Goodbye Parking lots

The transportation sector is currently undergoing one of the most transformational shifts its seen in the last one-hundred years, and its leader is the autonomous vehicle. I’m personally very excited for this technology to hit primetime, and as of this year [2019], it’s already made its debut. 

There are many, many benefits to letting our cars drive themselves, most notable being road safety and giving us back valuable travel time to be productive…or not. [I’m looking at you Netflix] One of the more intriguing, yet underrated benefits of autonomy is how much this tech will change our landscape -more specifically our parking lots.

“We have created so many parking spaces in the U.S. that we have two to three extra ones per vehicle.”

The amount of estimated parking spots in the U.S. vary greatly starting from 105 million spaces, surging all the way up to 2 billion. Even with a conservative estimate of 500 million spaces, that still constitutes a paved parking lot bigger than the states of Delaware and Rhode Island combined. In fact, we have created so many parking spaces in the U.S. that we have two to three extra ones per vehicle. That’s a lot of space devoted to cars.

Isn’t this a good thing though? We will always need ample parking right? Actually no. According to Lawrence D. Burns in his book, Autonomy: the quest to build the driverless car, we just won’t need that much parking. For many urban cities, Burns estimates that up to eighty-five percent of cars could be eliminated from use by uber-esque autonomous car fleets. This would create greater efficiencies in car use as well as greatly lower our parking space needs. Some urban thinkers believe it could eliminate parking lots by up to ninety percent. 

So what can we do with all that space? Repurpose it of course. Large parking expanses could turn into greenbelts and parks. Parking garages could house retail and residential spaces instead of cars. We would no longer have to worry about street side parking and could instead devote that prime real estate to other forms of transport like walking, cycling, and public transit-all without having to build anything new. In fact, this is already starting to happen in many cities around the country and even in car-centric Los Angeles. These cities are taking parking spaces and under-utilized streets and re-purposing them into parklets & plazas for pedestrians, shoppers and cyclists.

This type of space re-purposing has the opportunity to reshape our urban landscapes, provide more space for the community to thrive, and bring more life and nature to our concrete expanses. For the days of the parking lot are numbered, and we get to decide what will take its place.