Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

Road safety, health inequity and the imminence of autonomous vehicles

Nature Machine Intelligence volume 3, pages 654–655 (2021)Cite this article

Subjects

To the Editor — Although personal vehicle ownership facilitates economic mobility, negative externalities persist. In the United States, motor vehicle (MV) fatalities represent almost four out of every ten ‘unintentional injury’ deaths — deaths that do not result from old age, disease, homicide or suicide1. Globally, MV injuries are estimated to be the eighth leading cause of death for all age groups and the leading cause of death for children and young people 5–29 years of age2.

This is a preview of subscription content

Access options

Buy article

Get time limited or full article access on ReadCube.

$32.00

Buy

All prices are NET prices.

References

  1. Savage, I. Res. Transport. Econ. 43, 1–8 (2013).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Road Traffic Injuries and Deaths—A Global Problem (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2020); www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index.html

  3. Nunes, A., Harper, S. & Hernandez, K. D. Am. J. Public Health 110, 796–797 (2020).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Fleetwood, J. Am. J. Public Health 107, 532–537 (2017).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. DeNavas-Walt, C. D. & Proctor, B. D. Income and Poverty in the United States: 2014 (US Census Bureau, 2015).

  6. Harper, S., Charters, T. J. & Strumpf, E. C. Am. J. Epidemiol. 182, 606–614 (2015).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Hsia, R. Y.-J. & Shen, Y.-C. Health Aff. 30, 1912–1920 (2011).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Levy, F. K. Manage. Sci. 11, B-89–C-85 (1965).

    Google Scholar 

  9. Argote, L. & Epple, D. Science 247, 920–924 (1990).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Kavlak, G., McNerney, J. & Trancik, J. E. Energy Pol. 123, 700–710 (2018).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Moreno, J. Waymo CEO says tesla is not a competitor, gives estimated cost of autonomous vehicles. Forbes http://www.forbes.com/sites/johanmoreno/2021/01/22/waymo-ceo-says-tesla-is-not-a-competitor-gives-estimated-cost-of-autonomous-vehicles/ (2021).

  12. Nunes, A. & Hernandez, K. D. Transp. Res. Part A 138, 28–36 (2020).

    Google Scholar 

  13. Fagnant, D. J., Kockelman, K. M. & Bansal, P. Transp. Res. Record. 2563, 98–106 (2016).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Nunes, A., Reimer, B. & Coughlin, J. F. Nature 556, 169–171 (2018).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Fulton, L. M. Joule 2, 575–578 (2018).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Chetty, R., Hendren, N., Kline, P. & Saez, E. Q. J. Econ. 129, 1553–1623 (2014).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Claybrook, J. & Kildare, S. Science 361, 36–37 (2018).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Hancock, P. A., Nourbakhsh, I. & Stewart, J. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 116, 7684–7691 (2019).

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

A.N. was supported through funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (award #2020-14048) and the National Science Foundation via its program on the Future of Work at the Human–Technology Frontier (award #1928616, FW-HTF-P: Impact of AI Robotics on Labor).

Author information

Affiliations

  1. Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Ashley Nunes

  2. ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Kay W. Axhausen

Authors
  1. Ashley Nunes
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Kay W. Axhausen
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ashley Nunes.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and Permissions

About this article

Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Nunes, A., Axhausen, K.W. Road safety, health inequity and the imminence of autonomous vehicles. Nat Mach Intell 3, 654–655 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-021-00382-3

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-021-00382-3

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing