The Great Mobility Disruption and The Future of Parking in Detroit

[Junjie]

There are a lot of issues with self-driving cars that could make them big challenges for cities:

- If we assume that there will be some sort of network of shared cars driving around, then we need to know who is paying for this. And remember that Uber lost $2 billion last year. Building our cities around the assumption that cheap individual taxis will be available to everyone might not be so smart.

- More likely, people will still buy their own cars because they want them to not have other people's trash, smell, etc. in them and want them to be available at all times rather than waiting on the curb for an available car to drive up. Then, you still need parking. A few people might send their cars home for the day or out to do errands [[though this means the car isn't available if they suddenly need it), but now you're just increasing traffic.

- Cities are dense. Cars are big and take up a lot of space. In a major city, self-driving cars will be just as out of place as human-driven cars are today. You cannot physically fit the number of cars needed for everyone to commute by car into a city's downtown. We will still need transit to serve these areas effectively, and self-driving buses would allow us to run twice as much bus service at the same cost as today [[most of the cost is the driver), but self-driving cars are already being used as the newest "don't bother investing in transit" excuse.

- To the degree that self-driving cars give everyone a "personal chauffeur," they will also make traffic worse for everyone. Currently, the annoyance of driving is an incentive to limit your trips. Better to make one trip with three stops. Once you can just surf the net or read or sleep or whatever while your car drives, why not just take three trips? When driving becomes costless in terms of time, people will drive a lot more.

On the other hand:

- A lot fewer people will die in accidents.

- Old, disabled, and young people living in areas that make their residents captive drivers [[e.g. suburbs with no other realistic transportation options) will have much more freedom.

- Everyone can check Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram instead of being forced to observe the world around them while driving.

So there are a few positives.