What will self-driving cars do to cities?
jonathannen.com
jonathannen.com
Conversely for a shared-fleet-subscription model you will pay a much more utility-like rate (or they will price the subscription based on utility like analysis). Now there will be a much more direct correlation to the distances you travel and the price you pay.
Especially since commuting will have the peak-utilization effect on pricing that all shared services from frame-relay networks to ec2 autoscaling exhibit. People will be able to directly price the cost of living in location X vs. location Y and make a much more informed decision (I can pay $250/month on my mortgage for a 3rd bedroom in a home closer to work, or I can pay $300/month for my 45-minute rush-hour service charge). Overall more accurate pricing will dramatically skew toward density.
Maybe in the united states, but in most Europe the highest cost for owning a car is gas.
10 miles a day or 50 miles a day can make easily a difference at the end of the year of thousands of euro.
The reason is simple. You can fit 5 to 10x more people in the land area of a big house in a city, at least.
You could argue that with this greater efficiency will come a jevons paradox like greater consumption. And that will probably be true in-aggregate, but I think thats going to skew toward more short trips per day (off-peak) than longer commutes (peak).
There are also fixed costs: parking (including at your residence, by way of dedicated real-estate), registration, and the like.
Depreciation is often hugely underappreciated, but if your car's life is based on the mileage driven (which to a large extent it is) then increasing the miles driven by a factor of five will reduce the car's life proportionately, and increase the frequency with which you have to replace the vehicle.
This isn't a currently realised cash cost, but it is in fact a real cost.
The inflection point between needing to own or not needing to own a car is a large one. The ability to foregoe the real-estate dedication of a driveway and garage accounts for 1/3 or more of many lots or structure area.
For example, will people be willing to commute longer distances? Will smaller cities outside larger metropolitan areas become more popular?
That would have a huge effect.
90 mile circle around London covers the entire south east of the UK pretty much.
90 miles from Leeds covers Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham,bradford and Hull which is much of all the major cities outside of London in the midlands/north.
I would probably prefer my Dönercopter delivery.
Automation to that degree would likely have wiped out many other non-driving jobs in the city, or made them such that doing the job remotely was possible.
This is all things equal, and assuming that the advent of self-driving cars doesn't also bring a whole new economy/job market.
I think this is fairly unlikely to stay a permanent source of inequality between classes of people. I also think it is very likely that people who don't notice the wage reactions will continue to complain about it indefinitely, though.
I'd be happy to pay triple my current commute expense in return for two things:
1) A vehicle that picks me up on-demand from my home and which goes exactly where I'm headed, so I don't have to commute to and from BART.
2) A vehicle populated only by other paying customers, with a mechanism to eject bad actors from the system.
As self-driving cars are introduced, places that previously had terrible public transport access, yet are still within a 45 min drive of CBDs via driving will have mini-booms.
There's a huge difference between meeting online and meeting offline. Online might become a venerable substitute for offline if VR/AR technology advances to the point where we can have the full experience of the other people sitting around the same table, i.e. their whole body language etc.
Funnily enough, a little while back my neighbour made the exact same point about Hoddle Street - in (say) twenty years the property values are going to see a massive shift because of changing technology in our cars. However I think it will be the move to electric cars that makes the real difference. No more fumes, no more grime covering every surface, far less noise. Add in reduced traffic because of self-driving tech and suddenly that property will be worth a packet.
Jeff Speck: Autonomous Vehicles & the Good City 10 rules
That will lead to lots of parking lots and garages being razed in favor of more useful buildings. That means more density in urban areas and potentially more pedestrian friendly cities.
Higher density means more electricity, water, and sewage usage.
I was looking for new office space a few months ago. I asked every real estate agent and commercial builder what they were thinking about self-driving cars. They all said that they weren't thinking about it as it was too far off to worry about. I was surprised at their lack of vision.
The commercial property developers I spoke to are building new properties right now and not thinking about how they might want to refit them in a few years. I agree that most of them aren't thinking ahead. I see buildings all around me being razed that were built just a few years ago. It's a myopic industry.
Maybe self-driving cars will hasten car-sharing. That seems to be Uber's long-term bet. We'll see.
People who can afford their own self-driving vehicle will probably have one (but maybe not multiple cars per family). Cars will likely still be seen as an expression of personality or status symbols.
Whether there is a driver or not (or whether the cars will be electrically powered or not) the cars will still occupy the same physical space, please read as parking, and if the same number of people will need to go from point A to point B and viceversa, roads will be needed as well.
Self-driving cars do nothing about the fact I need somewhere to put my gym bag during the work day or my gym and work bags while I go out in the evening. Or that I might need a carseat for a child. Or that I might like to keep an umbrella and change of clothes in my car. Or....
Any benefit to not having the static car is quickly mitigated by the inefficiency of storage shuffling for even a moderate amount of things.
It will free up the streets nevertheless. The reason you park your car nearby is so that you can walk to it. But if the car can go park itself and come back 10-15min from where you live in some big car park, you would probably as happy as if you had to walk 5-10min yourself.
Plus ownership isn't fully rational. Otherwise people wouldn't bury themselves into debt to own their house, pushing property prices up. Instead you would have cheap property you can rent.
Let's play it another way, let's assume that no self-driving car exists but that all humans (with the exception of those making a living as a driver) can afford a third party human driven car for all their movements/commuting.
This could be either an enormous fleet of Taxis (or Limousines) or Ubers, or each household having one or more cars and a corresponding number of employed drivers.
