Self-driving cars in England's big cities.
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I hate traffic. And in Leeds that means that I dislike going most places most of the time, until I arrive.
I know that this is the same for colleagues and other people working in Leeds’ exciting tech scene and I am convinced it is the biggest fixable reason for our city’s economy under-performing similar sized cities in Europe and the USA by between 30% and 70%.
I think that self-driving cars might fix this and thus deliver huge economic returns. As I see them succeed in the USA and China, I’m more and more excited to see how they change my city.
But first let me set the scene for my travel options where I live, in a terraced house in a central suburb of Leeds, about a two mile walk from my office in the old part of the city centre.
The train is unreliable.
I live a five minute walk from a train station, it was a big factor in us buying our house where we did. But I almost never take the train.
One reason for that should be obvious from that train’s performance over the last twelve weeks, a period with no particularly challenging weather and no industrial action.
Perhaps surprisingly given that it is never on time, this train service is always packed into Leeds in the mornings.
In the evenings out of Leeds it is even more packed. People need to get home to pick up kids, cook dinner, and get to events. These things aren’t as flexible as getting in to work and this compressed peak period means that the three carriage diesel trains that run on the route are regularly too small for everyone to get on. Lack of investment over decades means they cannot be made any longer, nor is there space at Leeds station to run any more. Even if there were, the diesel commuter trains that Leeds relies on are used almost nowhere else in the world and they are thus expensive to buy, run, and maintain.
The data says that the reliability of these evening trains is better than in the morning, around a third manage to leave Leeds on time. But for the individual passenger, the reliability is much lower. A train leaving on time that you couldn’t get on doesn’t get you to where you need to be.
Everyone has alternatives of course. One is the bus.
The bus is slow and infrequent.
My most convenient bus is the number 19. It runs once an hour from a stop just a five minute walk from my house. The 19A makes it half hourly at certain times. It arrives into Leeds less than five minutes from my office. It’s quite a good option for me to get to work. It rarely arrives more than five minutes early or five minutes late and at 8:12am it rarely takes much longer than the timetabled 16 minutes. If I leave my house at 8am I know I’ll get the bus, and I know I’ll be in the office by 08:40am. Not bad at all.
On the way back, things are worse. The same reduced flexibility that leaves trains from Leeds too full to get on does the same to the roads that the bus runs along. About half of the journey that I take on it has a bus lane, but the car traffic is so bad on the rest of the route that this barely matters. At five o’clock in the evening, the hourly bus can arrive between 10 minutes early and 10 minutes late and it typically takes 40 minutes instead of the already padded timetabled time of 20 minutes.
This is, realistically, a journey I need to leave an hour for. It is quicker to walk home, so I usually do. That option is particularly tempting with Britain’s best pub and Britain’s best social club on the route.
The alternative bus, the 56, runs more frequently. Every 15 minutes at peak time it winds its way through streets with cars parked on both sides, effectively a single lane shared by two way traffic. This means that a journey that typically takes just over ten minutes off peak takes nearly thirty minutes at peak times.
The longer walk to the stop, the likely wait of 7 or 8 minutes (timetables are useless at peak times due to delays and countdown timers barely any better) and the longer walk back home make this no better option.
Electric bikes are great, but not for many.
I cycle. Since I own a home and run my business, I can guarantee a safe indoor space for an eBike. And it is the eBike that lets me cycle to work every day, no matter the weather, without hesitation.
It lets me take longer routes, up and down hills, on cycle paths, and through parks that keep me largely separated from car, van, and bus traffic that makes me stressed, slows me down, and risks my life. The built-in lights mean no-one can steal my bike lights when parked, nor do they ever run out of charge. The electric assist means I can swap the chain and gears for a single speed belt drive system that reduces maintenance enormously. While the remaining maintenance (punctures still happen, wheels still buckle over time, brake pads still need changing) is enough to put off many, I can manage it by myself. This is fortunate given the refusal of most local bike shops to service an eBike they didn’t sell.
But I know that eBikes aren’t for everyone. Even with my experience and tools, maintaining an eBike, even one as simplified as mine, is a pain. The up-front cost of around £2000 is a lot for many. The constant fear of theft, especially for those who don’t have space to store a bike inside, is off-putting. The cold, the wet, the abuse, and the risk of getting run over all add up to meaning that bicycles will probably always be a small share of transport in British big cities. Even in the Netherlands’ four main cities, the percentage of journeys to and from work by bicycle is around a third.
Cars remain king.
All of this leaves cars the main way that the people of Leeds get to work. It’s a very similar pattern in every big city in England except for London, which I mention here only to stop quite as many people saying that this blog post is crap because I didn’t mention it. I fully expect further replies from Londoners who feel that their much longer commute taking much longer means I am moaning. The economic illiteracy of such statements, shared broadly by experts in our capital, is part of why Britain’s productivity is so low and our big cities achieve no agglomeration benefits. To make up for our smaller population Leeds must aim to beat, not equal, London for commutability.
Large employers in and around Leeds know that the car is the best way for most of their workers to get to work. Big names like Morrisons, Capita, Arla, and First Direct operate from out of town office parks with huge car parking capacity. Asda, Transunion, KPMG, and Leeds Building Society all operate out of more central offices built on top of and surrounded by car parks. The city’s proposed innovation district rightly boasts that “there are currently over 9,500 car parking spaces in surface car parks and multi-storey car parks within the area”.
