Worcester on road to driverless vehicles

WORCESTER — Fewer parking spaces and fewer cars per household. More demand for road maintenance, more congestion and more miles traveled per vehicle.

In a recent report, the Worcester Regional Research Bureau predicts major changes to the roadways in a future of autonomous vehicles and ride-sharing. And while admitting many uncertainties about the technology, the bureau advocates that the time to start planning for autonomous vehicles is now.

“We should think now of what (the future) is going to look like,” said Timothy J. McGourthy, executive director of The Research Bureau. “The infrastructure we build today will live into that new technology. We need to build infrastructure that is either adaptable in the future or is built today in a form that it will work with technology of today, and technology of tomorrow.”

In late September, The Research Bureau released a report titled “City on the Move: An Overview and Assessment of Worcester’s Transportation Needs.” The report examines multiple modes of transportation in the city including privately owned vehicles, regional transit buses, ride-hailing services, biking, walking, passenger and freight rail service, and planes. It foresees changes in each and offers recommendations on planning for a “dynamic, multi-modal future.”

But Mr. McGourthy said the biggest change that the report foresees will occur on the roads with the adoption of self-driving vehicles.

“Of all the changes that we see, autonomous vehicles will have the most widespread use and so, on one level, the most widespread impact,” Mr. McGourthy said.

It is uncertain when autonomous vehicles will arrive. The city has signed a memorandum of understanding with the state that would make Worcester one of more than a dozen communities where companies can test self-driving cars. The communities are finalizing the application that would allow such testing, according to Jacob Sanders, liaison to the project in City Hall.

“Eventually the city will provide areas that we’d consider for the testing,” Mr. Sanders said.

“What those areas are and how we determine that, it’s still too early” to know.

The report also notes “automated vehicles do face challenges in gaining a foothold in the transportation market,” citing recent accidents, a 2018 Gallup poll finding 52 percent of people would never want to use a driverless vehicle, and uncertainties over the cost of such technology. Nevertheless, Mr. McGourthy said it was an “uncertain inevitability” that driverless vehicles would appear.

“We don’t know at what point the technology will mature so that its universally available,” Mr. McGourthy said. “But we do know that it will get there.”

And when it gets here, The Research Bureau predicts the city’s road network will look and function quite differently.

Instead of empty cars parked at destinations (the average vehicle spends 95 percent of its time empty, according to some experts), the report predicts that driverless cars will more continuously circulate.

In conjunction with the rise in ride-sharing, this could lead to fewer cars per household, as multiple members of a family use one car, or even multiple households essentially share use of a car.

As a result, the need for destination parking — or parking spaces available at destinations — will decrease, according to the report.

So there may be fewer cars and fewer parking spaces in the city. Great for eliminating congestion and the parking lots of urban sprawl, right?

Not necessarily.

First, more continuously circulating rather than parked vehicles — for every two trips a normal car makes to and from a destination an autonomous car would make four: to destination; home to garage; back to destination; home to garage — will mean more travel on local streets. It’s similar to how continuously circulating Uber and Lyft vehicles have been demonstrated to increase congestion.

“Congestion is likely as empty vehicles compete with occupied vehicles for limited road space,” City on the Move notes.

The money to address that congestion could also be lacking in an autonomous-vehicle future.

The Research Bureau’s report cites a Conservation Law Foundation study cautioning that local revenues related to parking fees, vehicle excise taxes and traffic violations will go down while road maintenance costs will increase as the roads are used more continuously. And if driverless cars use gasoline, pollution will increase.

The report also notes that in a world with fully-automated traffic, traffic signals, signage and road markings are unnecessary as vehicles communicate via satellite and directly with one another ... and are incapable of violating traffic regulations. (Although with 52 percent of people vowing to never ride in a driverless vehicle, not to mention “Americans’ love affair with the automobile,” as Mr. McGourthy called it, it’s unlikely we’ll see a total elimination of such traffic infrastructure).

So this raises the question of what we can do to prepare for such a world.

First, The Research Bureau recommends hiring a transportation planner who can keep an eye on transportation trends and prepare the city.

The city funded the position in the 2019 budget and the position has been posted, according to city spokesman Michael Vigneux.

The bureau also recommends embracing electrification of vehicles as a way to reduce the pollution from more continuously circulating vehicles.

As for the physical layout of the city, the bureau advocates that parking should be phased out in new downtown projects and parking maximums - rather than minimums - should be standard in zoning. To avoid some of the congestion that driverless vehicles are expected to cause, Mr. McGourthy said the city should encourage density and alternate modes of transportation - such as sidewalks and bike paths.

“We need to be thinking carefully about (autonomous vehicles) and planning for it so the city takes steps necessary to adapt to it and capitalize on the changes that the new technology offers,” Mr. McGourthy said.

Steve Rolle, Worcester’s assistant chief development officer, agreed and said the city is already taking many of these steps. These include “right-sizing” parking requirements — for instance the city has lower off-street parking requirements in its commercial corridor overlay district, which covers all of downtown and parts of Highland, Chandler, Shrewsbury, Main, Grafton and Pleasant streets, and the Canal District and Gateway Park — and encouraging walking and biking through the recently adopted Complete Streets program.

“The notion that we’re moving away from these high minimum parking requirements is something we’ve implemented and are continuing to implement,” Mr. Rolle said. “We’re certainly trying to improve pedestrian and bike networks in mixed-use neighborhoods ... and we’re thinking more holistically about transportation rather than on a project-by-project basis.”

Alex Wyglinksi, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, said the report reflected the current thinking of city planners and leaders.

“There is nothing revolutionary in it,” Mr. Wyglinski said of the report. “But it’s great to see the city is very cognizant, ... and Worcester is on top of things in terms of the future of transportation.”

Mr. Wyglinski, who is trying to design new ways for cars to wirelessly connect in order to share data in a time-critical manner to avoid hazards, saw the self-driving vehicle as a great equalizer for society — particularly if a self-driving van service similar to Lyft or Uber is developed.

“People would not have to buy insurance, spend money to buy a car, wouldn’t have to worry about parking on a narrow street with ten feet of snow on it,” Mr. Wyglinski said. “It could fill a need for people who can’t afford cars or who don’t really have the ability to drive.”

But Mr. Rolle — like Mr. McGourthy — stressed that the big unknown in dealing with self-driving vehicles was the timeframe in which they would be adopted.

Thus he predicted incremental change ... perhaps not an elimination of traffic signals or all downtown parking in favor of large satellite parking lots for autonomous vehicles, but a gradual reduction in destination parking and increased infill to create mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods.

Although Mr. Rolle cautioned that new technology can be adopted and make an impact quite quickly; just look how the city has changed since the invention of the automobile.

“There’s a lot of unknowns at this point, and we have to be cautious about not jumping to conclusions about the technology and where it goes,” Mr. Rolle said. “But we need to start thinking about it and start maybe making incremental adjustments. ...  It’s tough to predict a time frame for adoption of these things, but I would say it’s accelerating faster than people really realize.”