Still, if the way the city/economy works there is a need that 100,000 people move from point A to point B in a time range between 7 and 9 in the morning and that the same number of people go back from B to A between 17 and 19, the same amount of roads (and the space occupied by them) will be needed.
The operators will be incentivised to service maximum people with minimum number of cars. At any point where there is high demand, there would not be enough cars to service everyone. So again, those who can afford it would opt to hace their own cars.
If everyone is forced to use the self driving service, there comes the question of how the system prioritizes pickups, young vs old, healthy vs sick, the vulnerable etc.
So, I believe it will still settle into the more wealthy using an elite service or owning their own car and others using a system not too different from a public transportation system, only self-driven.
That will likely lead to similar dynamics of other transport modes:
1. A high-priced, high-amenity premium "first class" (perhaps "white glove") service, catering to upper-income / high-discretionary-spending households.
2. Possibly: a moderate-tier, principally professional-employment / shopping-oriented tier. The primary support for this will come from the businesses served by the livery, notably professional employers (a transport/commute perk) and upscale shopping districts (to increase in-store traffic). I'm presuming that brick-and-mortar retail will remain a thing, and given a less-than 10% incursion by e-commerce, this seems likely.
3. A bare-bones "economy" tier. This will be made intentionally bad, not because of price, but because any amenity enhancement will erode demand to the higher-priced tiers. This will be offered to low-income households, and possibly to noneconomic sectors (children, students, handicapped, elderly).
One characteristic of transport services dating to the dawn of large-scale passenger ship travel and rail service is that the lowest-tier amenities are made intentionally worse than necessary, for the logic outlined above.
The commercial airline market is one in which there is route competition between carriers ... and yet there remains a race-to-the-bottom dynamic in economy class (that is, third-class) accomodations.
If anything, an open-competition market will tend to further erode bottom-end margins. I also suspect it will tend to produce extralegal competitive dynamics, e.g., mob influence.
In many of the world (not familiar with the US), the minimum level of comfort is regulated and some consumers would probably go for even less comfort if airlines were allowed to provide it.
The fact that a "free market" (or generally: one devoid of regulation or moral buttress) seeks a particular level does not make that level good. Untreated wood rots, unpainted steel rusts. These are natural tendencies. I'll posit they're not preferable to alternatives.
EDIT: Also, what does "first class" entail in the context of self-driving cars? Most differentiation between travel classes is in the area of service by train/flight attendants. The only thing I could think of is the comfortableness of the seat and the amount of leg space.
The ultimate differentiator would likely be a dedicated chauffeur.
Self-driving cars will equalize this and it's a good thing. If you can take an affordable self driving taxi to the city you don't care about train connections any more and the key factors for choosing a home outside the city will change.
Cities are dendritic or networked structures. They can be defined as a locus of points with connections between them, both physical (as with transport networks), or logical -- the financial, cultural, social, political, communications, and other links between nodes.
Cities are characterised by greater nodal density than non-urban areas. Cities provide a superlinear return to scale, Cf. work of Geoffrey West (Santa Fe Institute) and others.
This is subject to limitations, ultimately an irreducible inter-nodal cost factor. An example of this would be the disease risks of major cities such as London and New York in the mid-19th century. London actually had a net-negative population replacement rate, excluding in-migration. That is, the city could not replace its population faster than it was dying out. The principle cause was disease, quite notably cholera epidemics, responsible for deaths up of to 50,000 people annually. It took the creation of the London Sewerage System (1870) for this to be addressed.
A similar history can be told of New York City. It had its first sanitation canal by the 1840s, but didn't have its first sewage treatment plant until 1903, and was still regularly dumping raw sewage into the Hudson River in the 1970s. (It now does so ... only irregularly.)
http://toilet-guru.com/nyc-sewer-system.php
New York (and Chicago) also saw the first use of the lift (elevator), which decreased the cost of vertical real estate, along with structural steel. The consequence being that those cities built up. By the 1950s, cheap petrol and booming auto sales made horizontal space cheap, and subsequent cities built out, notably also the Chicago area (which had land to expand into), Los Angeles, San Jose, Atlanta, and the Washington / Alexandria region.
New limits were reached with smog and traffic congestion levels, in suburbs. At the same time, crime and social problems were driving middle-class and wealthy residents from city centres. Policing costs and requirements, as well as greenfield infrastructure developments made sprawl more attractive than densification.
Self-driving, potentially electric, vehicles affect these dynamics a few different ways.
They may allow for more effective roadbed utilisation. Given traffic density in many cities, this may well be limited, and still likely cannot meet to density of urban bus, light-rail, or subway / heavy-rail systems.
They should reduce the requirements on residential and destination parking, by shifting parking to non-central regions. Parking may become denser and/or less deterministic -- it's not necessary that a specific vehicle is extracted, only that some vehicle is extracted.
Utilisation costs of transport likely shift toward marginal rather than fixed costs. That is, much of the present cost of private transport is a sunk value, whilst a distance- or time-based rental front-loads the full direct cost. This may discourage casual travel.
Transport use is very unevenly distributed through the day. Peak-load requirements are either un-met, are responded to with demand-pricing, or require a large unutilised capacity in off-hours.
A likely development of a multi-tiered service-class offering, as with rail, air, or ship transport. The lowest-level tier offering will be intentionally disincentivised to foster utilisation of higher-level tiers, in a private-enterprise system.
Elements of the service might be more or less reliable than current private transport.
I suspect on balance that denser rather than less dense construction will be incentivised, though it's hard to account for all factors, or arising disincentives.