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By John Hood

 

Artificial intelligence is coming to public transit. In fact, in some functions and places, it’s already here. But can AI elevate transit into a major mode of daily travel in North Carolina cities and towns? Sorry, the answer remains no.

You don’t have to be a techno-optimist to recognize that autonomous vehicles are inevitable. Self-driving cars get the most headlines, for understandable reasons, but I’m persuaded that automating truck, bus, and train routes will happen faster, in a manner that saves time and money while also satisfying safety concerns.

AVs cannot, as yet, consistently navigate pedestrian-heavy street grids. Their initial deployment to scale will likely occur along fixed routes, including intercity passenger and freight service.

Writing in City Journal, economics editor Jordan McGillis observed that such uses won’t eliminate driving as an occupation. Instead, humans will handle operations near origins and destinations “where the irregularities of tight city streets, loading docks, and warehousing demand a flexible mind,” he wrote. “In practice, this will mean men who previously would have been isolated on the highway for hours on end are instead able to move freight closer to home.”

Some transit vehicles will become autonomous, as well, and future iterations may well include Waymo-style vans and shuttles. More immediate are AI applications that optimize routes, signals, and back-office support for human-operated buses. Some transit systems are already using them.

We should welcome such innovations in North Carolina. They’ll save money and improve service. But I remain doubtful their effects will include significant increases in the share of North Carolinians who regularly use transit for commuting or other daily tasks.

Charlotte has by far the state’s most elaborate and costly transit system, including rail and streetcar lines. A bill filed this year in the General Assembly would place a one-cent hike in the sales tax on the Mecklenburg County ballot this fall. Public transportation would get 60% of the revenue. Even so, its buses and trains are already running well below current capacity, with ridership only 65% of what it was before COVID and about half what it was in 2013.

Transit trends differ across other North Carolina communities. From 2019 to 2023, total passenger miles traveled were up slightly in Greensboro, down moderately in Asheville and Durham, and down dramatically in Winston-Salem and Wilmington. In no place other than college towns did transit play more than a modest role in overall commuting patterns.

Although technology-driven improvements in transit service may budge these numbers a little bit, the blunt truth is that the vast majority of us will always choose personal automobility (or work flexibility, if applicable) over riding in groups on someone else’s schedule.

“COVID and technologies have changed travel,” wrote Arizona State University professor Steven Polzin in a recent Reason Foundation study, “but it’s important to recognize that many attributes of travel are very resilient to change.”

After analyzing decades of transit investment and ridership data, Polzin concluded that claims “public transportation can be ubiquitously viable at attractive levels of service over broad swaths of urban America are not supported by empirical data or by evidence of a public willingness or financial capacity to redesign and reconfigure urban areas to optimize transit use.”

That doesn’t mean transit will or should disappear, however. Outside of a few highly dense markets such as New York and Washington, transit’s primary function is to provide essential mobility services for those who cannot drive or afford their own vehicles. AVs and AI applications will help us better and more economically meet their needs. That’s fantastic news — and no fantasy.

John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books Mountain Folk, Forest Folk, and Water Folk combine epic fantasy with American history.