Will this change make city living more or less desirable?
A few forces could be at work here:
* Parking lots in major cities are free'd up because they no longer make sense creating more housing real estate. City living is more affordable.
* Traffic Congestion is reduced so commutes are shorter creating more demand for suburb living.
* Distances feel shorter because they are no longer inconvenient so living outside the city makes more sense - more suburb demand.
* City living gets even more desirable because of the abundance of cheap self-driving cabs not available in more rural areas - city prices go up.
* More?
I'm sure some of these things will have a very little impact while others will have huge impact. I just wonder about the net result. Any speculation?
Said in another way, if the car can get there quickly it'll be off the streets sooner and another one will take its spot.
Also a "perfect" driver wouldn't make the stupid mistakes ppl do all the time, the most annoying one staring at gory accidents. And even accidents wouldn't occur as often.
But this all assumes that the AI gets even more sophisticated.
I'm more in the camp of the GP. I think a big reason why people live close to work, take public transit and go without a car are all the things the GP described. Take those away and suddenly using your self-driving car to commute doesn't sound so bad. That equals a HUGE increase in car demand.
In fact, I think that if car ownership is cheaper, journeys can be made by anybody, and the experience is less stressful, many more people will travel by car.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if autonomous cars produce even worse congestion than today.
Also, if the car is self-driving, people will be want to make more trips. For example, if we send their cars back home once they got to work, we'll save on parking, but get more congestion. I'd love to automatically send my car to a mechanic when needed, what's also more congestion... I'm sure people will find lots of good reasons for sending their cars around.
Anyway, what will probably reduce congestion is a smart bus system. Imagine a small bus that takes you door to door, and takes only slightly more time to get there than your own car, but is way cheaper. I've seen that on the news just recently, I think it's Japan trying it.
There is a possibility to optimize transport better using self driving cars but we may not actually take advantage of it. Even things like sharing self driving cars may not work in areas with larger sprawl because the probability of two people looking for the "same" ride within a certain time window and geographical area is small. In the city it's more likely but there are already solutions such as bicycles and public transport that work fairly well in dense areas.
It is very difficult to predict the impact. Perhaps impossible.
One interesting social effect of self driving cars is I only see my bosses boss about every three months because he lives and works several hundred miles away, and I have coworkers I've never met in person. (note, not a remote job, just a typical "dozens of billions of dollars" non-tech mega corporation). Self driving cars mean I'd probably be stuck sitting in a car while working for an entire day to meet people face to face. For people who still believe in mystical laying on of hands, self driving cars would likely explode the amount of it that goes on, as I've found it weirdly true that famous projects are international, but its fractally similar in that you're also more likely to have a boss thats 30 miles away, or a bosses boss 800 miles away, not the proverbial instantaneous jump from the entire company in one skyscraper to fully distributed. Yes, a self driving car would be useless if my boss was in China, but things haven't spread out geographically that fast.
I guess the bigger question is, will subways have as much demand once self-driving cars become big? Obviously, no, if the cost for hailing a self-driving car becomes almost as inexpensive as a subway. But there are things the city of New York could do to impact that, such as reduce street capacity (i.e. increasing pedestrian and bike capacity).
But that's just New York. Everywhere else in the U.S. where mass transit is not a daily option, automated cars will be a daily habit. Inevitably, as more and more people migrate to New York and expect automated cars to be the default option, it's hard to imagine subways (and buses) winning out, absent some major limitation in self-driving car production or capability.
New York will always be an anomaly...but yes, I'd have to agree with your speculation that suburban living would become much more attractive without having to worry about car ownership or driving. And this would most definitely impact commuters to New York. But if self-driving cars become a ubiquitous option, will there be the political appetite to continue subsidizing mass transit rail, such as the kind that is currently used to bring in upstate workers to the city today?
New York City is pretty close to the maximum limit of car capacity it can support. For one thing there are only so many cars that can travel on so many lanes through bridges and tunnels. If you tried to add more lanes, you'd have the same kind of problems connecting those to surface streets that you get in the "Jetsons in London" scenario.
Robert Moses did have some plans for urban removal on the southern side of midtown to accomodate more traffic (and destroy traffic demand) but it didn't happen.
