Noted on 20 Aug 2026

Last week Uber and Pony AI announced plans to put over 2,000 robotaxis into four European cities.

At the beginning of this year, the UK lost around 2,500 shared cars, not to a technology problem but to parking permits, insurance costs and congestion charging.

I don't think those two facts are unrelated. I think they're the same underlying issue.

The key constraint on shared vehicle fleets in dense cities has never been the vehicle. It's the kerb. Where can it sit? Who owns that space? What does it cost per year? Who decides? Remove the driver and every one of those questions is still there, unchanged, plus a few new ones about where the vehicle goes to charge and clean itself when nobody's using it.

An autonomous fleet in London would need bays, or depots. It would need those negotiated across thirty-three boroughs. And it would meet the same permit regimes that made a conventional car club unviable last year, only this time with a considerably more expensive asset sitting in them.

There's a version of the future where autonomy fixes shared mobility economics: the driver cost disappears, utilisation goes up, the maths finally closes. I'd like that to be true. I really would.

But the car club operators leaving the UK weren't losing money on drivers. They didn't have any.

Kerbside access is the actual bottleneck, and it's a policy and allocation problem, not a technical one. Worth solving before the expensive fleet arrives rather than after.

Anyone who's actually negotiated kerb space with a London borough tell me I'm wrong?