Opinion: We Must Price and Manage The Curb Before Robo-Taxis and Other AVs Scale Up The gap between what's on the street and what cities can actually see, price, or enforce is the defining curb management problem of the next decade. And no one is treating it with any urgency. Jordan: I live in Los Angeles, so I see autonomous vehicles every day. I ride in them. I also watch them stop in active travel lanes, idle in red zones, and sit at the curb in metered spaces for which they don’t pay, at which they can’t be ticketed, and that don’t appear in any city system as occupied. The car is physically present, but administratively it is largely invisible, unlike most other vehicles today where cities have at a minimum mechanisms for them to pay for curb use and receive citations for non-compliance. Gabe: I live in D.C. and AV legislation for commercial service is just being introduced. We currently have robo-taxis testing on the streets, and myriad delivery and ride-hail services are visible throughout the city. The gap between what’s on the street and what cities can actually see, price, or enforce is the defining curb management problem of the next decade. And almost no one is treating it with the urgency it deserves. Cities are underestimating VMTs Enforcement is about to get much harder. By BloombergNEF’s count, highly automated vehicles are already operating in 103 cities globally, intermingling with around 310 million people daily. A peer-reviewed study published this year in Travel Behaviour and Society found that automated vehicles in US cities are associated with a roughly 6-percent increase in vehicle miles traveled — driven in part by AVs traveling empty between trips, searching for parking, or returning home after dropping off passengers. That’s not a forecast.