“What we need are proven mass transit solutions, not the latest car-based fantasy damaging the environment and perpetuating urban sprawl.” Unlike other arguments made against autonomous cars — most of which are fleeting perspectives destined to be conveniently forgotten once the technology is in place — this statement has serious repercussions because of the money involved. As I previously stated, once you decide to shell out tax dollars for infrastructure, that money is gone. The Transportation Department is outlining a 30-year plan for the future of U.S. transit as we speak. The vision is not one we can afford to have clouded by partisan politics and selfish agendas.

In such spirit, I’ll begin by outlining the problems with my own perspective.

Like many of America’s 20th century infrastructure projects, the Interstate Highway system was a reach at its inception: aggressively funded and prioritized as an inalienable facet of U.S. culture, only to be built with materials and technologies that have since become antiquated and high-maintenance. Our roads are as good a testament as any to the mind-blowing speed at which humanity’s best ideas become outdated ones thanks to their own implementation. We learn best by doing, and in “doing” the Interstate Highway project, we’ve learned a lot.

The U.S. road system is at the same impass as many other 20th century initiatives: it has failed to self-sustain (the gas tax doesn’t cover maintenance costs, nor does it make much sense in a world of alternate fuel vehicles), causing us to dip into funds from elsewhere to keep it alive… yet at the same time, the infrastructure needs to evolve as we do. This is the dilemma across the country: do we keep whittling away at the budget to keep the lights on, or do we bite the bullet and pour a ton of cash into advances that we hope end up having been the right choice a century from now? But the point I’m making is that autonomous cars are the only solution that will actually help us make those decisions more intelligently, and that’s why we need to keep funding our roads. Allow me to explain:

The Tappan Zee Bridge in New York connects one of the richest counties in America with… well, some other county. It also happens to be one of the primary arteries for entry into New York City. Alas, it was built on a tight budget 60 years ago, and as such, was engineered to last only 50 years. Nope, your math’s not wrong: this monstrosity is living on borrowed time. The bridge replacing the Tappan Zee should be finished around 2018 to the tune of $5 billion in construction costs. But what if autonomous cars traveled the current bridge? Would we save a few million by having civil engineers communicate with the cars to program driving patterns that would exert less stress on the bridge, thereby extending the bridge’s life? Would we save a few hundred million by having cars that could drive seamlessly at high speed around construction workers as they assembled the new bridge and dismantled the old? Would we save the entire $5b by asking the cars to take alternate routes, only to find that a fleet of connected vehicles could get everyone to their destinations just as efficiently without any bridge at all? We’ll have to support self-driving cars to find out, but one thing should be clear: wherever we can put these cars on the ground, they will improve our economy, in every sense of the word.

Alright, now where was I? Oh yes, bursting the mass transit bubble.

I’ve heard a few detractors refer to autonomous cars as “fantasy”, supposedly in comparison to the well-established options of heavy/light rail and rapid transit buses. Folks, these contraptions are quite real. They’ve been driving around amongst us in several states. Conventional car manufacturers have built iterations of them, and most estimate that you will be able to walk into a dealership and buy one in the next 2–5 years. The University Of Michigan has created a fake city just to test these things. Are they fantasies because you’ve never seen one in your driveway? By that logic, any solution is a fantasy. Just because a bullet train worked in Japan doesn’t make it “real” for Californians. Autonomous cars will be consumable solutions long before any mass transit option actually completes construction. The fantasy’s all on your end, champ. Case in point: subways.

Arguably the most familiar poster child for those who perpetuate the mass transit argument is the New York City subway. I can sympathize with anyone who has spent time in NYC enjoying the relative benefits of the subway. Unfortunately, your allegiance is poorly placed for three significant reasons: 1) you’re referencing subways, 2) you’re referencing New York City, and 3) you’re specifically referencing the New York City subway. None of those are good reference points for what America’s cities should be doing.

