The End of Driving: Transportation Systems and Public Policy Planning for Autonomous Vehicles

By Bern Grush and John Niles

While many transportation and city planners, researchers, students, practitioners, and political leaders are familiar with the technical nature and promise of vehicle automation, consensus is not yet often seen on the impact that will result, or the policies and actions that those responsible for transportation systems should take.

The End of Driving: Transportation Systems and Public Policy Planning for Autonomous Vehicles explores both the potential of vehicle automation technology and the barriers it faces when considering coherent urban deployment. The book evaluates the case for deliberate development of automated public transportation and mobility-as-a-service as paths towards sustainable mobility, describing critical approaches to the planning and management of vehicle automation technology. It serves as a reference for understanding the full life cycle of the multi-year transportation systems planning processes, including novel regulation, planning, and acquisition tools for regional transportation.

Application-oriented, research-based, and solution-oriented rather than predict-and-warn, The End of Driving concludes with a detailed discussion of the systems design needed for accomplishing this shift.

From the Foreword by Susan Shaheen: The authors … extend potential solutions through a set of open-ended exercises after each chapter. Their approach is both strategic and deliberate. They lead the reader from definitions and context setting to the transition toward automation, employing a range of creative strategies and policies. While our quest to understand how to deploy automated vehicles is just beginning, this book provides a thoughtful introduction to inform this evolution.

• Offers a workable public transit solution design melding the traditional “acquire-and-operate mode with the absorption of new technology
• Provides a step-by-step discussion of digital systems designs and effective regulation-by-data approaches needed for a new urban mobility
• Learning aids include case study scenarios, chapter objectives and discussion questions, sidebars and a glossary

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Release date: Jun 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9780128165102

Bern Grush

Bern Grush is a transportation demand management and geographic systems entrepreneur, consultant, speaker, and writer. Co-Founder of Grush Niles Strategic, Bern develops patents and technologies for autonomous road tolling and autonomous parking, is a contributing author to Disrupting Mobility: Impacts of Sharing Economy and Innovative Transportation on Cities (Springer, 2017), and holds degrees in Human Factors and Systems Design Engineering from the University of Toronto.

Book preview

The End of Driving

Transportation Systems and Public Policy Planning for Autonomous Vehicles

Bern Grush

Grush Niles Strategic, Toronto

John Niles

Grush Niles Strategic, Seattle

Table of Contents

Cover image

Title page

Copyright

Dedication

List of Figures

List of Tables

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Exercises

Chapter 1. Critical Terminology and System Views

Summary

1.1 Terminology

1.2 Systems Views

1.3 Exercises

Chapter 2. Three Planning Contexts: Hype, Diffusion, and Governance

Summary

2.1 Forecasting: Hope, Hype, and Exaggeration

2.2 A Proactive Diffusion Model

2.3 Acquire-and-Operate vs Specify-and-Regulate

2.4 Exercises

Part I: Contexts

Part I. Contexts

Chapter 3. A Broad Context: The Contention of Change

Summary

3.1 We Focus on the Wrong Issues

3.2 Automation Is Just a Catalyst

3.3 Social Change Will Dwarf the Direct Effects of Automotive Innovations

3.4 Two Markets

3.5 The Installed Base Matters

3.6 Urban Transportation Challenges Will Get Worse Before There Are Improvements

3.7 Attention Is the Prize

3.8 What Will Happen to Public Transit Systems?

3.9 Job Change or Job Loss

3.10 Human Behavior and Behavioral Economics

3.11 Exercises

Chapter 4. Conflicting Narratives: Shared Understanding Will Be Difficult to Achieve

