How Self-Driving Cars Will Reverse a 10,000 Year Trend
By: Richard Farnworth
Tags: AI, Urban Planning, Autonomous Cars, Technology, Self Driving Cars

How Self-Driving Cars Will Reverse a 10,000 Year Trend

Plus other unintended consequences of autonomous vehicles.

Göbekli Tepe in Anatolia, Turkey is the world’s oldest known human settlement. At 11,500 years old, its founding marked the beginning of our species’ transition from small groups of nomadic hunter-gatherers, to complex societies within ever-growing communities.

Göbekli Tepe — Source: Wikipedia

From there, it’s been a one-way street.

By some accounts, Rome became the first city in history to have over 1 million inhabitants in 133 BC. By 1500, 1 in 25 people lived in towns and cities. Then, the industrial revolution sent this process into overdrive, bringing huge numbers of people to the cities in search of manufacturing jobs. At the turn of the twentieth century, London became the world’s first “mega-city” achieving 5 million inhabitants.

As of 2018, 55% of us lived in urban areas, a trend projected to reach two-thirds of the world’s population within the next few decades.

However, technological changes just around the corner may reverse this trend, changing where we live and how human societies are structured.

Escape to the country?

While predictions about AI are notoriously difficult, it’s a fairly conservative bet to say that autonomous vehicles will become commonplace in the next 10 to 20 years.

Soon we’ll be able to pass almost complete control of our vehicles to the on-board computer, freeing ourselves up to work or relax.

Autonomous vehicles will take the sting out of a lengthy commute, as you’re able to remain productive during the long time on the road. By allowing people to work during their journey, commuters will be able to leave for work later, and leave the office earlier, without affecting their output. This encourages people to take advantage of cheaper property prices and greater living space, further out from the big cities.

The high-speed reaction times of self-driving cars may enable them to travel in dedicated lanes at much higher speeds, further expanding the commutable distance. Traffic jams may also be a thing of the past, as autonomous vehicles communicate with one another to efficiently move through a city.

At the same time, the Covid-19 pandemic has seen a massive surge in the uptake of remote-working, with companies all over the world allowing workers to log in from home. And Elon Musk’s StarLink will bring high-speed internet connectivity to even the most remote areas.

These changes could bring about a mass shift in white-collar workers out of the city and into the country.

Photo by Matt Benson on Unsplash

A boom in regional manufacturing

Driver wages make up a large component of the cost of transporting goods by road. While the technology companies which own the algorithms used in self-driving cars will undoubtedly take a hefty chunk of the savings, freight transport is likely to get considerably cheaper.

This could lead to factories moving out of dense urban areas to take advantage of cheaper land, locating based on other considerations such as access to energy, water, or government subsidies.

For example, a furniture manufacturer might currently be located in an inner-city industrial estate, enabling easy access to materials and its customer base. With significantly reduced transport costs, however, they might opt to locate in a smaller, rural town. The cheaper land prices give them room to expand, perhaps building their own solar array to bring energy costs down. And bringing jobs to the area could attract regional development subsidies, making them even more profitable.

An end to hub and spoke

While transport costs will fall across the board, the cost saving is proportionally higher for small vehicles. The driver of an 18 wheel truck might be hauling a few million dollars’ worth of freight in their trailer. But they don’t get paid much more than the local grocery van driver, carrying a few thousand. Therefore, smaller vehicles will become more competitive on a price per item basis.

This softening of the economy of scale opens up new possibilities for businesses shipping physical products and commodities.

Previously it made financial sense to put as much material on an individual truck as possible, then drive that truck to a single destination where that material would be processed. Smaller trucks or multiple destinations increase the cost per item, meaning it’s cheaper to deliver your goods to fewer customers.

This gives birth to a hub and spoke topology, where goods are processed en-mass in regional population centers. Factories are primarily located in cities (the hubs), because it’s easier and cheaper to access materials, parts, and customers (via the spokes e.g. interstate highways).

Hub and spoke topology

However, with self-driving vehicles, the equation changes. Without such a large penalty for delivering smaller quantities, suppliers can diversify their customer base and cut out the middle-men. For example, a strawberry farmer might previously have sent most of their produce to a single supermarket distribution center. Self-driving vehicles could deliver their produce in smaller batches, to hundreds of customers around the area for a similar price per tray. This presents an opportunity for a diverse range of smaller regional manufacturers to popup, creating products using those strawberries which are competitive on price with larger companies.

Point to point topology

Cutting out the middlemen

In fact, cheaper small deliveries may encourage producers and manufacturers to sell and deliver directly to consumers, without going through a retailer.

