 (1937), who observed that beyond a certain point congestion reduced accident rates. congestion unsurprisingly acts as a calming measure when it becomes severe enough. ↩︎
you are literally doing what i mean when i say you are making assumptions with no evidence. there is, again, no reason to believe that “driving more efficiently” will result from mass-adoption of automated vehicles–and even granting they do, your assumption that this wouldn’t be gobbled up by induced demand is intuitively disprovable. even the argumentation here parallels other cases where induced demand happens! “build[ing] new roads or widen[ing] existing ones” is a measure that is almost always justified by an underlying belief that we need to improve efficiency and productivity in existing traffic flows,[^1] and obviously traffic flow does not improve in such cases.
I’m doing nothing other than questioning where the induced demand is coming from. What is inducing if not increased efficiency?
The whole point of induced demand in highways is that when you add capacity in the form of lanes it induces demand. So if our highways are already full and if that capacity isn’t coming from increased EV efficiency then where is it coming from? If there’s no increase in road capacity then what is inducing demand?
but granting that you’re correct on all of that somehow: more efficiency (and less congestion) would be worse than inducing demand. “efficiency” in the case of traffic means more traffic flow at faster speeds, which is less safe for everyone—not more.[^2] in general: people drive faster, more recklessly, and less attentively when you give them more space to work with (especially on open roadways with no calming measures like freeways, which are the sorts of roads autonomous vehicles seem to do best on). there is no reason to believe they would do this better in an autonomous vehicle, which if anything incentivizes many of those behaviors by giving people a false sense of security (in part because of advertising and overhyping to that end!).
You are describing how humans drive, not AVs. AVs always obey the speed limit and traffic calming signs.
you asserted these as “other secondary effects to AVs”–i’m not sure why you would do that and then be surprised when people challenge your assertion. but i’m glad we agree: these don’t exist, and they’re not benefits of mass adoption nor would they likely occur in a mass adoption scenario.
We haven’t agreed on anything,I said I was open to your reasoning as to why those effects wouldn’t happen, then you didn’t provide any.
the vast majority of road safety is a product of engineering and not a product of human driving ability, what car you drive or its capabilities, or other variables of that nature. almost all of the problems with, for example, American roadways are design problems that incentivize unsafe behaviors in the first place (and as a result inform everything from the ubiquity of speeding to downstream consumer preferences in cars). to put it bluntly: you cannot and will not fix road safety through automated vehicles, doubly so with your specific touted advantages in this conversation.
You think you can eliminate all accidents through road design?
You are literally ignoring every single accident caused by distracted driving, impatient driving, impaired driving, tired driving etc.
Yeah, road design in America should be better, AVs should still also replace crappy wreckless humans. Those two ideas are not mutually exclusive.
The whole point of induced demand in highways is that when you add capacity in the form of lanes it induces demand. So if our highways are already full and if that capacity isn’t coming from increased EV efficiency then where is it coming from? If there’s no increase in road capacity then what is inducing demand?
just for example: “freeing up both parking lot real estate, but more importantly, freeing up on street parking, creating more room for actual traffic to move”–every single one of these posited improvements would induce demand unless you literally demolish the infrastructure (which, if you’re just switching people one-to-one from regular cars to automated cars is not going to happen, because the number of cars will remain a constant). the existence of unused parking begets driving and is a predictor for more driving.[1] the existence of more space to move obviously begets more driving because the “highways” aren’t “full” anymore; and again, if it didn’t that would actually be worse because it incentivizes less safe driving practices.
You are describing how humans drive, not AVs. AVs always obey the speed limit and traffic calming signs.
if by AVs you mean “fully autonomous” ones that literally do not exist currently then sure–they better! but at that point nothing you say is meaningful, because the technology literally doesn’t exist. we might as well be talking about mass-adopted hydrogen cars or whatever.
but, if we mean semi-autonomous ones—the ones that clearly exist, and which companies advertise as autonomous, and which people actually use—no. absolutely not. these things routinely violate even the most obvious traffic laws and necessitate humans to intervene in their ordinary function. Waymo hits pedestrians even now, and it’s ostensibly one of the most advanced semi-autonomous programs in the world. Uber literally killed a pedestrian and got into legal trouble over it. Tesla’s problems are omnipresent to the point where the NHTSA has said their feature is unsafe in practice and people make it a punchline. you can’t no-true-Scotsman this technology. even in the best and least ambiguous traffic circumstances it has obvious problems!
