Michigan takes a Huge Leap Forward in Transforming Cities through Autonomous Driving
Our vision at May Mobility is to transform cities through autonomous driving. We mean that literally — that cities will start to physically change as transportation systems enabled by autonomy become available. Unnecessary road lanes will become bicycle and pedestrian paths, and parking structures will be replaced by green space, affordable housing, retail, and schools.
Last week, Michigan took a huge step forward in transforming cities through autonomous driving when it announced a first-of-its-kind dedicated roadway for autonomous vehicles, connecting May Mobility’s home town of Ann Arbor to the city of Detroit. Transportation planners and corporate sponsors are starting to invest real dollars to change our physical infrastructure to take advantage of what autonomous vehicles can do.
What’s really exciting about this route is that it’s not a mere technology demonstration, it will serve a huge need for the region — reliable public transportation to and from one of the 10 largest airports in the world. Midway between Ann Arbor and Detroit is Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport (DTW) a major hub for Delta and the home of the third largest parking structure in the United States. The need for such a large parking structure is due to the fact that there currently aren’t any good shared or public transportation options to get to or from the airport, so people drive.
Parking structures like this use up precious capital resources. At an estimated cost of $20,000 per spot, the parking structures at DTW cost about $370M (in 2020 dollars). And their sole function is to store away 18,500 cars… which represent an additional half billion dollars worth of investment. This inefficiency, multiplied by the scale of New York City, is hard to fathom: the area taken up by NYC’s on-street parking spaces adds up to 17.2 square miles!
All of that parking physically spreads everything out, making cities less convenient. It means that the closest grocery store (or elementary school) is farther away from where you live. Removing all that wasted space makes getting around the city easier, which further decreases the need for cars and other forms of transportation, which allows further reductions in the amount of space set aside for vehicles.
Transportation planners are looking for better ways to invest capital, but the big wins require changes in consumer behavior. You can’t stop building traffic lanes and parking lots unless people stop driving their personally-owned vehicles everywhere.
One of the things we’ve been able to demonstrate is that convenient services, made possible by self-driving technologies, can change behaviors. In Detroit, for example, we were able to double the ridership on one of our routes versus a conventional shuttle, in part because riders started using the fast and convenient service to go out for lunch. That’s great news for not just transportation planners but also the restaurants in the area.
Not all changes in rider behavior are good — widespread adoption of ride-hailing services (e.g. Uber and Lyft) has made congestion worse. The average occupancy for a ride-hail vehicle is between 0.3 and 0.5 — in other words, for every person actually going somewhere, there are between one and two other vehicles circling for their next fare, adding to congestion in the process.
To have a positive impact on cities, rider behavior must shift to scalable, shared services. Gustavo Petro, the former Mayor of Bogota, said “A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation.” The key to achieving this is for the quality of service to be extremely high — so that even those who could afford to take their own car would choose to use public transportation instead. Self-driving is the key to achieving this, because it changes the economics enough to enable incredibly high levels of service while still providing a service that improves access and equity.
At May Mobility, we’re working with city transportation planners all across the country on how we can help them make their cities safer, more equitable, and improve accessibility for people when they need help getting around. Michigan’s new corridor connecting our Ann Arbor back yard to Detroit is an incredibly exciting step in reimagining infrastructure.
