Spoons, school runs and robotaxis: How urban life could quietly change
Sketches of the social implications of cheap autonomous transport in Britain
It’s a wet Tuesday night in the mid‑2030s.
You step out of a pub on the High Street, thumb open the maps app and tap “home.” Three options appear: Tram line plus autonomous shuttle, 26 minutes; shared robotaxi, door‑to‑door in 19; private pod in “quiet mode”, 17 minutes with a small surcharge. You don’t think about parking, or whether the driver will show, or how safe it feels to travel alone at 11pm. You just choose.
Britain’s roads haven’t turned into a sci‑fi set, in London the buses still grumble down Oxford Street, Manchester’s Bee network is chugging along, and in Birmingham cyclists still squeeze past lorries. But behind the familiar surface, robotaxis and autonomous shuttles have quietly rewired the social patterns of our cities.
If autonomous vehicles became a normal part of urban transport, what would actually change? What would we notice on the ground, who would live differently, and what would have had to go right for this to happen?
What follows are sketches of possible futures. They aim to be plausible rather than guaranteed: less prediction, more invitation to look at where transformation might take hold.
The starting assumptions: economic pressures and strong safety records lead to widespread acceptance of autonomous vehicles in cities. Two main vehicle types become common. Small “pod” cars offer a private, chauffeur-like experience for one or two passengers. Larger shuttles running fixed routes, door-to-door carpooling, or some mix of both.
How far these services spread will depend on competition between providers, public acceptance, and policy decisions around routing and road space. The sketches that follow assume autonomous shuttles become price-competitive with public transport.
Spoons, jazz and a bit of booze: The transformation of nightlife
Nightlife is where urban ride-hail demand is at its highest. In a country with public transport driver shortages, night-time public transport services are lacking, this constrains the potential of the night-economy.
Among young people, taxis are the primary way home at night for 31% of surveyed women and 19% of men. But taxis are expensive, and whilst night-life outings lead to demand surges for ride-hail there are fewer taxi drivers willing to work anti-social hours compared to the daytime. Autonomous transport would smooth out this asymmetry, as the same vehicles that serve morning commuters or afternoon errands can cover the demand of the 2am boozy return home. This means that party-goers could stay out for longer, without having to worry about getting the last bus, tram or train home.
Night outs could become longer, and they may also move out further from the city centre. Shuttles and robotaxis would support both existing hotspots and new-and-upcoming night-life venues. The gravitational pull of public transport to cluster night-life in city centres would now compete with areas that were previously “too far out”. These destination venues could include outdoor club spaces, garden spaces or converted industrial buildings in cheaper rent areas. Just as cities in Rome and Berlin have turned their sprawling suburbs into entertainment spaces, cities such as Birmingham, Newcastle and London could do the same. Cheap transport services would give a boost to pub-crawls and multi-venue nights. Evenings could naturally flow from a cocktail bar to a gig, or from a restaurant to the jazz lounge.
Safety of women
Autonomous transport leans into an existing advantage of taxis, the ability to be transported privately without your own vehicle. For some this is a convenience, whilst for young women in particular it provides a sense of security.
Surveys show that young women spend on average £44 a month on taxi services to avoid the night-time risks, 74% of women say they take a longer route home for the sake of safety. Despite being more expensive, women often opt for taxis over public transport as 58% of women aged 16 to 34 report feeling “fairly” or “very” unsafe on public transport. British transport police report that over a third of women have been sexually harassed on their way to work.
However, when it comes to decisions on risks there is no perfect solution. The government’s ‘Statutory Taxi and Private Hire Vehicle Standards’ describes the sector as a “high risk” environment for criminal and exploitative activities.
Robotaxis would eliminate driver-perpetrated harassment. Interviews from the US show that some women already prefer autonomous transport for this reason. But the new picture has its own challenges. Reports from the United States describe men deliberately stopping robotaxis to harass women passengers. The vehicle may lack a driver, but the streets around it do not lack threats. Strong social norms against traffic interference, onboard cameras, and partnerships with police could all help deter bad actors from the outset.
