Our Autonomous Vehicle Future
[Note: This post started as a comment to a post on the Strong Towns website by Chuck Marohn regarding Autonomous Vehicles.]
I have my concerns about automated vehicles, but I do believe they’ll make city centers more walkable. The most important change is that autonomous vehicles will allow for the removal and reuse of parking lots. This will allow the gaps along walkable corridors to be filled in, providing a better pedestrian experience. While it’s possible to do this now, one of the biggest hurdles is public resistance to removing parking. Autonomous vehicles will make this an easier hurdle to get over. In essence, autonomous vehicles will allow development to become more compact, without increasing intensity. This in turn makes cities more walkable, because more things worth going to are within walking distance.
The ownership model for cars will also change with autonomous vehicles. While it’s hard to imagine today, when we’re so tied to our cars, the day will come when most people don’t own cars because it will be so much cheaper and more convenient to use something like Lyft for all car trips. As people become car-free, they will be more willing to walk and use other forms of transit to get around.
Equally importantly, as households become car-free, they will be able to convert their garages into other uses. We’ll see many people convert their garages into secondary dwelling units, especially in regions with very expensive housing markets. This will greatly increase the intensity of uses in existing neighborhoods, without wholesale redevelopment. As the intensity increase, there will be more people within a walkable distance for many shopping centers and strip malls. These centers will be redeveloped in time to cater to a clientele on foot rather than in a car.
The increased intensity of our existing neighborhoods aren’t the only way autonomous vehicles will improve walkability. Downtown streets will also allow pedestrians to take over the street because autonomous cars will be programmed to stop for them and be able to stop. This will further improve the walkability of city streets, because it will make it so pedestrians can cross mid-block (i.e. jaywalk) without having to wait for traffic signals.
This change of behavior will change societal norms, it will become acceptable to slow cars on city streets. The biggest reason for this is that drivers and passengers act differently, even today and through history. While many people say they want slower traffic to increase safety, once they get behind the wheel they drive at unsafe speeds. It’s just like the classic Disney short Goofy Motor Mania, which shows how crazy people become when they drive a car. By moving drivers to the passenger seat and letting the autonomous vehicle take the wheel, people will become much more accepting of slower car travel.
Of course, on larger roads and highways, it will still be expected that cars will be able to drive quickly, the societal norms won’t change there. Most importantly, pedestrians won’t walk out in front of cars because the autonomous vehicles still won’t be able to stop in time. Cars traveling quickly still have sizable stopping distances even when the driver reaction time drops to near-zero. We won’t need new laws or fences keeping people out of roadways any more than we do today, self-preservation will keep people from going into the roadway (most of the time).
The downside to autonomous vehicles is that they’re going to make sprawl worse. They will make it easier for people to have longer commutes. People will be able to sleep, or watch TV, or even get dressed in the car, especially once car design changes to be more open instead of rows of seats facing forward. As 2+ hour commutes becomes tolerable for more people, people will move further from their jobs to cheaper, bigger housing.
Autonomous vehicles will lead to a strange contradiction, while making life in the urban core more walkable and livable, it will also lead to more sprawl. The long-term change in land use will be for the development of smaller urban cores far away from major cities, where people from the smaller places commute to where the jobs are in the major cities. Of course, this future is just as possible today with rail and walking, and some day I expect we’ll get there, but autonomous vehicles will be a necessary stepping stone to that future.
[Note: This is one article in a longer series on how local communities can address global issues related to climate change, housing affordability, the local economy, the fiscal solvency of cities, and public health.]
