Autonomous vehicles threaten to worsen congestion, experts say

Autonomous vehicles, which never speed, drive while intoxicated, or text-and-drive, have the potential to make vehicle transportation safer and more accessible. But seven experts say this high-tech solution to San Francisco’s transportation problems brings what transit-first cities are trying to avoid: More cars on the road.

“The main risk with AVs, whether privately owned or ‘robotaxis,’ is that their convenience seduces us into driving far more often,” wrote Carlo Ratti, a practicing architect and professor of urban technologies and planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Not unlike other ride-hailing vehicles such as Uber and Lyft, he added.

Ratti and his colleagues at MIT’s Senseable Lab researched in 2014 how Uber and Lyft would impact the number of vehicles on the road. They predicted that 40 percent of New York City’s taxi fleet might be made redundant.

Instead, however, with cheaper car travel, many people opted for Uber or Lyft instead of the bus or subway.