AVs and the Future of Transport: Choosing Utopia Over Dystopia
Key Takeaways
- The outcomes we get from AVs will depend on the policy choices we make, not the technology itself.
- Without proactive policy, the default AV rollout will lead to dystopia: more congestion, urban sprawl, declining public transport, and a lower quality of life in our urban areas.
- Road pricing for AVs should be implemented now, while political resistance is low, with revenues reinvested in walking, cycling, and public transport.
- AVs must be placed firmly within a transport hierarchy that prioritises walking, cycling, and public transport.
- Autonomous public transport should be properly evaluated, but a staff presence may remain necessary on quieter services to ensure safety perceptions, particularly for women.
- In rural areas, robotaxi services should be subsidised to replace traditional public transport, improving access for people without cars.
- Transport and land-use planning must shift to a focus on access, repurposing parking, reshaping stroads, and removing planning rules such as parking minimums.
- Support for people on low incomes should be mode-neutral, empowering them to choose the best transport option for their needs rather than focusing on giving them access to AVs.
- AVs must be regulated for both safety and resilience. We cannot afford to depend on systems that fail in bad weather or when a single provider exits the market.
- The political window to act is open now; delay makes reform harder as AVs become more embedded in our economy and daily lives.
What Next?
Are you advocating for policies that move us towards utopia or sitting on your hands and therefore moving us towards dystopia?
Introduction
Over the past six weeks, I have published a series of posts examining autonomous vehicles (AVs) from many angles: their implications for urban and rural communities, for freight and passengers, for the environment and equity. This final post in the series attempts to pull all of that together into a coherent vision: not just a prediction of where AVs might take us, but an argument for where we should actively choose to go.
Let me be clear about where I stand. I am not a techno-optimist who believes that AVs will automatically produce great outcomes simply by existing. Nor am I a sceptic who sees them as just another form of car to be marginalised wherever possible. And I have no interest in a compromise for the sake of compromise. My aim is to maximise outcomes by asking how we can use AVs to improve our communities.
What this series has shown me is that AVs have genuine potential to shift the political dynamics around transport in ways that could unlock improvements we have been unable to achieve before. But it has also shown me how easily that potential can be squandered. The same technology that could free up road space for cycling and walking could just as easily entrench car dependency for the foreseeable future.
Which future we get is a matter of recognising the challenge and making the right political choices. And the time to take action is now. Every day we delay, the window for meaningful policy action closes.
The Vision - Dystopia v Utopia
To understand what is at stake, it helps to think in extremes. Not because the future will necessarily be extreme, but because mapping the best and worst plausible outcomes gives us a clearer sense of the direction we are travelling in and how much it matters which policy path we take.
So consider two futures. In the first, governments step back and let AVs roll out as they are today, keeping the car-focused transport systems of today. In the second, they use the arrival of AVs as a catalyst to reform transport systems, focusing on better outcomes for people. The first future is dystopia. The second is utopia. Here is what each looks like.
Dystopia
As AVs roll out, they prove price-competitive and more convenient than public transport for most trips, and passenger numbers on buses and trains begin to fall. At first, the shift is gradual, but as AV reliability improves and fares become more competitive, the decline accelerates. Public transport operators, losing revenue, cut services, which drives more people towards AVs, which further cuts revenue.
Most people end up owning their own AV for convenience. The total number of vehicles on the road has barely changed, and globally has continued to increase. Parking lots have been converted into vast pick-up and drop-off zones. Roads are even more clogged; people just mind the congestion less because they are working or watching something on their phone while in an AV.
The streets are safer, AVs have dramatically reduced accidents, but they do not feel much safer. Cycling infrastructure has been neglected in favour of AV infrastructure, and most parents do not let their children walk or cycle to school. The public realm has not improved; it has simply been reorganised around a different kind of vehicle.
Driverless freight trucks have become ubiquitous, delivering real cost savings to logistics companies, but also pulling more freight off rail and onto roads, accelerating road deterioration and adding to peak-time congestion. Last-mile delivery robots and drones have proliferated, creating constant friction with pedestrians and cyclists and filling urban airspace with noise. People have drifted away from public plazas and high streets, which are now even less places for people than thoroughfares for machines.
In the suburbs, the calculus of commuting has shifted. Because you can work from an AV, a longer commute feels less punishing, and so people move further out. Urban sprawl accelerates. Infrastructure costs rise.
In rural areas, AVs have brought genuine benefits: safer journeys and new independence for older and younger residents who can access their family's AV. But the economics of robotaxi services have never stacked up outside cities, so those without a vehicle of their own remain stranded.
We have become dependent on AVs, but not resilient. When heavy snow falls or a major provider withdraws from a market, the system's fragility is exposed.
We built our communities around the AV, and ended up with many of the same problems and a few new ones.
