Study: Robo-Taxis Not the Answer for Low-Income Medical Access

Proponents of autonomous shuttles and robo-taxis have championed the vehicles as a means to help provide transportation to medical appointments to low-income and other underserved communities.

Don’t count on it—at least not anytime soon.

Cost Prohibitive

Autonomous vehicles currently are too costly to provide much practical assistance to poor people, according to a new study published this month in the American Journal of Public Health.

The study, titled "The Price Isn’t Right: Autonomous Vehicles, Public Health and Social Justice,” calculates the cost of a robo-taxi ride to be at least three times that to operate an older car.

Taking into account such factors as vehicle financing, licensing, insurance, maintenance and fuel, researchers found that a self-driving taxi would cost $1.58 per mile in a best-case scenario. This compared with 52 cents per mile to own and operate a traditional vehicle.

San Francisco was used as the baseline for the study.

Why it Matters

Lack of transportation causes more than 3.6 million people to miss or delay non-emergency medical treatment each year in the U.S., according to the authors.

Even poor people who have access to a vehicle are at a disadvantage. That’s because the vehicles they use are likely to be older models without the latest safety equipment, which the authors describe as more vulnerable to accidents.

The study was co-authored by Ashley Nunes, a research fellow at Harvard Law School; Kristen Hernandez, former research assistant at MIT and now a policy analyst at Securing America's Future Energy; and Sam Harper, associate professor at McGill University in Canada.