The Weekend America Towed Its Robotaxis - and what it has accidently taught us about road pricing.
A slightly different article this week. We have a good transport friend in San Franciso and over the weekend we had a 20 min chat on robotaxis and what has been happening in both San Franciso and more broadly the USA.
Some good lessons for Aus and NZL, especially the Pacific, and road pricing in general!
On the Fourth of July, San Francisco put on two light shows.
The first was the fireworks - apparently amazing this year!
The second was the blinking hazard lights of driverless taxis stranded in the gridlock afterwards - some of them towed away after running out of battery while going precisely nowhere - yikes!
A city supervisor has now formally asked what all these robots did to the buses and the fire trucks that night.
Hold that image, because it's one of the key transport stories of 2026 - but one that isn't in isolation.
The same fortnight, Tesla launched an unsupervised robotaxi network in Miami - and here's the crazy/wild part in our mind with this:
Owners can enrol their personal cars into the fleet. Your neighbour's car can now go to work without your neighbour in it?!
And with the World Cup rolling across North America, operators are pouring hundreds of extra robotaxis into host cities that were already at a standstill.
So let me say the quiet part out loud that all us transport people are thinking:
A robotaxi is congestion with better PR.
If there is one thing us transport planners know it is this. The maths has never once cared who - or what - is holding the steering wheel. A car takes the same road space whether it's driven by a human, a computer, or nobody at all (all the maths cares about is how many people are in the vehicle).
In fact, the driverless one is worse, because it can circle empty, reposition empty, and queue empty - all day, at scale, without ever getting bored or needing a bathroom break, or going to Wendy's, five guys, or whatever the best burger bar may be in your area (open to thoughts on this!!!) The most wasteful thing on any street is a seat moving with no one in it. We've just industrialised it.
Which is why in our mind the most interesting transport policy of 2026 isn't a megaproject. It's fifteen cents. Why fifteen cents?
Washington DC is proposing a US$0.15 per mile charge on robotaxi operators, with the revenue split between public transport and retraining displaced drivers.
Read that again.
A city just put an honest per-kilometre price on empty vehicle movement - and pointed the money straight at the modes that actually move people at scale.
That's not a tax. That's the first draft of the rulebook every city will/may eventually write.
Here's what my US transport friend and I think:
Within ten years, pricing empty vehicle-kilometres will be as normal as paying for parking.
Human-driven, robot-driven, doesn't matter. If a vehicle is using scarce street space without carrying anyone, cities will charge for it - because the alternative is San Francisco on the Fourth of July, forever...but with no fun fireworks.
Now the bit that matters for us in Aotearoa and the Pacific.
New Zealand has just built the legal infrastructure for time-of-use charging. Auckland is working through what that looks like on real roads. And unlike American cities, we have a priceless advantage: the robots aren't here yet!
We get to set the price of road space before the flood, not after the tow trucks are already busy. Get the pricing architecture right now - charge for space and time, not just fuel - and driverless fleets arrive as guests who pay their way and feed the bus network. Get it wrong, and we'll import Miami's traffic with a Kiwi accent - Kia ora bro!
And for our Pacific neighbours, where we as KA Advisory do a good chunk of our work: island networks with one main road can't tow their way out of a mistake. The lesson lands even harder there - decide what your streets are for before someone else's business model decides for you!
The robotaxi debate has been framed as a technology story. It was never a technology story. It's a street space story, and street space is the one thing no algorithm can manufacture more of.
Fifteen cents a mile. The cheekiest, smartest number in world transport right now.
Keen to understand others thoughts: would you back a per-kilometre charge on empty robotaxis in your city - or is that innovation-killing bureaucracy?
Til next time
Andrew Collings
#TransitTrends #Robotaxi #CongestionPricing #RoadPricing #UrbanMobility #FutureOfTransport #PublicTransport #TransportPlanning #NewZealand #SmartCities
Transit Trends · Andrew Collings, KA Advisory. Read and comment on the original on LinkedIn.
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