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. The city’s auto leanings are inscribed on its infrastructure—with deadly consequences. According to one local outlet, at least 12 Angelenos have died while riding this year.

So it’s surprising that Eli Akira Kaufman, the executive director of the LA county cycling advocacy group BikeLA, is pretty excited about a car. Specifically, a car driven by a robot.

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.”

Kaufman’s feelings represent a shift for the cycling community, and something like a schism. For years, some bike riders have viewed the efforts of autonomous vehicle tech developers—and the automakers supporting them—with deep suspicion. 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. Exactly, one might argue, the sort of cities that exist today.

But as more self-driving vehicle services pop up around the country, they have racked up a safety record that, while far from definitive, seems to improve on the performance of humans. Waymo’s latest data suggests that, in the cities where it operates, its vehicles are involved in 92 percent fewer crashes that injure pedestrians, and 78 fewer crashes that injure cyclists.

This has led some cycling advocates to take a more pragmatic approach to the tech. “I don’t think anyone, including autonomous vehicle operators, think that taking drivers out of the equation is going to single-handedly solve America’s traffic safety crisis,” says Joe Cutrufo, the executive director of BikeHouston. Waymo began testing in Houston in May, and the Texas city has seen testing from companies including Nuro and Cruise. “But we need to be open-minded about solutions that can bring results quickly.”

As more of the new tech pops up on city streets, activists are asking a question that moves well beyond wheels: How should a future city be?

Budding Relationships

Cycling groups say that some autonomous vehicle developers have mostly done what other transportation companies don’t: They’ve shown up. Waymo’s representatives hop on Zoom meetings with bike lobbyists. They make appearances at local events. “Companies like Waymo and Zoox have proactively approached us, asked us about their technology, and asked us to meet with their engineers,” says Kendra Ramsey, the executive director of CalBike, a California bicycling advocacy group based in Sacramento.

The autonomous vehicle industry also writes checks. Waymo sponsored last year’s National Bike Summit in Washington DC, a lobbying event hosted by the nonprofit League of American Bicyclists, and will sponsor next year’s event, too. Local groups, including BikeLA and BikeHouston, count Waymo among “partners,” and Zoox joined the Alphabet subsidiary—and organizations including Caltrans and AARP California—as sponsors for CalBike’s annual meeting.