Summary

4.1 Utopia vs Dystopia

4.2 Density vs Sprawl

4.3 Share vs Own

4.4 Hope vs history

4.5 Human vs Machine

4.6 Technology Will Solve It vs Technology Will Make It Worse

4.7 History Shows Technology Helps vs History Shows Technology Hurts

4.8 Market vs Regulated

4.9 Infrastructure: More, Less, or Different?

4.10 How Long Should We Wait Before Acting?

4.11 Environment vs Jobs

4.12 Internal Combustion vs Electric Vehicle Power

4.13 Faster vs Slower

4.14 Exercises

Part II: Problem

Part II. Problem

Chapter 5. A Challenging Transition: Two Competing Markets

Summary

5.1 Which Model Best Illuminates the Disruption?

5.2 Two Consumer Markets

5.3 Some Time in Hell Before Heaven

5.4 Exercises

Chapter 6. Transitioning Through Multiple Automated Forms

Summary

6.1 Transition Will Start Immediately, Move Slowly, and Reach a New, Uncertain Stasis

6.2 Predicting vs Hoping

6.3 How Soon Will Full Automation (SAE Level 5) Become Mainstream?

6.4 Utopia Simulated

6.5 Moving From Non-automated Through Self-Driving to Driverless Markets

6.6 Exercises

Chapter 7. How Privately Owned Vehicles Could Dominate the Next 30 Years

Summary

7.1 Markets: Technology Adoption and Stickiness

7.2 Exclusivity, Choice, Access, Need (ECAN)

7.3 ECAN for the Conditionally Automated (Market 1) Vehicle

7.4 ECAN for the Driverless, Market 2 Vehicle

7.5 Exercises

Chapter 8. A Note About Congestion

Summary

Chapter 9. Barriers to Shared Use of Vehicles

Summary

9.1 The Ownership Question Is More Important Than Automation

9.2 Environmental vs Personal Choice

9.3 The Challenge of Travelers With Nonroutine Needs

9.4 Exercises

Part III: Solutions

Part III. Solutions

Chapter 10. Transit Leap in Theory

Summary

10.1 How Shared Vehicles Could Dominate Passenger Trip Counts Within 30 Years

10.2 Switching to Robotic Vehicles From a Regional Government Perspective

10.3 Transit Leap

10.4 Transformation of Ownership—Not Just Disruption of Driving

10.5 Viability of Transit Leap

10.6 Service Delivery and Social Equity

10.7 Exercises

Chapter 11. Transit Leap in Practice: City of SeaTac

Summary

11.1 Background

11.2 Study

11.3 Status and Early Recommendations

11.4 Exercises

Chapter 12. Governing Fleets of Automated Vehicles

Summary

12.1 What Might Be Achieved With Automated Vehicle Fleets?

12.2 Factors to Be Considered for Governing Automated Fleets

12.3 Performance Metrics

12.4 Sharing: Neither the Default Start-State nor the Sole End-State

12.5 Anticipating 2030–40

12.6 Sizing a Massive Market 2 Fleet

12.7 The Performance Opportunity of Massive Market 2 Fleets

12.8 What Would Happen Without Region-Wide Market 2 Fleet Governance?

12.9 Exercises

Chapter 13. Harmonizing Competitive Fleets of Automated Common Carriers

Summary

13.1 Regulating Automated Vehicles

13.2 Harmonization: The Opportunity

13.3 Harmonization: Mode and Fleet Competition

13.4 Harmonization Management System: Solution Overview

13.5 Harmonization: Performance Feedback System

13.6 Harmonization: Business Benefits

13.7 Harmonization: Operation

13.8 Harmonization: Examples

13.9 Two Independent Collaborative Processes

13.10 Exercises

Chapter 14. The End of Driving and Transit-Oriented Development

Summary

14.1 Definition of Transit-Oriented Development

14.2 A Larger Target Radius for TOD

14.3 Target Reduced Vehicle Ownership—Ridership Will Follow

14.4 Efficacy of TOD in Metropolitan Regions for Commuting to Work

14.5 A Proposed New Definition of TOD

14.6 Summary

14.7 Exercises

Chapter 15. How Behavioral Economics Can Help

Summary

15.1 How We Decide

15.2 Cognitive Biases and Vehicle Ownership

15.3 Loss Aversion

15.4 Nudges

15.5 Exercises

Conclusion and Recommendations

Glossary

References

Index

Copyright

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-12-815451-9

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Dedication

To Andy Manahan for your patience, your support, your vision for regional infrastructure, and your generosity.

List of Figures

List of Tables

Foreword

Susan A. Shaheen, PhD, University of California, Berkeley

Our transportation system is undergoing notable transformations. Technology is reshaping cities and societies and changing the way we travel. Real-time information coupled with on-demand mobility is redefining automobility. Rather than rendering cars obsolete, the convergence of on-demand shared, electric, and automated technology will make autos more convenient, cost-effective, and efficient—especially when shared. But the convergence of sharing, electrification, and automation in itself is not a silver bullet to solve our transportation challenges. To maximize the potential opportunity and minimize the challenges associated with automation, we need thoughtful pieces to provide balanced guidance for transportation planners and students facing a world of confusing hype around automated vehicles. This volume is one of them.

