Back in 2017, techno-optimist Jason Bedrick made the skeptical Robert Pondiscio a bet on the adoption rate for self-driving cars in the Phoenix area:
“Robert and I are putting our money where our mouths are. Although I expect that in five years, few people will be sending their kids to school in autonomous vehicles, I predict that at least 25 percent of children in the Phoenix area will get to school via a self-driving car by the 2022-23 school year. This may sound overly exuberant, but with self-driving cars already on the Phoenix streets and Waymo launching its taxi service, I expect high demand for the safety that self-driving cars offer.”
Pondiscio won the bet (a trip to a bar for a beer in a self-driving car). The 2022-23 school year turned out to be an aggressive prediction, especially given the pandemic’s debut in 2019. Today in 2025, self-driving cars are increasingly ubiquitous in the Phoenix area. Phoenix also has a minimal amount of variation in weather, which represents a technical challenge for self-driving cars (R2D2 does not like fog). The price of a self-driving car ride remains slightly higher than a traditional ride-sharing trip, but there are paths to get the cost down and the very cautious driving style of automated taxis might appeal to parents. Not having to get into a car with a stranger might also help.
Anecdotally I am hearing reports of the parents of school age children using self-driving cars for extra-curricular activity transport and rumblings of school carpooling via Waymo. A carpool of adjacent students attending the same school would have advantages for both families and schools.
Arizona student transportation is, in a word, a mess. Everyone pays a property tax, which goes for a district yellow bus system that largely spins around in the same district attendance boundaries that Arizona families began ignoring decades ago. Thus, year by year yellow-bus ridership declines, but the cost of the system continues to rise. Consequently, if you drive past schools in the Phoenix area in the morning or during pickup time in the afternoon what you will often see is an extensive line of personal vehicles. So, what if humans didn’t need to be sitting in those lines (editor’s note: it’s not exactly fun to sit in a car line in Phoenix heat) and what if through carpooling there could be far fewer cars in the line?
Carpooling is the lowest of low-hanging fruit to address this issue; every empty seat in every vehicle is an opportunity. Arizona’s move toward a larger number of smaller schools calls for a more flexible and nimble system of student transportation that delivers smaller groups of students to a wider variety of schools. The combination of decreased self-driving costs and the modernization of antiquated student transportation policies might just happen. Alas, it is not going to happen on our preferred timeline (yesterday).
