Towards A Vision for AVs Part 3: Equity, Sustainability, and Livability
Key Takeaways
- This blog is part 3 of my series exploring what our vision for autonomous vehicles should be. It covers equity and fairness, sustainability and livability.
Equity and Fairness:
- Transport fairness should be measured by people's overall well-being, not by their access to any particular mode, including AVs.
- Subsidising cheap robotaxis for everyone would likely worsen inequality by starving funding for walking, cycling, and public transport.
- The biggest equity gains from AVs may benefit people who never use them, through lower rents and retail prices when parking requirements disappear.
- Community transport services for people with disabilities must be prioritised over robotaxis, requiring new business models.
- Road-user charging for AVs can improve equity if the revenues fund better, more sustainable transport options.
Sustainability:
- AVs will only deliver sustainability benefits with decisive policy intervention; without it, induced demand and sprawl will likely erase any gains.
- Comparing AVs to today's unsustainable system sets the bar far too low; the right comparison is against excellent walking, cycling, and public transport.
Livability:
- The greatest livability opportunity from AVs is reclaiming parking and road space for wider sidewalks, bike lanes, trees, public transport and public spaces.
- AVs could make it politically feasible to transform dangerous stroads into genuine streets by reducing driver frustration with lower speeds.
What Next?
In part 4 of this series, I will examine AVs in a rural and regional context.
Introduction
This is part 3 of my series exploring what our vision for autonomous vehicles should be. In part 1, I examined the productivity, congestion, funding, and technology development implications of AVs in urban environments. Part 2 focused on accessibility, public transport, shared mobility, resilience, and road safety.
My aim throughout this series is to, at the end, develop a comprehensive vision for what we should aspire for AVs to contribute to our communities.
This week, I'm tackling three more critical lenses: equity and fairness, sustainability, and livability.
Let's dive in.
Equity and Fairness
One of the biggest challenges in transport planning will be determining what constitutes a fair and equitable approach to autonomous vehicles.
I am not going to cover every aspect of equity when it comes to AVs. Instead, I will focus on what I think are the most significant issues.
To begin, we need to face the truth about most of our current transport systems: they're deeply unfair.
Our existing systems heavily subsidise private cars at the expense of everything else. People who can't drive, people who choose to walk, cycle, or use public transport all pay the price. "Free" parking makes everything more expensive, including housing, people's biggest outlay. These subsidies also undermine public transport, degrading services and forcing many people to spend thousands of dollars on car ownership.
These hidden costs fall hardest on people with low incomes.
In short, the bar for AVs to improve equity and fairness is remarkably low. But will they clear even that low bar?
The narrow view of equity
Here's a scenario that troubles many people:
AV services are only offered in wealthier neighbourhoods, require smartphone access, and charge premium prices.
This sounds unfair, doesn't it? Shouldn't everyone have cheap, easy access to AVs?
This is where we need to think more carefully.
One of the fundamental problems with our existing transport systems is that we evaluate fairness too narrowly, focusing on individual modes rather than the system as a whole.
Consider public transport fares. Lower fares sound like an obvious win for low-income households. But when we starve public transport agencies of revenue through cheaper fares, we often end up with fewer services. This increases car dependency, leaving many worse off overall. As I've explored in previous blogs, it would be far better to address transport affordability through the tax and welfare system than through fare subsidies.
The same principle applies to AVs. We cannot allow "access to AVs" or "AV fare levels" to become our measure of transport fairness. What matters is people's overall well-being, not their transport options in isolation. Having great transport options means nothing if housing costs consume more than 50% of someone's income.
Some advocates propose subsidising AVs to ensure coverage and low fares for people on lower incomes. The problem? This unduly favours AVs in the transport system, probably at the expense of walking, cycling, and public transport.
We need to design welfare systems that give people genuine choice over their transport options to best meet their needs, while favouring the options we want more of. Transport "wallets" that are mode-neutral are one possibility, though I'm sceptical of limiting people's income to specific uses. (There may be cases, such as supporting people struggling with addiction, where ring-fencing makes sense.)
In most cases, people are far better placed than bureaucrats to decide how to spend their income. Around the holidays, someone might choose to spend more on food and gifts instead of transport. Someone else might spend more on transport to visit distant family. Why should we restrict these choices?
Do we need universal AV coverage?
Should we mandate minimum service guarantees so that AVs cover all areas, like public transport often does?
I'm unconvinced. If people's transport needs are already well met without AVs, why force AVs to provide an option that won't deliver significant welfare gains? If they aren’t already well met, is the answer AVs, or should it be better walking and cycling infrastructure and public transport services?
The goal should be to ensure people can meet their holistic transport needs, not to require everyone to have AV access regardless of need.
The hidden equity impacts
One of the great uncertainties with AVs is their potential for substantial second-order effects, especially around land use.
Some research suggests that as commutes become more tolerable in AVs, high-income people will move to the urban periphery, increasing housing costs in areas where lower-income households disproportionately live.
This is possible. But as people move out of city centres, rents might fall there, allowing people on lower incomes to move closer to the centre and benefit from shorter commutes and better transport options. In short, it's difficult to predict.
