5 ms·

I'm hopeful that driverless cars will be a boon to cities, particularly to the many second-tier American cities whose formerly vibrant cores have been decimated

by pash 14y ago

I'm hopeful that driverless cars will be a boon to cities, particularly to the many second-tier American cities whose formerly vibrant cores have been decimated by the need to supply parking for suburban workers. For the past sixty years, suburbanization has increased demand for parking and fed a feedback loop that's destroyed urban density. More people driving means greater demand for parking, which means buildings get torn down for lots and parking structures. Nodes of activity spread farther apart, so more people drive, and drive more often, further increasing demand for parking. The result is a country of paved-over cities with more parking spaces than people [0]. Driverless cars have the potential to break the feedback loop by decoupling destinations from nearby parking, shifting parking out of central cities and freeing land for all the things that make urban living great. Perhaps the feedback loop will start working in the other direction. (I don't think driverless cars will lead to a redoubling of suburbanization, by the way, because I think big houses and wide open spaces are far down the list of reasons most suburbanites live in the suburbs.) 0. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/arts/design/taking-parking-lots-seriously-as-public-spaces.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/arts/design/taking-parking...

tocomment 14y ago
Why are big houses far down the list? What's high on the list?
- potatolicious 14y ago
  The perception and/or reality of safety. Suburban flight in the US didn't occur until long after cars became ubiquitous. People had the means to move to suburbs for years but didn't do so en masse until the urban cores started to rot. People moved out of cities when they became shitholes, and people stay out of cities out of a perception that they are shitholes. Said perception may be true or false depending on where you are. There is also the issue that for people with families, many urban centers have in the past few decades reconstituted and cleaned up, but without the infrastructure that families are looking for: e.g., schools. Suburban living is all about being safe from criminal hordes outside the gates - whether real or imagined.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    There is no coincidence that suburban flight coincided with desegregation.
    - mkr-hn 14y ago
      It's a coincidence by definition. Whether or not the two are linked is another matter, and someone has probably done research on it.
      - rayiner 14y ago
        The idiomatic phrase "it's no coincidence" means "it's more than just a coincidence."
        mkr-hn 14y ago
        I know. I'm saying you should offer more than a one-line assertion.
        rayiner 14y ago
        People were really racist in the 1960's, to the point where they wanted blacks to not use the same restrooms. They didn't suddenly stop being racist when cities were legally desegregated. What happened consequently was what you would expect if a bunch of racists were stuck in cities with a bunch of black people who were no longer confined to their separate areas.
        mkr-hn 14y ago
        I know the popular assertions. Was hoping you had some actual research.
    - paul_f 14y ago
      Are you suggesting people like big houses with large lawns in quiet suburban neighborhoods with great schools because they are racist?
- jrockway 14y ago
  Cost, I'm guessing. A studio apartment in Manhattan becomes a 5-bedroom house outside of the city. If you're willing to sit on NJ Transit or the LIRR for 3 hours a day, that is. (I don't see how self-driving cars are going to change commute times. There will still be traffic, and they'll still only go 60 miles an hour.)
  - tocomment 14y ago
