2025-09-16 06:30:00
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: The Trump administration says it has agreed on a deal that would let TikTok avoid a US ban.
What’s the context? TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese tech company ByteDance, was supposed to be subject to a nationwide ban starting in January 2025, after a deadline for ByteDance to sell the app — imposed by Congress in 2024 — passed unmet.
Instead, President Donald Trump has signed a series of executive orders punting on the ban. The latest of those orders, in June, set the new deadline for September 17 — this Wednesday.
What does the deal say? We don’t know yet, though any deal would require the sale of TikTok to a US-based owner. As is often the case under Trump, the announced deal is currently just a “framework,” according to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Chinese officials said Monday that the two sides had reached a “basic consensus” on a deal.
Why did the US want to ban TikTok in the first place? Concern about TikTok boils down to a concern about Chinese influence. ByteDance’s close relationship with the Chinese government, coupled with the app’s proprietary content algorithm and vast reach — TikTok has about 170 million American users — mean China could gain access to huge amounts of American data or use TikTok to spread propaganda.
Why does this matter? TikTok’s massive user base in the US means a potential ban is a politically sensitive topic, particularly with young voters who are becoming increasingly electorally important for both parties.
What comes next? It’s still possible Trump pushes the deadline for the ban back further as terms of the deal — if it holds — are finalized. For now, Trump said he is set to speak with Chinese President Xi Jinping about the deal on Friday.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year: The 2025 World Athletics Championships began over the weekend in Tokyo, Japan, which means nine days of amazing track and field action. But the rest of the schedule is going to have a hard time topping my favorite race of the meet so far, from this morning (East Coast time, at least — Tokyo is 16 hours ahead).
In the 3,000-meter steeplechase, where runners jump over four barriers and one water jump per lap for seven and a half laps, New Zealand runner Geordie Beamish took a stunning win over double world champion and double Olympic gold medalist Soufiane El Bakkali. It’s the kind of finish you need to see to believe, and you can watch it here. Have a great evening!
2025-09-16 03:45:00
A long-simmering showdown over whether President Donald Trump may seize control over the Federal Reserve appears to be entering its endgame. It is highly likely that the Supreme Court will weigh in on this dispute either Monday evening or Tuesday.
If the Court does side with Trump, that would be one of the most consequential economic policy decisions in the federal judiciary’s history. And it could potentially have disastrous consequences both for investors and for the US economy broadly.
The Fed is one of several federal agencies that are labeled as “independent” from the president. Though the president chooses who will serve on the Fed’s Board of Governors, these governors must be confirmed by the Senate, and they serve 14-year terms. By law, the president may only remove a member of the Fed’s board “for cause,” unlike most agency leaders who serve at the pleasure of the president.
The Supreme Court’s Republican majority, however, subscribes to a theory known as the “unitary executive,” which claims that it is unconstitutional for Congress to shield agency leaders from presidential control. If you care about the details of this theory, I’ve written more explainers on it than I can count, but the gist of it is that the Constitution places all “executive” power in the hands of the president. So any agency leader who wields authority that the Court deems to be “executive” in nature must be fireable at will by the president.
For most of the past two decades, the Republican justices have slowly expanded the president’s power to fire officials under this theory. And they kicked this process into overdrive shortly after Trump took office for his second term. But, in a May decision, the Court did signal that it was spooked about giving Trump the authority to fire members of the Federal Reserve.
Although the Court’s May decision in Trump v. Wilcox was cryptic, it’s not hard to suss out why some of the justices feel torn between their loyalty to both Trump and the unitary executive theory on the one hand, and a desire to preserve Fed independence on the other.
The Fed essentially has the power to inject cocaine into the US economy. When the Fed lowers interest rates, it makes it easier for businesses to borrow money that they can use to begin new projects and hire new workers. But it also risks spiking inflation rates. Thus, if the president controls the Fed, he can engineer a short-term, politically advantageous boost to the economy — but at the cost of much greater economic turmoil down the road.
