On Self-Driving Cars, Cities, and Aviation
My children will never have to learn how to drive.
Self-driving cars are coming — and faster than most people thought. Uber revealed that it has been testing its self-driving Ford Fusion in Pittsburgh, PA for the last few months and is continuing its research there. Tesla’s autopilot is a nice example of very simple, very narrow self-driving features, and there are videos of people sleeping in their cars while they commute to work. A convoy of self-driving trucks recently completed its first trip across borders in Europe.
Our self-driving future is on the horizon (assuming regulators don’t kill it, something Uber, Google, and Ford are fighting against) and its implications go far beyond automation of Uber drivers and nice options for wealthy car owners.
The End of Car Ownership
Private car ownership makes sense if you need somebody to drive a car — it does not if you do not need somebody to drive the car. We’ve already seen that fewer young people are opting to own cars when presented with viable alternatives like Uber and Lyft (and in Europe, denser cities less-reliant on freeways make walking and biking easier).
Just imagine the Uber model taken to the extreme. Nobody will own cars except for companies that specialize in getting people around. This could be based on a subscription-model, like a cooperative, or an on-demand model, like Uber or Lyft today. You will go into your phone, press a button, and a car will show up at your house in a couple of minutes. For “downtime” hours, these cars will be routed to areas in which they’ll be used more efficiently. More cars will be available in high-density residential areas before the morning commute and will be in business districts during lunch time. Cars will automatically be routed near airports during times of high arrivals and away from them in the early morning when fewer flights are arriving.
The car I currently own will be the last that I will have to own. That money spent every month on insurance, gas, and car payments will go towards a co-op, a service like, Uber, and living in a home with a parking spot or a garage will be considerably less important to me.
Construction, Garages, and Secondary/Tertiary Industries
Parking garages may be used for extreme downtime but most will become irrelevant. Why would you need structures devoted to cars remaining unused while people work or go shopping if the car can go off and pick somebody else up or run errands for people while they aren’t using it?
(Take note that one of the best companies to own in the 1990s and early 2000s was a parking lot/garage company. Low rent, low overhead, and high demand. This is already less-often the case.)
Parking structures will largely become irrelevant, which will further remove the stressors of visiting dense neighborhoods of cities for those who don’t live near them. Going downtown or to the cultural district will be less of a hassle because you won’t have to think about where to park your car (and it won’t be thought of as a cost to Uber or Lyft there, it will be the norm).
This will open up real estate in cities. Lots formerly devoted to parking and parking garages can be repurposed for apartments and offices as the cost of living in a city (transit-wise) continues to be dropped and more people will move to cities. Parking lanes will be reduced or turned into drop-off lanes, reclaiming part of the street for pedestrians and bikers.
Purchasers and renters will put less weight in living in places with garages or dedicated parking spots. Garages in residential units can be repurposed as in-law suites, home-offices (further eliminating the need for the commute), or other rooms. The face of residential real estate will change drastically.
Secondary and tertiary industries to car ownership will be affected, as well. Meter maids will be a thing of the past, thankfully. Maintenance garages will either contract directly with or just be operated by the self-driving car companies or cooperatives. You won’t be able to go to Costco and buy tires anymore because those will just be bought directly by Uber and installed in Uber garages. Gas stations (recharging stations?) will turn into mere convenience stores or fall into a similar model as garages. The same goes for car washes, car dealerships, body shops, and anything directly, or indirectly, dependent on individual car ownership. These industries probably won’t disappear entirely, their customers will simply change and they’ll melt into the background as they shift from consumer-oriented to enterprise-oriented.
The Commute Is Killing You — Kill the Commute
The exodus to the suburbs in the late-20th Century was driven by many factors but one of those was the rise of the car, the establishment of the Interstate Highway System, and companies moving from offices in skyscrapers downtown to campuses and office parks in the suburbs. With this grew the development of the existential dread associated with the morning commute. There’s a reason that Office Space opens with the miserable Dallas morning traffic. People identify with this dread, boredom, and anxiety.
Commuting sucks not because we are inherently opposed to the idea of going to work — commuting sucks because driving is stressful (so is sharing a bus or subway full of other people). Even more, we don’t psychologically get used to commuting — but we do get used to a smaller house closer to work.
If you can sleep in your car during the commute or share it with one or two friends without having to deal with the anxiety, high blood pressure, and stress that comes with the morning commute, it may make more sense to live further away from work as more companies return to cities. The commute as we know it will die as a ride-sharing model becomes less about an appointed driver and more about a car that drives 3 or 4 people (or just one person, for a premium) to work. You can catch up on your sleep, work on the report needed once you get in, or just enjoy coffee and talk to your friends and colleagues while the car deals with the once-stressful component of driving.
This is also going to change long-distance driving for the better. Driving ten hours through the night between Pittsburgh and Chicago is less of a big deal if everybody can sleep. Services with human-driven buses equipped with beds are already popping up in California as response to lack of good alternatives. The push for effective rail will become irrelevant as interstate highways are turned into self-driving bus and car systems akin to train systems.
The Painful Death of the Regional Airlines
This is going to put pressure on already-strapped regional airlines. A nonstop flight between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia costs around $300 right now for one person and takes ~3 hours once you factor in TSA lines, getting to and from the airport, and the flight time. Driving between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia on a self-driving sleeper bus would take 5 hours and would likely cost considerably less (a Megabus between the two costs well less than $100/person). Commuter and shuttle airliners will continue to consolidate and go bankrupt and will have to specialize, focusing on a business and high-end demographic for whom time is extremely valuable. They’ll then face tougher competition from private jet companies like JetSmarter. The regional airline as we currently know it — cramped, uncomfortable, late, dirty CRJs with underpaid crews and service more determined by the Essential Air Service than by market demand — will die.
If they’re smart, the major airlines, currently dependent on regional carriers to act as feeders to hubs, will partner with sleeper bus and self-driving car companies or will run their own services to hub cities. You could pay $800 for a PIT-PHL-LHR flight, or you could pay $600 for an overnight bus to PHL from PIT and then a flight to LHR.
We’re astonishingly bad at predicting the future, so I don’t want to make specific prescriptions for how things will turn out. Given past-trends and given how much the modern city is built around the city and the freeway, we should expect massive changes to our daily lives for the better.
Kudos to Geoff Graham for some great thoughts on the role self-driving cars will play in density and construction. Geoff has some great thoughts at his blog about the effects that self-driving cars will have on pedestrians. His background in community development and construction makes his insight particularly interesting. I recommend checking his blog out.
