Autonomous vehicles are circling around the great transit debate, metaphorically, in the way some envision fleets of driverless cars cruising cities and providing a more flexible, less-expensive means of getting people around without train tracks.
As cities spend — or make plans to spend — billions of dollars on rail systems, the drop in people riding mass transit across the country is spreading anxiety among some transportation experts and planners.
Something has to change in order to vastly reduce transportation-generated greenhouse gas emissions — required not only by environmental realities but laws in many states — and relieve congested roadways. Increasingly, doubts are being raised about whether enough residents in sprawling regions such as San Diego County will embrace mass transit to make it work even decades down the line, unless they are essentially forced to get on board.
The general public has little direct experience with driverless cars, and the notion that autonomous vehicles could take over mass transportation right now strains the imagination. But knowledge of the technology and its potential are becoming more widespread by the day and, with increasing familiarity, people will become more comfortable with the idea of being in a car that drives itself.
For every report of an early glitch with self-driving cars, stories circulate about people who head up the freeway in a Tesla or another vehicle that is basically driving on autopilot, without incident.
The idea of these vehicles driving in efficient coordination with each other, in theory making freeways more manageable, contrasts with plans to build new trolleys and high-speed rail systems that still seem retrograde, regardless of technological advances. The new cars will be powered by electricity or some other non-polluting fuel, taking concerns about emissions out of the equation. To what degree they could live up to the promise of unclogging roads is an open question.
But could self-driving cars, whether individually owned or part of corporate ride-sharing fleets, make mass transit as we know it obsolete? Some experts think so, others don't.
The interest in autonomous vehicles comes amid questions about whether traditional transit is the way to go for the simple reason that ridership has been dropping in cities across the nation, including San Diego, as detailed this past weekend by the Union-Tribune's Joshua Emerson Smith. While the future of mass transit may not yet be facing an existential crisis, belief in it has been shaken.
Some experts say more needs to be done to make transit attractive and convenient, while making driving cars less so.
"You have to make sure it's not so easy to drive around, and that means reducing the amount of parking that's available or that is required for new (building) projects," Yonah Freemark, a doctoral candidate at MIT and a member of the school's Urban Mobility Lab, told Smith. "It means reducing the number of car lanes and, in some cases, increasing the taxes on gasoline."
The sweeping transit proposal being developed by the San Diego Association of Governments is outlined in a synopsis called "5 Big Moves" that discusses a future regionwide system of trains, trolleys, buses and vehicles integrated with transportation corridors and transit hubs, along with enhanced bike lanes and pedestrian walkways. The plan also contemplates a surcharge for driving at certain times in certain places, known as "congestion pricing" — perhaps the most controversial component among several.
Autonomous vehicle technology certainly will have a place in all of that, but will it upend the entire concept?
"Fixed-route transportation won't make any sense in 10 or 15 years," said Paul Brubaker, president and CEO of the Alliance for Transportation, according to SciPol, a Duke University website on science and societal trends. "I think the whole paradigm will shift pretty significantly quickly. Justifying (billions) without knowing where the hockey puck will go strikes me as a bit foolish."
To continue with sports analogies, if you build it, there's no guarantee they will come.
But while spending big on mass transit may seem a risky bet, the notion of self-driving vehicles as a panacea may be a siren song, promising to do away with the evil aspects of automobiles (pollution, maybe even traffic jams) while allowing individuals and small groups to remain in their personal transportation pods.
Lance Eliot who has written a lot about driverless cars for AI Trends, said self-driving car advocates "keep bringing up a nirvana world of all and exclusively . . . self-driving cars on our streets, but this just isn't going to happen for a very long time."
In other words, San Diego and other cities could get stuck in neutral waiting for driverless cars to provide a theoretical silver bullet.
The American Public Transportation Association believes that transit will always be around, according to SciPol, but in what form isn't clear.
"We are on the precipice of as much change in transportation as we have seen in 100 years," said Art Guzzetti, an APTA vice president of policy. "The clock is going to move fast."
There in lies the dilemma: Something is coming, but what?
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