Nor is this concern merely hypothetical. In advance of his reelection bid in 1972, President Richard Nixon successfully pressured Fed chair Arthur Burns to lower interest rates. The economy boomed that year as a result, and Nixon won in an historic landslide. But Burns’s capitulation is often blamed for years of “stagflation,” slow economic growth and high inflation, during the 1970s.
In any event, a lawsuit known as Cook v. Trump is now barreling toward the Supreme Court, and is likely to land on the justices’ doorstep as soon as Monday night. Trump has asked the courts to weigh in on this case on an exceedingly expedited basis, in the hopes that he can gain the power to fire Federal Reserve governors in advance of an important Fed meeting that begins Tuesday.
As of this writing, Cook is pending before a federal appeals court. Trump asked that court to issue its decision “by the close of business on Monday, September 15, 2025.” If the appeals court does not comply, however, Trump will almost certainly attempt to bypass it and seek review from the Supreme Court in advance of the Tuesday Fed meeting.
So we are likely to find out very soon if the Court’s Republican majority intends to place the Fed under Trump’s control.
Last month, Trump attempted to fire Lisa Cook, a member of the Fed’s Board of Governors who was appointed by President Joe Biden in 2022.
Trump claims he fired her because she allegedly committed mortgage fraud by claiming two separate properties as her principal residence — and thus he is firing her “for cause” — but this claim is an obvious pretext. Trump has raised similar allegations against several of his political foes, including Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Democratic New York Attorney General Letitia James. And, in any event, the allegation against Cook was later revealed to be false.
Last week, Reuters reported that Cook declared one of the two properties as a “vacation home,” so the lender that helped her purchase that property was aware it was not her principal residence.
Nevertheless, Trump claims that he is allowed to fire Cook anyway. In briefs filed in a federal appeals court, Trump’s lawyers argue that the president’s false determination that Cook committed mortgage fraud “is not subject to judicial second-guessing,” and thus no court can prevent Trump from firing her based even on a transparently made-up pretext.
Under Trump’s legal theory, he could have justified firing Cook “for cause” by accusing her of being responsible for the 1881 assassination of President James Garfield, or for causing the fall of Rome. Trump is asking the Court to neutralize the law protecting Fed governors from political firings in its entirety.
What stands in Trump’s way is the Court’s decision last May in Wilcox, which indicated that the Fed is exempt from the unitary executive theory, and that Trump may not fire its leaders at will.
Admittedly, the opinion in Wilcox was gobbledygook. It claimed that the Fed is special because it “is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States” — whatever that means. Numerous legal experts, including the Republican chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, have questioned whether there is actually a principled way to distinguish the Fed from other independent agencies.
Ultimately, however, the question of whether the Court’s decision in Wilcox rests on a principled distinction is academic. This Court frequently hands down bizarre or incomprehensible decisions, and those decisions are no less binding than cases that rest on sound legal reasoning.
The important thing is that, just four months ago, this Court handed down a decision indicating that Trump cannot fire members of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors. If the Republican justices reverse course after such a recent decision, either by overruling Wilcox explicitly or by defining the term “for cause” so narrowly that it becomes meaningless, that wouldn’t just have stunning implications for the US economy.
It would also be an unusually loud signal that this Court has decided to become a wholly owned subsidiary of the Trump Organization.
2025-09-15 19:30:00
Spooky season isn’t here quite yet, but you’d never know looking at the box office. The Conjuring: Last Rites, the latest installment about a (problematic) real-life couple who investigated the paranormal, had a massive $84 million domestic opening weekend. That’s just the latest success for horror films. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, Zach Cregger’s Weapons, and Final Destination Bloodlines also had surprising success in theaters this year.
According to Paul Dergarabedian, the head of marketplace trends at the media analytics company Comscore, horror movies have already surpassed $1 billion at the domestic box office. The last time that happened was 2017, when It and Get Out took theaters by storm.