Recent changes may reduce the city’s car dependency slightly. After forty years of fighting against the UK government’s central ban, Leeds, via the West Yorkshire Mayor, will regain the right to regulate buses in the city next year. We should expect a similar large increase in ridership as Manchester has experienced since reinstating bus franchising this year. If local control over local rail is ever devolved we should expect substantial increases in public transport use through the integration of trains and buses. Continued investment in cycle lanes should help cycling share increase. And in around seven years, if all goes to plan, some people may start using the first part of a new tram system. The cancellation of HS2, the delay of Northern Powerhouse Rail, and the associated saturation of Leeds station leaves little hope of a meaningful change in rail use. A basic new station on an existing line in Leeds currently sits unfinished after £26.5m of investment proved insufficient. The cost of basic rail investment often seems so high that it is impossible to justify.
So for now and for the next decade, cars will remain the kings of Leeds’ transport system.
Will self-driving cars change everything?
But cars themselves are changing.
YouTube is full of videos of cars driving themselves through Chinese and American cities. Each month, new complexities that self-driving car opponents said would prove insurmountable are overcome. Self-driving cars today navigate rural China and America, new cities of both countries, and increasingly old cities of both countries. Even London, surely one of the hardest cities in the world to drive in, is navigated surprisingly well by Wayve’s self-driving vehicles, albeit with the UK government required safety driver on hand to intervene if necessary.
Self-driving cars increasingly deal well with complicated and undefined junctions, roundabouts, and interfaces between different drivers, pedestrians, and the built environment. While far from perfect, self-driving cars are already better and safer drivers by most measures, in most conditions, than humans.
Such cars remain banned by the UK government in Leeds. That may change next year and I await details eagerly. My hope is that we are allowed to move extremely quickly to open up our roads to the most innovative types of self-driving vehicle as quickly as possible. I can imagine things changing enormously, though no-one can confidently predict what broad adoption of self-driving vehicles will do to our cities and our society.
My guess is that quite quickly the reasons why I don’t drive to work, and why many of my colleagues who live further away get frustrated coming to work, will fade away. An autonomous car could pick me at my front door and drop me off at my office. I wouldn’t have to worry about the stress of driving in traffic or the cost or inconvenience of parking. I could take calls, reply to emails, read, or listen to podcasts. I would be warm and dry. And while this would undoubtedly be expensive at first, at the rate at which costs are likely to fall as self-driving cars mature, and given the huge direct and indirect subsidies that public transport receives in cities like Leeds, I suspect it would be a good financial choice both individually and for society pretty soon.
Of course I would also be stuck in horrendous traffic. As soon as being driven became the best option for me, it would become the best option for everyone, and the badly congested roads of today would become awfully congested. But I wonder if that would be so bad. Taking the bus or a train already turns a 10 minute journey into something closer to an hour, and that hour is much more lost to me than it would be in a private vehicle driven by a computer. If I’m sat in traffic that a robot is navigating, I’m not sure I’ll care all that much.
For me in one of the inner suburbs of Leeds I’m likely to do fine from increasingly awful traffic. People further out might struggle, but I struggle with the congestion and pollution they cause driving through my poorer inner neighbourhood at the moment while I cause them no issue in their richer outer neighbourhoods. The new situations feels fairer than what we have now.
The second and third order effects of a self-driving car takeover would be enormous. Would rail services survive? I suspect not if they really can’t improve beyond the levels of service they provide today despite very high subsidy. There seems little prospect of trains becoming self-driving. Buses may well fare much better since they are already self-driving in some places.
The extra changes we could imagine seem enormous and possibly society-changing. If self-driving cars are shared, like taxis, they won’t need central parking. If they are mostly owned, which I guess will happen quickly, and can be summoned on demand, we might not need to park them outside our homes. This would free up a huge amount of road space where I live in Leeds and solve the problem of how to charge electric cars in terraced houses. The shifting of delivery vehicles to running at night, at low speed, with quiet electric engines, would free up even more road capacity at peak times.
If self-driving cars can be trusted to drive at 15mph in built up places, might children feel safe to return to playing in the street like they used to? And might we feel safe enough to remove speed bumps and crash barriers? I would certainly feel safer cycling surrounded by self-driving cars not humans stressed out by traffic and looking for a two-wheeled outlet for their frustrations.
We don’t know what changes self-driving vehicles will bring to our cities and our society. I am always surprised by how confident many of their strongest supporters and opponents are.
From the strongest cheerleaders of self-driving vehicles, I all too often hear certainty that self-driving cars will make public transport infrastructure obsolete such that we should stop investing in it today. That feels unwise to me, especially since the economic boom that they predict self-driving cars will usher in would make any money wasted on infrastructure today trivial to pay off.
From the strongest opponents of self-driving vehicles, I am surprised by their certainty that reasonable assumptions about road space allocation and flow capacity that hold today will carry over to a very different world. I’m particularly surprised that, having seen their early predictions that self-driving cars would never work be proven wrong across the USA and China, they remain confident in their new predictions of the future.
I don’t know how self-driving vehicles will change our cities and our society. I’m wary of thinking about it too hard before we get started given that we have no way of predicting what will happen. As long as self-driving vehicles are safe, and all the data from the USA suggests that they already are, and are getting safer, we should learn by rolling them out, seeing what happens, and responding quickly and locally.
As so often in recent times, San Francisco and the Bay Area is leading the way. I look forward to following along as closely as possible as soon as I can.