Driverless cars have been, for many generations of wide-eyed kids, part of an intangible, faraway future. But, since 2020, they've burst out of the film screen and onto the streets, picking up passengers in city's across the US. As California-based Waymo announces plans to trial driverless cars on London’s streets next spring, I’m confronted with a decidedly less sexy vision of this projected utopia - being a cyclist amongst it.
The battle for London’s streets is being played out by two companies with surprisingly similar names: London-based, Uber-backed Wayve, and the Californian company Waymo. Both have trialled their cars outside the UK, with Wayve technology trialled in Tokyo and Waymo fleets in San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Atlanta.
Designed for the wide streets of the United States, where jay-walking is illegal, there are already concerns about the safety and efficacy of the cars on London’s higgledy-piggledy streets, with its chancy pedestrians and erratic Lime bikers. I'm not sure I'm looking forward to the future.
From the Welsh-English borderlands, Meg's first taste of cycling was downhill - she's now learning to love the up, and swapping her full-sus for gravel (for the most part!). She is slowly embarking on a road riding journey.
“Great news, Londoners!” exclaimed Waymo’s press release. “We’re bringing our fully autonomous ride-hailing service across the pond, where we intend to offer rides – with no human behind the wheel – in 2026.”
But this innovation hasn’t got everyone excited. Cycling UK has been among those outlining concerns that the technology hadn't been adequately tested with pedestrians and cyclists.
According to one study conduced by Waymo, the cars, equipped with cameras, artificial intelligence, radar and lidar (sensors that map the environment around the vehicle using lasers), are significantly less likely to be involved in crashes than when manned by a human.
Yet in the UK, the cars are only required to achieve ‘a level of safety equivalent to, or higher than, that of careful and competent human drivers’. Cycling UK questions whether this is enough, suggesting that the driverless car should rather operate at the level required to pass a driving test with no faults – including minors.
“We don’t just need better road safety; we need significantly better road safety,” the article stressed.
And isn’t this the crux of the matter? The Automated Vehicles Act states that automated cars could result in “road safety in Great Britain [being] better as a result of the use of authorised automated vehicles on roads than it would otherwise be.”
Yet, the rhetoric remains car – and passenger – centric, a symptom of wider issues of imbalance between road users here. The UK is still one of the only European countries that lacks presumed liability. If we are involved in an accident, it’s our responsibility to prove that the driver was the cause of the collision. By its very existence, this legal system creates an unequal footing in a landscape in which cars remain the priority.
Driverless cars may still be an unavoidable part of our future. According to data cited by the Economist, the number of people employed in San Francisco by taxi firms after the introduction of driverless cars rose by 7%, bringing with it a wage-increase of 14%. A KPMG report, now ten years old, projects that the economic benefit of driverless cars could reach £51 billion by 2030 in consumer savings.
However, much of these economic predictions remain simply that. And the legislation allowing the use of driverless cars in the capital hasn't been fully enabled yet, with the government accelerating rules allowing driverless cars to be trialled in the capital before the legislation is passed in full in 2027.
The coming vehicles may bring unbridled benefit to our country; maybe I’ve just become a weary old technophobe. But I can’t help thinking that, aside from the seemingly ill-thought-through impact these cars could have on vulnerable road users, that in an increasingly automated world, we might be losing even more than we have bargained for.
Hop on any London bus now, and there are posters encouraging you to say hello and thank you to bus drivers. I’m guilty of silently boarding the buses in the city – it’s part of the culture we operate in here, but it can’t be healthy. Hopping in an un-manned car too removes what little human-to-human interaction happens in the taxi-passenger exchange today. My housemate joked that driverless cars might come installed with pre-set statements: “going anywhere nice?”, "busy day?". A remnant of the black-cabs of old.
Back on my bike, I can't help thinking that without serious investment in cycle infrastructure, in dedicated, safe cycle lanes and an overall reduction of cars on the city streets, that the addition of driverless cars might only make an already dangerous situation worse.
Driverless cars are set to be trialled in London in the spring, manned by a human driver while the technology adjusts to London's road layout and users.
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