Disruptions: How Driverless Cars Could Reshape Cities

Jeff Swensen for The New York Times A self-driving car at Carnegie Mellon. Researchers have been contemplating how cities could change if our cars start driving for us, including having narrower streets because parking spots might not be necessary.

SAN FRANCISCO — By now, seeing one of Google’s experimental, driverless cars zipping down Silicon Valley’s Highway 101, or parking itself on a San Francisco street, is not all that unusual. Indeed, as automakers like Audi, Toyota and Mercedes-Benz make plans for self-driving vehicles, it is only a matter of time before such cars become a big part of the great American traffic jam.

While driverless cars might still seem like science fiction outside the Valley, the people working and thinking about these technologies are starting to ask what these autos could mean for the city of the future. The short answer is “a lot.”

Imagine a city where you don’t drive in loops looking for a parking spot because your car drops you off and scoots off to some location to wait, sort of like taxi holding pens at airports. Or maybe it is picked up by a robotic minder and carted off with other vehicles, like a row of shopping carts.

A test of Google’s self-driving car.

Inner-city parking lots could become parks. Traffic lights could be less common because hidden sensors in cars and streets coordinate traffic. And, yes, parking tickets could become a rarity since cars would be smart enough to know where they are not supposed to be.

As scientists and car companies forge ahead — many expect self-driving cars to become commonplace in the next decade — researchers, city planners and engineers are contemplating how city spaces could change if our cars start doing the driving for us. There are risks, of course: People might be more open to a longer daily commute, leading to even more urban sprawl.

That city of the future could have narrower streets because parking spots would no longer be necessary. And the air would be cleaner because people would drive less. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 30 percent of driving in business districts is spent in a hunt for a parking spot, and the agency estimates that almost one billion miles of driving is wasted that way every year.

“What automation is going to allow is repurposing, both of spaces in cities, and of the car itself,” said Ryan Calo, an assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Law, who specializes in robotics and drones.

Harvard University researchers note that as much as one-third of the land in some cities is devoted to parking spots. Some city planners expect that the cost of homes will fall as more space will become available in cities. If parking on city streets is reduced and other vehicles on roadways become smaller, homes and offices will take up that space. Today’s big-box stores and shopping malls require immense areas for parking, but without those needs, they could move further into cities.

The Autonomous Intersection Management project, created by the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin, imagines cities where traffic lights no longer exist but sensors direct the flow of traffic. Although a video showing off the automated traffic intersection looks like total chaos, the researchers insist that such intersections will reduce congestion and fuel costs and can allow cars to drive through cities without stopping.

Of course, getting to a utopian city will take a little longer than circling the block looking for a spot. A spokesman for Audi said a fully automated car would not be available until the end of the decade. And the regulatory issues to be addressed before much of this could come true are, to put it mildly, forbidding.

But the pieces are starting to fall into place, at least enough to excite future-minded thinkers. Last year, Jerry Brown, the governor of California, signed legislation paving the way for driverless cars in California, making it the third state to explicitly allow the cars on the road. And federal agencies are starting to consider their impact. In May the Transportation Department made its first formal policy statement on autonomous vehicles, encouraging cities to allow testing of driverless cars.

But to some, this promise — or overpromise as the case may be — sounds familiar.

“The future city is not going to be a congestion-free environment. That same prediction was made that cars would free cities from the congestion of horses on the street,” said Bryant Walker Smith, a fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School and a member of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford. “You have to build the sewer system to accommodate the breaks during the Super Bowl; it won’t be as pretty as we’re envisioning.”

Mr. Smith has an alternative vision of the impact of automated cars, which he believes are inevitable. Never mind that nice city center. He says that driverless cars will allow people to live farther from their offices and that the car could become an extension of home.

“I could sleep in my driverless car, or have an exercise bike in the back of the car to work out on the way to work,” he said. “My time spent in my car will essentially be very different.”

“Driverless cars won’t appear in a vacuum,” Mr. Smith said. Other predictions for the future city imagine fewer traditional-looking cars. Taking their place will be drones and robots that deliver goods.

Oh, and that food-delivery car double-parked outside? That, Mr. Calo said, will be replaced by a delivery drone.

E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com

Bits Blog: The Money Side of Driverless Cars

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times Parking tickets generate millions of dollars in revenue for cities across America.

In Washington, an average of six parking tickets are issued every minute of a normal workday. That is about 5,300 tickets on each of those days. Those slips of paper have added up to $80 million in parking fines a year, according to a report by AAA Mid-Atlantic.

As I noted in my Disruptions column this week, ”How Driverless Cars Could Reshape Cities,” the parking ticket could vanish from the future city as cars park themselves and refill parking meters electronically. (If there even are meters in the future.)