Utopia
The utopian future begins with a shift in politics that AVs make possible.
For decades, attempts to realign our transport systems away from the private car have foundered on a simple political reality: the people most inconvenienced by change (drivers) have been the loudest voices in the room. AVs change that. When you are no longer the one steering, you care less about lane widths and parking bays. The political coalition that has blocked reform for a generation begins to dissolve.
Into that opening, far-sighted governments move quickly. Road pricing, long the holy grail of transport economists, is introduced for AVs while their numbers are still small and resistance is still manageable. The revenues are hypothecated into walking, cycling and public transport. Alternatives to private vehicles are increasingly popular, and more people are using them.
Vehicle ownership falls in favour of shared AV services. Not to zero; there are still households and contexts where owning an AV makes sense, but significantly so. The total number of vehicles drops, and with it brake dust, tyre pollution, and the vast acreage of land devoted to storing cars when they are not in use.
Parking lots become housing, libraries, shops and public squares. The removal of parking minimums from planning rules unlocks development. Housing becomes more affordable. Supermarkets, no longer required to provide acres of surface parking, pass some of the savings on. Streets that were once stroads, that dispiriting category of road too wide to feel safe and too busy to feel pleasant, are revitalised with space for trees, seating and market stalls.
Most roads in residential areas are now 30km/h. That change, combined with reduced traffic volumes and improved infrastructure, transforms the experience of walking or biking. Children cycle to school. People walk to the shops. The local street becomes, again, a place where you might stop and talk to someone rather than somewhere you pass through as quickly as possible. Physical health improves. So does mental health. Community cohesion, where people know their neighbours, quietly strengthens.
Public transport is thriving. It is safe, accessible, reliable, quick and frequent.
Autonomous trucks arrive in cities at night, when roads are quiet, and prices are low, and offload at urban consolidation hubs. From there, last-mile deliveries are made by smaller AVs on roads, in cycle lanes, on footpaths, and in the air, but are governed by rules that keep them subordinate to people. They avoid the busiest streets during peak hours.
In rural areas, the robotaxi has transformed access for many. Rather than attempting to sustain poor traditional rural public transport, governments have embraced subsidised robotaxi networks as the backbone of rural public transport.
For people on low incomes, the shift has been equally significant, though it has required deliberate policy to achieve it. The old model of heavily subsidised fares has been replaced by targeted, mode-neutral support: a transport payment that people can spend on whatever gets them where they need to go, whether that is a bike, a bus, or an AV. The result is that car dependencyhas been substantially reduced. People who once spent a disproportionate share of their income keeping an ageing car on the road now have genuine choices. They travel more, spend less getting there, and keep more money for everything else.
In short, the transport system has stopped focusing on supporting motor vehicles and has become something that serves the people who live there.
Avoiding Dystopia and Getting Closer to Utopia
The dystopian future I described is not the product of malice. Dystopia, in this case, is the path of least resistance, which is what happens when governments let the AV rollout proceed on its own terms.
Unfortunately, that is what makes it so likely. It only takes good people not to act to get there.
However, the political window for meaningful action is closing. Now is the time to take action, while AVs are still establishing themselves, while there are too few users to defend their privileges, while the path dependencies that make reform so difficult have not yet set in.
The good news is that the utopian vision does not require a revolution. It does not depend on technologies that do not yet exist, or on public spending that is politically inconceivable, or on a change in human behaviour. It requires, instead, a handful of deliberate policy choices, most of which transport planners and economists have been advocating for years, and which AVs now make both more urgent and more achievable. The following section outlines those choices.
Policy 1 β Price the Infrastructure, and Do It Now
Transport economists have been making the case for road pricing for decades. The roads are a scarce resource; we currently allocate mostly for free, and the result is predictable: overuse, congestion, underinvestment in alternatives, and a vast hidden subsidy for private vehicle use that distorts every other decision in the transport system. The intellectual case was won long ago. The political case has been the problem.
And it has been a serious problem. The political economy of asking millions of existing drivers to start paying for something they currently get for free has, with a handful of honourable exceptions, proved too difficult to overcome.
AVs change that calculation, but only temporarily, and only if we act quickly enough to take advantage of the shift.
Right now, AVs are a very small part of the vehicle fleet. The people using them are early adopters, not a mass political constituency. And critically, AVs are already connected and location-aware, which means the technical barriers to usage-based pricing, barriers that were genuinely significant for conventional vehicles, are largely absent. We can price AV infrastructure use based on location, time of day, vehicle weight, road type, and environmental footprint.
Hypothecation, committing the proceeds of AV infrastructure charges to investment in walking, cycling and public transport, is what transforms road pricing from a revenue measure into a genuine transport policy. It is also what makes it politically defensible. People are far more willing to accept a charge when they can see, concretely, what it is buying: better bus services, safer cycle lanes, improved footpaths, and more accessible stations.
