Infrastructure development for autonomous vehicles
Transport and technology concept. ITS (Intelligent Transportation Systems). Mobility as a service.
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(This article was co-authored with Dr Martin Adler, economist, co-founder and partner at Hoag+Co and researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam).
Reducing traffic accidents and saving lives on the roads is a top priority for governments around the world. With 39,000 fatalities and injuries per year in the United States alone, the widespread adoption of autonomous vehicles (AVs) is expected to bring about significant improvements.1 Currently, road safety relies on factors such as individual safe driving behavior and government actions such as speed limits and the provision of adequate infrastructure.
Just a few weeks ago, the Biden Administration unveiled a $2 trillion infrastructure proposal as one of its first policy objectives.2 This new administration is not the first to promise a solution to America’s chronic infrastructure underinvestment of the past three decades, but we can be hopeful that the scale of the new proposal is commensurate with the problem.3
Democrats want to address the climate crisis, so the proposal is framed around investment goals for green energy and sustainability. The auto industry is mentioned briefly, but AVs and our decaying road infrastructure are not. But there’s a mistake here, because AVs are directly tied to sustainability goals in the form of renewable energy propulsion, reduced energy consumption through technologies like platooning, and more shared transportation options.
Autonomous Vehicle Infrastructure Readiness Survey Results
Hoag + Co
To realize these important environmental benefits, autonomous vehicles need the right infrastructure. Market research from mobility advisory firm H+C shows that 74% of consumers perceive roads as not ready for autonomous vehicles, while only around 11% believe the opposite is true (see Figure 4). Road authorities, regulators and other experts tend to agree with this negative assessment of AV readiness.5
The bottom line is that the speed of autonomous vehicle adoption is directly related to infrastructure readiness, so significant additional efforts are needed in the coming years to scale up adoption and realize the promised benefits of vehicle automation, including fewer roadside fatalities.
Road infrastructure is already expensive, with Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries spending an average of 1-2% of GDP to build and maintain6. Roads built today are designed to last at least 20 years, well within reach of increased AV adoption, so time is of the essence to avoid costly aftermarket upgrades to adapt roads to new mobility. There’s just one problem: for now, experts don’t agree on what exactly being AV ready means.
There are numerous testing projects underway around the world. Canada, for example, is considering turning a toll highway in Ontario into an AV test road.7 The European Union is currently considering at least 12 projects that will address AV roads, from vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications using 5G to road markings.8 Asia may be considered a concurrent leader in these transformations, as China plans to dedicate two entire lanes of the Beijing-Kumamoto highway to AVs when it opens this summer.9 In the US, Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners subsidiary Cavnue and the state of Michigan are working in a public-private partnership to test an AV-only road corridor.
Why and how should governments prepare for AVs when the public is not? Governments and their agencies have a strong influence over the goods and services used to meet people’s needs. This political economy is heavily biased towards achievable initiatives that have both strong public interest and support.
With little public support or interest and no significant backing from private industry, governments have little interest in investing in AVs. The US government is often driven by the wealthiest. Sometimes, the most vocal advocates can generate the momentum to move a policy issue, especially if it has strong repercussions that benefit society as a whole and has high economic value.
Educational campaigns that list the many improvements that could occur, from urban to rural areas and everywhere in between, would be effective in increasing understanding of AVs. While some may be pessimistic, the opportunity to improve nearly every aspect of life, including safety, should not be overestimated.
At this stage in AV advancement, we seem to be at a crossroads of public-private partnerships. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being poured into the industry through startups and OEMs. Governments are being encouraged by industry lobbyists and safety and advocacy groups who understand the benefits of this technology. Promises of a more sustainable, safe and equitable transportation system are being made. This appears to have captured the attention of the necessary stakeholder groups who can push the promise of AVs to the forefront for nearly all groups needed to make this technological innovation a reality. Political will is as important as public sentiment, and both will ultimately be needed to make widespread use of AVs a reality, but attention to our dysfunctional infrastructure must be at the forefront of this effort. Additionally, as adoption of electric vehicle (EV) technology expands, significant investment in charging infrastructure will be needed to support this new direction in mobility globally.
Moreover, planning and financing require long-term foresight and complex decision-making amid uncertainties around future demand for road space, technology requirements, etc. The regulatory challenges are daunting, but so are the implications for industry providers of infrastructure, mobility, and everything in between, requiring close attention to the political economy of AVs and EVs.
Compatibility between conventional and autonomous vehicles on the roads will be an immediate challenge. Once autonomous vehicles are widely deployed, they will share the roads with conventional vehicle users. The remaining challenge is how to create an ecosystem of autonomous vehicles and human drivers that does not center on the elite who can own the most expensive and latest cars. The hope is to intentionally create an equitable transportation network.
Without a federal framework for autonomous vehicles, the U.S. currently has a piecemeal approach to implementing laws on a state-by-state, and sometimes city-by-city basis. The lack of a consistent regulatory framework across jurisdictions has hindered the development of a nationwide autonomous vehicle transportation network. Meanwhile, many European and Asian countries have taken a nationalistic approach to both AVs and EVs, allowing for rapid progress in these areas.
If the US wants to achieve global parity in AVs, it also needs to consider how it handles infrastructure. Too often city and road planners plan for today’s structures and short-term horizons, and don’t anticipate future technologies and future benefits. A paradigm shift in future AV technology and infrastructure must avoid the harms of early planning in aviation. The lesson in aviation is that they wanted to incentivize innovation, so they didn’t create the right tax system, but in the long run created bad policy. What will help is to address lanes, lighting, jobs, tax revenue, citizen perception, and trust and confidence in the technology as part of an infrastructure plan that focuses on long-term impacts.
While U.S. regulators may initially be reluctant to add dedicated lanes to infrastructure to support AVs, not only are many European and Asian governments pushing for dedicated lanes, their publics also overwhelmingly support the idea. As popular as the idea is abroad, this growing support could spread to the U.S., where policymakers may have a hard time enacting a swift transition to adopting dedicated infrastructure for new transportation technologies.
The idea of widespread adoption of AVs is not an entirely partisan issue, but rather a common-sense solution. People need transportation to get around; that gets them to jobs, homes, food, and healthcare, and vice versa. With increased mobility, AVs give people more freedom, access to healthy food, healthcare, better paying jobs, and affordable housing.
