Automated vehicles have moved from science fiction into beta reality. Cars and shuttles can already navigate complex city streets, even if they still need careful supervision. The stakes are enormous. This is a technology that could reshape how people and goods move, how cities are built, and who gets to participate in everyday life.
That power cuts both ways. Automated vehicles could make transportation more affordable, inclusive, and safe. They could also deepen inequality, erode public space, and lock society into even more car dependence if we are not careful. The key is not to ask whether AVs are “good” or “bad,” but to ask what kinds of systems we are building around them, for whom, and under what rules.
This blog explores four themes. First, the core promise of AVs. Second, the specific pitfalls that emerge once we put the technology into today’s legal, economic, and social context. Third, the questions we should be asking to guide policy and design. Finally, a conclusion that steps back from pro- or anti- narratives to consider the power, incentives, and car‑centric framework we are starting from that will shape what AVs do for us.
The promise of automated vehicles
Even with all the hype, there are real reasons serious people are interested in AVs. They are not just a fancy gadget. They are a new way to think about mobility.
Making transportation safer
Human driving is error‑prone. People get distracted, drive drunk, speed, run red lights, misjudge gaps, and lose focus late at night.
Automated driving systems offer some clear potential safety advantage: They do not drive drunk, drowsy, or angry. Their sensors do not blink or look at phones. They can monitor 360 degrees at once and track multiple objects. They can react faster than human reflexes when something unexpected appears.
If designed and governed well, AVs could significantly reduce the crashes that come from ordinary human mistakes. That includes many serious and fatal crashes that devastate families and communities every year.
Reality is in the details. What counts as “seeing” a child behind a parked car. How the system behaves in messy, low‑visibility environments. How often it fails, and how much those failures matter. Safety is not just a technical capability but a set of design choices informed by law and policy. Still, the potential to cut many kinds of crashes is real.
Expanding mobility and inclusion
Many people live in a world built for drivers even though they cannot drive. Older adults who have given up their license. People with disabilities. Teenagers in suburbs with no transit. Low‑income workers working late shifts or living in transit deserts.
Shared AVs, if centered in equity , could help provide more frequent, reliable service in low‑density neighborhoods that are hard to serve with fixed‑route buses. They could
offer door‑to‑door or first‑mile / last‑mile connections to rail and bus networks. The could give some people who cannot safely or legally drive a way to reach work, school, and care services.
Those possibilities are not automatic. If AV fleets focus only on high‑income city centers or airport trips, they will widen gaps. If they are integrated into public mobility plans, they could fill some of the worst holes in today’s networks.
Lowering costs and improving efficiency
Automation offers potential cost savings in freight, logistics, and passenger transport. At scale, those savings might show up as lower operating costs for some services if driver labor is removed. They could also translate to more efficient routing and platooning of freight vehicles, along with smoother traffic flows that reduce stop‑and‑go fuel waste in some settings.
For public agencies, automated shuttles on fixed routes or in specific corridors might make it cheaper to run high‑frequency service in areas where traditional bus operations struggle to break even. For freight operators, automated trucks on well‑defined highways might improve delivery reliability and reduce some labor shortages.
These efficiencies could lower prices for riders and shippers. They could also free public money for other mobility investments, including better transit and safer streets. The direction, again, depends on policy choices.
Making mobility cleaner and quieter
Many AV pilots involve electric vehicles. Combined with smart routing and better matching of vehicle size to trip needs, AVs could help reduce local air pollution relative to older gasoline vehicles, cut greenhouse gas emissions when powered by a cleaner grid, and encourage smaller, lighter vehicles for short urban trips.
This only holds if AVs are mostly shared, mostly electric, and part of a strategy to reduce unnecessary driving. If they simply add more car trips on top of current travel, even with electric drivetrains, they could still drive up congestion, energy use, and land consumption.
The pitfalls and power plays around AV deployment
The technology does not land in a vacuum. It arrives in a legal and economic system where car dependence is normal, powerful firms shape policy, and vulnerable road users already struggle for basic safety and dignity.
That context creates a series of risks.
Shifting responsibility for crashes away from AV companies
When a human driver harms someone, legal systems at least in theory have a path to assign fault. With AVs, responsibility can be blurred across the vehicle maker, a software provider, the fleet operator, and whoever “owns” the car.
Companies have clear incentives to write user terms that limit their liability for software failures. Same for arguing that a “safety driver,” remote operator, or vehicle owner is at fault and to frame crashes as rare outliers rather than foreseeable design risks.
This matters especially for fatal and serious‑injury crashes. If companies succeed in disowning responsibility, victims face an uphill battle to get justice. Society loses a key lever to push for safer designs. And the cost of harm is quietly shifted onto individuals and public systems like health care and emergency services.
A strong legal framework for AVs must keep clear lines of responsibility. If software is driving, then the entities that design and profit from that software should be accountable for its failures.
Eroding the rights of people outside vehicles
Pedestrians, cyclists, wheelchair users, bus riders, and others already face a built environment tilted toward drivers. Some AV firms and allies may pursue policies that tilt it further.
