WILL IT WORK? Taxi association General Secretary questions suitability of driverless services on London streets

Licensed Taxi Drivers’ Association (LTDA) General Secretary Steve McNamara says proposed driverless services are not suited to London’s streets and travel habits.

Responding to claims of a near-term launch, McNamara argues the city’s layout, traffic mix and human behaviour will expose limits in automated systems. “London is nothing like any city in the United States,” he said.

McNamara points to the physical shape of the city. “For a start, we are not laid out on a grid,” he said in a recent article in TAXI Newspaper, adding that even if a satnav can plot a route, the real challenge is everything that moves around the car. He listed high volumes of pedestrians, motorcycles and cycles. He also highlighted rental e-bikes priced by the minute that, in his view, push riders toward poor decisions at junctions.

His concern is how highly conservative automation will perform in places where people cross informally and traffic flows are irregular. “The cars are designed to be ultra cautious too, which is going to be a major problem in busy areas,” said McNamara. “How long will the car wait in Goodsway as the constant stream of pedestrians cross on London’s most infamous pedestrian crossing?” He also cited problem points in Fenchurch Street and Great Marlborough Street, asking whether a car would shut down or try to push on through.

McNamara predicts Londoners will quickly learn how the vehicles behave and adjust their own manoeuvres. “I for one will see the Lidar dome on the top of the car as carte blanche to pull out of a side street or on a roundabout in front of the Waymo, knowing full well it will stop and give way.”

He questions whether stated American results can be copied to the capital. “Waymo insists that the cars work brilliantly in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and it’ll be the same in London,” he questioned, before arguing that conditions are not comparable. He noted that London’s denser streets and varied road users present many more interactions per mile than US grid networks. “It’s just another big city, they argue, completely missing the obvious fact that London is nothing like any city in the United States.”

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McNamara adds that take-up elsewhere hints at how services might be used here. “They have become a tourist attraction: visit Alcatraz, ride the cable car and hop in a driverless car. Real San Franciscans don’t ride the cable car, and they don’t use Waymos,” he said. He expects something similar in London if services begin on a small footprint, with visitors more curious than residents.

He also challenges the labels being used. The vehicles will begin with a human on board, he said, so describing them as driverless or as taxis doesn’t quite describe the service being offered to passengers at the time of launch. “They were not taxis by any definition of the word,” he said. He added that a so-called “safety operator” would be present in each car at the start. “It’s smoke and mirrors in an attempt to normalise them.”

McNamara accepts that automation may arrive in some form, but he maintains the capital’s environment may set the bar higher than others suggest. That includes complex street patterns, visitors who do not always know the rules, delivery riders on time-based pricing, and drivers who will learn to exploit cautious machines. In that mix, he argues, even well-tested systems could slow junctions and block key arteries at peak times.