Horror films have always been an easy way to make money in movies because their budgets tend to be low. “Even back in the day, you would have a movie like the original Halloween, which had a very modest budget and then just became this box office juggernaut,” Dergarabedian told Vox.
But until recently, that financial success didn’t always come with critical appreciation. Horror, Dergarabedian told Vox, has been “the Rodney Dangerfield of genres. It can’t get no respect.”
What’s striking about 2025’s horror hits is not only their ability to sell tickets at a time when many other movies are struggling. It’s also the critical consensus that these are truly great films. Sinners and Weapons in particular could contend for major Oscar nominations. It’s a swing toward respectability for a genre that encompasses both The Exorcist (a Best Picture nominee) and Friday the 13th (the guiltiest of pleasures).
“If you go through the history of the genre, there’s sort of these peaks and valleys in terms of critical appreciation,” filmmaker and DePaul University film professor Andrew Stasiulis told Vox. “But we now have swung back into a phase of people really respecting horror, respecting its traditions, and you see that in some of the most popular and well-respected directors of today: Jordan Peele with Get Out, Ari Aster with Hereditary and Midsommar, Robert Eggers, and Zach Cregger.”
One counterintuitive trait many of those creators share: They got their start in comedy. “I think that comedy is always paired really naturally with horror,” Vulture film critic Alison Willmore said.
Why is it that those genres pair so well? And what does our love of horror movies say about us? That’s the subject of this week’s episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.
Below is an excerpt of our conversation with Willmore, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to [email protected] or call 1-800-618-8545.
What is a horror comedy? Are they truly scary movies with some comedic elements?
The best horror comedies are both scary and funny. Even in movies that are pretty straightforwardly horror, I think there’s usually some room for intentional comedy or, sometimes, if the movie’s not going well, unintentional comedy.
“There is definitely a real trend there in terms of the comedy to horror pathway.”
The one I always think about in terms of an early horror comedy is Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. That was back in the 1940s. Even back then, you’ve got a classic comedy duo meeting a classic movie monster. Since then you’ve got things like the Evil Dead movies, which are funny as well as very creepy. Or Shaun of the Dead, a zombie movie that is clearly made for and by people who actually have seen zombie movies — including the characters within it.
Why do horror and comedy go so well together? It feels like such an odd combination.
They do feel like they should be opposites, but I think they’re both genres that have been considered a little disreputable; we don’t treat them as seriously as drama. A lot of the same elements that go into making a bit work or a joke work are what makes a scare work. It’s a question of timing. It’s a question of craft. It’s a question of landing that punchline or landing that jump scare.
I think that that speaks to a certain kind of shared spirit in both of those genres. That’s one of the reasons I think they fit so well together and people move back and forth between them.
They both thrive on the unexpected. There’s a sense of surprise with both comedy and horror.
Absolutely. We think a lot about jump scares as trademark experiences of watching a horror movie, but what do you do when you get a really good jump scare? You laugh a bit, right? You build up tension and then there’s a release, and I think that same thing happens with a joke as well.
Some of our most buzziest horror creators right now — Jordan Peele of Get Out, and Zach Cregger of Weapons — they’re comedians. I’m curious what you think about that crossover.
I think that it goes back to that shared DNA of how you set up a scare and how you set up a joke being very similar, even if your aims are different in terms of the response you want from an audience.
The director of Heart Eyes, which is a movie that is both a riff on slasher movies and romantic comedies, was directed by Josh Ruben, who worked at CollegeHumor. The Philippou brothers who directed the 2022 movie Talk to Me got started on YouTube making goofy sketches. There is definitely a real trend there in terms of the comedy to horror pathway.
One of my favorite things about horror is that it can accommodate so many mixes of tones, I think maybe more so than any other genre. It’s just this incredible container for things that can be really weirdly touching, and then on the other side, outrageous and funny and shocking and grotesque.
It almost seems like it’s the tofu of movie genres.
Absolutely. It picks up the flavors of whatever it’s cooked with.
The main focus of practically every horror movie is escaping death. I wonder what that says about us, the fact that this can be funny, the fact that this can be cathartic in a way.
