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

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.