(Note the response to the car in most American cities was urban removal -- you can often find a big empty space in a second or third tier city that has a 'civic center' plopped down on it.)
Manhattan looks pretty much the same today with all the cabs that it would look like with self-driving cars.
1. Until all cars are self-driving, we will still need traffic lights, and so intersections will still be a big bottleneck.
2. Self driving cars may be able however to maintain closer following distances since they have quicker reaction times.
3. Jaywalking has the potential to cause huge traffic problems because pedestrians will know that self driving cars won't hit them.
4. Parking can be made more efficient by sharing cars. This is already happening in Berlin and other cities with floating carsharing systems.
5. Parking can also be made a lot more efficient if there are self-driving parking lots or areas marked off on the street, and the self-driving cars have a protocol to cooperate with parking. Parallel parked cars can be parked bumper-to-bumper, and they all just scoot out of the way to let someone out. In a lot, cars can park much more closely packed left-right since doors don't need to open, and the driving lanes can be reduced or eliminated if cars cooperate to get out of the way when one has to leave. This may free up street area to add extra driving lanes.
6. More people will probably share rides with a self driving Uber Pool/Lyft line type model.
7. If cars are shared, a lot of the fleet can be very small two or even one seat cars that take up less space in the road and parking.
8. Car interiors will resemble an office workstation. With mobile internet, very long commutes will be acceptable if the car is a fairly comfortable mobile office.
This means greater density is possible increasing the value of central real estate. But also means that further commutes are much faster, increasing the value of outlying real estate? Or does it, what does this suggest for real estate investing?
I'd love to have underground streets.... But $$$....
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/why-china-is-tunneling-a-mind...
The difficulty of public works projects in the US is a legitimate question. But it's a separate question from what self driving cars will make possible (especially for the 90%+ of people who live outside the US).
Personally, I wouldn't mind a 1.5 hour commute each way if I could code the whole time rather than drive, and if my car was electric.
There may be a bit of overlap with self-driving ICE cars, though. I'm wondering if that would be more difficult to handle.
Either way, I had been looking for this story, ever since people started talking about modern self-driving cars. Don't know how it slipped through.
Self driving cars could encourage sprawl by making commuting long distances more practical. If you could be working during your commute instead of driving, and didn't need to find parking once you arrive, a 2-hour commute could become practical. That would intensify the "car culture" that currently drives municipal planning, but would reduce the harmful effects. As you mention, less space wasted on parking, less congestion etc.
On the other hand, driverless cars will be a big boost for Uber, Lyft, Zipcar, GetAround and the like. That could make city living more desirable, because car-on-demand only works well when there are lots of available cars nearby. Folks that live out in the boonies would still have to own their own cars, and so wouldn't benefit as much from the technology as city-dwellers. Also, spending less space on parking has a bigger effect in the city where space is already tight, so we might see even higher density in the inner city.
I'm a member of a typical 2 car suburban family. I work and my wife is a stay-at-home mom. Truthfully, I only need a car to get myself to and from work, while my wife needs a car for ferrying kids to and from school (and activities), shopping, errands, etc. Thus, we need two cars.
My car spends most of its day sitting in the parking lot at my office building, unneeded. However, if I can drive myself to work and then order my car to drive itself home for my wife to use (who would hopefully send the car to come and fetch me at the end of the workday), we could easily become a one car family. Which would be nice. Of course, I live about a half an hour from my workplace -- this might not work as well with a 2 hour commute.
I expect the "Soccer Mom" occupation to disappear.
In any case, these technologies won't come along in time to help my current situation. I do hope SDCs become generally available in time to prevent an elderly jcadam from plowing into a farmer's market sometime in the 2050s/2060s. Hey, I guess 'senior mobility' would be another good application of SDCs.
* Will more remote vacation destinations, including owning a second home in these areas, be more in demand? Buying or renting a vacation house that's a 5-6 hour drive away may not be as ideal if you have to drive yourself there. If you own or can rent a self driving car though, the trip may not seem quite as far. Longer road trips may become more popular, and geographical far places may feel closer than they used to. Demand in coastal or mountainous locations currently far removed from cities may increase.
