On the other hand, the benefits of automated vehicles are as dazzling as the dystopian scenarios are cautionary. New vehicle technologies offer improvements in safety, speed, convenience, fuel efficiency, cost, traffic congestion and the environment. For example, the level of driving precision enabled by automation will permit vehicles to safely convoy on freeways at high speeds. Bumper to bumper, these pelotons will achieve better fuel efficiency at the same time as their tight formations permit more congestion-free traffic per lane-mile of road.

Inside the urban core, automated vehicles will relieve traffic congestion in several ways. They will be able to gauge their speed to take into account the timing of traffic lights along the entire intended route. To the extent that shared cars are being used, fewer cars will be needed on the urban boulevards, since the incoming vehicles can drop off their passenger and then be used by a someone seeking an outgoing vehicle.

This means urban traffic planners will have the welcome new ability to either do more with the same, or the same with less. That is, shared vehicles will allow either more traffic capacity with the existing urban network, or they will facilitate a stable capacity even while some urban lanes are transitioned into space for bicycles, scooters or pedestrians.

Even these benefits don’t fully describe how smart vehicles will relieve traffic congestion in cities. By the time vehicles are sophisticated enough to be fully autonomous, they will have total situational awareness – i.e., each vehicle will know the location and destination of every other vehicle in the vicinity, and all of them will automatically swarm into routes that optimize the use of every street. It will be as if human drivers were making perfect use of the Waze application.

In the immediate future, the prototype application that is already here are self-driving buses. This makes sense, since buses are perhaps the most efficient mass-transit applications possible. Unlike trains, they can go anywhere there is a flat surface. Also unlike trains, they’re capable of far greater variation in configurations. At one extreme, a massive fleet of mini-buses that only carry a few people can offer on-demand, point-to-point transportation covering an entire city. At the other, large buses each carrying 100 people or more can convoy in and out of cities, offering the capacity of trains while retaining the route flexibility of cars.

Because buses are mass-transit applications, they are also prime candidates for public funding, and all over the world, that’s what’s happening. Just last month, as part of their “shaping the future of mobility” information campaign, the World Economic Forum published an article noting that, “Driverless buses are arriving soon in these three European cities.” It describes a pilot program where “45 driverless electric minibuses will be programmed to run for a year in Geneva, Switzerland; Kronach, Germany; and Oslo, Norway.” In the United Kingdom, a self-driving bus began road testing last April. In 2021, “robo-taxis” debuted in Connecticut.

These are baby steps into a vast new world, where – as WEF infamously proclaimed a few years ago – you will own nothing and you will be happy. Why, for example, own a car, if, as these driverless electric mini-buses promise, you can order one to show up using your cell phone, 24 hours a day, and have door-to-door service on demand?

Once the development costs of self-driving vehicles are amortized, the expectation is they will deliver mass transit for far less, since labor remains the highest cost of transit operation – in high-income nations, around 70 percent of operating expenses. But not so fast.

In the news site Streetsblog USA, which covers “the movement to end car dependence,” the dawn of autonomous mass transit is being positioned as follows: “Will ‘Autonomous’ Buses Force Drivers Out of a Job – Or Make Them More Important Than Ever?” As the blog put it, “the rise in vehicle automation technology – at least in the imperfect form in which it’s expected to exist for the next few decades – may actually make trained transit professionals more important than ever before, and possibly even elevate their societal status and pay to a level similar to commercial airline pilots as the two jobs become more and more similar.”

We may expect a fascinating tug-o-war between labor interests who will claim “transit professionals” will now have to be paid more as they drive less, versus public and private transportation innovators who will argue that we cannot afford to deliver universal “mobility alternatives” and end car dominance if we don’t reduce the role of paid human operators. This controversy will likely drive innovation towards more micro-solutions, shared cars and mini-buses where the presence of a human operator is obviously impractical.

We might speculate how AI will eventually take the driver out of driving machines and reflect over its many transformative implications, but it is also important to recognize that this day of reckoning isn’t tomorrow. It will be years before fully autonomous vehicles hit the streets, and many decades – if ever – before manually controlled throwbacks are completely absent.