No LA28 Car Plan Needed

I’m a Long Beach resident who was disappointed to see the opinion piece on my doorstep last week advocating for autonomous cars in Long Beach in preparation for the 2028 Olympics.

LA needs an autonomous car plan as much as it needs smog, traffic, and ICE harassing and detaining residents. Jose Cervantes warns of the upcoming traffic and champions a solution in his opinion piece “LA28 Needs Autonomous Car Plan” in the Jan. 23 Beachcomber issue. The nightmares of parking and the dangers of the multi-ton vehicles occupying the streets of Long Beach are untenable at baseline even before wealthy international tourists visit Long Beach for the 2028 Olympics and sooner for the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

Caring about how the world will view American life through the prism of the LA28 games is a luxury. If tourists even dare visit in the face of the deportation and security apparatus promised to greet them by the Department of Homeland Security is an uncertainty. Furthermore, caring about the perceptions of wealthy tourists conveniently aligns with the interests of real estate, the IOC’s corporate sponsors, and national security and private security firms which stand to benefit.

Autonomous vehicles as part of a “Smart City” strategy approved by the City Council in 2021 equals consenting to and financing a network of surveillance and enforcement that Americans since 1776 have opposed from their national and local governments. Opposition should extend to the anti-democratic tech companies profiting from and sharing our data. 

However, I applaud Cervantes’ call to reimagine Belmont Shore’s 2nd Street entirely, removing commercial street parking to create a pedestrian-first zone. Having autonomous vehicles servicing high frequency drop offs is as efficient means to achieve the worthwhile desired outcome as digging a hole at the beach with plastic takeout spoons. We can do better. The autonomous vehicles are significantly less space efficient than the existing technology of the bus.

But a bigger concern I have is how autonomous vehicles are anti-social and exclusionary. 

The writer and journalist Omar El Akkad describes a memory from growing up in Qatar witnessing a local man assault a migrant worker after the worker rear-ended the man’s Mercedes. Years later he reflects that the worker “did something worse than dent a fancy car’s bumper. He had violated the bounds of his assumed nonexistence.” The problems with autonomous vehicles extend past their efficacy as a safe technology; it’s more problematic that they are anti-social, anti-worker and exclusionary.

For many users of autonomous vehicles, the appeal is not purported safety, but the benefit of not interacting with a human driver. Uber and Lyft apps already are a transactional black box which algorithmically extract wages and remove the necessity of human interactions. With the adoption of autonomous vehicles, corporations and customers no longer have to pay human drivers, but also no longer have to be rudely forced to acknowledge their existence.

The real value-add of autonomous vehicles for corporations is a subtraction of labor. In LA we will subsidize that cost in anti-community isolation that segments the undesirable neighbors from the tourists and just the humans in general who would otherwise be in community together on a bus, on a train and in the world. The nonexistence of groups is the promise of autonomous vehicles and the promise of the Olympic broadcast presented by their corporate sponsors.

In November, Archer Aviation acquired Hawthorne airport for $126 million in cash. The company says, “Archer plans for the airport to serve as its operational hub for its planned LA air taxi network and, as a test bed for the AI-powered aviation technologies it is developing.” The Archer helicopter taxis for the wealthy during LA28 are an extreme version of autonomous vehicles of the car variety, neither of which are a solution with everyday people benefitting. And much like the legacy of LAPDs violent policing Operation Hammer prior to LA84 never left LA and created the conditions for the Rodney King uprising in South LA, the testbed of aerial AI-surveillance of the poorest Angelenos while transporting the wealthiest will remain.

Plans for the Olympic event venues show both Inner and Outer Zones that forbid passenger vehicles from entering. Locals who live in these zones will be required to show proof of residence, a process I hope – yet doubt – will be smooth and unobtrusive. No AVs will solve the elusive last-mile solution. Even those obnoxious E-scooters are a more space-efficient last-mile solution than large resource-intensive autonomous vehicles.

Yes, the clock is ticking, but it’s not like that is new. LA28 had an unprecedentedly long 11-year lead-up to the games. The now dwindling time remaining that has not produced infrastructure that benefits the people of LA long-term is arguably by design so the building required for events and accommodations could be rushed through without any sort of democratic approval or environmental review.

The aspiration to show off to the world – with AVs or otherwise – is the same ethos that motivates law enforcement sweeping the streets of unhoused neighbors and violently evicting, displacing, and deporting the most precarious members of our community. Spending energy and resources to increase AV usage for wealthy tourists’ approval and convenience while ICE officers continue to kidnap Angelenos is a modern rearranging of deck chairs on the Titanic.

Parking and congestion and the dangers of passenger-vehicles are real concerns, and autonomous vehicles are not a serious solution. There’s plenty of research on street-widening not being a solution to traffic, and Donald Shoup’s research on the consequences of car parking is worth a look. I want democratically decided solutions to these problems that do not conveniently align with the interests of the wealthy and anti-democratic tech companies. Canceling the Olympics would be a more serious and effective solution to congestion and safety.

Millerman is an English Teacher and XC + Track & Field Coach