The coming nightmare of autonomous trucking

Solving problems of nature and driving in traffic jams

I had my vision of the dystopian future amid the bucolic plains of east-central Indiana. I was taking my elderly mother to see her brother in Richmond, near the Ohio border. We flew into Indianapolis and rented a car; Google Maps told us to drive 90 minutes east on I-70. Her brother told us not to listen to Google Maps, and instead take the two-lane US40 through a series of small towns. I stupidly didn’t believe him.

            The stop-and-go traffic must have reached its full stop somewhere north of Riley. It was mid-afternoon and we were surrounded by fields and trees. No exit ramps in sight; this was all Thru Traffic, headed to destinations hours away. I was in misery not only because I’d come from Montana and was not used to traffic jams, not only because the contrast of unending rurality and clogged highway felt so absurd, and not only because it was my own fault for ignoring my uncle’s advice. The real misery stemmed from being surrounded by trucks. Trucks may have comprised only half the vehicles on the road, but they took up far more space. Their size intimidated us. They blocked views. Their presence removed the last scraps of driving-is-fun that my generation had been promised. And, I knew, scenes like this were poised to proliferate.

Minus the snow, this was my view of Indiana (Tony Alter 2012 photo courtesy Wikimedia)

When we talk about self-driving vehicles, we often talk about the convenience of being able to have a Zoom meeting during your morning commute, or the safety issues of potential crashes. In other words, we focus on the driver, not the road. Proponents argue that, assuming they work, the autonomous drivers will reduce traffic jams by bunching vehicles together more tightly and moving more rationally. But my question is: How many of these vehicles will be filling the existing infrastructure? If everyone is on the road in a Zoom meeting, won’t that be too many cars on the road?

            Furthermore, around 2020 much of the industry’s energy shifted from autonomous cars to autonomous trucks. Companies saw that the best situation for driverless vehicles, avoiding complex urban driving, was to send trucks down the nation’s Interstate highways.

            Today, if you’re a businessperson who wants to ship lots of large, heavy items across the country—say, auto parts, or dishwashers—you generally have a choice of train or truck. The train, which hooks your trailer to maybe 100 others, is far cheaper and more environmentally friendly. But train tracks don’t go everywhere, so in certain situations you may be better off paying the extra fuel and labor costs of the truck. An industry expert once explained to me that there was a rule-of-thumb threshold: If your load was going more than 1500 miles (or maybe it was 800 or 2000, I forget the exact number), you were probably better off with a train.

            Driverless trucks will reduce the costs of trucking. (Truck drivers are justifiably upset about the labor side of this, and there’s lots of chatter about jobs. But driverless trucks will also improve equipment efficiency, because the truck can keep going 24/7 instead of resting uselessly while its driver sleeps.) They could thus cut that threshold in half. Absent other changes, plenty of freight that now goes by rail would then go by truck.

            The results could bankrupt railroads, or cause them to demand huge government subsidies. The results could also clog the Interstate highway system with freight that used to go by rail. Although the overall cost of shipping might go down, the misery of people taking their elderly mothers on a family visit will explode.

This transformation is years in the future, and already behind schedule. I’m not telling this story because I have a stake in the truck drivers’ quest, or a tech-bro fascination with the issue, or a petition to Save Indiana’s I-70. (The drive back on US40 proved plenty more enjoyable.) I’m telling this story because it has so many parallels to the decisions that Americans have made about our relationships to nature over the past century or two.

            First is the attention to the shiny new thing. Much gee-whiz coverage focuses on how cool driverless vehicles would be on an individual level, without pondering the effects on others nearby (what economists call externalities). We may now have an environmental justice movement pointing out how often the results of past decisions (say, about pollution or toxic waste) had greater negative impacts on people of color—but are we thinking any more intelligently about the next decisions?

            Second is the hidden role of infrastructure. Trains are cheap because rail is dedicated infrastructure. Indeed, many cross-country rails prioritize freight over passengers, which is easy to do because so few people take long-distance trains. But on the roads the new technologies will exacerbate conflicts between uses. Just like new outdoor technologies (snowmobiles, mountain bikes) increase conflicts among uses of public lands.

            Third is the way everyone wants someone else to pay for stuff. Railroads are among the most powerful lobbyists in Washington, continuing a tradition of giveaways that built the West. Meanwhile, moving freight by driverless truck would mean taking over highways that were built by and for taxpayers. If the increased traffic means that I-70 needs a new lane, freight companies would demand that general taxpayers pay for it. Just like the jockeying over who will pay for various adaptations to climate change.

            Fourth is a seeming willingness to degrade the public sphere. Many people are now familiar with the “tragedy of the commons”—the way communally-owned resources such as fisheries or parks or public rest-rooms or National Forests get tragically overused and spent up. But even with that familiarity, we seem powerless to protect some of the few commons we have left, such as roads or climate.

            I’m usually an optimist. I believe people can mostly figure out solutions to problems. And when they can’t figure out solutions, maybe the problems weren’t worth solving. When it comes to shaving a few dollars off shipping costs, or being able to have a Zoom meeting during your morning commute, maybe the problems that autonomous vehicles hope to solve aren’t all that important. And maybe, if we could better see that, we could better see some other problems that are.

Discussion:

• This week’s Natural Stories is operating in out-of-office mode, meaning that I may be slow to respond to comments and queries.