In a few of the points, the author discusses elimination of urban parking as a given from automated vehicles. I don't agree, or maybe I just don't understand the scenario. Here's what I see. Urban offices see employees file in between 6:30 and 9:00 each morning, with employees parking and then walking into their offices. The logistics of those same cars dropping off the riders without a large off street area to do so sounds like a mess. And then there's the obvious issue of where the cars go. The author does mention this briefly (cars roaming streets) with no real solution. Do we see a double rush hour as cars drive to businesses, drop their riders, and then drive back out to parking lots in low value areas? This is even more of an issue of we assume these are electric cars with limited range and long recharge times. I like the promotion of bikes, but that's going to require making the urban areas more livable so rides are a two or three miles and not fifteen miles each way. People have to want to live there. Currently, I'd say people want to get out of dense areas and that it has nothing to do with cars or roads.
Check it out: Acme Corp has 200 employees. They're a new startup so they're murderous to their employees; they give them a bare 100sqft per employee. Acme Corp therefore occupies 20,000 square feet. Nearly all municipalities require between 3 and 5 parking spots per thousand square feet, so Acme's office building needs between 60 and 100 parking spaces. If they're compact spots (8x16), that's a minimum of 7680 sqft (not to mention one parking spot for every three employees - Apple just built 11,000 parking spots for 14,000 employees). If they're full spots (10x20 in a parking garage), that's a maximum of 20,000 sqft. Let's assume people show up at Acme between 6:30 and 9:00am. Let's further assume that everyone lives half an hour away and that there's no traveling salesman problem in the world that allows the car to not be empty half of the time. We can make one run between 6 and 6:30 then half an hour off. We make another run between 7 and 7:30 and then half an hour off. We make another run between 8 and 8:30 and half an hour off. Then we make another run between 9 and 9:30 and we're done. Pretend Acme owns all those cars because capitalism. Let's assume a single rider at a time because capitalism and a lack of optimization. My 200 employees in 4 waves is 50 cars at a time. At the end of that wave all my cars tuck into parking spots in the lot. I've saved 10 spots just with that. In the meantime I've got an extra 1200 square feet for drop-off and pick-up. Let's instead assume I can make people ride 2-up - now I've got 35 spare spots. (and 4500 square feet for staging). 4-up? Holy shit. I'm saving more than 50 spots because I could do this whole thing with 12 cars and I could build a damn playground where people used to park. What if instead I replace them with 10pass vans? And remember - that's with 1 parking spot per 3 employees, which is dickish (most of them are going to spill onto the street). We deal with this all the time in production - we've got to get a crew of 50 people into a bookstore and we're not allowed to use their lot. So we have everyone park in a lot a quarter mile away and we have pass vans that ferry them onto set. It takes like two. In our circumstance those cars are on someone else's lot but in an autonomous vehicle future they could park right where cars used to park all night and all day. If I can get four commutes out of a car instead of one, I need a quarter as many cars. As far as bikes, I ride fifteen miles each way. More than, in fact. And I ride through some objectively sketchy shit. I'm here to tell ya - if there were ten times as many of me, there would not be people in beach chairs shooting heroin under the street lights. I opened a club once that got all the drugs out of Pioneer Square in Seattle simply by putting a bunch of dressed-to-the-nines twentysomethings in their faces every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night.Here's what I see. Urban offices see employees file in between 6:30 and 9:00 each morning, with employees parking and then walking into their offices. The logistics of those same cars dropping off the riders without a large off street area to do so sounds like a mess.
Arrival times are more of a bell curve than evenly distributed, but the point stands with parking scaling down in some measurable way. Does parking drop dramatically? In lieu of filling streets with cars, I have my doubts. Rush hour is a thing, and all of those people will want a ride about the same time. Either streets are clogged in all directions as empty cars try to get in as occupied cars try to get out, or cars wait nearby in anticipation of a request. Again this can be less than current posting demands as the late departures don't need a car nearby until demand had started to taper off, but I doubt the difference is significant (for some nebulous definition of significant). It would be fantastic if everyone biked 15 miles each way to work. That isn't going to happen short of a global apocalypse, but it's nice to imagine. Put differently, people won't bike to work unless something else changes: a desire to live in the area near work such that it's just as easy to bike as drive, extremely high transportation costs, a social change that makes arriving sweaty as normal as khakis are today, or some other significant change. Were those twenty-somethings there to get the drugs out of Pioneer Square, or were they incentivized to be there by the draw of the club?I opened a club once that got all the drugs out of Pioneer Square in Seattle simply by putting a bunch of dressed-to-the-nines twentysomethings in their faces every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night.
Naturally, yes. Inject a little surge pricing and you will find an impressively efficient load-balancing algorithm. That's a lot of the allure of an autonomous network vs. individual driver initiative - more top-down control means more network-positive, individual-negative decisions. A 30-minute drive non-surge in LA is about $30 (and loses money, BTW). A 30-minute drive surge can be $75. Let's presume for the sake of capitalism that you're taking my vanpool. My system runs better if your ass gets up 15 minutes earlier. Will you do it if I pay you $10? How about $15? Again, you're presuming there's no impetus to ditch parking lots. There's a big impetus to ditch parking lots. I've got a 20,000 sqft building. It's got 60 spots. It used to be a warehouse and only 20 people worked there; the other 40 spots are actually truck staging but when we converted it to office we restriped those. According to my municipal code I used to need a parking spot for every thousand square feet. If I wanna convert it to office I need one for every 300 square feet but I've got 100 square feet per employee, remember? Two out of every three cars is on the street already because I don't have any limitations on employees per square foot. But if I don't have to worry about those parking spots, I can build more employee space. I also don't have to worry about everyone else in the office park fighting over the one spot per three employees we're all running in the name of "efficiency." I don't think everyone's going to bike 15 miles to work. But I also think that there are solutions between "this will never work" and "everything mentioned in the article." And that's because there's powerful incentives for the change to happen. Much like my club on Pioneer Square.Arrival times are more of a bell curve than evenly distributed, but the point stands with parking scaling down in some measurable way.
I'm not assuming there's no impetus to eliminate parking, I'm acknowledging that there are competing interests that will resist adoption. Parking sucks. So does traffic.
YES. THIS. In VERY short order, cities are going to be FORCED to allow autonomous vehicles, or they will lose their largest employers. Because these companies are going to drive the change to autonomous vehicles, simply because it makes good business sense. And we may see that change driven by the LANDLORDS, even. Imagine owning a 35-story office building, and knowing that you can create more rentable space in your building simply by requiring tenants to use autonomous vehicle services, and cutting your parking space by 50%. This change is coming, and it will come fast.
Insurance will definitely play a part. But insurance is not a significant cost center. A couple of percent off here or there is not going to move the needle on the bottom line. Whereas, suddenly getting another 20k sq feet of rentable space from an existing building, with nothing more than a minor policy change? That's more money every single month of every single year, and adds up to Big Dollars very fast.