Self-Driving Cars- Twin Cities Impacts

Well according to a story I read on the Red Star last week the Twin Cities sprawls all the way out to almost Cambridge. I wouldn't worry about my neck of the woods getting too developed. The city isn't too hard on developers who propose a 50 - 75 house development in the city service area almost 3 years ago about staying on task and a time line. It still has yet to come to a final plat or see anything really meaningful in terms of subdivision and development move forward.

As far as the self driving cars there are too many unknowns if you ask me. How do they do in the winter with ice/snow/black ice and all those wonderful things? Are they smart enough to move over when they see emergency or other vehicles on the side of the road? Didn't one of the Google Cars get in an accident while driving around by itself?

In a perfect world even though we still can't seem to figure out the LRT game in this town (see SWLRT) expanding that would make the most sense. However it needs to be done to more areas of the city or expand commuter rail and make it more efficient. Currently enough of the metro has to drive a good distance to even take advantage of a transit option we keep going to and using our cars. I personally have thought that if the Bonttineau line ever gets built I would seriously consider using that to get to work over having to drive downtown every night.

Self-driving cars will be a part of our future transportation systems, but I don't think they will transform those systems as drastically or in the specific ways most think they will. While autonomous vehicles will increase roadway utilization efficiencies (assuming we get to a point where they’re no longer sharing roadways with human operators), there's still the problem with urban geometry and the physical capacity of our roadways to accommodate traffic of any type.

I see autonomous vehicles being utilized more for commercial distribution and public transit systems. While personal automobiles will also benefit, I think they will be more useful as part of a feeder system in lower-density communities that provide convenient access to higher capacity transit systems nearby that bring them into the higher-density urban centers.

Not to mention most cities are starting to reconfigure how they manage traffic, no longer using level of service calculations and instead focusing on Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) as the metric for measuring significant impacts. This means that new developments will be required to provide less parking and other amenities that cater to and encourage any personal automobile usage.

While autonomous cars could potentially provide more efficient taxi or ridesharing services, this will be a relatively small percentage of the general mode share in most major cities. This would increase the efficiency of each vehicle and would hopefully reduce the number of cars circulating the streets looking to pick up passengers.

The real issue is that there is still a physical limit to how many single occupancy vehicles you can fit on a roadway, no matter how closely together we can pack them. With the continued increase in population, this is not going to be a solution to traffic congestion. Autonomous buses, trains, and other high-capacity transit modes would help to increase efficiencies, reducing wait times, and increasing capacity.

Many people seem to think that autonomous and electric cars will save the suburban way of life, but that just glazes over all of the other negative externalities associated with low-density sprawl. These systems won’t make infrastructure maintenance cheaper, won’t make traffic congestion go away, they won’t help to create a sense of community, won’t solve our environmental issues, won’t lower energy demand, won’t lower tax burdens, won’t lower the costs of transportation significantly if at all, and won’t fix the tangled web of streets that don’t connect or go anywhere.

Even if we shift to 100% electric and autonomous vehicles, our energy demand would far exceed the current rate of energy growth. Our supply of energy would therefore limit how many people can utilize a personal automobile, as energy costs increase due to demand. So while the technology seems exciting, I just don’t see it changing the fact that we need to continue to invest in high-capacity public transit systems.

People also seem to miss the fact that personal automobiles come with an extremely high hidden cost that we all pay without realizing it. The cost of parking in a suburban retail strip mall isn’t actually free. Consumers are paying for that parking through increased product/service prices. Parking adds significant cost to housing and office developments that are typically rolled into the price of the structure, whether the buyer or leasee wants that parking or not (although this is slowly changing in some cities that now require any parking be unbundled from the housing or office use). There’s also the added costs that go to pay transportation planners and engineers (like myself) to analyze all new developments and determine their impacts on traffic, parking, etc. in the surrounding environment.

When it comes down to it, we would save a lot of time, money, and frustration if we weren’t so depended on personal automobiles of any kind.

I was referring to the overall modal breakdown of transportation options moving forward. I do see car-sharing services becoming more common, but I also see this industry being heavily regulated moving forward.

Here in San Francisco, Uber and Lyft have caused a significant increase in traffic congestion around the city; as so many cars are circulating around a city where many residents can no longer afford parking (or a car for that matter). This will eventually force the hand of governments to ban such services or regulate them to reduce congestion. Even if they're autonomous there are still limits to how many vehicles can reasonably utilize a given roadway network.

I agree that moving forward there will be a continued downward trend regarding automobile ownership and usage. Barring any major shift in political leadership or economic stability I would expect to see most major cities continuing to grow and add density. Given these realities, autonomous cars are not going to fix your commute from home to work. I think people will use car-sharing/ride-hailing to do some of their trips, but the morning and evening commutes will still be reliant on high-capacity transit systems to move the majority of people. I would also expect to see an increase in mode share for alternative modes such as walking and bicycling, as cities continue to become more dense.

With only a portion of major U.S. cities seeing the majority of growth and increasing push-back on density in many of those regions, housing will continue to be a major issue. With housing costs continuing to increase in many of these cities due to increasing demand with few places to add supply, many residents will have less disposable income for private transportation options. With increasing competition for use of the existing roadways, private transportation will also become more expensive and more frustrating.

I do think that autonomous technology can be used to improve our public mass-transit systems to make them more reliable, more affordable, and provide greater access to areas that currently can’t support a transit system.

I just don’t see the long-term solution being self-driving private automobiles. They will be great for the wealthy or for those who might want to use them for road trips and other non-commute purposes. If there’s traffic congestion now, it won’t be any better in the future with a million more people living in the Twin Cities trying to use the same roads.