Could the driverless car save the country pub?

When driverless cars come to Britain, they will arrive as a thoroughly metropolitan spectacle. California’s Waymo intends to introduce its autonomous taxi service in London this year. Its cars — effectively sensor-laden Jaguars — have already been photographed navigating the lanes of the capital, albeit with their safety drivers behind the wheel. British firm Wayve, working with Uber, says it will follow “in the coming months”.

Pundits and politicians alike will ask whether these vehicles can understand potholes and roadworks, while taxi drivers will warn of lost livelihoods. Someone will, inevitably, film one of the cars doing something ridiculous.

Yet London might not be where autonomous vehicles make their most persuasive case. London, after all, already possesses a multitude of transport options. Indeed, the places that might actually benefit most from driverless vehicles are those places where mobility is already scarce: the villages, small towns, and various dispersed settlements of rural Britain.

Consider the country pub. Much of its appeal of the country pub lies in, well, being removed from the city. We all have a certain image of an old coaching inn next to a village green, perhaps in a low-beamed building next to winding country lanes. But despite this, the modern countryside is effectively governed by the motor car. The rural idyll that makes a pub attractive also makes it inaccessible to anyone wishing to drink much more than a pint, lest they risk danger to themselves and others.

A sensible visit to a country pub therefore requires one of several arrangements. One is that you have the good fortune to be within walking distance of said pub. Another might be that someone in your party has to remain sober, thus resigning them to the status of the black sheep of sociability. Another might be that an expensive taxi has to be ordered well in advance, setting plans into stone when they might not otherwise be. Another option is that a family member may need to be persuaded to collect someone or indeed a group. 

As anyone who has spent any time in the English countryside knows, public transport is rarely much help in these situations. The rural bus — where it survives — is designed at best around school, shopping, and working hours (and sometimes not even that).

We can see this as a quiet structural pressure bearing upon rural hospitality, in addition to the trend of changing drinking habits which already bear down upon pubs more generally, as well as punishing energy, wage, rent, and business rate costs. For these reasons, hundreds of British pubs continue to disappear each year. But many country pubs specifically suffer from a rather peculiar contradiction, in that they are surrounded by potential customers who would like to go to them, but cannot safely visit them.

The car transformed rural Britain during the 20th century. In fact, it probably transformed rural Britain far more than it did urban Britain. It allowed people to live further away from shops, railway stations, and workplaces, and helped to turn former agricultural villages into dormitories for commuters. Yet, with perfectly reasonable legislation against drink driving that same century, it also made rural social life curiously conditional. The car represents great freedom until the first pint is ordered, after which it starts to slowly become a metal hunk of liability.

A cheap, reliable autonomous taxi service might do something to loosen this constraint. A pub whose practical evening catchment currently extends only to its own small village might become accessible to many more neighbouring villages, and indeed to the nearest town or city. This means diners could order wine without negotiating who would drive home. Older residents who might be reluctant to drive on dark country roads would have greater freedom to go out in the evening, and a group could visit (and leave) a pub spontaneously rather than arranging taxis well beforehand.

The way that we currently imagine autonomous vehicles is as a kind of substitute for existing drivers. In London and other major cities this is understandable, because robotaxis would compete directly with a substantial private-hire workforce. Those most immediately threatened will likely be drivers working long hours under the thumb of taxi app platforms.

In the countryside the calculation is obviously different. In many rural areas the robotaxi would not compete with an abundant, heaving taxi trade. Rather, it would compete with  almost nothing at all. Local taxi firms might only have a handful of cars spread out across a wide area with demand far exceeding supply, with this reflected in either taxi shortages or excessive pricing.

A driver in the countryside, for example, might need to travel 10 miles without a passenger merely to begin making his fare, and then spend another 10 without a passenger after dropping the customer off. The customer therefore pays for this doubly. He pays not just for the journey itself, but for the scarcity of the driver’s time.

Autonomous vehicles would not abolish every running cost associated with a car, which would obviously still require power and maintenance. But removing the need to pay a person to sit in every vehicle could make journeys viable which are presently too expensive or too inconvenient to offer.

The driverless rural taxi would probably not resemble an urban ride hailing service in which a car appears within four minutes. It might instead form part of a bookable, demand-responsive network covering a market town and its surrounding villages. The cars might in fact be minibuses, shared by passengers travelling in roughly the same direction. Fleets could connect settlements with railway stations during the morning, hospitals and shops during the day, and pubs and restaurants in the evening. In effect, they could provide some of the flexibility of a taxi but with an economics closer to those of a small bus — or, in the best sense, a post-Soviet Marshrutka.

For those who argue that this all sounds rather fanciful, I would note that the Government has already spent money experimenting with demand-responsive transport in rural and suburban areas. The new autonomous vehicle regime in Britain also provides a route by which taxi- and bus-style services may be piloted without a safety driver, before the Automated Vehicles Act is brought fully into force. 

Difficulties would still no doubt arise. Rural roads could turn out to be more challenging for autonomous technologies than their emptiness suggests. They are, after all, usually narrow, poorly marked, and famously hedgerow-lined. Roads have blind corners, floods, livestock, and humans who drive on the basis that nothing is coming towards them. Poor mobile signal coverage could pose another challenge, and that’s before we get to the question of whether a machine trained on Californian boulevards, or indeed even big London roundabouts, could genuinely handle a single track road in the Pennines.

Not all the actions carried out by a taxi driver could be performed by a driverless car. A taxi driver, for example, might personally help old, frail, or disabled people get in and out of the car, or help to carry their shopping. School transportation and transportation of vulnerable people present safeguarding issues which could not be resolved just by putting another camera into action. Some degree of remote monitoring would probably still be required.

The economics may also be less miraculous than optimists hope. A fleet large enough to collect everyone from the pub at eleven o’clock would need other uses during the day if its vehicles were not to sit idle. However, it is not the ideal public transport system which should be the basis for comparison here, but the situation as it is now. Regular night buses will not serve every village, nor can every rural district sustain a successful round-the-clock taxi business.

Technology sometimes acquires its greatest value far away from the setting in which it first captures people’s imagination

The driverless car will not by itself save rural Britain. The British countryside’s difficulties are many and complex. Housing is unaffordable for the wages one can earn locally, services are often declining, and many villages have become rather grey-haired, demographically narrow places. A robotaxi cannot solve all of these problems.

But technology sometimes acquires its greatest value far away from the setting in which it first captures people’s imagination. While autonomous vehicles will be judged initially by how they will navigate London, the more consequential tests may be whether they can make life just a bit more bearable in places where the economics of transport are so unforgiving.