People who are authorities on autonomous vehicles (AVs) often say a major benefit will be the accompanying mass reduction in parking needed.
And replacing parking with places where people can socialize, lounge, and generally enjoy living does indeed sound like a utopian vision for our cities of the future.
But new research from the University of California, Santa Cruz in the current issue of Transport Policy finds a dark side when AVs replace all that wasteful parking. Author Adam Millard-Ball notes that AVs would be able to cruise around city streets – completely devoid of people – at less cost than having to pay to park during that time.
Science Daily claims that “Millard-Ball is the first researcher to analyze the combined impact of parking costs and self-driving cars on city centers, where the cost and availability of parking is the only tool that effectively restricts car travel.”
Under the best-case scenario, the presence of as few as 2,000 self-driving cars in downtown San Francisco will slow traffic to less than 2 miles per hour, according to Millard-Ball, who uses game theory and a traffic micro-simulation model to generate his predictions.
“It just takes a minority to gum things up,” he said, recalling the congestion caused at airports by motorists cruising the “arrivals” area to avoid paying for parking: “Drivers would go as slowly as possible so they wouldn’t have to drive around again.” Free cell-phone parking areas, coupled with strict enforcement in loading areas, relieved the airport snarls, but cities will be hard-pressed to provide remote parking areas for self-driving cars at rates lower than the cost of cruising — which Millard-Ball estimates at 50 cents per hour.
He makes the excellent recommendation that the introduction of AVs presents the window needed for places to finally implement congestion pricing, which could raise badly needed revenue for transportation improvements. Since the public has been habitualized to expect road use to be essentially free, it fights against congestion pricing and therefore politicians don’t have the will to make it an issue. But since the public, in theory, wouldn’t own the AVs, there would be an opportunity to charge for entering busy zones and on a per-mile basis.
With approximately a third of land in cities clogged by parking space, AVs present a prime opportunity to reutilize prime real estate. As Alain Kornhauser of Princeton says, “Having parking wedded or close to where people spend time, that’s going to be a thing of the past.”
Let’s just hope it doesn’t translate into having empty vehicles driving close to where people spend time.
Also see a good short UC Santa Cruz video about this research here. Photo of Tampa International Airport by Tom Driggers/Flickr.