Another possibility is more concrete and more promising: reducing parking requirements.
Research shows that mandatory parking requirements significantly increase rents for people on low incomes who don't own cars. AVs could enable more housing to be built without parking, reducing rents and improving equity. It could also reduce supermarket costs as hidden parking subsidies disappear, lowering prices.
Therefore, AVs might improve someone's equity and fairness situation even though they never use or step into an AV.
That's a good starting point, but remember, it's still a low bar because our existing system is so inequitable. Our vision should aim higher than being slightly better than the status quo.
People with disabilities
Meeting the transport needs of people with disabilities must be an important aspect of any vision for AVs.
I know at least one major AV company has worked hard to enable blind people to use their services successfully. These users have benefited significantly from being able to bring their guide dogs in an AV, something that can be problematic with rideshare services, where drivers often refuse to pick up guide dogs.
Again, though, we shouldn't evaluate the needs of people with disabilities from an individual mode perspective, but from a holistic travel perspective. Community Transport/Paratransit services already exist in many places to support people with disabilities.
Community transport (CT) may face some of the biggest challenges from driverless vehicles. While CT vehicles could eventually go driverless, drivers don't just drive; they provide critical assistance to help people use the service. In other words, CT will continue to need staff, preventing significant cost savings from automation.
CT's biggest challenge will come from competition. Currently, CT competes with taxis and rideshare services for certain journeys. In an AV world where these services become significantly cheaper, CT will lose revenue. This will make the essential services they provide, where AVs can't substitute, more expensive, as they can't spread costs over as many trips or achieve economies of scale.
Would we want to favour robotaxis over these community services? They won’t be able to meet people’s needs, so absolutely not.
Therefore, our vision must ensure the continuation of CT services, but we'll need to rethink their business model to make this sustainable.
Road user charging and equity
I've previously argued for implementing road user charging for AVs. It would be remiss not to consider the equity implications.
One common argument against road user charging is that it's regressive, disproportionately impacting people on low incomes. Unfortunately, this argument only considers first-order effects.
What if road user charge revenues fund improved public transport, more bus services that enable people on lower incomes to give up car dependency and save thousands of dollars annually? This isn't fanciful; it's partly what happened in London when it introduced its congestion charge.
The key, again, is not to think about AVs in isolation, but to design a fairer and more equitable transport system overall. If road user charging delivers a fairer transport system, it passes this test.
What about driving jobs?
I'm not going to focus on job losses from AVs in this vision. Not because AVs won't have equity impacts as driving jobs disappear, but because I'm focusing on a long-term vision that shouldn’t include people keeping their driving jobs forever. There might be transitional arrangements, but these aren't part of a long-term vision.
What this means for our vision
AVs offer a significant opportunity to improve equity and fairness, not by ensuring everyone has access to AVs, but by holistically improving the transport system and rethinking tax and welfare systems.
Our vision for equity and fairness should prioritise:
- Holistic welfare over mode-specific access
- Community transport services over robotaxis
- Removing parking requirements to reduce housing and living costs
- Road user charging that funds better walking, cycling, and public transport
The measure of success isn't whether AVs themselves are equitable. It's whether the transport system as a whole becomes fairer, and whether people's lives improve, regardless of whether they ever step into an autonomous vehicle.
Sustainability
Advocates for AVs frequently highlight their potential to deliver significant sustainability improvements.
They're not entirely wrong, but they're not looking at the whole picture either.
The efficiency promise
AVs have genuine potential to reduce energy use through operational efficiencies: smoother acceleration and braking, optimised routing, reduced congestion from better traffic flow, and platooning at highway speeds.
These aren't trivial gains. A well-programmed AV has the potential to drive far more efficiently than the average human driver.
But if AVs induce significantly more vehicle kilometres travelled, those efficiency gains could be completely offset and result in higher total energy consumption.
The emissions question
AVs do offer pathways to reduce emissions, primarily through two mechanisms:
First, they could accelerate electrification of the vehicle fleet. Shared AV fleets will be electric. The business case for electric AVs is compelling when vehicles are in constant use rather than parked 95% of the time.
Second, a shift to shared AV models could dramatically reduce the total number of vehicles needed. Fewer vehicles mean less manufacturing, less material use, and lower embodied emissions.
However, it's entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that we'll see a proliferation of privately owned autonomous vehicles, many of them running on internal combustion engines, achieving minimal sustainability benefits.
The land use wildcard
Perhaps the most significant sustainability impact of AVs won't be direct emissions at all; it will be secondary effects on land-use patterns.
By making longer commutes more tolerable (by allowing you to work, sleep, or watch videos instead of driving), AVs could increase demand for urban sprawl at the expense of the countryside and agricultural land. More sprawl means longer trips, more infrastructure, more embodied emissions in construction, and less efficient service delivery for everything from utilities to emergency services.
The incredibly low bar
AV advocates present their sustainability vision as a significant improvement compared to today.
They're setting the bar on the floor.
Yes, AVs might be more sustainable than our current car-dependent system. But that's not the right comparison. Our current system is extraordinarily unsustainable.