↩︎In 2015, a group of researchers led by Chris McCahill looked at historical trends in parking supply and commuter behavior for nine cities: Albany, New York; Berkeley, California; the Washington, DC, suburbs of Arlington, Virginia, and Silver Spring, Maryland; Cambridge, Lowell, and Somerville, Massachusetts; and Hartford and New Haven, Connecticut. Using historical aerial photography from three dates to identify and approximate the parking supply, McCahill found that parking growth between 1960 and 1980 was a “powerful predictor” of car use in the following two decades. Every ten spaces added per one hundred residents before 1980 were linked to an 8 percent increase in the share of residents driving to work after 1980. Increase in the parking supply in the study’s first two decades was directly correlated with increases in car use in the following two decades. More parking appeared to cause more driving, not the other way around.
Look up Waymo, then stop going on long winded rants about things when you don’t even have a basic grasp of the current state of the technology.
Jesus Christ.
three paragraphs saying you’re wrong and that the empirical evidence supports nothing you’re saying is not a “long-winded rant” lmao–this uncritical “trust me bro it’s actually fine, you just don’t get it” stuff is the exact reason i consider autonomous vehicle stuff to 98% worthless techbro hype and autofellatio. cite your sources if you want people to listen–i have, and you’ve refuted none of it!
I didn’t know that I needed to know about Jevons’ paradox. Such a simple but brilliant reasoning.
You’ll get less pollution and crash deaths if, instead of trying to improve cars, society improved transportation methods that compete with cars: walking, biking, public transport, so goes on. They either don’t show those issues, or show them in a meaningfully lower level.
The extreme privilege and waste inherent in cars will never be healthy, sustainable, equitable, safe, etc.
Ban cars.
Jevons didn’t know that autonomous vehicles can work like a hive mind, today it’s possible.
Sure, it’s possible to make AVs into basically drone swarms that have perfect coordination, the problem is that unless you also kick all human-controlled cars off the road, it’s not going to work. Drone swarms don’t have human controlled drones, or even drone swarms from other manufacturers, flying through the middle of them, or they would be crashing into each other all the time.
Even if you perfectly solve crashes (doubtful, definitely not something that exists right now), the problems of microplastic pollution from tires and emissions from electricity generation are non-trivial.
I’m more skeptical than most that self driving will be properly solved anytime in the next few decades, but I really doubt the article’s claims that it will be able to claim much modeshare from bikes and transit.
Firstly, we already have and have had autonomous vehicles for nearly as long as we have had vehicles, their called taxis and carpools. Making these potentially cheaper, though in practice I doubt it since a taxi’s costs are spread over all its users while a car has to be paid by just you, does not change the fact that they are less convienent than being able to show up and hop on like a bus, or the immunity to traffic delays of rail. Indeed the proposed system of distant out of city parking lots would take more planning than just parking your own vehicle today in most places, as you have to call or order ahead with AVs to have them ready for instead of waking to your car and jumping in. Similarly, getting stuck in traffic does not get much more fun simply because someone else is driving, especially if you can’t even talk to them.
The arguement for them replacing bikes is even worse, because one of the few things proper self driving vehicles are already pretty good at thanks to 360 ultrasonic and lidar sensors at is not blindly running down bikes, and a future with widespread adoption would also imply that most other vehicles have similar driver assistance tech, and as such more people will feel safe biking even in places with shit bike infrastructure. Meanwhile most people who were going to use a bike for a trip will not choose driving over bikeing just because they can get someone else to come pick them up.
I could see it having an effect on modeshare in places with really shit and infrequent transit, but the whole point of rapid transit is that it is more rapid than taking a car. If your transit system is slower and worse than waiting ten minutes in the rain for an Uber, fix your terrible transit system, because that really should be a low bar to clear.