We want to be able to sample the darkness, to sample the danger. But it has to be in a controlled environment, in a way where you know that the credits are going to roll and then you get to go home. I think that it does offer this safe space in which to explore these dark, really exciting, tense experiences.
Correction, September 15, 4:45 pm ET: A previous version of this post misstated Paul Dergarabedian’s title.
2025-09-15 19:00:00
Charlie Kirk, who was fatally shot last week at a campus event in Utah, was a hero to a generation of young conservatives; last week, my colleague Christian Paz wrote about how he and his organization, Turning Point USA, redefined what politics and political media looked like for many in Gen Z.
I sat down with Christian to talk about that appeal for Vox’s daily newsletter, Today, Explained. Our conversation is below, and you can also sign up for the newsletter here for more conversations like this.
Where did Charlie Kirk come from, as a figure in the conservative movement?
He came pretty much from nowhere. Around the time that he was 18, he decides that he wants to start a revitalized movement of conservatism. His idols were Rush Limbaugh, the radio host, and he was a believer in the old “lower taxes, smaller government”-style conservatism. Essentially, the way that a lot of people describe him is somebody who was unique in the talents he had in communicating and talking and connecting with people.
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You get to 2024 and he goes from being an outsider, somebody who’s never ran for office before, who had no connections, to becoming friends with Donald Trump Jr. He becomes close to Tucker Carlson. He becomes close to the new Republican power center.
And that’s part of the myth of him: somebody who is not college educated, somebody who started a movement by himself when people doubted that it would take off and slowly builds until it’s more than 800 college chapters and millions of followers. They raised $100 million last year in the presidential election, and they were one of the groups responsible for the Get Out the Vote effort that Republicans used last year.
How did he connect with and then transform youth and Gen Z politics on the right?
A lot of what he did was old-fashioned retail politics: showing up to places, going to centers of liberal elitism and intellectualism, the places where it wasn’t cool to be conservative, where it was weird to be a Republican. He embraced a personality of saying bombastic things, of sparking outrage, and cultivating that outrage and that anger to make an even bigger name for himself on college campuses.
What he was able to do was like, clip content well, share it widely, and then use that to found more chapters and grow the organization. And once you have people who are fans of you, who have clubs that they’re starting at their schools, they form a sense of community, and they form a sense of not being alone anymore on a college campus. It’s no longer that taboo to say certain things, or to say that you’re a conservative, or to argue conservative positions. That builds a sense of, you know, social connection on campuses.
In that process, you make this a lifestyle, and I think that’s the key here. He wasn’t just building a political movement, he was becoming a lifestyle and a social and cultural identity, and that’s what ends up transforming campuses and Gen Z in general. It becomes a fact of the culture. And once it becomes a fact of the culture, it becomes its own universe, and that’s the big shift.
Why Charlie Kirk? What did he see about Gen Z that helped him achieve this?
The thing that defines Gen Z is how swingable they are, how open to taking in any perspective. Charlie Kirk saw that there was a countercultural response against the doctrine of the millennial era of liberal progressivism that everyone got used to, and assumed that Gen Z would easily hold onto. Gen Z ended up not simply adopting all those views and becoming much more idiosyncratic. He saw a way to feed it, a way to cultivate it, to offer those debating spaces that maybe weren’t proliferating as much on college campuses.
The other thing that I think he understood is the specific nature of Gen Z, social media nativism, of being ready to immerse themselves into parasocial relationships. A whole generation gets their news or gets more informed through podcasters, through influencers. They interpret life around them based on shows or specific people, and not so much a shared sense of monoculture that we were used to in the past.
Whether you liked him or hated him, you grew to have some kind of a relationship with him, whether it was in disgust or in really liking what he was saying, seeing him not just as a political figure but as an influencer who talked about faith and religion and health and wellness. There were different aspects to what his messages were, and that made it connect with people much more intimately than any politician.
What do you think is misunderstood about what he was doing and what his legacy is going to look like?
