On a recent trip to Tempe, I decided to “hate ride” a Waymo.
In my work on transportation for disabled nondrivers, I’m frequently asked if I think autonomous vehicles will solve our transportation access problems. I’ve always been skeptical that they will provide a mobility solution worth chasing, but I figured I should have the experience of riding in one if I was going to continue to be so critical.
But instead of unequivocally hating it, I experienced an unexpected sense of freedom. As the Waymo approached the first stop light, I realized what it felt like to be in a car by myself. For the first time, there was no need to explain what I was doing or where I was going to another human being. And that was profound.
Normally when I need to get a ride somewhere I have to ‘perform’: grateful spouse, compliant daughter, cheery co-worker. I feel a need to justify that my automotive errand is worth running. Even when I take a taxi or ride hail, there’s a level of performance and negotiation required: yes, I am grateful to be able to afford this ride, but no, I do not want to flirt.
I once had to report a Lyft driver for inappropriate verbal harassment and driving me off route. I couldn’t sleep for nights afterwards worrying that he would be able to track me down. (He also bragged about his guns, his work as a prison guard, and his friends who were cops.)
This discomfort is so prevalent that Lyft has created a special “Women+ Connect” feature to allow passengers the option to pair with female drivers in an attempt to avoid this dynamic, and Waymo is promoting robotaxis as a safer alternative for women. An influencer working with Waymo was quoted in a recent NBC story about the dynamic with male drivers: “It’s like you have to check yourself the whole time. You don’t want to come off as anything sexual.”
I hadn’t really considered what a relief it was to not be “checking” myself, until I got in the Waymo. As we approached the airport, I realized that if these existed everywhere, I would definitely choose them over taking a regular taxi or ride hail. I would probably choose it over asking my spouse or my parents or coworkers for rides, and if it was affordable enough, I would choose it over the bus or train.
And there lies the problem.
Every time driving becomes more affordable, less stressful, safer, and more convenient, the more people will choose to travel that way, and the further they will be willing to drive (or be driven). Under our current land-use and zoning policies, this will result in even more sprawling and car-based communities, where everything you need to do is far away from where you live.
In these sprawling communities, the distances you need to travel are too far to go by walking, wheeling or biking. Moreover, their density is too low to support transit, resulting in fewer and less frequent routes. If you can’t drive or afford a driver — ride hail or autonomous — your options for leaving home become very limited.
The blind community is well aware of this problem. The rider costs for ride hail — Uber and Lyft alike — were initially heavily subsidized by the venture-funded companies. Rides were artificially cheap and it felt possible that this could really “solve” the problems with transit access.
But then prices rose, as they needed to to reflect more of the real costs of driving. Rarely do I encounter someone from the blind community these days who can afford to use ride hail on a regular basis.
There also remains the problem that ride hail remains inaccessible to many wheelchair users, especially those with larger power chairs. And although it’s illegal, many ride hail drivers continue to refuse rides to blind people with service animals.
While my experience finding my Waymo was relatively pain free because it met me in an area without other vehicles, I often struggle to identify the correct ride hail vehicle because I can’t easily read license plates or tell car models. I’ve gotten into random cars before, and often I have to call my driver to have them help me find them. It is unclear how robotaxi customers will be able to access needed help.
There’s still much to be understood about whether self-driving cars will be safer for people outside of cars: people walking, rolling and biking around our communities. I’m hopeful that the traffic calming created by strictly following speed limits might be enough to reduce serious injuries more broadly in our transportation network.
But I’m also skeptical that machine learning will enable robotaxis to act appropriately in complex and unpredictable circumstances. And hidden biases built into the algorithms could make disastrous mistakes based on normative assumptions of what a “person” looks like.
I was living in Arizona when Elaine Herzberg was killed by a self-driving vehicle while walking her bicycle across a four-lane road in Tempe. Looking at pictures of the crash, I saw myself – often traversing eerily similar high speed multi-lane desert arterials, sometimes balancing heavy loads on the handlebars of my bike.
There are so many unique configurations of wheelchairs and scooters and grocery push carts and walkers with strapped-on umbrellas, and counter-weighted, dangling grocery bags. WIll robotaxis see us? Will the algorithms code us as worth stopping for?
Beyond the impact robotaxis may have on the distances between the places we need to go, we must also weigh the other public health impacts of increased driving: noise pollution, tire dust, and increased vehicle miles traveled resulting in greater exposure to crashes and collisions, both to people inside and outside of vehicles.
Also, driving for hail companies is an economic lifeline for many. Recently, on a long Lyft trip to the airport in Pensacola, I was chatting with the driver about how I can’t drive and often rely on ride hail when traveling. I shared about my Waymo experience. He hadn’t heard that robotaxis were on the road already, offering rides. When I told him they were operating parts of California, Arizona and Texas, he admitted he “didn’t feel great hearing that.”
Riding in an autonomous vehicle for the first time by myself allowed me to realize how intoxicating the freedom of car mobility feels in America to people who are lucky enough to drive. It gave me a much more profound understanding of the appeal of cars.
But the promise of expanding car access to more people doesn’t mean that we should continue to embrace car dependency as the model for mobility and land use.
Autonomous vehicles will result in more cars on the road. If we don’t want to spend more of our lives inside them — and if we don’t want to deal with all the externalized public health and climate impacts of driving — then we must ask if autonomous vehicles move us closer or further from the kinds of communities we want to live in.
