Automakers and tech companies are closer than ever to delivering self-driving technology to the masses. The urban areas that will host these vehicles, by contrast, aren’t quite up to speed. With many companies firming up deployment plans within the next two or three years, cities are still figuring out how to brace for the first wave of autonomous vehicles. That’s troublesome, cautions a new report from the National League of Cities.
“We know it’s happening, we know it’s coming, we just don’t know how to prepare,” said Nicole DuPuis, principal associate for urban innovation for the NLC and co-author of the report. “It’s happening at a much more rapid pace than we all imagined.”
The report, Autonomous Vehicles: A Policy Preparation Guide, draws insights from the Federal Automated Vehicles Policy published in September 2016 and provides guidance for city managers and local governments.
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“The big takeaway here is that this is all happening much more quickly than we anticipated.”
– Nicole DuPuis, National League of Cities
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Proposed preparations may be geared toward policy wonks, but they should earn the attention and consideration of industry executives as well. While much autonomous development lies with the technology itself, that’s only half the path to deployment. The successful rollout of these vehicles is intertwined with the ability of consumers and cities to accept them.
From a city perspective, planning for their arrival involves everything from the pragmatic—determining how a network of autonomous vehicles might complement existing public transportation, for example—to considering unexpected developments, such as a massive loss of municipal revenue resulting from a long-term decline in parking-enforcement fines.
NuTonomy’s driverless car, the first to launch in Boston, takes a spin around Drydock Avenue in South Boston.
On that particular point, the report mulls the adoption of a tax on vehicle miles traveled, the proceeds from which could both offset lost city revenues and help restore solvency in the Federal Highway Trust Fund. But recalibrating revenue streams remains one small component of a much larger transformation in the way cities operate in an autonomous era. In short, they need to rethink the fundamental nature of how people get around.
The National League of Cities represents more than 1600 cities and municipalities from across the country, and its report comes on the heels of others focused on the readiness of cities to accept autonomous vehicles and new mobility plans. A report issued in March by INRIX, a real-time traffic data and analytics provider, examined which U.S. cities are best positioned to let self-driving vehicles replace miles driven by conventional cars.
A report released this month by the U.K.’s Centre for Economics and Business Research Exploration, commissioned by Qualcomm, warned that U.S. cities are falling behind in a global race to prepare for urban-mobility changes. The crux of the report is focused on increasing use of low-emission vehicles, but the same roadblocks for greener driving may further hamper the adoption of autonomous vehicles.
“Progress of North American cities is weakened by a reluctance to fully embrace change,” the report says. In addition, a “tangled federal, state, and city legislative framework” threatens the incentives many might have to change habits or policies.
All the concern for readiness comes at a time that the president’s announced intention for a $1 trillion infrastructure infusion could ostensibly help cities accelerate their readiness. Or maybe not. Administration officials have indicated the President favors “shovel ready” projects on which work could begin within 90 days after an infrastructure bill’s signing into law.
An infrastructure bill may not arrive until summer at the earliest. In the meantime, Waymo is testing driverless minivans with members of the public in Arizona; California is paving the way for truly driverless testing with a regulatory overhaul that could take effect by the end of the year; and Uber is picking up passengers in Pittsburgh, among other locations, in vehicles that still have safety drivers.
“The big takeaway here is that this is all happening much more quickly than we anticipated,” DuPuis said. “We’re rapidly approaching mixed-traffic environments, where there will be automated vehicles and non-automated vehicles on the road at the same time. Cities need to start planning for this and not waiting for the inevitable peak of all this.”
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