This morning’s guest post is from Benjamin Schneider, a freelance journalist, Bloomberg CityLab contributor, and the writer of “ The Urban Conditi

Robotaxis should be a wakeup call for cities

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2024-07-10 13:00:09

This morning’s guest post is from Benjamin Schneider, a freelance journalist, Bloomberg CityLab contributor, and the writer of “ The Urban Condition” on Substack. He is currently working on a book for Island Press about why American cities have stagnated — and how they can change for the better.

In San Francisco, robotaxis are like naked guys. The first time you spot one, it feels like a big moment. After that, they fade into the background.

Until 2022, most of these cars tooled around the city with backup drivers behind the wheel. Then, the drivers began to disappear, and platoons of cars were suddenly navigating the city’s famously chaotic streets all on their own. Yet, it didn’t feel like local or national media were capturing the gravity of the moment. Robotaxis didn’t fit into the narrative that autonomous vehicles were still years, if not decades, away.

As a local reporter in San Francisco , I was intrigued by this plainly visible disconnect. In 2022, I wrote half a dozen articles on the rise of robotaxis for the San Francisco Examiner, and more the following year for MIT Technology Review and on my Substack. The more I learned, the more it began to feel like we were sleepwalking into a new era.