Autonomous Vehicles: Good For The Climate, Commute, Pocketbook, Bad For The Heart?

Autonomous vehicles could save Americans $1 trillion and prevent a gigaton of carbon emissions, according to the Rocky Mountain Institute, but former New York City Traffic Commissioner Sam Schwartz says he's got something better.
"I think autonomous cars will definitely improve safety," said the man popularly known as Gridlock Sam Tuesday at the National Shared Mobility Summit in Chicago. "They talk about a 90 percent improvement in safety. Well, I've invented something that can give you a 90 percent improvement in safety and do a lot more than autonomous vehicles can do, especially in city centers. I call it the iPed and I brought one."
Schwartz took off his shoe and held it in the air.
"That's your solution. Walk and solve a lot of the problems that autonomous vehicles would do."
On Monday, Rocky Mountain Institute manager Jonathan Walker revealed a suite of benefits offered by shared autonomous vehicles: not just the $1 trillion that Americans currently spend on cars that sit idle 95 percent of the time, not just the gigaton of carbon emissions, but also a five-fold increase in lane space on existing highways, the liberation of lanes currently committed to street parking, the evaporation of the gridlock that Schwartz is credited with naming, the elimination of accidents caused by driver error, and safer streets for pedestrians and bicyclists.
"On highways absolutely," Schwartz said the morning after. "Otherwise, we become like the people depicted in the film Wall-e. You know, we lose the ability to walk."
Schwartz repeated a scenario he had heard at the conference, in which an autonomous vehicle picks you up at home, drives you to work, and then goes and parks itself.
"I imagine at that point your autonomous chair comes and picks you up, unless you have an autonomous chair in your car," Schwartz said. "And that sounded horrible to me."
Why so horrible? Because cars already deserve some of the blame for a passive society plagued by obesity and related disorders like diabetes and heart disease.
Ron Burke, the director of Chicago's Active Transportation Alliance, said even bus riding is healthier than riding in a car.
"The average transit user in the nation walks about 30 percent more every day than somebody who relies on their car," Burke said.
"For every hour that a person spends in their car, per day on average, their likelihood of obesity goes up about 6 percent. On the other hand if they're walking about an hour a day their likelihood of obesity goes down. This is not a surprise I'm sure to all of you. We know this is true."
Autonomous vehicles are likely to remain a darling of the shared mobility movement because of the imposing threat they pose to individual car ownership, a threat driven home by powerful economic forces. A shared autonomous vehicle costs about 15 cents per mile to operate, according to RMI, compared to 60 cents for an individual car.
They also promise to reduce the number of lives lost to fatal accidents, air pollution and climate change. But they can't save lives as well as some other forms of shared mobility, like bicycles.
In a study this year, Elliot Fishman of Australia's Institute for Sensible Transport revealed that bikeshare systems inspired millions of minutes of increased physical activity for urban residents:
In the first multi-city analysis of the physical activity impacts of bikeshare, Fishman, Washington, and Haworth (2014b) estimated changes in physical activity due to bikeshare in Melbourne, Brisbane, Washington, D.C., London and Minneapolis/St. Paul. The results suggest an average of 60% of bikeshare trips replace sedentary modes, but when bikeshare replaces walking, a net reduction in physical activity results. Overall, however, bikeshare was found to have a positive impact of physical activity, leading to an additional 74 million minutes of physical activity in London, through to 1.4 million minutes of physical activity in Minneapolis/St. Paul, for 2012 (Fishman et al., 2014b).
Like bus riders, bicyclists are more likely than car users to interact with other destinations along their routes, Burke said.
"Let's take cycling for example. People who bike walk a lot, they shop local. It's one of the ways we make a case for installing all the new bike lanes you see in Chicago. The local merchants are going to see a benefit out of that," he said. "People aren't using their cars to go out to the malls, the big box stores; they're shopping more locally, they're shopping more frequently."
Autonomous vehicles pose the greatest threat to individual car ownership, which promises huge environmental benefits, but side-by-side with bikes they can't compare.
"The greenest car of all is not driving a car. There's a lot of attention given to Priuses and so forth but if you don't drive at all that's by far the greenest way to get around," Burke said.
Google, Apple, and Tesla are all working on autonomous vehicle manufacturing, and Walker expects the first autonomous robo-taxis to appear in as little as three years in cities. But Schwartz urges cities to be wary.
"When it comes to city centers, don't give up on your pedestrian spaces, your bike spaces," Schwartz said. "Just don't buy into it."