Feb 1 2019
If anyone considers the traffic in city centers to be awful at present, they must wait until self-driving cars come into being, navigating around to avoid paying massive city parking fees.
Mean streets: Self-driving cars will "cruise" to avoid paying to park
With no need to park, self-driving cars will clog city streets and slow traffic to a crawl. However, a policy fix could address these problems before autonomous vehicles become commonplace, says Adam Millard-Ball. (Video credit: University of California, Santa Cruz)
Still worse, since cruising is less expensive at reduced speeds, self-driving cars will slow down to a crawl as they “kill time,” according to Adam Millard-Ball, transportation planner, who is an associate professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Parking prices are what get people out of their cars and on to public transit, but autonomous vehicles have no need to park at all. They can get around paying for parking by cruising. They will have every incentive to create havoc.
Adam Millard-Ball, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz.
Millard-Ball has analyzed “The Autonomous Vehicle Parking Problem” in the latest issue of Transport Policy.
Millard-Ball stated that the scenario of robot-induced gridlock is imminent and also that autonomous (or self-driving) vehicles would possibly become commonplace in the next 5–20 years. Millard-Ball is the first scientist to investigate the conjunctive effect of self-driving cars and parking costs on city centers, where the availability and cost of parking is the only tool that effectively limits car travel.
In the best-case scenario, the existence of a mere 2000 self-driving cars in the city of San Francisco will make traffic slow to less than 2 miles per hour, stated Millard-Ball, who employs a traffic micro-simulation model and game theory to power up his predictions.
“It just takes a minority to gum things up,” he stated, recollecting the congestion caused by motorists who cruise the “arrivals” area at airports to avoid parking fee: “Drivers would go as slowly as possibly so they wouldn’t have to drive around again.” Although free cell-phone parking areas, in combination with strict rules in loading areas, eased out the airport snarls, cities will be baffled with offering remote parking areas for self-driving cars at lower rates compared to the cost of cruising—which has been predicted by Millard-Ball to be 50 cents per hour.
Even when you factor in electricity, depreciation, wear and tear, and maintenance, cruising costs about 50 cents an hour—that’s cheaper than parking even in a small town. Unless it’s free or cheaper than cruising, why would anyone use a remote lot?
Adam Millard-Ball, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz.
Moreover, regulation falls short since, as stated by Millard-Ball, “It’s difficult to regulate intent. You can pass a law saying it’s illegal to drive more than 10 minutes without a passenger, but what if the car is picking up a parcel?”
The solution would be to impose congestion pricing that, despite taking varying forms, would typically amount to a user fee. In the city of London, a flat fee of £11.50, or about $15, is paid by motorists to enter the city center. Stockholm and Singapore employ analogous models. In more advanced models, charges could be based on miles driven, or different fees could be assigned to specific streets.
Environmentalists as well as economists concur that congestion as well as pollution can be effectively brought down by imposing congestion pricing; however, it is a politically fraught approach since it elevates the rage of commuters. This is exactly where Millard-Ball views an opportunity.
As a policy, congestion pricing is difficult to implement. The public never wants to pay for something they’ve historically gotten for free. But no one owns an autonomous vehicle now, so there’s no constituency organized to oppose charging for the use of public streets. This is the time to establish the principle and use it to avoid the nightmarish scenario of total gridlock.
Adam Millard-Ball, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz.
Furthermore, he stated that it is possible to equip self-driving cars with devices that would offer policymakers options for imposing fees based on speed, location, time of day—or even based on the lane occupied by the vehicle.
“The fees could raise money for cities to improve transportation,” he stated. “The idea is to do it now before autonomous vehicles become widespread.”