As the saying goes, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” But who gets duped three times?
I’m afraid NYC is about to be caught flat-footed again for the third time in a dozen years with another promise of a traffic elixir. In 2014, when the impacts of the surge in For Hire Vehicles (FHVs i.e. Uber and Lyft) on paralyzing traffic were apparent, and the destruction of the taxi industry was obvious, Mayor Bill de Blasio blinked and let the numbers rise to today’s 100,000 ride-hail vehicles eclipsing the remaining 10,000 yellow taxis on the road.
In 2020, as e-bikes, stand-up scooters and mopeds started rising astronomically the city did little and since then 100 people have died using these modes. Now autonomous vehicles (AVs) — self-driving cars — are being “tested” on NYC streets, and the Adams administration is welcoming them with open arms (de Blasio, to his credit, posted on X, “If there’s one place on Earth that was NOT meant for self-driving cars, it’s NYC.”) As The Who (look ‘em up) sang “We’ll be fighting in the streets…Don’t get fooled again, no, no.”
The city has authorized Waymo to pilot eight vehicles on NYC streets. While a human operator will be present, testing in other cities has led to commercial-scale robo-taxi operations shortly thereafter.
First, let me say Waymo is the leader in autonomous vehicles (AVs) and relies on the gold standard triple sensor technologies of Lidar, radar and cameras. Nonetheless, there are good reasons NYC should be wary of allowing AVs on our streets. While some have reacted to the very real and consequential loss of jobs by drivers I’ll focus on safety and traffic impacts. Due to space constraints, this is only a partial list of my concerns.
Our streets should not be testing grounds. Waymo, perhaps the safest AV company so far, has gotten into more than 700 crashes (mostly minor, though). Tesla, which boasts of being much safer than conventional cars as well as Waymo, has a checkered history of promises and fatalities. More than 50 deaths attributable to Teslas while in autopilot or full self driving mode have been compiled by the website www.tesladeaths.com. Let’s table AVs in NYC until they’re proven safer than conventional cars.
AV companies self-certify how safe they are. There have been no comprehensive independent studies of the industry. “No oversight, verification, or validation is currently required in the testing of autonomous vehicles,” writes Junko Yoshida, editor of Tech Probe, who closely follows the industry. An AV company wanting to use NYC streets, I urge, must first present such a study to be approved.
Transit is already 95% safer, on a per mile basis, than cars. As the new 21st century modes (Ubers, e-bikes, electric mopeds etc.) have shown, emerging transport services tend to take people off the subways and onto the streets. In NYC that means that even if AVs were 50-75% safer than cars, but they take people out of the underground, total transportation deaths would rise — not decline!
I estimate each robo-taxi vehicle will have the equivalent deleterious effect on traffic as two to three Ubers. That’s because they can stay in motion seven days/week and 18 or more hours/day. An analysis I did when I was traffic commissioner found that congestion was most closely linked to the number of vehicles that stay in motion such as taxis and FHVs. Since the addition of FHVs in the early teens of this century Midtown speeds have dropped by 24% to historic lows (prior to the advent of congestion pricing).
Fully autonomous vehicles may be used as weapons by malicious actors. And NYC is the biggest target. A 2024 report by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, “Vehicle Incident Prevention and Mitigation Security Guide,” warned, “Emerging technologies in the form of fully autonomous vehicles (FAV) may pose a threat as they expand the potential tactics malicious actors can employ for targeted vehicle attacks.”
James Niles, chief innovation officer, Orbit Labs; in a statement to NHTSA said, “You could have the safest vehicle, the highest cybersecurity, and the tightest control of privacy data and still be wide open for bad actors to load the vehicle up with explosives, punch in coordinates, shut the door and send the vehicle to its destination,” eliminating the need for a martyr or suicide bomber.
I conclude with a quote by Brad Hoylman-Sigal, Democratic nominee for Manhattan borough president, who told Gothamist, “My goal would be to get more vehicles off the streets … not add more of them. The future is public transit, not private driverless vehicles.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Schwartz is chair of the Transportation Research Program, Roosevelt House at Hunter College.