He did say a lot of controversial, offensive, in many cases bigoted things, and that wasn’t a disqualifying thing for the way that people consumed his content.
I think one of the things that was shocking for a lot of people is just how broad his reach was and, essentially, the cinematic universe he created, where so many stars in the conservative movement were connected into the fabric that he built. You could easily consume culture that was connected to Turning Point USA and Charlie Kirk without realizing it. And I think that’s the factor that is really interesting. He wasn’t just a political activist. He became a celebrity, he became an influencer. He became somebody who represented various aspects of people’s lives.
2025-09-15 18:45:00
Something striking just happened in global nutrition: As of 2025, children worldwide are now more likely to be obese than underweight.
According to UNICEF’s new Child Nutrition Report, about 9.4 percent of school-age kids (ages 5–19) are living with obesity, compared to 9.2 percent who are underweight. Twenty-five years ago, the gap was much wider: Nearly 13 percent of kids were underweight, while just 3 percent had obesity. Over time, those lines have converged and flipped.
It might feel odd to put obesity in the same bucket as underweight; one has long been seen as a problem of scarcity, the other of excess. But public health experts now define both as forms of malnutrition, which they describe in three dimensions: not enough food, too much of the wrong food, and hidden hunger from micronutrient deficiencies.
There’s a silver lining in this crossover: Fewer kids are dangerously thin than two decades ago. That decline really matters, because being underweight can mean stunted height, impaired brain development, weak immunity, and in worst cases, a higher risk of death. So, the fact that those numbers are falling is genuine progress.
But it’s overshadowed by how quickly obesity has surged, with 188 million children now living with it — though where it shows up most varies widely by region.
Obesity in children isn’t just about size; it raises risks for Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, and even certain cancers later in life. Starting so young makes the costs even higher. By 2035, being overweight and obesity are expected to drain more than $4 trillion a year globally — about 3 percent of the world’s GDP.
UNICEF bases that 2025 crossover on projections from survey data through 2022, and while the precise year carries some uncertainty, the trend is clear. And it’s still pointing upward; the report projects child obesity rates will continue to climb through 2030, especially in Latin America, the Middle East, and East Asia.
The shift aligns with the change in the kind of food environment today’s kids are raised in. Supermarkets, schools, and corner stores are stocked with foods high in calories, added sugar, saturated fat, and salt. Think sodas, packaged snacks, instant noodles — the kind of products that are designed to be cheap, convenient, and irresistible. That’s by design.
“Food companies are not social service or public health agencies; they are businesses with stockholders to please,” said Marion Nestle, a longtime scholar of food politics at New York University, over email. “Their job is to sell more of their products…regardless of the effects on health.” And unlike a generation ago, these foods are no longer confined to wealthy countries; they’re now widely available in LMICs, and are increasingly displacing traditional diets.
Ultra-processed foods — the buzzword taking health circles by storm — tend to encompass such foods. A rare randomized trial at the US National Institutes of Health found that people on ultra-processed diets ate about 500 extra calories per day than those on minimally processed ones. Most other studies show associations between ultra-processed food intake and obesity or poor health, though they can’t prove cause and effect.
But experts also debate about what counts as ultra-processed. The system used by the UN and many researchers to determine what qualifies as ultra-processed is too broad and sometimes lumps together very different foods. That’s why critics like Nicola Guess say the category “borders on useless,” pointing out that it can group together things as different as Oreos, tofu, and homemade soup made with a bouillon cube.
Still, the debate over definition doesn’t erase the broader finding: Diets heavy in these calorie-dense, heavily marketed products are consistently linked to worse health outcomes. “This is as close as you can get to a causal relationship [in public health],” said Rafael Pérez-Escamilla, a professor of public health nutrition at Yale University.
The other shift in the last 25 years is that kids today are far less active than even a generation ago. In global survey reports, more than 80 percent of adolescents fail to get the World Health Organization recommended hour of daily exercise — a sedentary shift that makes the impact of poor diets worse.
