Are self-driving vehicles the future, as they relieve cities of having to guess where to make big infrastructure investments — such as rail lines — that will have to last for generations? Or will the idea of autonomous vehicles as a major-league mass transit system remain in the cartoons that gave it birth?
Austin has been betting on self-driving vehicles for a long time. Back in 2000, Austin voters defeated a $1.9 billion plan for a 52-mile light-rail system. Light-rail supporters tried again in 2014, for a scaled-down 9.5 mile system, but that got support from just 43 percent of the voters.
In 2020, however, nearly 60 percent of voters lined up behind a $7.1 billion transit system, with 42 miles of service, including an underground tunnel that would run 20 blocks beneath the city center. Supporters claimed the project would generate 10,000 jobs, mostly for construction. They claimed it would create $13.8 billion in economic activity and support affordable housing. A trip from the airport to the new downtown convention center would take just 11 minutes.
But barely had the last vote been counted than exploding costs led planners to start slashing down the scale of the project. First to go was the downtown tunnel, followed by miles of the proposed route and then the stop at the airport. The financing plan got caught up in years of litigation, and each passing month led to ever-higher costs and ever-shrinking ambitions.
As the project went on its labored journey, Austin’s economic boom paid the plans no attention. A cluster of new downtown apartment towers and a 74-story mixed-use tower sprang up, and none were near any station. The plan that once seemed poised to launch Austin into the future had been completely bypassed.
Meanwhile, tech-crazy Austin gave birth to next-gen self-driving cars. Waymo, owned by Alphabet, sent out a fleet of more than 200 vehicles. Tesla is running to catch up, as are Amazon’s Zoox cars. Cute four-wheeled delivery robots, which can hold up to six pizzas, are scooting around town.
The autonomous vehicles have the great advantage of flexibility. They don’t require tunnels or tracks, and they can go anywhere their geomapping can take them. Once the test drivers show them the streets, they can take off on their own, 24/7. Waymo now covers 140 square miles of the city.
Of course, ride-sharing services don’t reduce congestion on already clogged streets. But experiments are underway, in Austin and elsewhere, to test autonomous vehicles for mass transit. Austin has tested a 40-foot self-driving bus. In West Palm Beach, Fla., MiCa is being tested as a smart autonomous shuttle, which can seat eight people and take them along a mapped-out route. Beep has launched NAVI (Neighborhood Autonomous Vehicle Innovation) service in Jacksonville, Fla., which it calls the first fully autonomous public transportation service in the country.
And the Federal Transit Administration, which funds mass transit systems — and from which Austin still hopes to secure more than $3 billion in grants for its capital-intensive light rail — has already funded self-driving pilot projects around the country. The Project 2025 policy blueprint, followed closely in the Trump administration, makes the argument that the whole country is moving toward “new micromobility solutions, ridesharing, and a possible future that includes autonomous vehicles.”
What we don’t know at this point is whether we’re moving quickly toward a self-driving world portrayed in television cartoons like The Jetsons during the 1960s, where the dad’s car folded up into a briefcase when he got to work — or whether this bit of early scientific fiction will ever become a reality. After all, “Mission to Mars,” one of Tomorrowland’s first rides at Disneyland, closed in 1992 because it was too much today and not enough tomorrow.
We also don’t know whether self-driving vehicles will be economical enough to compete with conventional mass transit — or, if they are, how safe and how expensive they will be.
It’s a good bet that more vehicles in the nation’s largest cities would only create more congestion, at least until travelers are ready to trade in personal cars for self-driving ones and cities are convinced to trade conventional mass transit for more nimble vehicles.
In the midst of excited talk about the technologies of tomorrow, it’s easy to forget the needs of lower-income Americans, who shouldn’t be left standing on the curb, having been priced out of the system. That problem is solvable — local government subsidies for mass transit systems could be translated into vouchers for lower-income riders.
But the biggest question remains unanswered. Which of the two futures will come to define urban transportation in this country?