But think of the transition from horse to automobile. If you didn't predict the invention of the airplane, your guesses about transportation in the future would have been pretty far off.
I think the questions to ask are: -why will anyone commute to work in the future, when telecommuting becomes more and more lifelike? -what will "work" even look like? We can't be that far away from most service jobs being replaced by computers/robots. -Why would anyone go shopping, when anything they want can be delivered to them instantly or even printed on-site?
I suspect that most cities that have good public transport would suffer similarly as commuters are tempted back onto the roads. The inevitable response would be London-style congestion charging becoming widespread, because few large European-style cities would cope with any significant fraction of the population switching from public transport to self-driving cars. In the end, due to such charging, I suspect we'd end up back in a similar status quo once the dust had settled, with most people still taking public transport.
On the other had, my kids would probably love to be able to get around the suburbs without me needing to taxi them.
You're looking at an ~85% drop in the number of cars required (today only ~15% of cars are on the road at peak times). The cars are used heavily in the day, but still need to park somewhere at night. Either way, 85% less parking required. This can probably be fulfilled without street parking. Easier to have centralized charging without street parking.
With intelligent driving, you can probably get away with single-lane streets (each way), with either an expanded turning lane at the corners, or preferably round-abouts.
This leads to a lot more real estate available in cities. Something like 20% more, due to single streets and less parking. That's a big increase in quantity supplied, leading to a big price drop.
Net, everyone gains an hour or two each day.
Assuming the SDC is reasonably cheap to run:
- The school run changes significantly. You don't need to live quite so near school any more. Yes, there is such a thing as the school bus, but that ties everyone to the same schedule and some parents are not comfortable with sending smaller kids on it. Depends a lot on the culture where this SDC lands. (Where I live, kids walk themselves to school. I lived in places where you sent kids on public transport, too. Or a school bus.) In any case, it means you don't have to be with the kid as they go to school. And they can do whatever after school activity they like, it doesn't need coordination with public transport.
- You can get drunk anywhere, not just where there are cabs/trains/buses nearby. You can keep partying until you literally faint in your car.
- You can live quite far away from work. An SDC with a bed could be a comfy commute. You can get things done while commuting. Heck, someone will build a house where the bedroom moves (or just park in your garage, but someone will build it in). Brush your teeth, get into your car, wake up where you need to be.
- You don't even need a fixed address if your SDC is a camper van. Combine it with a remote job and you are on a constant tour. I reckon someone will do this reasonably soon and show us.
- Think of all the things that are limited by having to go home afterwards (clubbing), or are normally quite remote (eg race tracks). They can all be made more attractive if nobody feels they're wasting time getting to them. It's possible there will be extra rush hours during each day.
* Centralized parking at the neighborhood level for cars to be out of sight and charging while not needed. Services could be built off of this concept to handle cleaning, maintenance, etc.
* Reduction in need for street parking in busy areas. Cars can drive themselves away to "orbit" or be parked while the owner is shopping/eating/etc. This allows for alternate uses for the space ... bike lanes, or just better pedestrian zones.
* Smaller lot sizes are possible for homes if driveways and large garages are not needed/downsized. Smaller parking lots for apartment/condos are also possible. This makes denser real estate developments possible, especially in suburban areas.
In city centers the worst externality of cars is the space they hog. Self-driving electric cars won't fix that; instead they are likely to increase the utilization of that space: unlike with humans where congested traffic suggests the drivers to look for alternative options such as mass transit, an empty car doesn't mind waiting in traffic by itself.
Suburbia is likely to expand further because if you can work a few hours in your car that means you can afford to live further away in a cheaper location. And school kids can get to school in a car by themselves, so the total number of automotive miles is likely to go up.
So if the closest public library is 5 miles down the interstate, a kid living there can get a similar life experience to my burb where the library was about 10 minute bike ride away. Wanna go to the park, fine. Wanna go to the library, fine. If kids still hang out at the mall, they can go there too. Friends house is 7 miles away? The self driving car won't care.
And a second-level social effect is the self driving car may eliminate helicopter parent attitudes toward kids being unsupervised... Well, maybe.
