Skip to Content
Smart cities

Self-driving cars could make city congestion a whole lot worse

February 1, 2019

If you think traffic in cities is bad now, just wait until autonomous vehicles arrive, cruising around to avoid paying pricey parking fees.

Perverse incentives: Driverless cars will snarl up city roads because cruising will cost less than parking, Adam Millard-Ball, associate professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, writes in Transport Policy. Even worse, because cruising is cheaper at lower speeds, they’ll slow traffic to a crawl as they kill time, he says: "They will have every incentive to create havoc."

2 mph: Using a combination of game theory and traffic simulation models, Millard-Ball predicts that under the best-case scenario, even just 2,000 self-driving cars in San Francisco would slow overall traffic to less than two miles per hour.

The solution? He suggests cities impose congestion fees like those in London, Singapore, and Stockholm, where motorists pay a flat fee to enter the city center. And we should implement them now, before autonomous vehicles arrive.

This story first appeared in our newsletter The Download. Sign up here to get your daily dose of the latest in emerging tech.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

Geoffrey Hinton tells us why he’s now scared of the tech he helped build

“I have suddenly switched my views on whether these things are going to be more intelligent than us.”

Deep learning pioneer Geoffrey Hinton has quit Google

Hinton will be speaking at EmTech Digital on Wednesday.

Video: Geoffrey Hinton talks about the “existential threat” of AI

Watch Hinton speak with Will Douglas Heaven, MIT Technology Review’s senior editor for AI, at EmTech Digital.

Doctors have performed brain surgery on a fetus in one of the first operations of its kind

A baby girl who developed a life-threatening brain condition was successfully treated before she was born—and is now a healthy seven-week-old.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.