The result is a world where no region is untouched, but the picture looks very different depending on where you are. Richer countries like the US (21 percent), Chile (27 percent), and the UAE (21 percent) report strikingly high rates of childhood obesity. In some parts of the Pacific Islands, more than a third of children are obese, a trend linked to growing reliance on imported processed foods over traditional diets.
But this isn’t universal. In sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, underweight is still more common.
That regional picture shows we’re in a patchwork of progress and crisis. Some regions are still battling too little food, others too much of the wrong kind, and many face both at once.
The drivers of this flip are structural — pricing, marketing, food availability — and that’s where the solutions are, too.
“Latin American countries are worried that obesity and its consequent chronic disease will bankrupt their health systems,” said Nestle. That concern has pushed governments to act faster than most. Chile’s 2016 warning label law and ad-ban package cut purchases of sugary drinks and snacks, and Mexico this year banned junk food in public schools, reshaping choices for 34 million children. “Impact studies show that they work to a considerable extent,” Nestle added. The UK’s soft drinks tax points in the same direction, pushing companies to reformulate beverages with less sugar.
By contrast, in the US, the Make America Healthy Again movement has delivered little beyond words. “The MAHA movement is all talk. … The policy document that came out a few days ago is essentially saying we’ll have no regulations or policies, we’ll only do research and voluntary guidelines,” said Barry Popkin, a longtime nutrition researcher at University of North Carolina. As Jess Craig reported previously for Vox, the Food and Drug Administration’s proposed front-of-package labels are a far cry from the bold stop-sign warnings in Latin America — the kind of measures experts say actually change behavior.
Of course, no single law is going to reverse the obesity curve, and nearly every country has struggled to get a handle on it. But measures like warning labels, soda taxes, and marketing restrictions at least sketch out what a serious policy toolkit could look like.
The decline in underweight is worth celebrating. But the rise of obesity, now surpassing it, reframes what malnutrition means in the 21st century. Calories alone are no longer the main problem; it’s the kind of calories children are consuming. We’re now in a world where we’ve partly solved one old crisis, only to stumble into another created by our food system.
2025-09-15 18:00:00
A century ago, a deluge of automobiles swept across the United States, upending city life in its wake. Pedestrian deaths surged. Streetcars, unable to navigate the choking traffic, collapsed. Car owners infuriated residents with their klaxons’ ear-splitting awooogah!
Scrambling to accommodate the swarm of motor vehicles, local officials paved over green space, whittled down sidewalks to install parking, and criminalized jaywalking to banish pedestrians from their own streets. Generations of drivers grew accustomed to unfettered dominance of the road. America was remade in the automobile’s image, degrading urban vibrancy and quality of life.
Today, the incipient rise of self-driving cars promises to bring the most tumultuous shift in transportation since cars first rumbled their way into the scene. Just a few years ago, driverless cars were a technological marvel available to a select few in San Francisco and Phoenix, but now, companies including Waymo, Tesla, and Zoox collectively transport hundreds of thousands of passengers weekly in autonomous vehicles (AVs) across expanding swaths of Austin, Texas; Los Angeles; and Las Vegas, with future service announced in a lengthening list of cities, including Dallas, New York City, Philadelphia, and Miami.
Ride-hail companies are getting in on the action, too: Uber recently signed a deal to deploy at least 20,000 robotaxis powered by the AV company Nuro’s self-driving systems. As the transportation venture capitalist Reilly Brennan recently observed, a “stampede is afoot to autonomize rides.”
AVs offer some undeniable benefits: Unlike humans, they cannot drive drunk, distracted, or tired. They make car trips easier, less stressful, more frictionless — in a word, nicer. The growing availability of AVs is likely to make many people respond just as they would to any other improvement in a product or experience: They will use it more often.
