Autonomous Vehicles Will Change the Way You Plan

Clarion Director Don Elliott, FAICP, recently joined Professor Shannon McDonald of Southern Illinois University and Zabe Bent of Nelson/Nygaard Consulting Associates to present a panel discussion of “Driverless Cars: Changing How You Plan.” Professor McDonald reviewed recent discussions of the Transportation Research Board, while Ms. Bent focused on insights from recent consulting assignments. Don’s presentation focused on the likely impacts of autonomous vehicles on local planners, and began with three insights:

1. Autonomous Vehicles are not “one thing.” The Society of Automotive Engineers defines six levels of autonomous vehicles (AVs), and only at the sixth level will the vehicle drive you to work while you read the paper and don’t pay attention to what the car is doing. Most of the vehicles planned for introduction in the near future are not at that level.
2. The impacts of AVs will depend heavily on whether they are individually owned or part of car sharing systems that reduce the number of vehicles on the road.
3. With 263 million non-AVs on the road today, it will be a long time before we live in a fully autonomous world – instead, we need to plan for a world in which roads, parking areas, and buildings need to be designed for a changing mix of AV and non-AV transportation.

Don identified some of the impacts that local planners should focus on in order to prepare for the gradually growing fleet of AVs likely to be arriving soon.

1. If AVs are individually owned rather than limited to shared-ride systems (which seems likely), the “lost time” of self-driven commuter trips goes down, and we may see significantly increased pressure for lower density sprawl at the edges of cities.
2. Whether they are owned privately or in shared systems, AVs are likely to have a negative impact on transit ridership, and regulating AVs to mitigate those impacts will be increasingly important.
3. Because some AVs will be in shared systems, the demand for parking spaces in commercial and business centers is likely to fall, and planners will probably be able to reduce or remove minimum parking requirements faster than they have to date.
4. However, AVs will still need staging areas during non-active periods – despite the hype, they will not all be gainfully employed all the time, because demands for mobility vary over the course of the day — so there will be pressure to repurpose parking lots and garages (as well as other properties) to serve as staging areas.
5. Demand for auto-related uses in valuable locations will likely drop over time. Look for slowly decreasing demand and shifts to lower-value locations for auto-body shops, gas stations, and car dealerships over time.
6. As the fleet mix shifts to AVs, there will be significant opportunities to redesign roadways with narrower lanes and more room for pedestrians and bicyclists – but remember that many non-AVs will be sharing the roads for a long time to come.
7. One of the first noticeable shifts will be for more “pick-up/drop-off” areas close to shopping and business locations – and it is likely that many on-street parking spaces will be repurposed so serve that need long before the majority of vehicles are AVs.