Is Your Community Preparing for Autonomous Vehicles?

At the unveiling of a futuristic vehicle at the North American International Auto Show last week, it was easy to notice many cars and trucks equipped with various degrees of autonomous capability. I saw numerous sensors and cameras mounted on vehicle bodies. My friends who attended CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas this month told me that the technologies on display there made you feel that self-driving vehicles are real and just around the corner.

Despite a few high-profile crashes involving autonomous vehicles in the recent past, development of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) is alive and well. While the industry and consumers are wondering when driverless cars will be on the market, communities are asking if we are prepared for this transformation.

Dealing with uncertainties

The deployment of CAVs may affect communities and regions in very powerful ways. There are a lot of uncertainties. Will they increase or reduce traffic volumes? Will they help create a more pleasant built environment? Will they induce further shifts in our economy? Who may lose jobs? What new jobs will be created? Will this shift favor only those with the resources to deploy innovative technology and leave the more vulnerable behind? What policies are needed to support the best results?

The conversation about CAVs is not just about technology. The real question is how we use technological innovation for the public good. At the end of the day, it’s about people. We need to maximize CAV benefits for better communities and higher quality of life for everyone in our region.

Land-use planning

In addition to transportation, CAVs will also impact land-use planning, one of the primary responsibilities for local governments. The effective allocation of precious land for various uses is key to creating healthy communities. CAVs have the potential to reduce the amount of land required for transportation as vehicles can travel faster and closer to each other.

When cars drive themselves, less parking will be required close to destinations. Parking spaces can be reduced, consolidated, and placed on lower-value land. The impact will be significant. It is estimated that there are three non-residential parking spots for every vehicle on the road in the U.S. today.

In the age of autonomous vehicles, parking spaces might be converted to other uses.

Reducing the space required for transportation has great potential to free up land for other more enjoyable and often higher-value uses, such as commercial and office buildings for businesses, apartments, condominiums, and houses for residents. Space for parks, recreation, and sidewalks for pedestrians and visitors may also increase. Reduced parking should bring activities closer to each other, mixing land uses, improving accessibility to destinations, and creating a better environment overall which, in turn, could increase property values. The result should be positive for development and redevelopment of communities.

As CAVs continue to develop and deploy, how should communities redevelop obsolete parking space into other uses? Pick-up and drop-off will be more important than parking. Good urban design practice is needed to make the use of curbs more efficient. Who owns what space? Who has the right to use it? And how to pay for it? For new development projects, should communities relax parking requirements in exchange for better curb design and management? The goal is to create an enjoyable environment for urban space users to walk, bike, travel, stay, and interact.

Urban Design

Urban design solutions can help. Alleys and off-street loading areas separate truck deliveries from curbside traffic lanes. The curbside has always been a place to pick up and drop off passengers and goods. More recently, the curb has increasingly become the domain of bike sharing, e-scooters, and ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft. Some cities have already set aside space for these new services.

The curb could become the most valuable space that a community owns. It needs to be well-designed for multiple modes of transportation, including cars and trucks, buses, bikes, and pedestrians. In fact, the curb may become the hub for connecting multiple modes effectively. Communities need to have new ways to design future curbs and create new ways to charge for curb usage and experiment with technology that adjusts prices based on demand. CAVs and related services will bring a sea of changes in how we design buildings and space. We don’t want to plan and design communities that will not meet the needs of the future.

Data

Enormous amounts of data will be collected as CAVs are developed and implemented. Availability, transparency, and sharing of data will be very powerful. Urban data needs to be a public asset. Data infrastructure needs to be open and beneficial to the public, ranging from using the transportation system to planning for a better future. Data enhance innovation but also need to protect the public. Mobility companies should work with communities on data exchange.

Flexibility

We need to “connect the dots” and find solutions that make sense of an array of emerging facts. However, the complex components and the interactions among them may bring different results in the short-term versus the long-term. Evolutions are often surprising. Communities need to be flexible to retain a capacity for surprise, which is the nature of innovation and creativity. Technology has unintended consequences. Sometimes they are great, other times not. Communities must find ways to ease into the future.