Properly calibrated pricing also creates a more level playing field between road and rail freight. It will not reverse the competitive advantages that autonomous road freight will bring, but it will ensure that freight that genuinely belongs on rail stays there.
No other policy on this list has as much leverage. Pricing is the foundation on which everything else rests. We cannot afford to miss this window of opportunity.
Policy 2 β Implementing a Proper Transport Hierarchy
In theory, many transport authorities operate a hierarchy that places walking at the top, followed by cycling, then public transport, then private vehicles. In practice, the hierarchy has rarely been more than aspirational. Decades of political pressure from motorists have produced transport systems in which the car dominates, and everything else competes for what is left over.
AVs will not fix this automatically. Left to their own devices, they will simply perpetuate it. But their arrival gives us a political opportunity to finally close the gap between the hierarchy we claim to have and want, and the one we actually operate.
As more journeys are made in AVs rather than driven cars, the emotional intensity that has always surrounded transport politics begins to cool. Driving, with its attendant frustrations, its territorial instincts, its identity politics, is replaced by something more like being a passenger on a train. People in AVs are less likely to feel personally affronted by a new bus lane or a reduced speed limit. The constituency for the status quo quietly shrinks.
But we should not wait for that shift to fully materialise before acting. The time to establish where AVs sit in the hierarchy is now. The rules we set today, while AVs are still novel, will shape the norms that persist as they scale.
What does a proper transport hierarchy for AVs actually look like in practice?
AVs that block cycle lanes or footpaths, or hold up buses, should face meaningful penalties that change behaviour.
We should mandate lower speeds, even if only for AVs at first, around schools, in residential neighbourhoods and on high streets, regardless of the current posted limit.
As AV use grows, demand for kerb space will intensify. We need to start managing AV use of the limited kerb space.
AVs are already capable of rat-running, using residential streets to avoid congested main roads. It should not be permitted.
The goal is not to obstruct AVs but to integrate them now in the way we envision in the long term.
Policy 3 - Evaluate Autonomous Public Transport
Driverless buses might slash operating costs, allowing better services at a lower cost. But the honest position, at this stage, is that we do not yet know and that the gap between the pilot project and the fully commercial operation has proved considerably wider than many early advocates anticipated.
The cost case, which was always the primary argument for autonomous public transport, deserves scrutiny. Bus driver costs account for a large chunk of operating expenditure. Eliminating them would, in principle, transform the economics of public transport provision. But the assumption that driverless vehicles can simply operate unstaffed deserves to be challenged.
A staffed bus is fundamentally different from an unstaffed one, not just in what can go wrong, but also in how safe it feels, particularly for women. The evidence on perceptions of safety on public transport is consistent and long-standing: staff presence matters, and its removal could deter significant numbers of potential users.
A driverless bus that still requires a customer service assistant or safety attendant on board is a less dramatic cost saving, but it needs to be evaluated. Governments should proceed with driverless buses, but keep an eye on the assumptions they are making.
Policy 4 β Redefine Rural Public Transport Around the Robotaxi
The truth is that for many rural areas, the public transport system has long been a residual service for people with nowhere else to turn.
Robotaxis change this in ways that are worth taking seriously. Remove the driver, who in a lightly-used rural service may account for the overwhelming majority of operating costs, and the per-trip cost of providing on-demand transport to dispersed rural communities falls to a level that begins to look, for the first time, genuinely viable. Not without subsidy, but viable in a way that staffed rural public transport is not.
But it will not change unless governments act. The commercial logic of robotaxi deployment points overwhelmingly towards cities: higher density, higher demand, shorter trips, faster payback on investment. Rural areas, almost by definition, do not offer those conditions. Left to their own devices, robotaxi services will reach the countryside last. The communities that would benefit most will wait longest.
What is needed is a willingness to reframe what we mean by rural public transport: not a fixed-route bus, but a responsive service that can get people where they need to go, when they need to go there, at a cost that does not require them to own a vehicle.
Governments should move on two fronts. First, they should create the funding frameworks that allow robotaxi services to be commissioned and subsidised as public transport in rural areas. Second, they should actively incentivise AV deployment in rural areas, rather than waiting for commercial operators to do it in their own time. The benefits of earlier access are real, and the cost of bringing deployment forward through targeted incentives is likely to be modest compared to the social value it generates.
Policy 5 β Stop Planning for Movement and Start Planning for Access
For most of the past century, transport planning has been organised around a deceptively simple question: how do we move more people and goods more quickly? It sounds reasonable. Unfortunately, it was wrong.