The right comparison is against a transport system that prioritises walking, cycling, and high-quality public transport. Against that benchmark, even the most optimistic AV scenarios fall short.
An electric, shared, efficiently-routed robotaxi is still less sustainable than:
- Someone walking to the shops
- Someone cycling to work
- A bus carrying 50 people
- A train carrying hundreds
What this means for our vision
Our sustainability vision for AVs cannot simply be "better than today." That bar is far too low.
Instead, our vision must recognise that:
- AVs are inherently less sustainable than walking, cycling, and public transport
- Any resources devoted to AVs represent an opportunity cost for more sustainable modes
AVs aren't a sustainability solution. At best, with excellent policies, they might be a less unsustainable way to provide some motorised transport services that genuinely can't be well met by walking, cycling, or public transport.
That's not inspiring, but it's honest. And honesty is what we need if we're serious about sustainable solutions.
Livability
What will AVs do to the livability of our cities?
Most AV visions focus narrowly on "ease of getting around", as if the ability to summon a robotaxi instantly is what makes a city livable.
Truly livable cities are places where you don't need to travel far for daily needs. Where streets are pleasant to walk along. Where children can play safely. Where communities form because people naturally encounter each other. Where the air is clean, and the streets are quiet.
The AV industry's vision of livability and frictionless mobility on demand assumes AVs will solve our congestion problems. If left to their own devices, this is unlikely. More likely, we'll get more traffic, not less.
Despite this concerning default trajectory, I think there are genuine opportunities from AVs to improve urban livability.
The parking dividend
This is potentially the biggest livability opportunity AVs present.
Currently, our cities dedicate an extraordinary amount of space to parking.
This has devastating effects on livability:
- Wider distances between destinations making walking less attractive
- Fewer street trees because parking takes priority
- Dangerous crossing distances at intersections
- Dead street frontages where parking structures face sidewalks
- Higher housing costs as parking requirements inflate land and construction costs
- Ugly streetscapes dominated by asphalt
If AV adoption reduces parking demand, we could reclaim this space.
We could create:
- Wider sidewalks that are pleasant to walk on
- Protected bike lanes that actually feel safe
- Street trees that provide shade and cooling
- Parklets and public seating
- Bike parking and small plazas
- Housing on former parking lots
This is a genuine livability transformation. But there’s a catch: AVs may also demand this space for pick-ups and drop-offs, leaving us no better off.
The outcome depends entirely on whether we reallocate former parking space for people.
The stroad opportunity
Stroads, a portmanteau of "street" and "road", are wide, multi-lane thoroughfares that try to be both fast traffic corridors (roads) and places for people and businesses (streets). They fail at both. They're too dangerous and unpleasant to be good streets, but too interrupted to be efficient roads.
Stroads are terrible for livability. They're hostile to pedestrians, dangerous for cyclists, ugly, noisy, and they divide communities rather than connecting them.
Currently, stroads are difficult to fix because drivers experience significant frustration from lower speed limits and the reallocation of space away from motor vehicles. This creates political resistance to the changes needed to transform stroads into genuine streets.
AVs might change this dynamic in an unexpected way.
When you're not driving, when you're a passenger in an AV reading, working, or watching something on your phone, you may be far more tolerant of lower speeds. The psychological experience of a slow journey changes completely when you're not gripping a steering wheel and watching every second tick by.
This could give politicians both the vision and political cover to transform stroads into genuine streets.
These changes would make our urban thoroughfares dramatically more livable. But again, this won't happen simply by putting AVs on the streets. It requires deliberate policy choices and urban design interventions.
Safety and speed
As I explored in Part 2 of this series, AVs should make our streets significantly safer if properly regulated.
Safer streets have direct livability benefits. Parents let children play outside when streets are safe. People walk and cycle more when they don't fear for their lives.
But safety isn't just about crash rates; it's also about speed and street design.
In a world where AVs dominate, it should be far easier to implement lower speed limits in urban areas. Not only might AV passengers tolerate slower speeds better, but AVs can be programmed to respect speed limits almost perfectly, something human drivers notoriously fail to do.
Lower speeds mean:
- Quieter streets
- Less air pollution (even from electric vehicles, through reduced tyre and brake wear)
- More predictable environments that encourage walking and cycling
- Reduced severity of crashes that do occur
- More opportunities for people to cross streets safely
These changes would make our neighbourhoods calmer, healthier, and more livable.
What this means for our vision
AVs create genuine opportunities to improve urban livability, but none of them happen automatically.
The real benefits will come from deciding how we allocate street space, design our neighbourhoods, and prioritise different modes of transport.
Conclusion
The equity question reveals that fairness isn't about ensuring everyone has equal access to AVs, but about designing transport and welfare systems that genuinely meet people's diverse needs.
The sustainability challenge shows us that AVs could either accelerate or undermine our environmental goals. And the livability opportunities remind us that the real benefits come from how we reimagine our streets and public spaces in response to them.
All of this will help inform our vision for AVs, but first, in part 4, I'll explore how a vision needs to consider rural and regional contexts, where the challenges and opportunities look markedly different from our urban centres.