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........

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