We’re always being told how self-driving cars will reward us with almost unimaginable benefits when they finally hit the streets. Aside from the sheer convenience of being chauffeured everywhere by artificial intelligence (AI), there’s the safety factor of not having error-prone humans behind the wheel, not to mention how environmentally friendly driverless electric vehicles could be.
But there’s also another advantage to not driving our own vehicles around, and it’s one that could have a vast impact on the look, feel, and function of the cities that we live in — parking.
Put simply, if we’re not driving our own vehicles to and from destinations any more, we won’t need to park idle vehicles on public streets or in car parks — something that could radically change the vibe of congested urban spaces. “The biggest impact is going to be on parking. We aren’t going to need it, definitely not in the places we have it now,” Alain L. Kornhauser, a researcher in autonomous vehicles at Princeton University, told Patrick Sisson at Curbed.
“Having parking wedded or close to where people spend time, that’s going to be a thing of the past. If I go to a football game, my car doesn’t need to stay with me. If I’m at the office, it doesn’t need to be there. The current shopping centre with the sea of parking around it, that’s dead.”
While the extreme case of totally empty car parks and city streets with no stationary vehicles on them would probably require people to fully let go of personal car ownership — something many people won’t feel comfortable doing, in the near future, at least, even moderate uptake of self-driving vehicles would constitute an improvement to clogged urban real estate jam-packed with stationary metal and rubber.
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