    I think human driver overcompensating for braking ahead, and human reaction time creating traffic "waves" contributes significantly to traffic. (At least that's what I've heard). Also self driving cars wouldn't need as much distance between cars to be able to stop safely so you could physically fit more cars on a given stretch of road.
  - alex_young 14y ago
    Traffic doesn't move at 60 mph during rush hour though. Automated cars have the potential to reduce the lag in speedup after breaking, eliminate most accidents, and pick better routes, and all while letting you do other things with your time. Commute time is a huge reason to do this.
- GrantS 14y ago
  If I had to guess, I'd say better public schools, less crime, and affordable houses (which also makes bigger houses more affordable as a side effect).
- pash 14y ago
  My perception is that cost tops the list. That's partly about home size (why pay twice as much for a condo that's half the size?), but I think mostly about sheer high prices. [0] Cost is also tied up with the issue of public versus private schools, and it's that issue more than any other that in my experience is the reason urbanites become suburbanites. Then generalized negative perceptions of American cities (as cesspools of crime, noise, high taxes, etc.) keep many suburbanites away. Those perceptions are half-truths at best, but a perhaps even bigger problem is that for the great many people who haven't lived it, there's no consideration of the benefits of an urban lifestyle. Of course you're going to choose to live in the 'burbs if you only see the city's detriments and not also its commensurately higher (or better) advantages. 0. In cities like San Francisco, a lot of that cost is due to land-use regulation. But in a typical mid-sized Midwestern city like Cincinnati or Kansas City, where public transit is poor and parking is provided pretty much everywhere, only the true urban warriors try to get by without a car. So parking is a big driver of the cost of city living. Structured parking costs $40,000 or more per space, and median home prices are well under $200,000. Ten to twenty percent or more of the cost of a condo downtown is parking, and you still have to pay for a car. (And it should go without saying that the benefits of city living are greatly reduced if you need to drive a lot anyway.)
  - rayiner 14y ago
    The problem is cities are full of poor people, for various lamentable and not so lamentable reasons. That fact drives all the other things that drive people out of cities: crime, bad schools, etc. The sorry state of American cities is due in huge part to state distortion. The social services for the poor are heavily concentrated in the cities, so that's where they go (has the irony ever occurred to anyone that people complain about not being able to afford SF, NYC, etc, but at the same time those places are filled with poor people living in project housing?). Social services for middle class people (roads, good schools, etc) are concentrated in the suburbs, so that's where they go. Then the municipalities prevent all development, causing skyrocketing rents for people who want to try and live in the city anyway. City and state governments try as hard as they can to get people to leave their cities.
    - 14y ago
king_jester 14y ago
While driverless cars can help with parking w.r.t. city development, I don't think that will be too helpful as we already have issues with the capacity of roads. We should be aiming to reduce the importance of roads for cars in city planning, and I'm not sure how driverless cars will help that. Rather, I could see it being worse if cities make mistakes and try to build more road capacity, making congestion worse as more cars fill the new road space.
- pash 14y ago
  Driverless cars should be a huge boon to the efficiency of moving cars along existing roads. There may be an awkward period during which both automated and human-driven cars are on the road at the same time, but by the time it's mostly robots out there, traffic will flow much better. Traffic congestion is caused mostly by human-led factors like route choice and poor cooperation (in merging, etc.) rather than merely the number of cars on the road.

by pash 14y ago

tocomment 14y ago

Why are big houses far down the list? What's high on the list?

potatolicious 14y ago
The perception and/or reality of safety. Suburban flight in the US didn't occur until long after cars became ubiquitous. People had the means to move to suburbs for years but didn't do so en masse until the urban cores started to rot. People moved out of cities when they became shitholes, and people stay out of cities out of a perception that they are shitholes. Said perception may be true or false depending on where you are. There is also the issue that for people with families, many urban centers have in the past few decades reconstituted and cleaned up, but without the infrastructure that families are looking for: e.g., schools. Suburban living is all about being safe from criminal hordes outside the gates - whether real or imagined.
- rayiner 14y ago
  There is no coincidence that suburban flight coincided with desegregation.
  - mkr-hn 14y ago
    It's a coincidence by definition. Whether or not the two are linked is another matter, and someone has probably done research on it.
    - rayiner 14y ago
      The idiomatic phrase "it's no coincidence" means "it's more than just a coincidence."
      - mkr-hn 14y ago
        I know. I'm saying you should offer more than a one-line assertion.
        rayiner 14y ago
        People were really racist in the 1960's, to the point where they wanted blacks to not use the same restrooms. They didn't suddenly stop being racist when cities were legally desegregated. What happened consequently was what you would expect if a bunch of racists were stuck in cities with a bunch of black people who were no longer confined to their separate areas.
        mkr-hn 14y ago
        I know the popular assertions. Was hoping you had some actual research.
  - paul_f 14y ago
    Are you suggesting people like big houses with large lawns in quiet suburban neighborhoods with great schools because they are racist?
jrockway 14y ago
Cost, I'm guessing. A studio apartment in Manhattan becomes a 5-bedroom house outside of the city. If you're willing to sit on NJ Transit or the LIRR for 3 hours a day, that is. (I don't see how self-driving cars are going to change commute times. There will still be traffic, and they'll still only go 60 miles an hour.)
- tocomment 14y ago
  I think human driver overcompensating for braking ahead, and human reaction time creating traffic "waves" contributes significantly to traffic. (At least that's what I've heard). Also self driving cars wouldn't need as much distance between cars to be able to stop safely so you could physically fit more cars on a given stretch of road.
- alex_young 14y ago
  Traffic doesn't move at 60 mph during rush hour though. Automated cars have the potential to reduce the lag in speedup after breaking, eliminate most accidents, and pick better routes, and all while letting you do other things with your time. Commute time is a huge reason to do this.
GrantS 14y ago
If I had to guess, I'd say better public schools, less crime, and affordable houses (which also makes bigger houses more affordable as a side effect).
pash 14y ago
My perception is that cost tops the list. That's partly about home size (why pay twice as much for a condo that's half the size?), but I think mostly about sheer high prices. [0] Cost is also tied up with the issue of public versus private schools, and it's that issue more than any other that in my experience is the reason urbanites become suburbanites. Then generalized negative perceptions of American cities (as cesspools of crime, noise, high taxes, etc.) keep many suburbanites away. Those perceptions are half-truths at best, but a perhaps even bigger problem is that for the great many people who haven't lived it, there's no consideration of the benefits of an urban lifestyle. Of course you're going to choose to live in the 'burbs if you only see the city's detriments and not also its commensurately higher (or better) advantages. 0. In cities like San Francisco, a lot of that cost is due to land-use regulation. But in a typical mid-sized Midwestern city like Cincinnati or Kansas City, where public transit is poor and parking is provided pretty much everywhere, only the true urban warriors try to get by without a car. So parking is a big driver of the cost of city living. Structured parking costs $40,000 or more per space, and median home prices are well under $200,000. Ten to twenty percent or more of the cost of a condo downtown is parking, and you still have to pay for a car. (And it should go without saying that the benefits of city living are greatly reduced if you need to drive a lot anyway.)
- rayiner 14y ago
  The problem is cities are full of poor people, for various lamentable and not so lamentable reasons. That fact drives all the other things that drive people out of cities: crime, bad schools, etc. The sorry state of American cities is due in huge part to state distortion. The social services for the poor are heavily concentrated in the cities, so that's where they go (has the irony ever occurred to anyone that people complain about not being able to afford SF, NYC, etc, but at the same time those places are filled with poor people living in project housing?). Social services for middle class people (roads, good schools, etc) are concentrated in the suburbs, so that's where they go. Then the municipalities prevent all development, causing skyrocketing rents for people who want to try and live in the city anyway. City and state governments try as hard as they can to get people to leave their cities.
  - 14y ago

king_jester 14y ago

While driverless cars can help with parking w.r.t. city development, I don't think that will be too helpful as we already have issues with the capacity of roads. We should be aiming to reduce the importance of roads for cars in city planning, and I'm not sure how driverless cars will help that. Rather, I could see it being worse if cities make mistakes and try to build more road capacity, making congestion worse as more cars fill the new road space.

pash 14y ago
Driverless cars should be a huge boon to the efficiency of moving cars along existing roads. There may be an awkward period during which both automated and human-driven cars are on the road at the same time, but by the time it's mostly robots out there, traffic will flow much better. Traffic congestion is caused mostly by human-led factors like route choice and poor cooperation (in merging, etc.) rather than merely the number of cars on the road.