Enhanced independence for people with disabilities and the elderly
When Waymo announced plans to enter London next year, the Royal National Institute of Blind People welcomed the move. America’s early rollout has already shown that disabled people are among the biggest beneficiaries of autonomous transport, for many, it offers something long out of reach: the ability to travel independently.
What would make autonomous transport an improvement on what already exists? Affordability matters most. Disabled people in Britain already face around £600 a month in extra living costs compared to non-disabled people. Many currently depend on taxis or lifts from others to get around, which means working around someone else’s schedule and paying premium fares for the trouble. Autonomous options could let disabled people travel at the same cost as everyone else, when they choose, without needing to ask.
The benefits extend beyond price. Ride-hail services offer more flexible pickup and drop-off points than buses or trains, and removing the cost of drivers should bring fares down compared to taxis. Autonomous shuttles, freed from designs built around a driver’s seat, can offer more space and better accessibility. The German-owned Holon vehicles are already wheelchair accessible, with automatic ramps and sliding doors. These hardware improvements can be matched by accessible apps, onboard cameras, and customer support intercoms that let passengers call for help or summon emergency services.
Older people stand to gain as well. Nearly half of British adults over state pension age have a disability, most commonly involving mobility. Door-to-door transport would make family gatherings and regular check-ins easier. It would also help elderly people hold onto their independence for longer, handling the errands, the GP visits, the small trips that become harder when driving is no longer possible..
Kids, your shuttles are ready! Autonomous school runs, teenage independence and a move away from the two-car family
Since their arrival in San Francisco, robotaxis have been used for the school run. Parents were quick to let their children ride solo, even when it broke Waymo’s terms of service. Waymo has since adapted, introducing a teens account with parental controls, travel budgets and ride tracking.
The demand for school shuttles is there. 45% of primary school children and 28% of secondary school pupils are driven to school. Autonomous school shuttles, where parents coordinate to send their children together, could offer a cheaper and less time-consuming alternative. For families juggling work and childcare, this could mean hundreds of hours a year returned to them.
Teenagers could gain a new kind of mobility. Getting to sports clubs, travelling to friends’ houses, reaching part-time jobs, all become easier, particularly in suburban areas or neighbourhoods with limited public transport. Some may delay getting their licence or buying their own car until they are older and insurance rates fall. The rite of passage of learning to drive at seventeen may give way to something more practical: waiting until it makes financial sense.
For families, the implications ripple outwards. Three quarters of multiple-car households. typically with two working adults, depend on their second vehicle to maintain relationships and get to work. Autonomous transport could loosen that dependency, making the second car the more expensive choice rather than a necessity. Parents could reclaim time currently lost to ferrying children between activities. Teenagers would no longer need to wait for a lift or be stranded when plans change. The household schedule, so often built around who has the car and when, could finally adapt.
Conclusion
The changes sketched here are not about the vehicles themselves. They are about time, freedom and who gets access to both.
A teenager in a suburban cul-de-sac could reach a Saturday job without relying on a parent’s schedule. A blind woman could visit a friend across town without booking assistance days in advance. A group of twenty-somethings could end their night at a jazz bar in a converted warehouse, miles from any train station, and still get home. A family could drop to one car and find they barely miss the second.
None of this is guaranteed. It depends on prices falling far enough, on regulations that enable efficiency, on social norms catching up with the technology. Autonomous vehicles will not fix broken housing markets or underfunded public transport. They are not a replacement for buses and trains but a complement to them, filling the gaps that have always made certain journeys too expensive, too inconvenient or too unsafe to make.
What they offer, if things go right, is a quiet expansion of possibility. Not a transformation of the streetscape, but of the daily calculations people make about where they can go and when. The fabric of urban life is woven from these small decisions. Rewiring them, even slightly, could change more than we expect.