Waymo Speaks: We Have More In Common With Urbanists Than You Might Think
A Streetsblog USA article cites a recent publication by Younghun Bahk, Michael Hyland, Susan Shaheen, Brooke Wolfe, and Adam Cohen, on the impacts of robotaxis staging at the curb.
A recent study from Open Plans and the Transportation Research Program at Hunter College argued that AVs will generate excessive “deadheading,” or empty vehicle miles, in New York City. The concern is fair, but the conclusion was based on a false equivalence: it treats the density of California as directly comparable to New York City. The literature is clear that deadheading depends on demand density. There are fewer empty miles when cars don’t have to travel far to find their next passenger.
When Waymo asked researchers from UC Berkeley and UC Irvine to model the impact on VMT from AVs staging at the curb, they found that it reduced empty miles by more than 60 percent. And the magnitude of the reduction was striking, particularly because the model strategically accounted for moving empty AVs into off-street lots during low-demand periods.
