urbanSTL

Interesting piece in the Boston Globe on how self-driving cars may lead to BOTH more suburban sprawl AND more dense development in commercialized areas, since all the parking can be remote.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas ... rless.html

Interesting, (frightening?) vision of how self-driving cars would impact cities and transit in the future. From London Telegraph originally. This is a bit exaggerated in my opinion, certainly for the transition period over the next 20-30 years. But interesting.



"Fewer people may want to own cars, with rental becoming more attractive. This could allow residential parking areas to be put to other uses."

It is hard to think about how this could change things. If personal car ownership diminishes, we won't need expensive and expansive 3-car garages anymore. City homes with street parking could become more attractive. Or people may choose more sprawl -- hard to say. Walking and biking could boom since cars won't ever be collision threat to them anymore.

http://www.thestarphoenix.com/life/driv ... story.html

More on parking and city revenue in the future with driverless cars.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/0 ... insurance/

Yesterday Nissan made a commitment to sell affordable driverless cars by 2020. And then introduce the technology into all their car lineups in two product cycles -- about 8 years later. They made a commitment to all-electric cars back in 2010, and met that commitment and have sold 100,000 all-electric cars since then, so they don't take these commitments lightly.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... %3Darticle

I went to the baseball game last night and saw CarPark Village first hand. With a truly autonomous car, I could envision having it drop me off at Flying Saucer and then sending if off on its own to find a cheap remote parking space. I would want it to come get me on demand in case I needed to leave the game early, say. But I can't quite envision how that would work for a large crowd of people. I can't see 35,000 people standing at the curb after a game looking for their autonomous car to come by and get them. (choose the "be aggressive" setting.) So I think it more likely that the pickup points will spread out -- you have your car meet you at, say, Joe Bucks curb after the game, and then you walk there to meet it. Maybe a small "cell phone" lot would work. Don't ask me what happens if it shows up with a big dent in the side, or a smash-and-grab guy stuck in the grille.

How self-driving cars might change our cities

Interesting piece in TreeHugger that summarizes the portions of a much longer piece in the New Yorker about Driverless cars that deals with the affects on cities.

Treehugger:
http://www.treehugger.com/cars/how-self ... ities.html

New Yorker:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013 ... act_bilger



I personally believe the immediate goal is a crashless car, not driverless. Crashless may lead to driverless, but it is easier to get to crashless incrementally with car-to-car communication. It raises lots of questions about the affects on pedestrians and bicycles. On one hand, communicating cars could get through intersections without stopping. But what would this mean to pedestrians and bicyclers? On the other hand, if bikers and walkers carry communicating devices, we should create a system where no car is ever allowed to strike a pedestrian or bike, which means bikes and cars can share roads with more safety. Smart intersections would be required to accommodate all users of the shared intersection, including bikes and pedestrians.

My Subaru Forester already has limited capability to detect pedestrians with tiny TV cameras and slam on the brakes. It was designed to prevent rear end collisions, but my manual has these words in it, and then a lot of caveats and warnings (that I didn't paste here.)

Detection of pedestrians
The EyeSight system can also detect
pedestrians. The EyeSight system detects
pedestrians from their size, shape and
movement. The system detects a pedestrian
when the contour of the head and shoulders
are clear and the left/right balance is
symmetrical.

So, the prospect is dramatically fewer traffic deaths, dramatically lower insurance premiums, and dramatically lighter vehicles that could be summoned rather than purchased and parked all day.