How should developers and cities prepare for the future of transportation?

"Everybody talks about the future of transportation - we don't." One is tempted to think that is developers adaptation of the nineteen-seventies slogan of the German Rail in which it claimed "everybody talks about the weather - we don't".

Parking everywhere, even on waterfront piers

How else to explain all the cranes towering over buildings sitting on top of giant parking garages which keep on being constructed either above or below ground, frequently even with those efficient sloping floors which prevent any other use than driving and parking cars on it.

When asked about the dead investment that these garages represent, developers usually shrug their shoulders and refer to the banks who just want to see parking before funding a project. In a recent exchange between a Baltimore design review panel and a developer panelists asked if a 10 floor 550 space garage was really needed for the proposed 20 story office building. The developer said:

"You need to supply what's good for the next five years, but technology is changing. We are flexible and open to any ideas that could work. We're going to study it." Gary Swatko, Merritt Properties

The continued willingness to readily sink huge amounts of  capital into dead non revenue producing concrete is a curious thing, considering that typical developer projects (except retail) have a payback period that lasts decades if not half a century. Most transportation experts predict that autonomous cars, taxis, buses and trucks will be here in a few years. Parking demand has already been diminished by young employees' enthusiasm for urban living, bicycling and car sharing services.

The future: empty garages?

Sure, predictions about the the future of transportation with autonomous vehicles (AVs) differ, some think that a complete conversion to AV's will take decades, some predict that the conversion will be much more rapid. Everybody agrees, though that some segment of traffic will be covered with AVs very soon. Test are already underway in many cities. The opportunities to reclaim space from cars are enormous, not only as a cost saving item for developers but also as a boon for cities:

Today, in the second decade of the 21•1 century, and as we anticipate the arrival of self-driving vehicles on city streets, we have a historic opportunity to reclaim the street and to correct the mistakes of a century of urban planning. This adaptation starts with a plan. (Janette Sadik Khan)

Next to cities and State DOTs, nobody will more affected by new transportation technologies and delivery models than developers.  After all, they cast their best guess about the future in concrete, betting their money on that their prediction is right. So why are they so blasé about the AV?

"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. 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 center with the sea of parking around it, that’s dead."Alain Kornhauser, Professor at Princeton

Although the technological frontiers for deploying AVs are being crossed, transportation planners and engineers know far less about the potential impact of such technologies on urban form and land use patterns. Parking Spaces in the Age of Shared Autonomous Vehicles

Various research papers are trying to shed additional light on the seemingly unpredictable future. To imagine the immensity of the change, just consider that in the US there are currently about 260 million cars on the road with about 2 billion parking spaces taking about as much space in form of surface parking lots as all of Puerto Rico.

Isolated by parking instead of place-making

Regardless of the various scenarios which could play out, certain consequnces seem almost certain such as these possibilities compiled by KPMG and Steer Davies Gleave:

How will parking change?

With the uptake of AVs, the need to park near one’s destination will no longer be necessary, potentially re-shaping land-use on a massive scale:

• There may no longer be a need for businesses, residential buildings, or any other facility to provide adjacent parking.
• Parking lots could be relocated to cheaper spots on the edge of town.
• The capacity of parking lots will increase, cars will be able to park efficiently nose to tail, side by side or stacked closely on top of each other.
• AVs may not even need to park, simply driving around until they are needed, or parking on the edge of roads, taking advantage of AVs needing less road width to pass safely.
• Parking lots may evolve from their current form into servicing centers, where AVs are recharged, valeted, and maintained.

With so much change in sight, one would think cities and developers are jostling for the opportunity to get in on the future by testing out models, conduct experiments and create prototypes of a desirable transportation world.  But in reality, neither cities  nor developers seem to pay much attention to policies, proof of concept or experimentation. Cities and the development community seem to think that the future of transportation is in good hands with Google, Tesla, Ford and Cisco, the same types that are already selling their smart city hardware and software to politicians that are glad if they can use their iPhone without too much embarrassment.

Only 6% of cities’ long-range transportation plans acknowledged the prospect of autonomous vehicles for their city. Nelson Nygaard report.

