Zombie Miles And Napa Weekends: How A Week With Chauffeurs Showed The Major Flaw In Our Self-Driving Car Future

Zombie Miles And Napa Weekends: How A Week With Chauffeurs Showed The Major Flaw In Our Self-Driving Car Future

"One did not have to look far for studies and articles suggesting fleets of self-driving cars could, for example, reduce traffic...

Harb, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California Berkeley’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, was intimately familiar with the research already done on the subject in his field. Most of it consisted of surveying which, while far from perfect, was the best approach available.

“You would send people a survey,” Harb described, “like, hey, there’s a self-driving car in the future, how do you think your travel will change in the future?”

These studies, flawed as they were, found something very different from the rosy future AV companies wanted investors and the public to imagine. They found reason to believe AVs would drastically increase the number of vehicle miles traveled, commonly shortened to “VMT” in academic literature.

And the more vehicles miles traveled, all else being equal, the more traffic and emissions we can expect, canceling out many of the AV’s touted benefits...

His advisor, Professor Joan Walker, had an idea. What if they hired chauffeurs to drive random people around?

The chauffeur, Walker outlined, will do the driving for you. And, just like the most optimistic AV future of fully autonomous robot cars zooming around, you don’t even have to be in the car.

“All these things the self-driving car can do for you in the future,” Harb summarized, “a chauffeur can do for you today.”...

Using 13 volunteers (a very small sample size due to budgetary constraints) from the San Francisco Bay Area who owned cars, Harb and his team studied their travel patterns using GPS trackers on their cars and phones for one week, then gave them a chauffeur for a week who would drive the participants’ personal vehicles for them. Finally, the researchers observed the subjects for a final week to look for any changes returning to their chauffeur-less life.

For the week they had the chauffeur, the participants could use them for 60 hours total (again, budget constraints), including for journeys in which the subject was not in the car. This was to simulate the potential use of an AV as a kind of personal robot...

Harb thought they would see people sending their cars out more than if they were driving themselves, something like a 20 or 30 percent increase in VMT with the chauffeurs. Nothing to sneeze at, of course, but towards the middle of the wide range of the results the surveys had suggested.

He was wrong. The subjects increased how many miles their cars covered by a collective 83 percent when they had the chauffeur versus the week prior.

To put these findings in perspective, when researchers looked into the impact Uber and Lyft have had on urban congestion, they reported an increase in VMT in the single digits. San Francisco, which has seen some of the largest percentage increase of cars driving around in its downtown thanks to Uber and Lyft, had an increased VMT of 12.8 percent...

This is not the first time car companies have positioned their products as keys to a utopian future.

For the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City, General Motors commissioned “Futurama” exhibit for the “Highways and Horizons” portion of the fair. The exhibit, designed by industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes, is still regarded as one of the most influential demonstrations of urban planning in the field’s history. It showed Americans a powerful company’s vision of the future, a company that would gain the financial and political might to help make that vision a reality...

One of the through-lines between GM’s 1939 and 1956 visions of their respective automotive futures is that technology can and will solve the biggest inherent driving annoyance: traffic...

When new roads and highways make traveling faster over longer distances possible, people change their behavior and restructure their lives to account for that. As more and more people do this, the roads fill up, resulting in rush hour gridlock and longer commutes for everybody...

Good VMT are trips that further some societal goals, such as allowing people with mobility issues to make trips they normally couldn’t make...

Every single retiree used the chauffeur to go to Napa for wine tastings, something they had wanted to do for a long time but didn’t feel comfortable doing themselves. They also used the chauffeur to go places at night or they could only get to via highways.

On the other hand, there’s bad VMT, or trips that generate high amounts of “zombie miles”—trips where the car is not transporting any passengers, or is replacing public transportation, cycling, and other some other available means of getting around...

But not all of the miles added to San Francisco area roads thanks to the chauffeur fit neatly in one of those two buckets. Call them “mixed bag VMT.”...

“People were really happy about the extra time they had because they didn’t have to run all these thoughtless errands like going to the grocery store or picking up their own pizza.” It doesn’t seem right to classify these trips purely as bad VMT if people got to spend more time with their kids or get some extra work done because of them.

This whole good/bad/mixed bag VMT conundrum is why several transportation researchers Jalopnik spoke to for this story favor a simple mechanism for letting people decide for themselves which AV trips are worth it and which ones aren’t: charge them for it.

Researchers haven’t reached a consensus on a preferred policy—when do they ever?—but they generally agree, even independently of AVs, road use needs to be taxed in a smarter way. Right now, the gasoline tax functions as the major road use tax, and researchers generally dismiss it as a clumsy mechanism that doesn’t impose the actual cost of driving, including road maintenance and the cost of sitting in traffic, on drivers. Plus, a gas tax will be rendered useless by the rise of electric vehicles.

So, researchers suggest moving away from the gas tax and towards other forms of road use taxes. Ideally, they generally prefer per-mile usage fees, perhaps even ones that change according to the time of day or density of congestion. Either way, they broadly agree that policymakers should move towards taxing the hell out of zombie miles."