Subways. This form of transit is the most permanent installation of all the options available to us, which makes it a bad idea by its very design. It’s also preposterously expensive to build under and around established real estate, as the upcoming Manhattan 2nd Avenue Line’s $2 billion per stop construction costs can attest to. Your city had its chance when costs and population density were manageable, and you blew it. I’m looking at you Cincinnati… and Cleveland… and Rochester… and Pittsburgh. But hey, don’t take my word for it: if anyone’s interested in watching a modern-day subway investment fail in real-time at the hands of autonomous cars, the fine residents of Los Angeles just saw a new subway line break ground two months ago. Best of luck with that. By the way, even when you give up on your subway, you’re still locked into perpetually blowing cash on its ghost to ensure the tunnels don’t like, cause $2 billion in flood damage and stuff. New York City. The cities I just rattled off may have bungled their subway initiatives for any number of reasons, but there is a consistent lesson to be learned across all of them: your city is not New York City. Very few cities in America even come close. Chicago? Sure. Boston and D.C.? To some degree, yes. L.A.? Nope, which is why their rail ridership is nowhere near commensurate with their population. And *insert your city here*? For better or worse, your ‘hood doesn’t have the necessary ingredients to build and maintain a subway. What’s NYC’s recipe? Hilariously dense population. A century of the richest people in the nation begging, borrowing and stealing to keep their investments afloat. Living costs so enormous that the notion of owning and operating a car is a joke. Enough variation in socio-economic structure and destinations that creating any kind of cultural gap is next to impossible. It’s almost an exclusive claim of NYC that you could find yourself on a subway sitting next to a millionaire, who is sitting next to an elderly lady, who is sitting next to a homeless man, who is sitting next to a girl moving her entire bedroom set, who along with the rest of you is watching a group of unsupervised chidren dancing on the poles. All of those people need to be present for a subway to flourish. The New York City Subway. Actually, NYC’s railway is not flourishing, much as it may masquerade as the dominant solution for traversing the city. It is not — and arguably has never been — profitable to run, as taxpayers annually pony up the half of its $6 billion operating costs that fare revenues don’t cover. Does your city have an annual tax surplus lying around waiting to be squandered? You know, on top of the billions you’ll need to build the subway in the first place? It’s a situation that got complicated here very quickly. There’s no doubt that the subway has been crucial to New York City’s growth and success, but the question remains: is this the best we could have done? The subway’s contributions as a resource, and its drain on other resources in NYC, are obfuscated to the point that no one truly understands how much its presence affects the community. Every New Yorker will tell you a subway ride costs $2.50, and every one of them is wrong. Subsidies, capitalized costs, tax dollars, loans, backdoor deals, incentive programs… these are all expenses you don’t see when you swipe your MetroCard. Did you know the MTA went through a debt restructure in 2002 that pushed $8.6B of costs out to 2015 (oh yeah, that’s this year!), or that it hid its financial woes by simply refusing to file required financial projections between 1999 and 2003? I can do this all day, people. But the upshot is that no city should follow a transit model that needed world-class robber barons to get it off the ground and mythical pots of gubment gold to keep it afloat.

Perhaps the most comical insight regarding subways is illustrated below. In short distances, the logistics of subway travel make it a fairly slow option. In long distances (which is the case for most cities), the gains in speed are more noticeable, but longer distances mean a lower concentration of riders, which means you have to wait longer for a ride, which means you lose time again. And so, if you’ll humor me just a bit, I feel compelled to point out that after 110 years of subway development in New York, you can still get where you’re going faster with a 200-year-old solution: a bicycle.

Yes, a bicycle. Many Americans mock the notion of a bike as an everyday form of travel, but it’s probably the hardest transportation method for autonomous cars to argue against on paper. It’s the only solution that is environmentally friendly, it’s by far the most affordable solution to implement and maintain… it even promotes better physical and mental health. Unfortunately, it’s just not the right solution for a country as large and dispersed as ours. Paris and Hamburg are aggressively pursuing the bike route (won’t be my last pun), but what they’ve got going for them is urban design unfavorable to cars and, consequently, much lower rates of car ownership. They’ve also been respecting and funding bicycle-based transit much longer than we have.

But that doesn’t mean bicycles can’t play a legitimate role as part of the solution on the autonomous grid… after all, remember that we don’t really care what autonomous vehicles look like as long as they satisfy the most efficient design for their required purpose.