The right question is not how fast people can move, but how easily they can reach the things they need: work, school, healthcare, shops, friends, green space, and cultural life. Access is what transport exists to provide. It is also a far more useful organising principle for transport and land use planning, because it integrates the two in a way that speed-focused planning never does. Access depends not just on how good the transport connections are, but on where things are located in the first place.
The most immediate opportunity is parking. Cars spend the overwhelming majority of their lives stationary, and accommodating that time has consumed an extraordinary amount of urban land and shaped development patterns. Parking minimums, requirements that new developments provide a specified number of spaces, have added cost to housing, retail and commercial development, pushed buildings apart, degraded the pedestrian environment, and signalled, in the most concrete possible terms, that the car is the expected mode of travel. In a world of shared AVs that do not need to park near their destination, the rationale for parking minimums collapses.
The land that parking has occupied, and it is a remarkable quantity of land, can be put to better use. Housing on former car parks brings people closer to the amenities and services they need, reducing the distances that transport must bridge.
The reshaping of stroads into proper streets is another access intervention. Converting stroads into streets, reducing speeds, widening footpaths, planting trees, creating space for outdoor dining and market activity will make them places people want to visit again. AVs, by reducing the political resistance to changes in road space allocation, make this kind of transformation more achievable.
None of this is new thinking. Transport and planning professionals have been making the case for access-based approaches for years. What has been lacking is the will to act on it.
Policy 6 β Support People, Not Modes
Transport policy has a long tradition of subsidising fares rather than people. The result is a system that spends significant public money on transport subsidies while leaving some of its most vulnerable people underserved. Car dependency, in particular, has become one of the most overlooked drivers of poverty. A household that cannot afford a car, in an area where a car is a practical necessity, faces restricted access to employment, healthcare, and basic services. A household that can just about afford a car is often spending a proportion of its income on that car that leaves very little for other things.
AVs have the potential to help change this, but only if we are deliberate about how support is structured. The risk is that we simply extend the existing model: subsidising AV services in the same unfocused way we have subsidised buses and trains. The opportunity is to do something better.
The principle should be straightforward: support people, not modes. Rather than directing subsidies at particular services or technologies, governments should provide targeted, mode-neutral support to people on low incomes, a transport payment, integrated into the broader welfare system, that can be spent on whatever form of transport best meets their needs.
There is an important distinction to draw here between access and mode. The goal of transport policy should be to ensure that people can reach the things they need, not to ensure that they can reach them by any particular means. If someone has excellent access to employment, healthcare and social life without ever needing to use an AV, that is not a problem.
Policy 7 β Regulate for Resilience, Not Just Safety
The regulatory conversation around AVs has, understandably, been dominated by safety.
But the regulatory frameworks being built around AVs have so far paid considerably less attention to resilience. That needs to change.
The first resilience risk is operational fragility. Current AV systems have well-documented limitations in adverse weather. For a transport system that has come to depend on AV services, that will be a serious problem. Regulation needs to grapple with this directly.
The second resilience risk is market concentration and provider dependency. In many cities and regions, a realistic long-term prospect is a small number of dominant operators, possibly just one.
The failure or withdrawal of a dominant AV operator would be like the failure of critical infrastructure, sudden, systemic, and very difficult to recover from quickly. Regulation needs to anticipate this risk before it materialises.
Other Considerations
The loss of driver jobs is a significant labour market consequence of AV deployment. I have deliberately not mentioned jobs here. That is because it is a transitional issue, not a vision issue. Sooner or later, those jobs will disappear.
Conclusion
The central argument of this series has been straightforward: AVs are not inherently good or bad for our communities; the outcomes we get will depend almost entirely on the policy choices we make, or fail to make, in the coming years.
If the dystopian outcome comes to fruition, it wonβt be a failure of the technology; it will be a failure of foresight and political will. If we simply allow AVs to roll out as they are today, layering new technology on top of a transport system already skewed in favour of the car, we will entrench and amplify the problems we already have. The utopian vision, by contrast, is not a fantasy. It is achievable, but it requires us to be deliberate and proactive.
The seven policies I have outlined, pricing infrastructure and airspace, properly implementing a transport hierarchy, evaluating autonomous public transport, redefining rural public transport, shifting to an access-focused planning framework, providing targeted support for people on low incomes, and regulating for resilience, are not new. Many are things transport economists and planners have been advocating for decades. What AVs change is the political opportunity. As people become less emotionally attached to driving and less conscious of changes to road space, the window to reform our transport systems opens.
So, are we advocating for policies that move us towards utopia, or are we sitting on our hands, thereby moving us closer to dystopia? There is no neutral position here. Inaction is a choice, and it carries consequences.
I hope this series has convinced you that a better future is not only possible, but that the policies to get there are well within our grasp. We need to act now, before AVs become so embedded in our political economy that changing course becomes as difficult as it has been with other cars.