Using Driverless Cars as an Excuse to Do
What Planners Wanted to Do Anyway

Minnesota planners want to be “ready” for driverless cars. But most of what they propose sounds like things that the anti-car crowd wants to do anyway.

This includes things like reducing parking spaces and shrinking the size of streets–both items high on urban planners’ agendas for years. While that may be possible when driverless cars come to dominate the road, there is no guarantee, so they shouldn’t jump the gun.

They are happy to jump the gun when it comes to not building new roads. “The last thing cities should do is add lanes to existing roads,” said a planner from the University of Minnesota. This assumes that driverless cars will dramatically relieve congestion and that neither population nor personal mobility will grow in the future. Actually, a good case can be made that some lanes should be added to existing roads both because they are needed now and because population and travel growth in some areas will make up for the potential congestion relief from driverless cars.

When it comes to not building light rail, however, planners are much less enthusiastic. When a Republican member of the Minnesota legislature pointed out that driverless cars may render light-rail obsolete, one of the planners responded that “large cities will still need high-capacity transit.” Let’s say that’s true–which I doubt–then why would you want to build light rail, which is by definition low-capacity transit?

Planners are also unenthused about letting people escape to the exurbs in their driverless cars. They propose to replace gas taxes with a per-mile tax “to rein in sprawl.” While the Antiplanner supports mileage-based user fees to pay for roads, I oppose mileage-based taxes–which by definition get spent on things other than what the payers are using–aimed at penalizing travel.

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Sena criticized the Rethinkx prediction that 95 percent of all travel in 2030 would be by driverless cars as “extravagant exaggeration.” While I agree with that, I’m not as pessimistic as Sena about timing. After all, a company called Torc Robotics just had a car drive itself 4,300 miles across 20 states. But Sena’s pessimism underscores my point about not jumping the gun.

The Antiplanner’s advice to cities thinking about the driverless future is to take care of today’s problems now and let the future take care of itself. There are so many uncertainties about what driverless cars will do that anyone’s (including the Antiplanner’s) “vision” of the future is likely to be colored by their own preconceived notions.

Yet there are things that need to be done today: replacing structurally deficient bridges, fixing congestion bottlenecks, filling potholes, coordinating traffic lights, and providing basic transit service for those who need it. All these steps need to be taken whether or not driverless cars take over the roads, and doing them all well is probably more than any state or local transportation agency can do anyway.

If you can’t do everything that needs to be done, then wasting billions on light rail, which isn’t needed now and will be even less needed in the future, is definitely the last thing cities should do. Planners who claim to care about the future shouldn’t make today’s and tomorrow’s problems worse by attempting to impose their vision on a future that may be very different from what they expect.