MB’s Overnight Open Thread today had a great link to a report that is…rather optimistic about the uptake of electric vehicles. There was an interesting discussion in the comments so I thought I’d go and take a look.
First off, I don’t drive. I won’t drive. I knew I hated it and thought it a waste of my time and money the second I had my first lessons. I don’t even like being a passenger in a car. The amount of expensive infrastructure our global civilization has built to accommodate drivers who in many countries, barely pay for it if they pay for it at all, will at some point in the future sink everyone. And that’s all I should say about that.
Back to the subject at hand, there were three things that really caught my eye: automation, and electric vehicles, and the report rolls them under a concept of “Transport-as-a-Service.”
AUTOMATION
There’s people, probably people like me who loathe driving, who believe this is a great idea, and many new vehicles have some features that can be considered precursors to automation. Teslas pretty much can drive themselves already, and automation has been long used in fixed-guideway transit. Lots of subway systems overseas are automated (WMATA and BART were built to be automated, but currently aren’t.) DOTs nationwide are pretty actively supporting the technology (I can’t think of one that isn’t) as a way to manage traffic congestion and deal with an aging population’s mobility because at some point in the not-too-distant-future the Boomers simply won’t be permitted to drive anymore and we’ll see if their kids step up to cart them around, especially if some service can do that for them.
An optimistic person might see a roving fleet of automated municipal vehicles on non-fixed routes, picking elderly people (and everyone else!) up and dropping them where they need to go, freeing households from owning one to several two-ton money pits. A good deal of the hype really seems to be “you’ll get the time you spend piloting your vehicle back to do what you want” and “you’ll get the money you sink into your vehicle back to do what you want!” I think about that and go “hey, the library is now accessible to me” (as a non-driver, it currently isn’t unless I get a ride.) Lots of people who can’t drive due to medical reasons, won’t drive for whatever personal reasons they might have, or can’t afford to drive will then have mobility.
The thing about automation is it is a great deal of hype, and there are real concerns about it. Most state laws require a licensed driver in the “automated” vehicle (at least one requires that driver to have their hands on the wheel, rather negating the whole thing I think). There’s also the “does the car’s programming cause it to kill pedestrians” problem, something I’ve not seen a good answer for. They can also be hacked by malicious hackers of a state or non-state nature, causing a traffic apocalypse. Don’t mock—it can and will happen.
There’s also the jobs aspect. We’ve automated quite a bit of our society. A machine processes your paperwork. A machine harvests much of your food. A machine mines your coal and other minerals. Machines dig road and rail tunnels. People (sometimes many people, in the case of tunnel borers, unless Elon Musk has his way) must monitor those machines, true, but machines do a lot of work. Still, trucks must be driven by people to and from freight terminals. Planes still have to be flown by people, and so on. These employ lots of people and pay them pretty well. I think we should keep them.
It also probably won’t relieve congestion and likely will increase it, which will annoy drivers—y’all hate sitting in traffic---I’ll get to that later.
I think proponents of automated vehicles are a bit too optimistic.
ELECTRIC VEHICLES
This is where the real revolution in transport will be, and it’s going to happen whether people like it or not. Still, again, the report author is a bit optimistic.
I don’t believe 90% of vehicles in 2030 will be electric (at least not in the United States and possibly Canada) but I do think hybrid vehicles are going to increase their market share.
People feel some kind of way about electric vehicles and I think those concerns are valid. The biggest problem is distance. Can the car get you to and from your home on a single charge? Are there charging stations available in public? And what about apartment dwellers? Townhouse and rowhouse dwellers? The infrastructure needed just isn’t there yet and it certainly won’t really be ready by 2030. But I’m impressed by the distance problem slowly being solved.
There’s a universal commute time constant that dates all the way back to the Neolithic and that time is one hour. Even today, the average American daily commute is 62 minutes. This number hasn’t changed much in ages and is the same across the world, even with the growth of sprawling suburbs, exurbs, slow transit systems, and “drive until you qualify.” Extreme commuters are rare and concentrated. It’s called Marchetti’s Constant. It seems to me if the average commute is about an hour, most electric-only vehicles would meet that time since they have ranges of about 300 miles. New vehicles appear to double that. But the biggest problem is the infrastructure. It’s just not robust enough yet. The other big problem is people don’t buy cars anymore, they just transfer their first car loan on to other vehicles and never really pay it off. That’s probably going to be a problem soon, if it’s not already.
(my commute by the way is about 80 minutes a day. I get a lot of napping and/or reading done!)
TRANSPORT AS A SERVICE (TaaS)
The report seems to indicate when everyone abandons their vehicles they’ll use some kind of service, be it ride-sharing, taxis, or whatever, to get around to where they need to go. It’ll be cheaper and more flexible, they claim, to manage than existing public transportation networks . The report cites a couple services, like Tesloop in California (literally it’s a ride-sharing service run entirely with Teslas—not automated—yet).
The authors of the report consider ride-sharing to be “transport-as-a-service”. You can throw in taxis, those illegal “hack” cabs common in many northeastern cities like Philadelphia, those carpoolers who pick up random people at park-and-rides (common around a number of big cities) and the like into this. I consider the bus that takes me 30 miles to work and back every day to be a service, because it is. The report generally is referring to Uber, Lyft, and others like it though.
This is an optimistic report for supporters of those. The whole thing assumes that we won’t use petroleum as a major transport fuel anymore at some point very soon, and then from there, Transport-as-a-Service will be where many Americans live (in cities or the surrounding suburban sprawl), which will then reduce congestion, traffic deaths, CO2 pollution, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It briefly glances over those who wouldn’t adopt, like rural dwellers, the very rich, and “tech-laggards”. There is some anecdotal evidence from Europe that TaaS does indeed do these things.
On congestion, at least, there’s some anecdotal evidence that TaaS has increased congestion in a handful of cities. In NYC, there is a substantial population of people of many income levels who do not own cars—and won’t. The rise of ride-sharing means they now have 24-hour access to vehicles—and they use them to get around the city despite how problematic (and illegal) those services have been. In Washington D.C where the Metro is in crisis and riders have abandoned it, congestion may be increasing on city streets as former riders abandon Metro for their own cars and ride-sharing services.
The thing is a bus is just as flexible as TaaS, and TaaS won’t solve our land-use problems. I take a bus to and from work, a commute of about 90 minutes and a round-trip distance of 60 miles. There are 2 busses that serve my rural exurb, because there’s demand from the towns up where I live that will fill a 40-passenger city bus and a 50-passenger coach. It’s full most days. That’s 90 people who otherwise would drive alone to the city, 90 parking spots (which aren’t cheap—average garage parking cost is $100/month because no downtown employer here provides parking for free) that’d have to be sourced and so on. Now of those 90 people, 89 of them drive, so the $87/month fee for the bus is money they’d spend on parking. I can see the attractiveness of the position where many people chose to dump their vehicles and hail a ride-share somewhere, autonomous or not. That’s money that those folks can then free up to save or spend elsewhere.
But there’s the built environment I alluded to in my opening snarky paragraph. The sprawl that surrounds most American cities isn’t just suburban homes, it’s suburban job sites too. That’s why Marchetti’s Constant is still a constant. When people moved their homes out to the suburbs, for a time they still drove into the central city (since we chose to build expressways instead of keeping and expanding already existing commuter rail networks). But then they got sick of that and the trains weren’t coming back, so the jobs moved out to the suburbs too. This report does not even bother to address that, and most proponents don’t either. The report’s 77 pages long and linked at the top, I recommend reading it for the entertainment value at least.
(I’m never going to drive though so…whatever happens happens).