Another social effect people have not discussed is employers love sick employees to show up to work, cough on everyone to demonstrate their devotion to the cause, not to mention primate dominance (I can make you work when you're near dead, not vice versa). Often when I call in sick its not because I can't sit quietly and appear to be busy, similar to sitting on my couch, its because I literally can't safely drive when I'm this sick or medicated or sleepless or vomiting or whatever. Self driving cars mean workplaces are going to be even more like a sweatshop from centuries past at least WRT illness. The lower classes packed cheek to jowl sneezing and coughing on each other while moaning in pain... There are people who get off on other people suffering like that and they're going to really like self driving cars.
Urban roads in the US and Canada are quite wide and probably make it much easier to make an effective and safe transportation solution out of this technology. This isn't the case in Europe where urban roads are considerably narrower, regardless of city size. The same can be said about Japan as a whole and other large asian metro areas - Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, Beijing, Seoul. Much tougher.
Europe and Japan also have a much denser rail networks than most of the US, which in turn will cause a different impact on real estate.
Driverless urban buses will probably be adopted much earlier as there are exclusive bus lanes in most medium and large metro areas throughout the world but I don't see it changing the dynamics in a fundamental way.
If you live in the vast majority of the landmass that has no public transportation, your commute isn't long enough for a self-driving car to register on the factors in where you live. If you live in places with great public transportation, then it seems like it matters less--you now inherit issues (and cost) with parking and maintenance you didn't have before.
If you're looking for real estate impact, consider the aging population and the ability of self-driving cars to keep people in their houses longer than they normally would. Along with the factors above, I see the big beneficiaries being the service providers (anything from Uber to grocery stores to healthcare providers) who can now optimize location and distribution differently.
Buildings will continue to exist, this will only have an effect on large parking lots which will be torn down and replaced by housing, but these are already rare enough in cities.
> Traffic Congestion is reduced so commutes are shorter creating more demand for suburb living.
If you have to travel 30-50 km to the city centres, even autonomous cars will not solve the issue that this distance needs time for travel.
On the other hand if transportation is more transparent then they may prefer the lower cost of suburbs and travel more.
There's different forces pulling in different directions, so it's hard to pick which way it will go.
What will really change real estate patterns is increased support for telecommuting, both with tools and cultural acceptance.
1. You can, literally, not build enough highways for the demand. As you rack up lanes buildings get further away from each other. This means more drivers and more driving. Attempts to elevate or bury highways are only cost effective in very specific circumstances.
2. Peak flow (cars per minute) is at around 80km/hr, although sometimes increasing flow further is only a temporary salve, as exit points (the city downtown streets) block.
3. People are likely to respond to incentives. For example, dynamic pricing on the 407, higher rates during rush hour have pushed out enough traffic to maintain a high flow, even during rush hour. (Though some argue that this has resulted in more spillover to the 401, the closest competing route. I've yet to see a competent paper proving this either way.)
Consider that Uber already has ride sharing code in test markets. With algorithms that work together to minimize driving friction, and with surge pricing to deal with supply and demand at peak rush hour here is what I envision:
1. Way more capacity to get close to the city.
2. Much more expensive to get into the city, as capacity increases to the perimeter. With surge pricing, only the very rich will be able to afford a car alone. The poor will either get to the downtown core with a denser option (like a self driving bus) or they will get into the city at an earlier time, even if it means waiting around for work to start. Also, I see "surge insurance" being popular with the poor, since a 10x commute on a single bad day (due to weather or a unexpected road closure).
So where does this leave us? In the short term the core get's more expensive. The closure of a few parking lots is not going to make up for the built in surge pricing of self driving cars. When the price goes up, some companies move to the edge of the core. Leading prices to go up there as well.
The people that really get hosed are the people in the zone just outside of that. Suburban homes no longer command a large premium, since what would have been an unthinkable distance previous years (say, 175kms from core) is now completely reasonable. A software developer can sit alone in a self driving car that drives 150 km/h for an hour, get some work done, then pick up some co-passangers for the last 25kms to offset the cost. Get in work by 10:30am leave by 4:00pm, get some work done on the way home. Maybe watch a show. By 5:30 he's on his hobby farm.
Now all of this is in a relative context. If the Canadian housing market is too bubbly, and across the board it goes down then I'm just arguing it will go down more in the suburbs than elsewhere.
