Small Vehicles
- Posted by ryan on February 17th, 2010 filed in Cities
Let me just add a few additional thoughts about the potential impact of new, small, innovative vehicles on urban forms. I see Sarah Goodyear has featured my posts on innovative vehicles under the headline “Still Looking For That Magic Highway”, which makes me a little uncomfortable. I’m not a techno-utopian, and I certainly don’t imagine that vehicle innovations will lead us toward the visions of 1950s era urban planners, in which personal automobiles whisk us all quickly and cheaply from point-to-point. I think that kind of vision is destined not to be realized, based on simple questions of urban economics and physics.
Better personal vehicles will ultimately be good for urbanism. It’s not too difficult to imagine a few reasons why. For one thing, small vehicles will require less space for parking, and autonomous vehicles may not require any parking at all. Parking lots and decks are the bane of walkability. Smaller vehicles, particularly ones which weigh just a few hundred pounds, will be much more pedestrian and cyclist friendly than standard automobiles. They’ll take up less precious road space. They’ll block less of other travelers’ field of vision. And in the event of a collision with a non-driver, they’ll do much less damage.
Flexible vehicles should allow walkability to work in a greater variety of settings. At present, many growing suburban neighborhoods are considering plans to turn older strip mall properties into denser, mixed-use community centers on a makeshift grid. The problem with this is that such areas generally can’t support enough of a residential population to sustain the ground-floor retail, and the neighborhoods beyond the center are too sprawling to allow a critical mass of customers to walk to the shops. In order to keep the businesses afloat, then, lots of room must still be made available for parking. Putting the parking at or above street level detracts from the neighborhood’s density, and putting it below street level is expensive, which changes the economics of the project.
Flexible vehicles help eliminate these challenges by increasing a walkable neighborhood center’s customer catchment area without having to set aside gobs of space for parking. That makes for a more effective walkable area, which will be more likely to spawn additional walkable areas, and which will be more likely to become dense enough, eventually, to support transit service.
What about transit, then? Won’t cheaper, more efficient, and potentially autonomous vehicles completely eliminate the need for transit? In a word, no.
One way such vehicles might displace transit would be by reducing average density, but this seems unlikely to occur. For one thing, as I noted above, smaller vehicles that don’t require parking (or much parking, anyway) will allow for more in-fill development. Another way to reduce density is to increase land area, but since these vehicles probably wouldn’t be delivering higher speeds or ranges than existing vehicles, that seems unlikely to happen, as well.
Given a general trend toward density, scarce roadspace, and the fact that even small personal vehicles use up a lot more roadway per person than buses or streetcars or cyclists, excess demand for roadways is inevitable. This excess demand will have to be rationed by prices (easier with new vehicle technology) or congestion, and either way there’s continued demand for transit alternatives. For a lot of trips, Metro is extremely convenient; for a home near the Brookland Metro station, Metro downtown is faster than driving, even if there’s no traffic at all. Or, if you take a resident of Falls Church or Colesville who works downtown, having a small autonomous vehicle drop you at the nearby Metro station would probably be preferable to having it take you all the way downtown.
In some cases. Not in all cases. But certainly often enough that transit will continue to grow in importance, particularly given population growth.
So no, I’m not saying innovation in the personal vehicle market will make every current transportation mode obsolete. I’m saying that it will alter usage patterns of most modes and may well make some, including public transit, much more effective.
February 17th, 2010 at 11:04 pm
The fundamental effect of (small, super-efficient, super-clean) autonomous vehicles will be to increase mobility. They will make it easier and cheaper for more people to travel longer distances. They will make the benefits of car travel available to essentially the entire population, at much lower cost than car travel today. They will eliminate the need to drive; everyone will be a passenger. They will eliminate the hassles of parking; the car will drop you off and find parking itself. They will greatly increase the effective capacity of our roads. I have no idea how you think buses and trains, with their fixed schedules, fixed routes, fixed stops, slower speeds, less comfort and less privacy will be able to compete effectively against this new kind of car. Perhaps there will still be a few subway services at rush hour along the densest travel routes (e.g., in and out of lower Manhattan), but at all other times and places mass transit will be wiped out. Why would anyone bother with buses and trains when they can have a chauffered, doorstep-to-doorstep car ride instead at a fraction of today’s price?
