Can Bike Riders and Self-Driving Cars Be Friends?

"Los Angeles is a car city, and it's rarely more obvious than from a vulnerable perch on top of a bicycle. Among big cities in the US, LA has a middling-to-bad reputation for bike riding. A lack of connected cycling lanes and safe crossings led one national cycling advocacy organization to recently rank LA's bike network 1,136th in the nation."

"For more than a year now, the Alphabet subsidiary Waymo has been picking up riders in the western half of the city. Kaufman likes what he sees. "They don't drive stressed, tired, inebriated, racist," he says. He finds Waymos pilot predictably, mostly adhering to traffic laws. When he's riding, "I deprioritize them in terms of my level of concern. I can focus on the human drivers.""

"Self-driving cars are, after all, cars, which are heavy and dangerous; more than 40,000 Americans die in traffic incidents each year. Moreover, if autonomous vehicles neatly replace the cars and trucks of today, advocates worry that other forms of transportation lose out. The long-term result of doubling down on auto travel might be sprawling cities with few opportunities for low-cost, emissions-free ways to get around."

Los Angeles's car-centric infrastructure produces dangerous conditions for cyclists, with disconnected bike lanes, unsafe crossings, and numerous cycling deaths. Waymo's robotaxis have operated in western LA for over a year and have demonstrated predictable, law-abiding behavior that some cyclists, like BikeLA's executive director Eli Akira Kaufman, view as safer than human drivers. Other cyclists remain suspicious, arguing that autonomous vehicles are still heavy, hazardous cars and that widespread adoption could reinforce automobile dependence. Critics warn that replacing current vehicles with self-driving cars risks reducing investment in alternative modes, increasing sprawl, and limiting affordable, emissions-free transportation options.

Read at WIRED