Our pavements are not for sale

This week we launched our new campaign Pavement Overload, which is seeking to stop autonomous delivery robots from operating on our pavements. Our trustee Adam Tranter, Founder & CEO of Fusion Media supported us in pulling together the campaign. He comments.  

Every few years, a technology company promises to fix our cities, and every few years, we discover it has made them worse. Uber said it would cut congestion. The Boring Company promised to move tens of thousands of people an hour and moves a few hundred. The pattern is reliable enough that you can spot the next one coming. This time, it is arriving on the pavement, in the form of delivery robots. They are already operating in British cities, at the expense of pedestrians, despite there being no law that permits their use. 

Technology has always promised to revolutionise cities. But, when it comes to transport, the solutions experts agree on are typically solutions we’ve had since the mid to late-1800s. If you want to reduce emissions, improve efficiency and decrease congestion, then you need trains, trams, buses, and metro systems - not to forget walking and cycling. These are the proven methods for carrying large numbers of people, both efficiently and sustainably. 

The motor car is, of course, also an impactful innovation when used in the right context. It is possibly the clearest example of a lobby being able to convince cities they should adopt a future of an individualistic private transport system that was neither technically possible nor desirable. 

Cars proceeded to destroy cities. In many cases, literally. My home city of Coventry was famously bombed by the Luftwaffe during World War II, destroying much of its medieval core. But the planners had already decided to do it anyway - to make way for the motor car - and were even quoted as saying that it helped them accelerate the process. As former West Midlands Cycling & Walking Commissioner, I can speak with experience: it is taking a lot of time and a lot of money to put things right as cities realise the private car experiment has not worked. 

I am not anti-technology; an electric bicycle has transformed my daily transport and I hope for the day when satellite internet makes its way to train travel, significantly improving productivity. Some technological improvements are welcomed, but they have to be implemented on top of sturdy foundations. 

Credit: Cllr Marieanne Elliot

Our Campaigns & Public Affairs Coordinator, Zak, poses with a robot in Leeds

A helpful question to ask is: What problem are we trying to solve? A second question might be: What are the benefits and disbenefits?

Two current big moves in transport, which have captured the imagination of the Government but in my view have significant disbenefits, are so-called “robotaxis” and pavement delivery robots. These follow a trend of trying to individualise transport, which, because of space constraints, makes no sense in cities, unless your only motive is profit. 

Supporters of Robotaxis have a strong card to play, and it deserves to be taken seriously: safety. The pitch is that a computer cannot drink, cannot text, and cannot lose its temper, and on the industry’s own numbers, that bears out. Waymo says its vehicles are involved in thirteen times fewer serious-injury crashes than human drivers across more than 170 million miles, and CNN’s review of the 1,200 collisions the company reported to American regulators found it was rarely at fault. 

If the only question were whether a robotaxi is safer per mile than the average tired or distracted human, the honest answer will probably be yes. 

But that is where the scrutiny usually stops, and it is precisely the wrong place to stop, especially if you care about sustainable transport in cities. The current data is the industry’s own homework; there is no requirement to report near misses, so the close calls never make it into the figures the companies are so keen to quote. CNN assembled them by hand from complaint lines, police reports and social media: a wheelchair user nearly side-swiped, a Waymo stopping a foot short of a schoolchild after ignoring a crossing guard, a father who had to push his son out of the road. None of that shows up in a collision statistic, and a former adviser to America’s road safety regulator summed up the direction of travel bluntly. As these cars gain market share in more cities, he said, we see more and more problems. 

Robotaxis may improve the lives of some disabled people but they could also make things more difficult for other disabled people. Lobbying materials would like you to think their impact will only be positive. But given that disabled people are not a homogeneous group, this needs to be carefully scrutinised. A video from San Francisco shows a Waymo vehicle blocking side road zebra crossings as a result of being programmed to be more aggressive so other humans yield, letting them join the queuing traffic. 

Self-driving cars look like they will be accepted onto UK roads, despite the issues. But there’s still a type of tech I feel that we can still stop: pavement delivery robots. 

What problem are we actually solving with them? Not a transport one. Zero-carbon last-mile delivery is already possible with bicycles and e-bikes, but the issue for tech companies is that it requires human labour. 

Now the people with the least room to give it up are penalised: wheelchair users, those with sight loss, older people, anyone pushing a pram on a pavement, sharing limited space with robots. These are the disbenefits we’ve been failing to talk about.