Examples include:
- Pushing for “jaywalking crackdowns” or new rules that treat walking outside crosswalks as a serious offense
- Supporting infrastructure changes that remove crosswalks, reduce sidewalks, or fence off pedestrian access because “the AV cannot handle unpredictability”
- Lobbying for rules that assume pedestrians and cyclists must be highly visible, heavily regulated, or even required to carry devices that broadcast their location to vehicles
All of these moves can be justified using safety language, yet end up restricting the freedom and comfort of people who are not in cars. They can also have disproportionate impact on low‑income communities, children, and disabled people who rely on walking, rolling, and transit.
A humane AV future must not treat people on foot or on bikes as obstacles to be disciplined into machine‑friendly behavior.
Prioritizing rider convenience over lawful, safe behavior
AV firms want riders to feel the service is smooth, fast, and convenient. That can create pressure to match the way human drivers actually behave in traffic rather than how the law says they should.
What “risky optimization” could look like: Rolling stops treated as “normal” even when they endanger crossing pedestrians. Aggressive lane changes or tight following distances to keep up with impatient human drivers. Speed creeping upward because slower driving leads to negative customer ratings.
If companies embed these “real‑world norms” into their systems, they recreate the very problems the technology was supposed to address. They might claim that otherwise riders will abandon the service. That is precisely why regulators need visibility into how AVs are programmed and which tradeoffs are being made.
Treating cities as unwilling beta test sites
The development of AV technology often uses public streets as large‑scale experimentation environments. Motivations include learning rare edge cases, improving mapping, and stress testing systems.
Risks include: High volumes of test vehicles in particular neighborhoods, with residents having no meaningful say; frequent near‑miss incidents that are not systematically reported to the public, and the use of “driverless” pilots to gather safety‑critical data without informed consent from the people sharing the road.
Unlike traditional product testing, where participants can opt in, entire communities can be enrolled in AV testing without agreement. When problems emerge, they are often documented by ordinary people posting videos, not by official reporting systems.
Cities need stronger authority and better data access so they can decide where, when, and how testing occurs.
Blocking emergency services and critical mobility
There have already been examples of AV fleets blocking fire trucks, ambulances, or buses, and freezing in place during abnormal events. At large scale, a software glitch, hack, or GNSS problem could produce clusters of stopped AVs blocking intersections and bus lanes.
Such breakdowns could delay ambulances and fire vehicles during time‑critical emergencies and clog routes during evacuations or major disasters when people most need clear roads
These scenarios are not theoretical. Complex, highly networked systems can fail in correlated ways. Conventional drivers, for all their faults, can sometimes be waved aside by emergency workers. A frozen AV that ignores human direction and waits for server instructions is a different kind of obstacle.
Regulators should demand robust fail‑safe behavior, clear procedures for first responders to override or move AVs, and realistic tabletop and field exercises to test behavior during disasters.
Externalizing risk and cost to the public
Developing AV systems at scale is expensive. Firms have incentives to push as many costs as possible onto others.
Common patterns:
- Offloading safety‑related infrastructure or operational needs onto city budgets
- Expecting law enforcement and fire departments to adapt at their own cost
- Treating crashes and disruptions during testing as a natural part of innovation, with victims and local agencies bearing the consequences
Public agencies, on the other hand, have a duty to consider the whole system. They must decide whether the promised benefits justify the added burden on police, fire, transit, and public works departments. That conversation needs to be transparent and grounded in data, not in marketing slogans.
Enshittification and platform power
Many digital platforms follow a familiar arc. They start with generous terms to attract users. Once enough people and businesses depend on them, they shift toward extracting maximum revenue.
It is easy to see how AV platforms could follow the same pattern:
- Initially offer low prices and discounts to undercut taxis and transit
- Build dependence, especially in places with poor alternatives
- Later raisin prices, charging extra fees, or introducing surge pricing that makes essential trips expensive
Because AV services will likely be run by a few dominant firms in each region, switching costs could be high. People might find that the “affordable, reliable” mobility they rely on has turned into a pricey, opaque service with limited accountability.
Public agencies need to think ahead about how to prevent this, through regulation, public options, and antitrust tools.
Undermining public transit and increasing car dependence
If AV services are deployed as private, door‑to‑door car rides, they can easily pull riders away from buses, trains, and shared shuttles.
That can create a vicious cycle: AVs skim off higher‑income or time‑sensitive riders. Transit agencies lose fare revenue and political support
Service cuts follow, making transit less frequent and less reliable. More people feel forced into AVs or private cars, further weakening transit.
Public transit is not just another mobility product. It is a public service that supports equity, climate goals, and city efficiency. It can move far more people in constrained space than individual cars, automated or not.
AVs that erode transit without replacing its social function risk leaving many people worse off, especially those who cannot afford AV rides or do not have credit cards, smartphones, or bank accounts.
More driving, more congestion, more emissions
Without careful management, AVs could increase vehicle miles traveled and congestion.
