Self-driving cars promised a future where you sit back, relax, and glide past the gridlock while the car handles everything. A new study from the University of Texas at Arlington has some bad news for that fantasy. According to research, widespread adoption of autonomous vehicles could actually make traffic significantly worse.
Professors Stephen Mattingly and Farah Naz conducted a meta-analysis on how self-driving cars could affect vehicle miles traveled (VMT). Their findings showed an average 5.95% increase in vehicle miles traveled. Non-shared autonomous vehicles pushed that figure even higher, to nearly 7%.
“The rise of AVs could make commuting more convenient, but it may also lead to more pick-up and drop-off activity, more empty vehicle trips, and new costs.”
The logic is simple. When your car can drop you off and drive itself home, or cruise around looking for rides, roads get busier. As Dr. Mattingly put it, “Where will commuters send their car when they don’t need it?” Will it be sent to a parking lot, sent to try to find other riders, or sent home?”
Are robot taxis already causing chaos on the streets?
To put it succinctly, the research shows that robotaxis are already causing an increase in vehicle miles traveled, and once their adoption becomes universal, it will put extreme pressure on existing infrastructure. But that’s in the future; if current news reports are anything to go by, the robotaxis are already causing havoc on roads.
For example, Waymo launched in Nashville on April 7, 2026, and within five days, people were posting viral videos of its robotaxis freezing at intersections and driving into restricted zones. In December 2025, a San Francisco power outage left dozens of Waymo vehicles frozen at intersections city-wide.
It’s not only a US-specific issue. Just a few weeks back, dozens of Baidu robotaxis simultaneously stopped on elevated highways in Wuhan, China, stranding passengers mid-traffic for over an hour.
These are just a few examples. Dozens of similar incidents have occurred over the past few months, where robotaxis have gotten stuck for various reasons and caused traffic jams.
This is happening while robotaxis are still largely in trial mode. Multiply this by a factor of a hundred or even a thousand, and it’s easy to imagine how much worse traffic could become in the future.
So what happens next?
Dr. Naz summed it up well: “AVs are not inherently good or bad. Their impacts will depend heavily on how they are deployed and governed.” Without smart policy ahead of mass adoption, the self-driving dream risks handing us a shinier, more expensive traffic jam.
If we are to pay that price, autonomous vehicles must clearly demonstrate that they are safer and more reliable than human drivers, which they have failed to do till now.
