Tag Archives: urban form

self-driving cars and urban form

Next City has a couple good articles about what self-driving cars may mean for land use and urban form.

How will roadways, sidewalks, intersections, signage, traffic signals, and the relationship between buildings, roadways, pedestrians, cyclists, and vehicles change?

The answer to that question is in picture form, so you have to click on the link to see it. The second article explains it in words:

There is much to recommend in this imagined world of cheap, ubiquitous drone taxis. This is a world where senior citizens, the disabled, young people and the inebriated can enjoy safer mobility and be freed from the enormous costs of owning and insuring a car. It’s also a world wherein parked cars have a smaller footprint. In 2010, researchers at the University of California, Berkley released a study on the country’s parking infrastructure. While conceding that assessments of the number of parking paces have varied significantly, they cited a series of estimates, from which we can draw a reasonable range. Following this data, current parking codes have made it so there are between three and eight parking spaces for each of the 250 million cars in America. Think about it this way: If the number of personal cars dropped and parking provisions were loosened, as many as 675 million parking spaces, particularly those in urban cores, could be turned into something else — housing, parks or a million other uses more desirable than street-deadening parking lots.

“If you could push all the land currently devoted to parking in Manhattan and Boston and other big cities 10 minutes outside the city limits,” says Anthony Townsend, author of Smart Cities, “you’re potentially talking about trillions of dollars worth of real estate that could be developed, and tens of millions of new city-dwellers who could be accommodated.”

Well, sure we can turn some of it into homes and businesses. But let’s turn some of it into parks and habitat and even farms too.

cars are evil

One of the most important things we can do to build a sustainable, resilient society is to design communities where most people can make most of their daily trips under their own power – on foot or by bicycle. It eliminates a huge amount of carbon emissions. It opens up enormous quantities of land to new possibilities other than roads and parking, which right now take up half or more of the land in urban areas. It reduces air pollution and increases physical activity, two things that are taking years off our lives. It eliminates crashes between vehicles, and crashes between vehicles and human bodies, which are serial killers of one million people worldwide every year, especially serial killers of children. It eliminates enormous amounts of dead, wasted time, because commuting is now a physically and mentally beneficial use of time. There is also a subtle effect, I believe, of creating more social interaction and trust and empathy between people just because they come into more contact, and creating a more vibrant, creative and innovative economy that might have a shot at solving our civilization’s more pressing problems.

No, Joel Kotkin, this is not the same thing as saying everybody has to live in tiny apartments, or in a “luxury city” where young childless “hipsters” do nothing but eat and drink and shop and party. Only someone who has never really experienced a walkable community would have this misconception. These are communities where people live, work, innovate, raise families, shop for groceries, garden, and care about each other. There are a lot of ways the actual buildings and infrastructure can be laid out to achieve the basic objective. It might be “dense” in terms of people, but it won’t feel crowded if the space is used well rather than wasted. There can be lots of breathing room for people, and even for plants and wildlife, as long as space is not wasted on oceans of parking lots and rivers of angry people trapped inside glass and steel bubbles separated by one car length for every 10 miles per hour of speed.