This has municipalities concerned.

“Automation is challenging all sorts of traditional revenue sources for cities and states,” said Bryant Walker Smith, a fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School and a fellow of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford. “It’s challenging how states and federal agencies get their funds, and parking fees are clearly challenges that could be in the future.”

Mr. Walker Smith said that while traditional revenue sources from tickets, towing cars and gasoline taxes could dry up, cities and states will come up with new ways to make money on vehicles.

Of course cities probably wouldn’t be alone in losing revenue because of driverless cars.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 93 percent of all traffic accidents result from human error. If cars are smart enough to avoid accidents — and many researchers working on these cars believe they will be — the multibillion-dollar car insurance industry could completely change and be reimagined.

Then there are the workers that could lose a paycheck to automated cars. Taxi drivers, delivery trucks, parking enforcers, bus drivers and a long list of other people who drive cars for a living could find themselves out of a job, replaced by a computer chip and an algorithm.

When I spoke with Lawrence H. Summers, the economist, former Treasury secretary and former Harvard president, last year about these jobs possibly vanishing, he insisted that the decline in certain vocations would lead to a rise in jobs in new industries.

Mr. Summers likened the rise in autonomous vehicles and robots to the Industrial Revolution, which gave way to new types of jobs in the arts, manufacturing, technology and elsewhere. ”In reality, if people are freed up from one thing they are able to do something different,” he said.

Let’s hope Mr. Summers is right. And that the researchers who say the parking ticket could soon be a thing of the past are accurate with their prediction, too.

Yes, Driverless Cars Know the Way to San Jose

THE “look Ma, no hands” moment came at about 60 miles an hour on Highway 101.

Brian Torcellini, Google’s driving program manager, had driven the white Lexus RX 450h out of the parking lot at one of the company’s research buildings and along local streets to the freeway, a main artery through Silicon Valley. But shortly after clearing the on-ramp and accelerating to the pace of traffic, he pushed a yellow button on the modified console between the front seats. A loud electronic chime came from the car’s speakers, followed by a synthesized female voice.

“Autodriving,” it announced breathlessly.

Mr. Torcellini took his hands off the steering wheel, lifted his foot from the accelerator, and the Lexus hybrid drove itself, following the curves of the freeway, speeding up to get out of another car’s blind spot, moving over slightly to stay well clear of a truck in the next lane, slowing when a car cut in front.

“We adjusted our speed to give him a little room,” said Anthony Levandowski, one of the lead engineers for Google’s self-driving-car project, who was monitoring the system on a laptop from the passenger seat. “Just like a person would.”

Since the project was first widely publicized more than two years ago, Google has been seen as being at the forefront of efforts to free humans from situations when driving is drudgery. In all, the company’s driverless cars — earlier-generation Toyota Priuses and the newer Lexuses, recognizable by their spinning, roof-mounted laser range finders — have logged about 300,000 miles on all kinds of roads. (Mr. Torcellini unofficially leads the pack, with roughly 30,000 miles behind the wheel — but not turning it.)

But the company is far from alone in its quest for a car that will drive just like a person would, or actually better. Most major automobile manufacturers are working on self-driving systems in one form or another.

Google says it does not want to make cars, but instead work with suppliers and automakers to bring its technology to the marketplace. The company sees the project as an outgrowth of its core work in software and data management, and talks about reimagining people’s relationship with their automobiles.

Self-driving cars, Mr. Levandowski said, will give people “the ability to move through space without necessarily wasting your time.”

Driving cars, he added, “is the most important thing that computers are going to do in the next 10 years.”

For the automakers, on the other hand, self-driving is more about evolution than revolution — about building incrementally upon existing features like smart cruise control and parking assist to make cars that are safer and easier to drive, although the driver is still in control. Full autonomy may be the eventual goal, but the first aim is to make cars more desirable to customers.

“We have this technology,” said Marcial Hernandez, principal engineer at the Volkswagen Group’s Electronics Research Laboratory, up the road in Belmont, Calif. “How do we turn it into a product that can be advertised to a customer, that will have some benefit to a customer?”

With all the research efforts, there is a growing consensus among transportation experts that self-driving cars are coming, sooner than later, and that the potential benefits — in crashes, deaths and injuries avoided, and in roads used more efficiently, to name a few — are enormous. Already, Florida, Nevada and California have made self-driving cars legal for testing purposes, giving each car, in effect, its own driver’s license.

Richard Wallace, director for transportation systems analysis at the Center for Automotive Research, a nonprofit group that recently released a report on self-driving cars with the consulting firm KPMG, said that probably by the end of the decade, “we would be able to have a safe, hands-free left-lane commute.” In 15 to 20 years, he said, “literally from the driveway to destination starts to become possible.”