Online platforms that connect customers with sellers will become the new store-front. Your weekly shopping list might contain 100 different products from 100 different manufacturers. Rather than all of these products coming through a supermarket’s distribution network, they could arrive independently, as and when you need it. Food could be ordered by smartphone app or automatically by your smart-fridge when you run out of stock.

It could even be delivered to you whilst on the move. If you’re walking down the street and fancy an apple, just order it on your phone and the self-driving fruit truck will pull up alongside a few minutes later.

This makes people less reliant on the particular shops and stores which are nearby. The convenience and choice that cities offer will be achievable in remote, rural areas, further increasing their attractiveness.

End of private car ownership

A typical car is in use only 5% of the time. For the other 95%, they’re sat there, quietly rusting and falling in value, often taking up space on public roads. Despite the huge cost of buying, maintaining, insuring, registering, refueling and parking a vehicle, many of us opt for the convenience of ownership, and car-share schemes haven’t taken much of a bit out of the market.

That 5% is highly concentrated around 8–9 am and 5–6 pm on weekdays, meaning at peak times, the number of cars on the roads is much higher. But even so, we still own many more cars than we actually need.

Fleets of self-driving taxis, however, may be too cheap and convenient to resist. The costs associated with owning a car will be shared amongst thousands of other users, and those who ride less frequently will make more of a saving.

One issue to raise here though is that of accessibility. If you have a disability that requires specialist equipment to help you enter the vehicle, it may be difficult to source a suitable car. This may create an additional burden on those with disabilities, either forcing them to own a private vehicle or face much longer wait times. With something so essential as mobility, it’s important that questions around accessibility are addressed.

For families with young children, this is also an issue. Although if self-driving cars prove to reduce accident rates dramatically, it’s possible that current regulations around child-seats and seat-belts may be dropped.

No more traffic… maybe?

Self-driving cars have many technical advantages over human drivers:

A self-driving car is able to accelerate perfectly smoothly and maintain a consistent distance from the car in front.

Their lightning-quick reactions allow them to drive much closer together without compromising safety.

The ability to use additional data sources such as live traffic data allows them to find an efficient route through a city.

…and it’s possible that they could one day communicate with each other to coordinate their paths through intersections, avoiding collisions without having to stop at the lights.

These things will help pack more cars into the same space and move them through our cities more efficiently. Space used for car parking would also be freed up, creating additional driving lanes or space for bicycles or bus-lanes.

On the other hand, with a reduced cost of transporting people and goods, we can expect many more journeys to take place. Those people who previously did not own a car, or who preferred to take the train over sitting in a traffic jam, might now travel by road instead. Deliveries will become smaller and more frequent and the use-cases for vehicles will expand. All this means the number of cars on the road at any one time will likely increase.

How these two forces balance out is yet to be seen. It would be a great shame for this technology to simply kick the congestion can down the road, giving us the same gridlock a few years later. I suspect government regulation will play a key role. For example, key bottlenecks could raise a “micro-toll” to encourage cars to take other routes at busy times of day.

It would also be a missed opportunity to take back some of our city space from the domain of the automobile. So much of our urban landscape is dedicated to traffic infrastructure, with pedestrians and cyclists pushed to one side. The technological revolution ahead is a huge opportunity to reallocate public space, create more parks and greenery while letting the algorithms worry about the best route from A to B.

Job losses on a massive scale

Driving is a big source of employment around the world. In the US alone, 3.5 million people work as truck drivers. Whilst not all professional driving jobs would be at risk — you still might need people to load and unload deliveries — there will certainly be a big impact on levels of employment. Taxi drivers will bear a huge cost, especially after getting into debt to purchase a license.

Despite the potential surge in regional jobs, there will be losers there too. Cafes and service stations on long-distance trucking routes will lose their regular supply of customers — with autonomous trucks simply cruising past without the need to take breaks.

The impact on governments’ balance sheets will be significant. Billions of dollars of taxable income will be lost. Those who lose their jobs might end up claiming welfare payments and will need to retrain to move into other industries. And the beneficiaries will be Silicon Valley technology companies, who have a notorious track record of paying very little tax on their profits. Given that self-driving cars will be operating and making money using tax-payer funded road infrastructure, tax reform will be necessary to make sure they pay their fair share.

At the same time, there will be new opportunities for people, but these will likely be fewer in number. And reducing the cost of transportation encourages increased economic activity across the board.

A force for good?

As you can see, the impacts of autonomous vehicles will be complex and far-reaching. For millennia we’ve organized our societies around the transport of people and goods, and the locations and makeup of where we live reflect that. What lies ahead is a step-change in how we move around, on a par with the invention of the steam engine, the car, or the airplane.

But it’s up to us to decide how to manage the transition, to reduce the pain for those negatively impacted, and get the best of this fantastic new technology.