Autonomous Cars
- Posted by ryan on October 14th, 2008 filed in Cities
Matt discusses a piece by Tim Lee on the effects of self-driving vehicles:
On the second page he makes a number of observations that are relevant to my transportation and planning interests. One is that if cars didn’t need drivers, then taxis would become relatively cheaper. You could imagine quickly and easily ordering a self-driving cab from your cell phone or some such. Tim says that “when self-driving taxis are readily available, many people—even far from dense urban areas—will find renting both cheaper and more convenient than owning a vehicle.” I’d be a little bit skeptical of that, but at a minimum I think what you can say is that you’d see much lower rates of car ownership among people who do live in-or-near fairly dense areas — the sort of places where you could expect such cabs to be widely available.
Perhaps more interesting is the idea that self-piloted vehicles could revolutionize our understanding of parking. To make drivable suburbanism viable, each person needs one dedicated parking space right adjacent to his or her house, plus another dedicated parking space right adjacent to his or her office, and then on top of that each retail establishment needs to be immediately adjacent to a number of parking spaces roughly equal to the amount of parking needed at peak demand times. But obviously most of the time it’s not peak demand at the mall. And most of the time your car isn’t parked at the office. Each car is maintaining a huge space footprint. On top of that, in order to prevent free riding on people who’ve already built parking lots, regulatory schemes are put in place demanding that all new construction involve new parking facilities meaning that space is used less-and-less efficiently.
I think the net effect of autonomous vehicles on suburban areas would be to make them denser (I think the net effect of a lot of things on suburban areas will be to make them denser). As important as those shifts, I suspect, would be the boon such vehicles would be to explicitly urban areas.
Taxis and car-sharing services are very much complements to walkable urban life. Cheap and effective autonomous vehicles would likewise be complements to urban life, but in a much more significant manner. It’s hard to overstate the negative effect of parking on dense, urban areas. When fighting against dense, new development, NIMBYs cite parking and traffic concerns first, second, and third. Given the value of urban land, parking has massive opportunity costs. Street space in urban areas is very limited and is currently given over almost entirely to driving lanes and parking lanes. If self-driving vehicles freed up much of that space, it would make room for large increases in transit right-of-way, bike lanes, and sidewalk space.
People hesitate to move to urban areas because of convenience concerns. If it’s a pain to use a car, they say, how will I get to and from the grocery store? What if I hurt my ankle and can’t easily use transit? What if I need to get somewhere when transit is operating with long lead times? The ability to satisfy all of these concerns cheaply and easily with self-driving vehicles would be game-changing.
A world where automobiles are almost entirely a shared resource is a world where urban living is much more inviting.
October 14th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Meh. I still say you’re better off riding pod cars, a subject that really seems to piss off light rail enthusiasts even more than automobiles. I think it gives dense urban development that candy-colored EPCOT cachet they so desperately need.
October 14th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
I’ve actually been thinking about this a lot lately. I went to Ethiopia a few weeks ago, and was pretty impressed that I could get nearly anywhere around Addis Ababa riding minicabs for about $0.20. They were slow and crowded, but they were very effective public transit, and they were probably providing excellent jobs to alot of people.
Arguable it is easier to get around Addis Ababa without a car than it is Birmingham, AL, my home. So, if we had these things, you could book them online and share them on a commute in to work, or you could split the cost of a longer drive.
I really can’t imagine a system of public transportation that’s more efficient, more practical, or more user-friendly.
October 14th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
Oh, except teleportation.
October 14th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
Thank you for riding Jonnycab.
October 14th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
Ryan’s argument makes no sense to me (as usual). The most obvious implication of robot cars is the death of conventional mass transit (buses and trains), which means the death of “transit-oriented development.” Who, exactly, will want to live in a dense “walkable community” when self-driving (clean, electric) robot cars make car travel universally accessible, dirt-cheap, and eliminate the hassle of parking and the stress involved in manual driving?
October 14th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
I see Mixner’s point too. I think it will be difficult to tell what effect this could have on urban/suburban form.
Whatever it does, it’ll be huge. Transportation seems to affect the form of cities more than anything else.
Does increasing mobility have to lead to a decentralization and the creation of more low-density development? Do people actually hate living in high density development, or do they just live there because it’s cheaper and easier for driving?
Does the fact that I can’t figure out why anyone lives in suburbs built in the last fifty years mean that I’ve lost touch?
October 15th, 2008 at 12:43 am
Does increasing mobility have to lead to a decentralization and the creation of more low-density development?
Why wouldn’t it? The cheaper and faster and more convenient transportation becomes, the less reason there is for higher-density development. Robotic cars are likely to further extend the long-standing trend of sprawl and decentralization. Buses and trains created the first suburbs (”streetcar suburbs”). The mass adoption of private motor vehicles expanded them. And clean, energy-efficient, robotic cars are likely to expand them further, especially when combined with the distance-shrinking effects of ever-more-sophisticated communications technology.
October 15th, 2008 at 11:57 am
Okay, but let’s not ignore the basic realities of time and the opportunity cost of being cooped up in a vehicle (guided or not). I can’t recall who came up with the figure, but it’s been established that throughout history, the human travel budget has always averaged out to about a half hour in each direction or about one hour per day. Anything beyond this and commuting becomes a hardship. The city limits of ancient Rome were 30 minutes by foot from the city center. Even if autonomous self-guiding vehicles become the norm, you aren’t going to see people moving out to the far hinterlands just for this. This will not be a game-changer. And re: future communications breakthroughs: The need will always exist to get live bodies in the same room together. Lack of a paper trail is just one reason that I can think of right now.