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Page added on August 6, 2015

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How Driverless Cars Could Turn Parking Lots into City Parks

Traffic jams aren’t exactly Zen. People are anxious about getting somewhere else instead of being happy about where they are.

To make matters more frustrating: In many cases, the cars clogging roadways are often already at their destination—and just circling the blocks looking for parking. There’s plenty of research showing that a surprisingly large number of people are driving, trying to find a place to leave their car. A group called Transportation Alternatives studied the flow of cars around one Brooklyn neighborhood, Park Slope, and found that 64 percent of the local cars were searching for a place to park. It’s not just the inner core of cities either. Many cars in suburban downtowns and shopping-mall parking lots do the same thing.

Robot cars could change all that. The unsticking of the urban roads is one of the side effects of autonomous cars that will, in turn, change the landscape of cities— essentially eliminating one of the enduring symbols of urban life, the traffic jam full of honking cars and fuming passengers. It will also redefine how we use land in the city, unleashing trillions of dollars of real estate to be used for more than storing cars. Autonomous cars are poised to save us uncountable hours of time, not just by letting us sleep as the car drives, but by unblocking the roads so they flow faster.

Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote a book called The High Cost of Free Parking, about how low-cost parking ruins cities. He estimates that cities that underprice their parking encourage circling, resulting in roads where up to 45 percent of the traffic is people looking for a place to park. His solution is for cities to boost the cost of street parking until there are usually a few free spots on each block.

Robot cabs don’t need to park. They just move on and pick up the next fare. Human-guided cabs don’t need to park much during the day either, but even in the densest cities there aren’t enough of them. In Manhattan, there are 100,000 off-street parking spots alone below 60th Street and even more on the streets. New York City brags that there are 500 metered spots that accept credit cards in the Broadway theater district. But there are only 13,150 Yellow Cab Medallions for the entire city. In the future, when demand ebbs at the end of the day, robot cabs can simply move to the edges of the city for rest, refueling, and repair—all out of the way.

To study this effect for myself, I built a simulator with rows and rows of city blocks filled with little cars headed for random destination. The cars aren’t drawn to scale and there are no effort to simulate stop lights or collisions, but even in this simple model, the streets quickly clog up. If a car reaches its destination and there are no more parking spaces, it choose a new destination at random, turns grey, and starts circling.

Here’s a video showing how the simulator works:

What’s striking is that the streets start clogging up when 15 percent to 25 percent of the blocks are full. If the cars can’t find a place to park in one section, they start bouncing around looking for another and jamming the streets. And because finding another spot takes almost as much time as getting to the destination, they start to fill up the streets quickly.

Here’s one video showing the simulator just after the first few blocks are full. The percentage of cars searching for parking starts to soar.

This next video is taken later in the simulation when more than 60 percent of the blocks are full. Most of the cars on the streets are on a quest for one of the open parking spots.

Notice that most of the empty spots are toward the bottom. The procedure for choosing a random location does not pick initial destinations uniformly, effectively simulating cities where some blocks are more desirable. Once the major destinations start to fill up, it takes some time for the cars to find the empty locations. They don’t have access to any central database of empty spots so they circle mindlessly until they happen upon an empty spot. (The simulator is very basic and full of poor approximations of the way that humans look for spaces. One researcher, for instance, suggests that people circling for parking often take right turns at red lights because they don’t want to wait. The simulator doesn’t try to be that smart: It just chooses a new destination nearby at random. The source code for the simulator is written in a game platform called Construct 2 and is available to anyone who wants to play with it and make it better. You can play with the simulator yourself here.)

Some parking garages have installed sensors that count the number of empty spaces, and signs to share this information to keep people from driving down full aisles. When autonomous fleets take over, they’ll have access to similar databases. The cities will probably keep a few parking spaces around for cars that need to pause but most will probably be repurposed as parks or retail locations.

Even though the simulator I used is just an approximation, it supports researchers’ findings about just how many cars in urban environments are looking for parking at any given time.

The results also show that autonomous cars have the potential to change urban life dramatically. If replacing the human drivers and their need to park will reduce the demand for the roads and eliminate the stressful traffic jams, it will make city life that much more peaceful. Maybe not Zen, exactly, but more like it

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14 Comments on "How Driverless Cars Could Turn Parking Lots into City Parks"

  1. kanon on Thu, 6th Aug 2015 7:55 am 

    There is also the possibility of eliminating parking on the street and having sidewalks, a bike share system, and shuttle buses. Interesting that the cost of replacing most cars with autonomous fleets is not discussed. Anyone have a parking space app?

  2. Davy on Thu, 6th Aug 2015 8:37 am 

    This is just another cornucopian diversion from reality. The article has no chance of scaling nor is there the capital needed to make this a game changer. No, this is just another example of reality clouding and drifting. The last thing we need is a driverless car. What we need is less cars, less pollution, and less reality diversions. The same can be said of space travel, fusion, and green-topia.