Bern Grush and John Niles are the kinds of thinkers that prefer not to use the term autonomous in contrast to automated, although it appears in the book title. This is somewhat counter to their central line of thinking in which the vehicles are connected to infrastructure and human operators for a long time into the future. They have chosen to use autonomous, as it is the more popularized term. At a high level, the authors draw parallels between digitization of print, media, knowledge, and commerce and the diffusion of digitization and automation in mobility. What will change? How soon? How much? In what order? How might we respond or, better yet, prepare for this transition? What role will artificial intelligence play? How will automation change our jobs and lives? Will automation provide a pathway to more safe and equitable transportation? A key focus for the authors is ownership vs access. They draw a clear distinction between consumers buying cars versus passengers buying rides. While some companies will sell one or the other, some well-known corporations, such as General Motors, Ford, and Volvo, are positioning to sell both.

This book develops several arguments for how technology will likely diffuse in terms of private ownership and shared mobility services. Shared mobility is an innovative approach that offers short-term access to multiple transport modes in contrast to the fixed costs of auto ownership. The authors emphasize land use, societal issues, environmental impacts, and equity in their analysis in contrast to a more technical approach. They recognize that automated ride services and self-driving private cars can each threaten public transit. Nevertheless, they emphasize that there are promising opportunities through shared automated vehicles to fill gaps in the public transit network, right-size vehicles, and replace underperforming public transit routes in the future. These technologies could also expand the reach of public transport to a wider range of geographic territories, such as suburbs and rural areas.

Naturally, many of us want a world of less congestion, fewer cars, and falling vehicle miles/kilometers traveled and greenhouse gas emissions. Grush and Niles, nevertheless, provide a sobering vision and detailed arguments that vehicle automation is not a magic bullet. Indeed, they paint reasons to fear a dystopian future of sprawling land use, increased congestion, and greater auto reliance. Fortunately, they do not stop at sounding this alarm. Six of the 15 chapters in this book are focused on solutions that range from shared mobility to governance and policy to how transit-oriented development (TOD) could be completely reenvisioned.

My work with the Innovative Mobility Research group at the Transportation Sustainability Research Center (TSRC) at the University of California, Berkeley, is keenly focused on shared mobility and automation, first and last mile public transit solutions, social equity and environmental impacts, the built environment, pricing for parking and roads, and alternative-fuel vehicles and technologies—all of which this book touches upon and offers some solutions. Some of its ideas are more expected, such as the use of on-demand transit services (or microtransit) to connect people to public transit. Others, such as TODs, which are large enough to be small dense cities, are more provocative. The authors assert that there is now a way to address a number of reasons why individuals continue to own personal vehicles, even while living in current TOD settings.

One intriguing idea the authors present is their harmonization management system, which is a software-based governance system to manage competing fleets of ridesourcing (or transportation network company, e.g., Lyft, Uber, and Didi) vehicles today and after reaching the highest level of automation. In their view, this system permits municipal and regional transit authorities to manage competing vehicle fleets. Another term they have coined, transit leap, describes a series of gradual spatial expansions that deploy driverless vehicles from inception. Each spatial expansion grows in capability with technical maturity, spreading like inkblots and fueled by user demand.

The authors have clearly uncovered more problems that can be solved in 300 pages. They extend potential solutions through a set of open-ended exercises after each chapter. Their approach is both strategic and deliberate. They lead the reader from definitions and context setting to the transition toward automation, employing a range of creative strategies and policies. While our quest to understand how to deploy automated vehicles is just a beginning, this book provides a thoughtful introduction to inform this evolution.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to have had support from many professional contributors to our efforts. Edgar Baum and Blair Schlecter each spent hours helping us think through particular market issues.

We have been encouraged and supported to look at vehicle automation through the lens of infrastructure planning by the team at the Residential & Civil Construction Alliance of Ontario, Andy Manahan, Phil Rubinoff, and Aonghus Kealy as well as Actual Media’s Todd Latham, Andrew Macklin, and Donna Endacott. These two teams provided hours and hours of reading and editing and the result is better for it.

Journalists provided the encouragement of a platform for our research often asking the tough questions that help hone ideas: Kevin Borras, Peter Taylor, Norris MacDonald, Don Wall, Angela Gismondi, Lindsey Cole, and Mike Lindblom. Margaret Parent and Kasia Kraszewska of the Insurance Institute of Canada have provided important support and another opportunity to expand our ideas.