Bikes have a lot more potential than you likely give them credit for. Inventions like the Copenhagen Wheel, which turns your pedaling into electrical power assist, have made bicycles viable for folks who don’t want every trip to be a grueling, sweaty workout. With minimal investment, engineers could easily bring bikes figuratively and literally up to speed with autonomous car traffic. The solution may not resemble the bicycle you grew up riding, but it would be better-balanced to comfortably suit riders and cargo of various sizes, and better-equipped to operate in harmony with cars. They’d simply be another option on the connected grid, which you could unlock with your phone (or whatever the kids will be using in 10 years) and hop on for a fraction of the cost of getting in a car. Again, the autonomous fleet concept has no allegiances — if it turns out that 75% of New Yorkers prefer bikes, then bikes it shall be. We’re talking about the same innovation, regardless of vehicle. On a personal note, I’m really looking forward to bikes as part of the shared/connected transit model. Might even buy me a silly horn.

My fair city of Pittsburgh has recruited its citizens to nominate a plan for a Bus Rapid Transit system. You know what’d be better than building another bus system? Building an autonomous bus system that could self-optimize its routes and coordinate logistics with all of its customers, service providers and city planners simultaneously. You know what’d be even better than that? Not crippling the system by limiting the technology to buses. Like, maybe smaller buses too. And a few vans. And some cars. And even bikes. See? We’re arguing for the same solution after all… except that you have a weird fetish for buses. Your naughty secret’s safe with me, chap.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention high-speed rail as one of the most anticipated solutions for the future of American transportation. But really, there’s a lot of bark here, and not much bite. Take everything I said about subways and tone it down a notch, because above-ground rail is obviously easier to build and re-route, easier to iterate when new technology develops, and so forth. That doesn’t excuse high-speed rail from its limitations as a fixed path system, which means that you have to make a lot of tough decisions before you ever lay the first piece of track, and that those decisions become difficult to reverse once the tracks are laid. So now you’re fighting against the clock of general technological and social progress which, if anything I’ve written so far has illuminated, is a death sentence. California’s HSR project took 30 years to plan, and will take 5 years (that’s what they say) to soft launch. Then it will take some number of years before it’s completed, and more years after that until it has the chance to become an economic asset rather than an immense liability. So many years. So little time. If you believe we have that kind of time to waste, then my request is simple: wait for it. Wait for America’s first HSR to become a reality, then look at what other states and countries have done with autonomous cars, and make your decision at that point. There exists so much speculation on both sides of California’s project that it really does need to just get built, unfortunately. Someone has to be the guinea pig who shows the rest of the country what not to do… and yes, the rest of the country is indeed watching — it’s the first episode of a huge transportation plan.

Better yet, since L.A. is participating in both a subway and high-speed rail project, it would be really awesome of the city’s residents to ban autonomous cars, so that the rest of the country can observe a clean control group to find out what happens when you try to build 20th century transportation tech in the 21st century. I’m not being sarcastic. I think the move would be vital to the education of politicians and the general public. My vote is for us as a nation to allocate an acceptable level of funding to the city of L.A. for its current transportation initiatives, and to offer some sort of financial promise to its residents that if things go south as a result, they can yell “mercy”, and the rest of us will jump in to bail them out (no worries, it won’t cost much —a few thousand autonomous cars and bikes will get the city back on track.)

Now, all of these transportation alternatives share one significant fault: they merely claim to improve our culture, not revolutionize it. Bicycles would be the best option if we only cared about the environment. High-speed rail would be the best option if we only cared about getting hundreds of people from Fixed Point A to Fixed Point B. And subways would be the best option if it were 1942 and we only cared about having shelters to protect us from Nazi carpet-bombing. But the fact is our needs are immediate, myriad and ever-evolving. There exists no other transportation policy or technology that will revolutionize and revitalize our nation in so many ways now, while creating the foundation for the future, i.e. the crazy stuff like flying and teleporting and *your sci-fi fantasy here*. To fund any alternative is to send tax dollars to their graves. We’re already decades beyond the era when it was safe to bet on established infrastructure models; it is unfortunately only now, in 2015, that we all have the vision to see why. The mass transit projects of yore are not safe in the face of autonomous technology, and if you are lucky enough to be one of the folks holding the purse strings to a state budget, I implore you — for the sake of your career, if nothing else — to have the guts and/or logic to make the safe decision.