Reasons include
- Empty repositioning trips as AVs drive around waiting for rides or return to charging depots
- Longer commutes made tolerable because riders can work or relax while the car drives
- Mode shift from walking, biking, and transit to solo AV rides for short trips
- Suburban sprawl, as people move farther from work and daily needs
Even with electric drivetrains, higher VMT means more energy use, more road wear, more parking demand, and potentially more sprawl. Local air pollution can shift from tailpipes to tire and brake particles, and to the electricity grid if it is not decarbonized.
The promise of AVs must be weighed not just in crash statistics but in how they reshape land use, travel behavior, and climate trajectories.
Questions to guide AV development in the public interest
Rather than debating whether AVs are “inevitable,” it is more productive to ask specific questions that can shape policy and design. These questions focus on integrating AVs into broader goals like safety, climate, mode shift, and VMT reduction.
Safety and accountability
- Who is legally responsible when an automated vehicle causes a serious or fatal crash
- What independent bodies audit AV safety claims and test vehicles in realistic conditions
- How much crash and near‑miss data must companies share with regulators and the public
- How will safety standards evolve as AV capabilities change, and who gets a say in that
A key principle should be that the party who controls the code shares responsibility when that code harms people.
Rights and experiences of people outside vehicles
- How will AV deployments protect and enhance the rights of pedestrians, cyclists, transit riders, and disabled road users
- Will cities preserve and expand crosswalks, protected bike lanes, and traffic calming, even if it challenges AV design assumptions
- What happens when AV routing conflicts with bus priority lanes, school zones, or slow streets that prioritize kids and elders
The goal is to avoid redefining normal human movement as “interference” with automated traffic.
Integration with public transit and mode shift goals
- Are AV services being designed to connect to and support public transit, or to compete with it
- Do city and regional plans treat AVs as part of a multimodal ecosystem, with clear targets for walking, cycling, and transit mode share
- Can AV fleets be regulated to provide service in underserved areas and off‑peak times, not just profitable corridors
Cities could, for example, make AV operating permits contingent on measurable contributions to transit ridership, not just on a promise of “innovation.”
Climate and VMT reduction
- Are AVs required to be electric, and if so under what timeline
- What policies are in place to prevent AVs from increasing total vehicle miles traveled
- How will pricing, zoning, and parking policy interact with AV deployment
Tools might include congestion pricing, per‑mile fees, low‑emission zones, and strict parking reform. AVs should fit into a climate‑aligned transport strategy rather than setting the agenda themselves.
Data governance and public oversight
- Who owns the data generated by AV operations, and who can access it
- How can cities use AV data to improve safety and planning without compromising individual privacy
- What transparency is required about algorithmic choices, training data, and known limitations
AV data is a form of power. If it is controlled solely by private firms, public agencies will struggle to manage the broader system.
Resilience and emergency planning
- How will AV fleets behave during large‑scale disruptions like floods, wildfires, cyberattacks, major blackouts, or telecom outages
- What authority do emergency services have to direct, clear, or disable AVs in crisis
- Have AV companies and public agencies run joint drills to test worst‑case scenarios
A resilient system does not assume that everything will work as intended. It plans for cascading failures and human‑machine coordination under stress.
Equity and inclusion
- Who gets to shape AV policy decisions, and whose voices are missing
- Which communities are bearing the brunt of testing and early deployment, and how are they being compensated or protected
- How will pricing, accessibility, and service design ensure that low‑income riders, people with disabilities, and people without digital access can benefit
An AV system that only serves wealthy, tech‑savvy riders is not progress. It is another layer of inequality.
Conclusion: A powerful technology in a car‑centric world
Automated vehicles are not destiny. They are tools whose impacts will be determined by choices about law, economics, and social values.
On one hand, AVs could dramatically reduce certain types of crashes, expand mobility for people whom the current system leaves behind, and help decarbonize and right‑size parts of the transport network.
On the other hand, they could entrench car dependence and sprawl, undermine public transit and active travel, concentrate power in a few corporate platforms, shift risk and cost onto communities while privatizing gains.
All of this is unfolding within a starting point that is already deeply car‑centric. Many regions have land use patterns that make driving a necessity. Large numbers of people live in places where walking or biking feels unsafe. Public transit, where it exists, is often underfunded and undervalued. People outside vehicle cabins are already marginalized in design, enforcement, and investment choices.
Introducing AVs into that system without changing the underlying rules is likely to reinforce its worst features. AVs could make car dependence more comfortable and more automated, while leaving the basic inequities intact. They might even obscure those inequities behind a story of high‑tech progress.
A thoughtful path starts with deliberately asking what kind of system we want to create.
What kind of transportation system do we want? How much space should be given to private vehicles versus people? What needs to happen to ensure that everyone, not just those inside a vehicle, has safety, freedom, and dignity on the street?
If we answer those questions now, AVs can be evaluated and shaped as one tool among many. Not as the star of the show, but as a supporting actor in a broader transition toward safer streets, lower emissions, less driving, and more inclusive mobility.
The promise is real. The pitfalls are real. The task now is probing the key issues in order to develop rules and incentives that make the most of the technology while delivering sufficient public oversight and protections for people and communities .
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