But that could prove disastrous for cities, causing crushing congestion (not to mention widening the gulf between those happily ensconced in their AVs and those stuck in buses crawling through gridlock). This is not pure speculation: Over the last 15 years, the rise of ride-hail, a service similar to robotaxis, has increased total driving, thickened congestion, and undermined transit. Autonomous vehicles, which offer privacy and service consistency that ride-hail cannot, could turbocharge the number of cars on the road, making a mess of urban streets. (Waymo did not comment on the record for this story, and Zoox and Tesla did not respond to requests for comment.)
AVs are coming, but they cannot just plug and play into our existing transportation networks. If cities don’t update their rulebooks, they risk repeating the mistakes of the last century.
While many of the policies governing AV deployments are set by federal and state officials, municipal leaders should not sit on their hands when their public sphere stands on the verge of a tectonic transformation. Cities can — and must — act now to increase the odds that self-driven vehicles enrich urban life rather than undermine it. Even better, doing so will improve current residents’ lives, no matter how long it takes AVs to scale.
Here are a few steps worth considering.
Today’s robotaxi deployments are still quite modest. Waymo, for instance, operates only around 300 vehicles across all of Los Angeles County. For AVs to be universally available, fleets would need to expand by orders of magnitude, and the cost of self-driving technology would likely have to plunge (Waymo reported an operating loss of over $1 billion in the first quarter of this year).
If and when that happens, cities should brace for many, many more cars on their streets.
There are several reasons to expect this. First, lots of people freed from the stress and fatigue of driving will use a self-driven car to venture further for a meal or meeting, and they will also take trips they would have otherwise foregone. With human labor costs eliminated, deliveries are also likely to skyrocket. As Anthony Townsend, author of the book Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car, warned, “imagine what happens when it essentially costs as much to send a package as it does to send a text message.”
Then there is the issue of “deadheading”: vehicles driving around empty en route to their next pickup, or while waiting to be summoned. It’s already a problem with ride-hail: Researchers have found that Uber and Lyft vehicles are passengerless around 40 percent of the time.
Beyond the misery of worsened traffic jams, an AV-fueled spike in driving would increase air pollution; even if the entire AV fleet were electrified, electric cars shed particles from tires and brakes. They could also make bus trips agonizingly slow and unreliable (which is all the more reason for cities to install bus lanes as soon as possible).
An obvious solution is to follow New York City’s congestion pricing model. Since January, cars entering Manhattan south of 60th Street on weekdays must pay a $9 fee during weekdays. In a matter of months, the policy has quickened traffic, quieted car noise, and reduced the number of automobiles on the road.
Cities could also consider mileage-based fees on both AVs and human-driven ride-hail cars that are not transporting any passengers, incentivizing them to minimize the use of traffic lanes while empty. Jinhua Zhao, a professor of cities and transportation at MIT, suggests going further by imposing ride-hail and robotaxi fees that inversely scale with the number of vehicle occupants, rewarding companies for pooling multiple trips in a single vehicle (and thereby reducing total driving).
There are myriad ways to design road use taxes that mitigate congestion. Once the policy is in place, it can always be adjusted later to keep street traffic moving.
AVs will transform our relationship with an unrelenting nuisance of American life: parking. A robotaxi does not need to find a parking spot after dropping off a passenger at their destination; it simply moves along to its next assignment (or plies the streets, waiting to be summoned). As self-driving cars replace human-powered ones, “the notion of parking will gradually evolve into the concept of stopping,” Zhao said.
That begs the question of where, exactly, all these AVs will stop.
“There isn’t always an open curb space where an AV can do a pickup or dropoff,” said Alex Roy, an autonomous vehicle consultant who previously worked at the now-defunct self-driving company Argo.ai. “In that case, the AV is just going to stop in a traffic lane,” potentially obstructing traffic and endangering pedestrians. Given the risks, Roy said, “the AV company should at the outset ask the city where are optimal pickup or drop zones that would be least disruptive.”
At the moment, that is a question many city transportation departments would struggle to answer. Information about loading zones and time-based parking restrictions (e.g., no parking 4 pm to 6 pm) can be dated and incomplete. “It’s very rare for a city to have a proper inventory of the curb,” said Robert Hampshire, who oversaw several federal grants supporting curbside management during his time as deputy assistant secretary of the Department of Transportation’s Office of Research and Technology under President Joe Biden.
