Yeah, I have seen maps and videos of suburban areas where the pedestrian-accessible space stops once you get to the end of the street, but even then you have to navigate through a miles-long maze of streets and roads to get to the next public building.
I can understand why the US is so excited for self-driving cars...
Fun exploration. I'd love to see something similar but for a city design built around shared self driving cars. I don't put much fundamental value in walkability. I put value in being able to get to a variety of types of things quickly and easily. Keeping those things within walking range of each other is one way. Autonomous vehicles is another.
Yes, luckily it seems cities are slowly starting to realize that allowing cars everywhere and infinitely widening roads is not scalable and, more importantly, does not create a pleasant environment for people to be outside in.
The future is definitely creating more walkable/cyclable cities and improving public transit. Self driving cars have the potential to make things even worse by generating new car trips that otherwise wouldn't have been made.
That's an interesting point. I think you may see something similar to tourist districts today where the streets are closed to traffic outside of certain hours. People drive near the area and continue on foot.
Autonomous vehicles may be even better for this, as a person could be dropped off at the closest accessible point, then the vehicle retreats to a lower-density area.
Take the Las Vegas Strip for example. They have a lot of pedestrian bridges for people to avoid crossing streets. Granted, this also works to funnel folks into casinos. However, it would be difficult for a pedestrian to get into the street at some intersections because of fences and barricades. I have to think that most cities will evolve similarly when self-driving cars become commonplace
This might seem minor compared to the other real estate trends that self driving cars will bring about, but it's interesting to think about what might happen to all the land in urban and suburban American that is currently on-street parking. Hopefully we'll see some creative uses for it, such as gardens, bike lanes, or outdoor seating for cafes, instead of just letting it lie underutilized. Maybe on some streets we'll get something similar to the woonerfs [1] in the Netherlands, with streets being shared by cyclists, pedestrians, and slow moving self driving cars.
I'm hopeful that driverless cars will be a boon to cities, particularly to the many second-tier American cities whose formerly vibrant cores have been decimated by the need to supply parking for suburban workers.
For the past sixty years, suburbanization has increased demand for parking and fed a feedback loop that's destroyed urban density. More people driving means greater demand for parking, which means buildings get torn down for lots and parking structures. Nodes of activity spread farther apart, so more people drive, and drive more often, further increasing demand for parking. The result is a country of paved-over cities with more parking spaces than people [0].
Driverless cars have the potential to break the feedback loop by decoupling destinations from nearby parking, shifting parking out of central cities and freeing land for all the things that make urban living great. Perhaps the feedback loop will start working in the other direction.
(I don't think driverless cars will lead to a redoubling of suburbanization, by the way, because I think big houses and wide open spaces are far down the list of reasons most suburbanites live in the suburbs.)
Lots of residential places have roads exactly like those. In Seattle in particular, it's not just suburbs, but roads filled with apartment buildings on either side (see the neighborhood capitol hill for example).
I like Musk's proposal for mostly autonomous tunnel driving because it actually seems much more feasible than handling every edge case known to man.
The issue is that these self-driving cars are limited to a few big cities--where they're least necessary, since good public transit is far more efficient, many things are within walking distance, and speed limits are low anyway.
IMHO the biggest potential for self-driving cars is in suburbs and exurbs where mass transit is inherently less efficient.
I absolutely agree, it's probably too late for established cities and suburban sprawl. I guess I just hope for a better solution than autonomous cars.
I guess this is just a step in the evolution of per-individual transport, and eventually we will get rid of roads and automobiles as we know them for self-locomoting ambiguous transport pods that don't need big asphalt/concrete roads.
We waste so much space to roads and bespoke parking lots.
That's kind of where self driving busses go. The first prototypes run short routes on aiports or something like that. But I don't think that short routes on normal streets are significantly easier than long routes on normal streets.
This is _exactly_ the use case I think self-driving cars are perfect for: a shared fleet of cars continuously picking up and dropping off passengers within cities – eliminating the need for parking and allowing cities to reclaim that ROW for other uses (bigger sidewalks, bikeways, parklets/seating, or even dedicated bus lanes and light rail for high capacity routes, maybe even housing in some spots), finally allowing vehicles to become a crucial supplement to higher capacity public transportation rather than a competitor to it, and hopefully decrease the amount of space dedicated to cars (think highways and sprawl in addition to parking) within cities.
Most of this country is a sprawling mess that does not lend itself to traditional mass transit options. Yet those same spaces have an abundance of well-maintained roads. At a certain point we need to accept we are not Europe and we need transit solution suited to our multi-trillion dollar pre-built infrastructure. Self-driving cars are likely to be a big part of that.
I agree about the importance of walkability and public space. On reflection, it is possible that self-driving cars (and their ability to go perfectly from point to point) could make walkability economically redundant, which would be very damaging, as you say, to health and happiness.
Public transport is great, but self-driving promises to fix the last mile problem.
> But it seems to me you could do "self-driving" a lot cheaper and easier by improving the commons. Embedding sensors in the roads, street signs, and furniture - isn't that going to make more sense than turning ever vehicle into a super-computer?
This would require a broad agreement on a global standard for Infrastructure to Vehicle (I2V) and huge investments by local and national governments around the world. It could technically happen, but likely will proceed at a snails pace. As you mention, it would be much better than relying on-board sensors like Lidar and cameras as centimeter accurate GPS coordinates can be embedded into road signs etc, but it will take decades.
I’ve imagined that self driving cars would fill in this “last mile” from the end destination to an air conditioned transit hub. Once you get enough density in a transit hub, the frequency and destinations should explode, making the network usable, even in car heavy towns like Houston.
This completely excludes "walkable cities" out of the equation. If everyone is moving around on their autonomous vehicles that means that the entire city is criss-crossed with wide roads that take up tons of space, instead of dense walkable city centers with big transit corridors.
Self driving cars can enable both urbanism and sprawl, depending on their deployment— if the existence of self-driving vehicle fleets at a per-mile price competitive with a personal car enables the collapse of personal car ownership in cities, that will open up a lot of possibilities for urban infill.
It will make the politics of building mid-rise housing without extensive, expensive underground parking space a lot more politically palatable in American cities. The same is true of replacing parking with pedestrian and bike infrastructure. And that says nothing about the safety benefits that will make cycling and walking a lot more pleasant and accessible in a lot of the US. (There are no technical barriers to building mid-rise urban housing without parking and replacing parking with high-quality pedestrian and bike infrastructure in the US today, but the politics are very difficult as drivers treat free/cheap access to city-owned street space as a right)
Plus, urbanites paying the marginal per-mile cost of a robotaxi trip, as opposed to buying a car as a huge sunk cost and then trying to get the maximum use from it, means that people will consider the car-versus-transit-versus-bike economics a lot more often, rather than buying a car and becoming someone who drives everywhere.
I love walking as much as anyone. And I love efficient and convenient mass transit, but I realize that there still is a place for cars. Tokyo, Paris, etc. Very good transit and very walkable, yet cars are still necessary. With autonomous vehicles we can utilize capacity better reducing the number of vehicles necessary to transport a given number of people.
I can understand why the US is so excited for self-driving cars...
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