Privatizing Profits from Use of Public Land: A Robotaxi Story

As Waymo vehicles saturate San Francisco, I’ve had an unnerving frustration with them that I can’t quite pinpoint. Backers of autonomous technology give endless benefits that we should be expecting from a transition to vehicles without human drivers.

Safer streets, safer travel experiences in a vehicle, and greater efficiency. Though as Peter Norton notes, we’re never quite sure when these benefits we’ve been promised will actually materialize and we certainly are unaware of the unknown future externalities.

I wonder if I’m frustrated because cities have a limited amount of space to move around and we just give it away, often for free. Imagine these vehicles running around with zero people in them, using up precious urban space while blocking public modes of transportation with many people or urban delivery trucks with packages that represent trips not taken. We already complain when cars have one occupant and take up 200 square feet, whether parked or on the road.

Just as we under price parking, perhaps we under price the valuable urban real estate of roadways. It seems like we might end up making the same mistakes that were made with real estate property, which is spending public money on infrastructure to create private value.

As Daniel Wortel-London notes in his book The Menace of Prosperity, (our podcast episode with him will be out Thursday Aug 28th) city leaders around the country decided that private land was more important than public and sold off their ownership stakes. They then depended on the value created by public investment for private actors and are now forever tied to private sector boom and bust cycles as taxes fluctuated.

It’s in this way that I wonder if we should think differently about the autonomous vehicle or vehicles more broadly. We shouldn’t be just taxing them just to maintain and upgrade infrastructure, but perhaps rethink our geographic relationship with them. The way they operate and the supposed benefits they could accrue are one thing, but the privatization of a public good such as a road is quite another.

I’m already frustrated by the language surrounding the future of autonomous technology, and you can actually see the cogs turning in some technologists heads around how they will have to compete with pesky pedestrians and other vehicles for public street space as if they owned it.

In a recent substack, Andrew Miller writes that Robotaxis have a problem, which is that they can be bullied by pedestrians. He notes that if this continues unpunished whether socially or by regulations, the whole urban mobility order will be disrupted. As he says “It’s choosing a slow-motion breakdown of urban mobility.”

I might argue myself that auto centric and auto dependent systems were already the breakdown of urban mobility, but we can see where this is going. It rhymes with regulations that vilified jaywalking and other street life that existed before drivers of cars were anointed the only users of public lands meant for everyone.

I wouldn’t take this writing as an argument against autonomous vehicles per se, but rather a different way of thinking about how governments should interact with them. We’re extremely fearful of publicly owned property being used to create value and profits for the public good, but we’re very good at investing public money that make private entities money.

I’ve been in other countries where friends have asked why there’s not a publicly owned corporation that builds transit lines and benefits and operates off the access they create. The “Hong Kong” method is an extremely popular talking point, but public profits are very scary for many in the United States who see the public sector as a means to private profits.

As driverless vehicles duplicate public service and privatize gains from using public land, we should start thinking about the ways in which the continuation of car culture without drivers impacts society. While there may be some good that comes from their use, I’m not sure we’re looking at them from the right angle.

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