Our way has been lit by the diversity of viewpoints from conversations with transportation thinkers: Susan Sheehan, Michael Fenn, Sherena Hussain, David Crowley, Alain Kornhauser, Sam Schwartz, David Ticoll, Charlie Houlton-Vinyl, Robin Chase, Paul Minett, Paul Toliver, Murtaza Haider, David Levinson, Gereon Meyer, Adriano Alessandrini, Matthias Sweet, Brendon Hemily, Doug MacDonald, Dick Mudge, Bob Poole, Wendell Cox, Todd Litman, David Hodge, Dean Wise, Susan Zielinski, Steve Underwood, Mike Pogodzinski, Martin Collier, Catherine Kargas, Cherise Burda, Michelle Berquist, Hamish Campbell, Joe Iacobucci, Paul Godsmark, Jean Paul Velez, Gary Simonson, Joseph Rosmann, and Tony Billera. From the University of Toronto Transportation Research Institute: Judy Farvolden, Baher Abdulhai, Eric Miller, Jonathan Hall, Enid Slack, and Matti Siemiatycki.

Providing a municipal context to implement vehicle automation have been City of SeaTac’s Rick Forschler, Peter Kwon, and Will Appleton. City of Bellevue’s Steve Marshall has also been very helpful.

A special thanks to Anthony Fernando who ensured that early versions of our work were presented to many audiences at both regional and federal levels in multiple departments and ministries related to transportation and infrastructure.

All opinions and interpretations of facts are solely from the authors. Except for direct quotes, nothing in this book represents a policy or position of any university, business, government agency or individual, except as directly quoted.

And of course, we would be a little less likely to do all this work without the forgiving support of our sweethearts, Bobbi and Marian.

Introduction

Summary

This book is concerned with the intersection of vehicle automation, public policy, and society. It is about the diffusion, use, and outcomes of automated vehicles, rather than about their technology. We consider diffusion modeling as a way to segment the adoption of vehicle automation into phases that can be understood and planned for. The outcomes it focuses on encompass social, urban, and environmental justice.

Keywords

Vehicle automation, public policy, innovation diffusion, environmental justice, social inclusion, road traffic congestion

Mounting investment, hype, and fascination for the development and promise of automotive technologies—especially the highest imaginable levels of automation—has been under way since the early 21st century, triggered by the United States Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s Grand Challenge of 2005, when five competing research teams built road vehicles that navigated a 212 km desert dirt road with no human riding in them (DARPA, 2005). Sixty-five years earlier, fast, driverless highway vehicles first reached widespread public visibility at the General Motors’ Futurama Exhibit at the 1939–40 World’s Fair in New York City (Vanderbilt, 2012).

Governments tasked by citizens to prepare for automated vehicles need to develop an understanding of many facets about these vehicles and their future environment. How many will there be? How will they be owned and operated? How will they be managed and coordinated? Without considerable detail in these matters, planning beyond sweeping generalities is impossible. The distance between dreamed of smart cities and livability to infrastructure modifications and revised regulations is filled with detail we do not currently understand.

Such gaps are dangerous for cities. Innovators can fill these gaps with unintended consequences that earn revenue, disrupt the status quo, and leave new layers for government to regulate and build around. Ride-hailing via smartphones is a recent example.

This book is concerned with how pending automotive innovations could change our cities and how we live in them. How might new vehicles be deployed or guided to address and resolve prevalent urban transportation issues? How might high-technology vehicles be abused, misunderstood, and wasted? How could governments leverage opportunities to increase social equity and make cities cleaner and safer? Or how might sprawl increase and congestion intensify as it becomes more tolerable for those who can afford vehicle technologies that alleviate congestion’s sting?

People tend to consume more of whatever becomes more convenient, less expensive, faster, more reliable, and more desirable. Travelers will continue to choose modes of travel according to these attributes, as they always have. Until now, most travelers in North America and many in Europe eschew public, shared modes of transportation in favor of private, personalized modes. Can innovations create shared modes that significantly change these preferences or will new technology enable circumstances that make continued ownership of personal vehicles preferred?

We authors call ourselves applied futurists. By that we mean we examine projections offered by those seeking to interpret or infer future states and ask what additional implications those projected states might provide. We consider what policies would be needed to reach those states, or to avoid unwanted outcomes. We look at what human behavioral changes would be implied or needed. We ask how those can be accelerated, promoted, or safe-guarded.

In the end we are optimists—we believe solutions are possible. Meanwhile we are cautious because we know humans generally seek to satisfy personal preferences and private efficiencies before considering the community good or urban benefit. We also know planners, politicians, and innovators are first and foremost fallible humans. Their decisions—and ours—are distorted by personal preferences. Professional training and career experience shape their views of efficiency.

None of us is without bias, but we all desire a solution.

Two of the conflicts that make it so difficult to solve the problem of moving massive numbers of people around increasingly dense cities are efficiency and scale.