Creating a current, digital map of all curbs should be a top priority. Doing so can help cities now, too, because those with the ability to collect real-time information about curb use could reduce double parking while collecting revenue from delivery and ride-hail companies. Philadelphia, for instance, in 2022 piloted “smart loading zones” that vehicles could reserve through a smartphone app. It’s an approach that can help manage today’s delivery trucks as well as tomorrow’s AVs.
As AVs proliferate, the demand for car storage will plummet. For cities where parking devours 40 percent or more of available street space, that is a thrilling opportunity. “You can drastically reduce the number of parking spots and reuse them for housing, parks, or any other purpose,” Zhao said.
That’s all the more reason for cities to jettison archaic zoning policies known as parking minimums, which require new housing, retail, and other real estate projects to include a fixed number of parking spots. In recent years, dozens of cities, including Austin; Raleigh, North Carolina; and San Jose, California have already implemented reforms, like scrapping parking minimums, to reduce housing construction costs and encourage travel modes that are more space-efficient and less polluting than driving, like walking, biking, and public transit. Those reforms will also lay the groundwork for a smoother AV transition.
Municipal leaders could go further by charging a dynamic market rate for street parking, creating pickup and dropoff spots that AVs can use throughout the day. “Pricing is how you create availability,” said Jeffrey Tumlin, former director of transportation of the Municipal Transportation Agency of San Francisco, the city that has been ground zero for robotaxi deployments. “The right price for parking is the price that ensures 15 percent availability at all times of day.” Those spots can provide easy and safe places for self-driven cars to pull over when collecting or depositing a passenger, paying the city a fee for the privilege.
San Francisco has already experimented with dynamic parking pricing that adjusts to real-time demand. Even at peak times, a spot can be found for those willing to pay a premium to avoid the joyless ritual of circling the block for an opening (an activity that contributes to street traffic and produces emissions).
In the Bay Area, self-driven cars have sown confusion on public streets by interrupting emergency response vehicles, randomly freezing in intersections, and pulling over in no-stopping zones. Since the infractions are often brief and police officers are scarce, AV companies can get away with it. Tumlin said that limited enforcement has led AV companies to program their vehicles to simply ignore the law: “The AVs’ business case says that it’s best to do a pickup or dropoff in the bike lane or in traffic, rather than inconvenience the passenger by having to walk a block or two.”
Humans, of course, also routinely flout traffic laws. Cities should use technology to fine illegal maneuvers reliably, regardless of whether a person or an algorithm is at fault.
In many countries and US states, automatic cameras that identify cars running red lights or breaking the speed limit are common and effective; studies have repeatedly shown that the resulting fines deter recurrence, and that a healthy majority of urban residents support their deployment. Automatic enforcement could be particularly useful with autonomous vehicles, allowing public agencies to batch a company’s infractions before issuing a bill. Raising the expected cost of breaking traffic laws would encourage AV developers to place a higher priority on obeying them.
At the moment, many cities can’t employ automatic enforcement at all, because their state legislatures, wary of driver opposition, have strictly limited the use of cameras to issue citations. Loosening those restrictions should be a top priority for city officials lobbying their state capitols.
There is a world of difference between a city where self-driven cars number a few hundred and one where they run into the tens of thousands. As currently configured, city streets may be able to handle the former, but the latter invites disaster.
Autonomous vehicles might be universally available in a few years, as some believers predict (though such forecasts have been wrong before). Or maybe that moment is still 20, 30, or 40 years away.
But city leaders need not strive to become Nostradamus, speculating about the evolution of a technology whose future remains wildly uncertain. The problems posed by self-driving cars are not so different in kind from those created by conventional, human-operated ones — and cities that make judicious policy choices now will enhance urban life regardless of how quickly an autonomous future arrives. There is no need to wait, and every reason not to.