Shannon McDonald who wrote a seminal book about parking garages has shifted her attention to the AV and its impact on planning, development and policy. She doesn't mince her words when she states

“This will completely change us as a society, I think it’ll have the same transformational change as the introduction of the automobile.”

Maybe those research reports and studies from engineering firms are still too complicated.
Maybe a few specific rules of engagement are in order.  Here are a few:

• Don't build more parking than the absolute minimum you have to build under zoning or lender requirements. 
• Build the  parking cheaply on shared lots, through share agreements with other nearby garages or whatever the law allows
• Or build the parking as a flex space that has enough height and frontage to be converted to lucrative office or apartment space, ideally in stages (floor by floor, starting from the top). 
• Include space assignments for care share services such as Uber or Lyft, initially with drivers and eventually driverless. 
• In either case there need to be clearly designated pick-up and drop off zones that allow a proper match between rider and vehicle, comfortable waiting and safe access to those points. 
• Give transit a second look. Even if your project ins't on top of a subway station or otherwise doesn't qualify as transit oriented development, new technologies could bring existing transit closer than you think for example through
• bikeshare, 
• car share
• automated shuttles
• automated pods
• Transit could look different than you think: Many experts expect that technology will allow a much more seamless transit delivery that combined fixed schedule, fixed route transit with demand based van type transit 
• Consider different cars: Even private cars may park themselves and could use automated garages with lifts and stacked cars that occupy about half as much space because they don't need all the ramps and aisles and easy to navigate wide spaces and would function much closer to thsoe New York City garages where drivers leave the car to garage operators who pack the vehicles in without much space around them.
• Build facilities for electric vehicles which need a charge. Charging technologies are rapidly changing but whatever they are, it doesn't look like "gas station" type facilities will be the future but places where vehicles charge because they are "resting" anyway, be it parked (as private vehicle) or staged as a fleet vehicle. 
• Consider space for all the automated service vehicles that will deliver stuff to your building, potentially even via drone. Delivery of packages by USPS, UPS, FedEx or pizza cars is already a usually unresolved problem, whether it is for where these vehicles stop to unload or where their deliveries get stored. 

The autonomous vehicle will change everything

Developers should take a hard look at their most recently completed projects, most likely developed around the outmoded mobility formulas of the past in which the car was the sovereign above anything else. They will likely find that they already sit on a surplus of parking because car ownership rates have gone down and share transportation is very hip with the younger generation.

Cities could evolve to see fewer multi lane streets, streetside parking and signaled intersections, potentially freeing up more than 30% of urban space.3 Further, cities could once again become pedestrian-oriented as they reclaim real estate that has been developed over the course of decades around the needs of the automobile. Projects like New York City’s recently completed 270,000-square-foot pedestrian recapture initiative in Times Square could be more common as cities figure out ways to repurpose busy city streets for additional retail, outdoor restaurants and open space. (The Urban Landscape Reimagined)

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to predict that semi or fully autonomous vehicles will accelerate this trend. Continued urbanization is a given all around the globe. Even Tesla won't be able to stop the fact that owning a car has become much less a status symbol or object of dreams than it was in the past, if for no other reason than the limitations of space in urbanized areas which prohibit to go on forever with increased individual auto usage. There simply isn't enough affordable space for that. Cities will continue to be attractive choices to live because the modern city can offer everything that the suburb can't offer. The future of transportation with autonomous vehicles of all kinds will offer for the first time a future that avoids the pollution, the congestion and the dangers from old style traffic.  If cities push in the  direction of clean shared vehicles properly applied to mass transit, demand based transit and well managed car sharing there, will be a way to grow without choking traffic and fumes. The path into such a desirable future needs to be laid today.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA

Sources:
Reclaiming space in the autonomous vehicle era, KPMG and Steer Davies Gleave

Autonomous Vehicles and the Future of Parking, Nelson Nygaard
Institute of Transportation Policies, Policy Brief  for Land Use and Transportation Policies

See also on this blog: 
Dynamic Pricing for Parking
The autonomous vehicle, savior or killer of cities? (2105)
The next big thing in transportation will change everything (2014)