The first conflict is that what is currently deemed efficient by most urban transit professionals in 2018—large vehicles on regular schedules and routes that cover a majority of its residents at peak times—is the opposite of what is currently efficient in the context of the private calculations of the majority of individual travelers—getting from point-to-point in a personally suitable combination of quick and affordable comfort. This conflict causes a rationality gap between public transportation planning and the current majority of urban commuters and travelers. The oft-heard statement that one city bus replaces 40 or 50 single-occupant vehicles may be rational and certainly inspirational for transit planners. But it leaves the majority of travelers in many cities unmoved. The geometric argument that one bus has a smaller footprint than 40 cars is pitted against the time-and-convenience argument for using one’s personal vehicle. Each of these is a rational argument. Unfortunately, argued from two different efficacy perspectives they co-create the reality of congestion, expense, inconvenience, and time delays for all participants.

The scale conflict is that public transportation planners prefer solutions that tend toward larger, rigid route, regular, constrained, and scheduled vehicle systems that carry large numbers of travelers, while the preferred solution for the majority of private travelers is personal-scale vehicles on a whimsical time-and-route 7/24 schedule. Clearly, the efficiency and scale problems are correlated, two lenses on the same problem.

Until now there has been very little public mobility service between the two extremes for both efficiency and scale. The oldest on-demand systems have been taxis and these exhibit their own scale and efficiency issues. Taxi medallion systems commonly constrain the supply (scale). The typical requirement prohibiting shared trips of unrelated travelers means ferrying fewer than one passenger on average, discounting the driver, and considering deadheading. These realities make taxicabs of the past and fading present fundamentally less efficient than a personal automobile, excluding the environmental costs of parking.

Digitization and real-time transmission of data bring ride-hailing, mobility on demand, vehicle automation, and numerous other technologies that promise to bear on both efficiency and scale. But the outcomes of these new technologies are thus far poorly imagined and weakly modeled. What is clear to the dispassionate thinker is that the opposing outcomes of relief from and exacerbation of, urban congestion are both possible.

If that is so, can cities and regions bend the outcomes in the direction its leaders and planners wish, and meet the expectations of its citizen travelers as well?

Can transit agencies and their employee unions move from a rigid, mechanistic, clockwork view of public transportation to a more fluid, dynamic, responsive, view? Can we shape public transportation less as a government service of large vehicles and fixed schedules and more as an integrated system: a complex, collaborative web of services designed and adapted to achieve sustainable social and environmental metrics? Can we regulate to prevent the kinds of transportation-design errors of the 20th century? Can we envision the potential for new sorts of errors? Can we mitigate the burden of the acquire-subsidize-and-operate model for public transportation and the over-subsidization of the road system predominantly used by personal vehicles? Will we be able to avoid applying pre-automation solutions to post-automation problems?

Josipa Petrunic, Executive Director of the Canadian Urban Transit Research & Innovation Consortium (CUTRIC), speaking at a conference in Toronto in November of 2017, made a plea for faster, greener, cheaper public transportation. The barrier, in her opinion, was that public transit agencies are without innovation teams to navigate this new reality. Rather they are tasked with operation of a system. Many people, such as Petrunic, see the mountain rising in front of public transit, yet no one sees a path over that mountain. A short video—The Power of Metaphors describes the fundamental problem-solving issue transit planning faces today (TEDPartners, 2017).

An even greater barrier is the critical difference between urban operational efficiency and personal efficiency—i.e., the difference between large, rider-filled vehicles on regular schedules and routes and small owned or on-demand vehicles on point-to-point routes. From a societal and planning perspective this is a wicked problem, a conflict between transit analyst Jarrett Walker’s urban spatial geometry (Walker, 2012) and human behavioral economics as described by Richard Thaler and others (Thaler and Sunstein, 2009). The solution will require a shared understanding among all stakeholders (Conklin, 2006). A lack of shared understanding has pitted transit advocates against road advocates to the detriment of all participants. We are not suggesting that there is an easy solution, rather that a better one is now possible. A workable solution cannot be had from either extreme of the current public-vehicle/private-vehicle conundrum. A conversion to a majority of shared fleets may be infeasible, even as the current status quo of majority personal ownership is unworkable. Nonetheless, there is likely a way forward.

To address this, we propose a performance-based regulatory system that promises dynamic means to respond and adapt to change—even supporting continuous change. Flexible, collaborating, transportation fleets would not need to be separate, taxpayer owned, and defensive of their space, funding, and purpose. Rather, these could be adaptive and responsive to every other system they share urban space with—systems—such as land use policy, bus rapid transit, urban rail—that get stronger,