    We are a slow motion train wreck that is in denial. I am wondering at what point will a profound crisis end all this nonsense. When will we have an awakening of a social tragedy in the making? I imagine when we have widespread food and fuel shortages that is when there will be undeniable evidence that reality cannot be spinned. Collapse is a process.

    I like to equate collapse to phase change of water. We are seeing the initial heating and nearing the boil. The transition of water to steam is a turbulent event. We are seeing the first indications now of phase change. It will not be much longer before these articles are ignored and rejected. I think we are close with maybe one or two years before this kind of nonsense is over.

  3. steveo on Thu, 6th Aug 2015 8:46 am 

    Davy, I like your phase change analogy, and I’d like to take it one step farther.

    When a very pure liquid is heated under physically still conditions it “super heats” and exceeds its boiling point while still staying a liquid. It only takes a small perturbation to have an explosive phase change. Our current condition of overshoot is like being super heated, it will only a relatively small disruption in the system to cause the system to come apart.

  4. ghung on Thu, 6th Aug 2015 8:47 am 

    …. and in related news:

    Cases of police shooting driverless cars that refuse to cooperate on the rise in mostly black neighbourhoods. NAADC (National Association for the Advancement of Driverless Cars) to protest in Baltimore Sunday.”

  5. penury on Thu, 6th Aug 2015 9:17 am 

    The thought of driverless cars freeing up parking and making streets less crowded reminds me of being young and living in a city. We had a unique system. people were poor, the country was coming out of a depression, engaged in two major wars, cars were in short supply so the city and the county had BUS service. It works sort of like Uber, you go to a point a bus comes along you get on and ride to your destination with 36 or 50 of your newest friends. Guess now we all need our personal bus. We can avoid the potentially annoying others.

  6. Apneaman on Thu, 6th Aug 2015 9:59 am 

    Driverless Cars? Using wireless technology. What is the equivalent of a dropped call for a driverless car?

  7. gdubya on Thu, 6th Aug 2015 9:59 am 

    Penury – can you explain this “bus” concept further? It seems to violate the requirement that all North Americans spend 1/3 of their working life paying for a device used 1 hour per day.
    I have also heard of a device that socialist counties like the EU, Japan, & Australia call a “train” where the entire city is designed around a dedicated transportation web.

    This all sounds like a communist plot to take away our freedoms.

  8. Davy on Thu, 6th Aug 2015 10:11 am 

    Gdub, Europe is full of cars. It is a car culture with the nice addition of good public transport. Nothing to crow about. I especially look down upon fast trains that will quickly become obsolete once complexity declines. Europe is broke with too many people and too many nationalities.

  9. Kenz300 on Thu, 6th Aug 2015 11:06 am 

    Cities would be more enjoyable if there were less cars and more bicycles.

  10. BC on Thu, 6th Aug 2015 11:22 am 

    “Cities would be more enjoyable if there were less cars and more bicycles.”

    Kenz300, I like the idea, but I’m fit and bicycle for recreation. Think of the aging, overweight, and obese American population trying to get around on bikes or walking where most of the terrain is not flat like The Netherlands. We would be thrust back into the time before the oil-, auto-, debt-, and suburban housing-based economic model that emerged during the 1920s-30s.

    Wait! That’s where I suspect we are going over the next 20-30 years. 🙂

    Then there are these:

    http://cleantechnica.com/2015/08/06/fastest-charging-electric-bus-charges-in-10-seconds-in/

    http://www.proterra.com/

  11. Plantagenet on Thu, 6th Aug 2015 11:42 am 

    Driverless cabs are a great idea!!!

    For one thing, you wouldn’t have to make small talk with the cab driver, a driverless cab connected to the internet would know exactly where to take you, and at the end you wouldn’t have to tip.

    Win-Win!

  12. Chris Hill on Thu, 6th Aug 2015 6:09 pm 

    Unfortunately the driverless cab wouldn’t actually know where you wanted to go. It would take you to the shopping center then start driving in circles trying to find the address of the place you need to get to. That is the major downfall with maps and mapping programs, they still all stink to some extent or other. We tried to go to Harbor Freight in St. Louis a while back, both mapping programs blew up and left us going in circles. Until somebody starts paying to fix the maps, they are going to be iffy.

  13. John Orr on Fri, 7th Aug 2015 4:34 am 

    What if your driverless car is going to be in an accident that can’t for whatever reason be prevented….will the car be programmed to kill you or run over the pedestrian???? Etc..etc…

  14. dubya on Fri, 7th Aug 2015 9:37 pm 

    Chris: I’m sure things will eventually improve, but right now the only way to find my house is with a paper map – the databases put us about 3 km away. Keeps out the Rif-Raff


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