Don’t Wait for Disaster: Regulate Companies’ Ride-Hailing Evacuation Responses Now
By: Joseph Wildey
Tags: Transportation, Mobility, Weather, Ridesharing, Tech

A transportation system dominated by autonomous vehicles, the majority of which are shared, is likely a more efficient transportation network but also one that is more fragile and less able to function without severe interruption during natural disasters.

Such a future scenario would lack the resiliency that the current transportation network possesses. Human drivers, while flawed and responsible for nearly all crashes, are still capable of piloting their vehicles in a greater range of conditions than autonomous vehicles currently can.

Natural disasters create extreme driving conditions and place significant and often overwhelming demands on the current transportation system, so much so that some states tackle this problem of peak demand by allowing single-direction travel along key evacuation routes.

This practice is termed contraflow lane reversal and it’s meant to meet the spike in demand by transportation network users during evacuations.

This video posted by an evacuee shows how contraflow lane reversal worked on I-26 during Hurricane Florence.

While autonomous and connected vehicles theoretically promise greater coordination and efficiency during such events and unique travel patterns, in practice, the well-documented deleterious effects of weather on these vehicles’ systems (e.g., lidar) could significantly impair or preclude their effective use in mass evacuations.

As an Axios reporter who recently took a ride in a Waymo van without a safety driver in Chandler, Arizona, reported this week, a “threat of flash flooding earlier in the week suspended driverless operations for several days.”

According to the same Axios piece, only around 1,500 people currently use Waymo in Chandler, Arizona. Of these, only 400 use the service without a safety driver — and are bound by a nondisclosure agreement — while the other 1,100 are riders who use Waymo One, which is the company’s name for its paid service.

Presumably, these 1,500 Waymo users could find alternative means of mobility during this temporary gap in service due to the risk of flooding, but this recent shutdown illustrates the novel risks inherent in a future that is entirely autonomous.

These risks are magnified if more people renounce personal vehicle ownership in favor of using such shared services. In these cases, it becomes a simple math problem in that not enough vehicles would be available for mass evacuation purposes. Put another way, “[t]he number of vehicles…will not match the number of people asking for a vehicle at the very same time in order to evacuate.”

Transit, and rail in particular, offers more theoretical resiliency and capacity in such cases.

When Hurricane Irma affected Florida in September 2017, at least one observer opined why passenger trains weren’t being used to evacuate the significant number of people leaving Florida, many of whom encountered empty gas stations and miles of traffic as fellow residents fled the notoriously car-dependent state.

After exploring why there wasn’t a coordinated public response that leveraged rail, the article’s author concluded that disasters like Hurricane Irma demonstrate “the abysmal, anarchy-filled state of transportation in America.”

While autonomous vehicles are more coordinated in many ways, especially if these vehicles are connected, this coordination is entirely in the hands of the private companies that operate these vehicles on public roads.

Ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft, which are often described as parts of the “sharing economy,” have contributed to some evacuation and disaster response efforts to date. However, their contributions have been entirely voluntary and have varied depending on the size and scope of the disaster. Importantly, their services still rely on human drivers.

Recent research from the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, examined what voluntary actions Lyft, Uber, and Airbnb took during the California wildfires in 2017 and 2018.

Source: Stephen Wong and Susan Shaheen. 2019. “Leveraging the Sharing Economy to Expand Shelter and Transportation Resources in California Evacuations,” University of California, Berkeley.

As shown in the above table, companies’ responses varied depending on the size of the evacuation. For instance, out of the six wildfires examined by the research team, Uber took action in only three of those incidents.

Importantly, all of these actions were entirely voluntary and not compulsory, which makes sense given that both Uber and Lyft still rely on “independent contractors” (a point of ongoing contention) to deliver their services. Many of these drivers were probably also understandably focused on moving themselves and their families out of harm’s way during the wildfires.

Overall, the report’s recommendations didn’t favor a strong regulatory response and instead highlighted the potential for cooperation. The report concluded that while the sharing economy represents an area of future and further collaboration between state and local officials, more research is needed, especially as it pertains to “innovative mobility” options like “driverless vehicles.”

Which brings us to the billion-dollar question: Should companies such as Waymo, which now offers fully autonomous rides, be legally obligated to provide shared emergency evacuation services from areas affected by natural disasters?

Going one step further: Should these companies be required to demonstrate the ability of their driverless vehicles to operate in a range of conditions and, if that is not possible given their current technology, be required to provide for “emergency evacuation safety drivers” who could operate their vehicles in the event severe weather precluded their continued safe driverless use?

These are questions more state and local officials should immediately start asking, especially as companies such as Waymo and Cruise Automation deploy more driverless vehicles in communities across the United States.

Cruise Automation is an especially interesting case since that company has proposed an entirely driverless (no safety driver and no steering wheel) taxi option called Cruise Origin. Such an option would preclude even mandating the presence or use of a safety driver during evacuations since the vehicle has no human controls that can be used to operate it in the event of severe weather.

And more severe weather like the kind that recently temporarily forced the shutdown of Waymo’s driverless service in Chandler, Arizona, is on the way.

As the Washington Post recently reported, cities like Boston are grappling with the effects of climate change now as its harbor inundates low-lying areas during storm and tidal surges.

The article noted that Boston is “ranked the world’s eighth most vulnerable to floods among 136 coastal cities,” which makes its situation particularly precarious.

Boston is also among dozens of cities with some form of autonomous vehicle testing program. However, such testing is often limited to ideal weather conditions until licensed companies can demonstrate the safety and efficacy of their systems.

Waymo has started testing its vehicles’ systems in states like Florida to learn how they perform during inclement weather events like heavy rain. This type of testing will be critical to improving the technology to the point where residents can rely on it even during severe weather.

While driverless technology is likely still a ways off (despite years of hype), thinking about how to regulate companies’ responses is prudent policy on the part of elected officials whose primary responsibility is ensuring the safety of residents they represent.

Requiring plans for deploying safety drivers to support emergency evacuation procedures would be one small step in the right direction. Such proactive policies would also ensure that the technology doesn’t develop the reputation of being a fair-weather friend in times of natural disaster.