(Autonomous) car-culture and the American city
Will autonomous vehicles really change the relationship between cars and the city?
An oft-repeated future benefit of autonomous vehicles (AVs), for cities in particular, is that they will free up significant amount of land currently devoted to moving and storing cars.
But self-driving cars are still cars, and it is the private automobile that drove (and still drives) the construction of sprawl in post-WWII America.
I find the notion that self-driving cars will strengthen cities, and urbanism in general, in the United States to be optimistic. The most likely outcome will be mixed: newly available land in cities will encourage infill development (a positive), while the increased convenience of using a car will reinforce the American pattern of sprawl (a negative).
There are two primary types of land that will be freed from the reduction of cars: car storage in surface and garage parking lots, and street space, both from removing on-street parking and the ability to reduce the number of lanes and their width because of automation.
Having more developable land in city centers will be a boon to private developers. On the positive side, many cities will have a rare chance to stitch back together center cities destroyed during the dark days of urban renewal. Less positively, development on this newly liberated and highly valuable land will likely look very similar to the kinds of large-scale developments we see in cities today: upscale apartments, condos, offices with very occasional investments in the commons.
More worrisome, there is no reason why autonomous vehicles will reduce the construction patterns of sprawl. In fact, they may even reinforce them. If commuters no longer have to drive themselves from suburb to office and can be productive on the road, a long commute is less a impediment. Longer commutes are not desirable, as they contribute to increased emissions and social isolation, and are, by their very nature, anti-urbanist.
Paradoxically, then, AVs may both reverse and magnify the effect that cars have had on American cities in the 20th century.
