Bring on the Robot Cars
It's not the speed, it's the variance
It’s hard to be on any remotely political social media these days without catching at least a little of what might be shorthanded as the Urbanist Center-Left: people who bang on endlessly about the need to build more housing and transit in a handful of hot cities as the key to achieving various progressive goals. Their core arguments seem reasonably sound in most respects— especially when compared to their further-Left sworn enemies in the “degrowth” sector of the #discourse— but I find them incredibly tedious, to the point where I’ve word-muted some of their favorite phrases (NIMBY and variants, YIMBY and variants…) on Twitter in an attempt to reduce my irritation.
There’s a weird spot of overlap between the YIMBY crowd and the degrowthers in that they both hate cars. Cars enable sprawl and ruin cities by making every intersection into an endless game of Frogger, and thus should be taxed or regulated out of existence in favor of everybody walking to work, taking trains, or biking. The bike part in particular gets a ton of emphasis, as if the main thing holding the majority of the populace back from bicycling everywhere is that you can hardly get on the road without getting flattened by an SUV.
I find a number of parts of this silly in ways I don’t want to engage with at this time, but the safety thing comes to mind pretty regularly, as biking is one of my main forms of exercise. And living where I do, going out for a ride necessarily involves at least some riding on surface streets. In fact, I have a number of set routes that I ride regularly— Strava has 26 versions of the exact route shown above logged, and similar numbers for multiple slight variations on it— that are basically entirely on (sub)urban streets.
I won’t say that I’ve never had a problem with drivers on these rides— there are a surprising number of people who feel a need to announce their presence by beeping as soon as they get close, even when there’s more than a full lane of space in which to safely go around me— but I can’t say it feels all that threatening, either. This is partly because I’m strategically choosing lower-traffic streets to ride, but even on the busiest roads I regularly travel, I don’t feel like it’s all that hard to avoid getting flattened by an SUV.
To the extent that I encounter problems with cars while on my bike, the issues have much less to do with the number or speed or type of vehicles I encounter than with what you might call the wide variance of driving philosophies on display. What ends up annoying me isn’t anything to do with the cars themselves, but the inability to predict what the people driving them are going to do.
My starting point for approaching riding on the road is that I should behave more or less like a really slow car: staying in the travel lanes (not on the sidewalk), keeping to the right unless I’m about to make a left turn (in which case I signal it as early as practical), and generally respecting traffic signals. OK, if I come to an unoccupied four-way stop, I won’t come to a foot-on-the-ground stop and then re-start, but I accept that I need to be ready to stop if there are cars on the cross street.
When there are cars on the cross streets, though, man, I just don’t know what to expect. A plurality of drivers— maybe even a slim majority— will likewise regard me as behaving like a slow car and we’ll both go in our turn as appropriate to the intersection. A smallish number of folks will get more aggressive on seeing a bike in the street, and gun it through to get ahead of me. A really small group won’t even look or won’t see a bike if they do, and the remainder are excessively deferential. A handful of drivers will go so far as to stop to let me go at intersections where I have a stop sign and they don’t.
The variance in approaches creates problems that jam me up. While the “I’m a very slow car” default mostly works, I have to be ready to stop in places where I shouldn’t need to in case there’s a maniac on a cross street. The excessively deferential people maybe annoy me even more, though, because they jam up other drivers, too— once or twice I’ve had people stop to wait for me on two-way streets where the cars in the other direction were very definitely not stopping, which does none of us any good.
Of course, this is not a problem unique to cycling on the roads. It is, in fact, exactly the same problem faced by drivers with regard to other drivers. And cyclists and pedestrians, for that matter— when I’m driving a car, I’m equally annoyed by trying to predict the behavior of people on bikes (some sizeable percentage of whom are teenagers with characteristically deficient self-preservation instincts…).
The trouble with coexistence on the roads isn’t the mere fact of having different modes of transport operating in the same space, it’s a problem with inconsistency. What jams everything up is the variance in approaches to driving (or biking, or walking) that makes it next to impossible to predict what somebody else is going to do. It doesn’t even matter that much which approach you choose— “Everybody drives like a psychotic asshole” is surprisingly functional, as folks from Boston or NYC can confirm— as long as everybody’s on the same page. This is why Washington, DC is maybe the most unpleasant city in America to navigate— a significant fraction of the drivers are tourists or staffers from more rural areas who are freaked out by driving in an urban environment at all, while a non-trivial number are diplomats from countries where all car functions are managed through the use of the horn.
Which is, in the end, maybe the best reason to welcome our eventual self-driving car overlords. If most of the vehicles on the road were algorithmically controlled, their actions would most likely be more predictable, and everybody would be happier on the whole.
Of course, getting to the mostly-robot-car situation is going to be a messy process, for both the cyclists and pedestrians trying to predict vehicular behavior and the poor engineers writing algorithms that have to anticipate erratic humans. And you just know that the last holdout human drivers will be the biggest collection of assholes in the world. But the chances of making it through that transition are probably better, on the whole, than the chances of getting autonomous human drivers to behave in a reliably predictable way.
This is what comes from a late-fall weekend where I’m making a big push to get out and ride before snow and ice shut me down until spring. If you like this, here’s a button:
If you want to argue with any of it, the comments will be open:
There are certainly people who just hate cars, but there are others who just think vehicles use roads and streets and are not charged for the use; a gasoline tax is not a vehicle-specific mileage charge. Vehicles are also parked on streets and roads an not charges the sometime non-zero opportunity cost of occupying the space another vehicle wants to occupy. Finally , when vehicles move too close to each others at certain times and places they cause congestion, only part of the cost of which is born by the congestor and they are not charged for this externality. If vehicle owners were charged for all these costs some would make different choices about when and where to drive and park their vehicles.