AVs Already Measurably Increase VMT While Remaining Administratively Invisible at the Curb

Headline Finding

Highly automated vehicles are already operating in 103 cities globally, intermingling with approximately 310 million people daily, yet they remain largely invisible to city enforcement and billing systems. A peer-reviewed study published in 2026 in Travel Behaviour and Society found that AVs in US cities are associated with a roughly 6-percent increase in vehicle miles traveled — a measured effect at current deployment levels, not a forecast — driven by deadheading, parking search, and empty repositioning. The deployment clock is running well ahead of the governance clock: cities lack the legal authority, data access, and enforcement infrastructure to price or manage the curb space these vehicles already occupy.

Detail

By BloombergNEF’s count, highly automated vehicles are already operating in 103 cities globally, intermingling with around 310 million people daily. A peer-reviewed study published in 2026 in Travel Behaviour and Society found that automated vehicles in US cities are associated with a roughly 6-percent increase in vehicle miles traveled, driven in part by AVs traveling empty between trips, searching for parking, or returning home after dropping off passengers. The authors describe this as a measured effect at today’s deployment levels, not a forecast.

The economic logic compounds the problem: removing the driver — historically the highest single cost in a for-hire trip — reduces per-mile prices, which raises demand, which scales fleets further. The authors argue that most municipal planners are working off expected AV volumes that will look far too low by 2030.

On the ground, the administrative invisibility is already acute. In Los Angeles, AVs stop in active travel lanes, idle in red zones, and sit in metered spaces for which they do not pay, at which they cannot be ticketed under current law, and that do not appear in any city system as occupied. Under California law, robotaxis are currently immune from moving violations because tickets must be issued to a human driver — though that changes in July 2026, when law enforcement will be able to issue ‘notices of autonomous vehicle non-compliance’ to companies themselves. Washington D.C. plans the same reform. Even after that change, parking citations remain the primary enforcement lever and are issued by humans walking up to vehicles with paper — a model that does not scale to the fleet sizes anticipated.

Governance Implication

1. The technology/deployment clock has moved materially: 103 cities, 310 million people daily, and a measured 6% VMT uplift at current (still-early) deployment levels means the governance clock is already behind on spatial-allocation and fiscal levers — cities are giving away curb space and forgoing revenue at scale right now, not in some future scenario.
2. The fiscal lever is being destroyed passively: AVs occupy metered curb space without paying, and existing enforcement architecture (human officers, paper citations, driver-addressed tickets) cannot recover that value even where the political will exists.
3. State pre-emption compounds the legitimacy deficit: California and other states have removed cities’ ability to cap AV fleet sizes or mandate granular operational data, the instruments that worked for micromobility, leaving cities with almost no proactive governance tools as deployment accelerates.
4. The July 2026 California reform — shifting citation liability from the (absent) driver to the operating company — is a necessary but insufficient step; it addresses moving violations but leaves the parking and curb-occupancy revenue gap unresolved, and paper-based enforcement still cannot match fleet velocity.
5. For investors and operators, the 6% VMT increase at current scale implies that induced-demand effects will be substantial at full deployment, making right-of-way pricing the most consequential fiscal instrument cities will retain — and the window to install that infrastructure before leverage is lost is, by the authors’ estimate, two to three years.

Sources

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2026/05/07/opinion-we-must-price-and-manage-the-curb-before-robo-taxis-and-other-avs-scale-up https://www.bloomberg.com/professional/insights/transportation/autonomous-vehicles-global-deployment-tracker/ https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/travel-behaviour-and-society