As for the effect on density, autonomous vehicles will certainly reduce the amount of land needed for parking, and will eliminate the need for parking areas to be located adjacent to travel destinations, but that doesn’t mean they will increase density. Autonomous vehicles will increase mobility, and increased mobility has always led to lower densities, not higher ones.
February 17th, 2010 at 11:56 pm
For a lot of trips, Metro is extremely convenient; for a home near the Brookland Metro station, Metro downtown is faster than driving, even if there’s no traffic at all.
The WMATA schedule shows that the ride from Brookland to Metro Center (a single unlinked trip on the Red Line with no transfers) takes 10 minutes. Google Maps reports the driving time for the same trip as 11 minutes. Add in the time needed to get to and from the Metro station at each end, and time spent waiting for the train, and driving is probably faster.
Of course, for rush hour trips the metro would probably be faster, because of road congestion. And driving would involve extra time for parking. But with autonomous vehicles, congestion will probably be greatly reduced, and parking time isn’t an issue. And if your metro trip required you to make a transfer, that would add extra time. The bottom line is that it’s not clear the Metro would be faster than an autonomous car even for a typical rush hour trip downtown. And the Metro almost certainly wouldn’t be faster for any trip outside rush hour.
And, of course, only a few cities are dense enough to support rapid transit systems like the Washington Metro. Most transit is buses and light rail, which are much slower than subways. They’d be even less competitive against autonomous cars.
February 18th, 2010 at 10:24 am
You can’t compare a hypothetical future private vehicle with transit as it exists today. It’s like saying the imagination is better than reality.
February 18th, 2010 at 11:54 am
I wonder about the scourge of parking lots. Just guessing but aren’t the more efficient urban transportation system hubbed and spoked? Whether we park pickup trucks in big spaces or autonomous vehicles in smaller ones, it seems like walkability can benefit from parking lots as a transient home base.
I can’t imagine a neighborhood where everything I might possibly want will be in one place, but I could drive less if there were a small number of places with diverse businesses, anchored by a parking deck (underground if it makes us feel better) where I could find an assortment of offers not available near home. If autonomous cars aren’t full-fairing motorcycles, these aren’t malls.
February 18th, 2010 at 4:58 pm
Japan is an interesting case study here. In the 1950s, cars under 500cc didn’t require a license to drive — so their was a boom in super tiny, efficient vehicles. It’s really what spurred growth in the Japanese car industry. And helped them innovate in smallness. Of course, Japan was also working on high speed trains which debuted in the 1960s in time for the 1964 Games. But Japan although has many large cities now, is still relatively rural. And was especially so in the 1950s with slow and inefficient rail capacity. They were not unlike India is today.
Japan though has never allowed on -street parking, and so even after the licensing laws were changed, there was still a need to have super small cars. You can’t register a car in Japan without proof you have a place to park it: enter the Kei car. Small cars, vans, and trucks that fit into a super small parking spaces and roads. (Roads are so narrow in Japan that people don’t have individual garbage collection, trucks won’t fit, you bring your garbage to central locations for your neighborhood where it is collected for incineration.)
Now admittedly, Japan has other weirdness designed to prop up their auto industry that don’t fit this case study: no cars older than 7 years for instance. But they do still have small walkable towns (and few sidewalks if at all) and focus on the pedestrian and bicyclist first with priority then for small, efficient and easily parkable microcars and vans.
February 18th, 2010 at 8:16 pm
Even Kei cars carry more than one passenger, unlike what Ryan Avent was advocating yesterday.
Gordan Murray, formerly of McLaren Cars and a principle designer of Formula I racers and the 240mph McLaren sports car that was a 90’s legend, has designed a city car that is smaller than a Smart, designed to carry three to four passengers, be relatively crash-worthy and weight about 1200lbs. It is also small enough to allow two to share a lane, three to share a standard parking space, and the manufacturing and shipping processes are designed to create the greenest life cycle possible using current technology.
Should someone license it for production we are likely to see the closest thing we’ll see in drive it yourself transport that meets some balance of utility, size and carbon footprint.