One basic problem to address will be additional traffic congestion in areas where parking spots are so hard to come by that people just set their cars to circle the block while they shop.
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Autonmous vehicles are going to be a disaster unless we move away from private ownership. Otherwise we’ll have all of the problems that we have now of there being too many vehicles for our cities and roads but there’ll be a load of empty running going on as well.
But then there’s the rush hour problem whereby everyone wants to get to and get away from work at the same time (in the UK there are three times as many journeys in progress at 8am as in the average hour) so there’s a limit to how many journeys an individual AV can realistically satisfy during that period so you need a lot of AVs to handle those peak flows.
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My biggest concern is the increased freeway traffic due to people being more willing to buy cheaper houses way the heck out in the exurbs and living with longer commutes. I’ve already had several co-workers tell me that they’re looking forward to doing that very thing (buying houses well over an hour’s drive away and sleeping on the way in) and I think it will accelerate urban sprawl as well as make my own drive more miserable.
That should be easy to remedy - just build more parking - plus if they are auto driving, it doesn’t have to be right by the big thing with lots of people. It could be say 10 min away.
with typical average speed in cities of less than 30 km/h those parking lots are not very far away, this does not really free space in the inner cities
ah, the famous car-friendly city. this was the nonplusultra in German city planning of the 1950s and 60s and fortunately died. cities ought to be for humans, not cars; quality of life is not measured in parking spots per inhabitant.
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Yeah, well, in American cities people live too far away and need to drive in to where the stuff is. There isn’t a Universal solution. What would work for say Downtown KC won’t work in NYC.
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As a general rule, any area where parking spots are so difficult to come by that people would send their driver (or self-driving car) to circle the block while they shop are NOT areas where it’s an easy matter to “just build more parking.”
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Well maybe not in all cases, but the Plaza area and the down town area in KC has both had significant growth lately, and both have had bad more parking installed, as both are also popular shopping and entertainment hubs.
20 years ago down town KC was a ghost town. Now it is very popular. The old abandoned lots used for parking have been converted to multi story parking.
So I concede that solution won’t work in all areas, especially areas already built up. But then again, like I said, if we really have automatic cars, they could drive even back home if you lived say 30 min away, or to a less dense area with new multi storied parking, and then recalled once your movie lets out.
The idea that we will have a sea of automated cars with NO ONE in them, circling the block I don’t think will be a real problem because it wouldn’t take that long for someone to outlaw such behavior, and there are possible solutions. Plus if cars are more and more electric, will they be able to putter around for hours with out a charge and get home? If they run on gas, people (not everyone) will game every system they can to save a penny on gas. Having a car idle for hours adds up.
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Well, so much for my red barchetta then.
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Back in the day, at many supermarkets, your grocery bags could go in a bin on a conveyor, and would roll down to an area at the front of the supermarket.
Meanwhile, you’d walk out to your car, swing around to the pickup line, and when you got there, hand the bag boy your claim-check and trunk key, and they’d load the groceries in the trunk. There was no need to take carts outside the store, or have employees collect them.
You could do something like that with a self-driving car that could be summoned.
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I think the supermarket parking lot is full not from people shopping inside, but from many ACs (autonomous cars) that dropped someone off at a nearby businesses and are essentially “stealing” the spot intended for the supermarket’s shoppers.
Whatever happened to this? 40 years ago it was quite common. But it’s been years since I’ve seen this setup.
Too costly to employee 2 or 3 bag boys?
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2 or 3 bag boys verses 2 or 3 cart wranglers. Cart loss verses conveyor belt maintenance. I don’t see an advantage for either, except that once you allow people to opt-out and take the carts outside, you need cart wranglers and have cart losses anyway.
It was probably the inflexibility and delay in the lineup: Taking the claim-check, finding the right bin(s) in the holding area, getting them to the car and loading. We could do that part a lot smarter now because the system would know where each bin was, and get it ready for each car.
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But that means anything up to double the vehicle miles driven for any given trip. It’s horrendously inefficient and will effectively negate any benefits of electrification of vehicles.
It would be a classic car industry thing to do though - finally crack electric vehicles that could lead to a huge reduction in their environmental impact and then right at the last minute distract yourself with a technology that leads to a massive increase in distance driven.
I say again, with continued private ownership, AVs are going to be a disaster. It has to be coupled with a move to mobility as a service.
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We do this with non-autonomous cars.
Our high school student stays a few minutes after school, moves the family beater to the best spot as everyone else leaves, then my spouse or I pick her up on the way home from work.
Sometime later the event du jour happens (awards, sport, concert, etc.) and everyone (friends, family, school chums) gathers at my house, I drive everyone to the school entrance and drop them off, then park far away and walk back. Because I like to walk of an evening - there’s one in every crowd. 
Then after the event everyone piles into the beater, and I get dropped off at my car, everyone else goes to our house and gets their cars.
In total, we have two cars at the school instead of three or five, and we get a quick exit instead of getting involved in the departure jam. Works a treat.
But Brooks is right; “the cost to the commons was a parking spot occupied all day by one of [our] cars.”
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