Cities Need “Waymo” Autonomous Vehicles

Good Urban Land Use Policy Could Support an Amazing Mobile Future

The car traveled down our street at the speed limit, slowing as it approached the stop sign outside our house and coming to a complete stop right at the line. It then inched forward, pausing before it turned right and accelerated back to the speed limit on its way downtown. Moments later, a speeding car blew through the stop sign, not slowing down until it was already well into the intersection, only to speed off to another illegal rolling “stop” at the next stop sign.

Guess which of these cars was a self-driving autonomous vehicle and which was driven by a human.

Waymo’s sleek autonomous vehicles (AVs) have become ubiquitous in our corner of Austin over the past year, driving safely and quietly through our neighborhood while human drivers continue to flout traffic rules and endanger pedestrians. I was skeptical of the technology based on the local experience with Cruise, another AV company which had a much rockier rollout and was recently defunded by its parent, General Motors. But Waymo, which currently operates its self-driving vehicles across 37 square miles of Austin, has been doing a much better job of showing the promise of AVs: in particular, Waymo data from San Francisco and Phoenix showed 78% fewer injury-causing crashes than human drivers. In a country with more than 40,000 annual road deaths, this could be majorly life-saving technology.

But there are tradeoffs. Urbanists, especially, are worried that AVs might further automobile dependency and exacerbate the problems that car-centric planning has created in our urban environments. They are concerned that AVs will bring only more traffic to already congested city streets, undermine transit, and perpetuate suburban sprawl, that they’ll put the “urban doom loop” effects of remote work into overdrive—that what started with Zoom will end with people zooming away to the exurbs. Accordingly, a lot of the urbanist discourse has focused on the potential negatives of AVs.

By focusing only on the negatives, however, we might miss the opportunity. Although AVs are rapidly deploying in fairweather Sunbelt cities, it is early days and we still have an opportunity to shape urban policy so that we are not only ready to manage the challenges of AVs, but to seize the opportunities they present for a better future. Indeed, rather than perpetuating sprawl and exacerbating post-pandemic problems, AVs could improve urban mobility, open up huge amounts of valuable urban land, and generally allow for more walkable, livable, and safe cities.

A future with AVs could be amazing for cities—if we get the policy right.

We can start by reimagining land use: cars take up a ton of space. According to the Parking Reform Network, parking occupies an average 26% of land in city centers—15% in central Austin, 26% in central Atlanta, and 33% in central Albuquerque. The upside of autonomy is that, whether individuals use personal AVs or robotaxi fleets like Waymo, they do not need to be stored near their owner or end user while not in use so long as the vehicle can be summoned on demand or on schedule. This potentially frees up a lot of central city land currently devoted to parking lots and garages. A decline in personal vehicle ownership will also reduce demand for auto-focused consumer businesses like auto shops, car washes, and gas stations (if not obviated by electric vehicles), functions that could be co-located with AV storage facilities away from downtowns. Meanwhile, car dealerships are already antiquated in an era when Tesla and Rivian—not to mention much older mobility brands like Suzuki, Harley-Davidson, and Vespa—have high-end showrooms in luxury malls and downtowns. Smaller-scale AV showrooms could add commercial vibrancy to urban streetscapes rather than paving over them, freeing up dealership lots for redevelopment opportunities.

Altogether, AVs offer an opportunity to reclaim millions of acres of high-value urban land for housing, parks, public spaces—whatever we can imagine. AVs could also transform city streetscapes, as well.

Today, our roads are shaped by the size and shape of modern vehicles, which are in turn shaped by the size and shape of the humans who drive them (as well as by tax and regulatory policy). If vehicle form factors are no longer beholden to human operators and bad policy, we might imagine new forms that more compactly cater to a broad market of needs and preferences. Exurban business people might commute to work from luxury mobile offices. Vehicles with built-in ramps and lift technology might cater to the elderly and disabled. Family vehicles could have built-in entertainment systems, dining areas, and child seats. Theoretically, these more safe, precise, and compact vehicles would take up less street space, allowing for narrower traffic lanes and more opportunities to expand pedestrian and micromobility options.

AVs can help transit systems, too. Cities that don’t have existing or robust transit systems—or the density to support them—might be able to save themselves and their constituents a lot of money by relying on private AVs or a fleet of publicly managed ones, providing subsidized fares to lower-income people or expanding access to those shut out from conventional transit modes. But in cities with true mass transit systems (i.e., those used by the masses), AVs can offer crucial last-mile connections to existing hubs, which could both reduce the need for parking near stations while also increasing potential ridership. To ensure that AVs complement rather than cannibalize transit, cities will have to price car traffic appropriately.

AVs could also help those caught in the middle.

Take Austin’s older neighborhoods. These were built around a streetcar-serviced street grid and feature vestiges of walkability: smaller lots, corner stores, and “missing middle” housing like duplexes and small apartment buildings. Today, the streetcar is gone and local transit is rarely competitive with cars, so anything perceived to increase the amount of car traffic—like the reforms I’ve worked on to promote gentle density and walkable neighborhoods—is met with resistance. As

Andrew Burleson

explains, these missing middle neighborhoods aren’t dense enough to be served by reliable transit and aren’t spacious enough to accommodate every car. He argues that AVs (and micromobility options like e-bikes and scooters) can bridge the gap by reducing the need for parking and personal vehicles, which should obviate any traffic externalities created by the reforms.

Walkable neighborhoods, affordable homes, seamless connectivity, increased mobility, vibrant urban life—AVs could be a boon to cities rather than their undoing. But we need good urban policies to ensure that we get the outcomes we desire, and not more congestion and sprawl.

These are the basics:

Parking Policy: Follow the lead of Austin, Minneapolis, and Manhattan and eliminate parking mandates that require developers to expensively build more parking than what the market demands. Meanwhile, put a price on street parking and charge competitively for curbside parking or—better yet—eliminate street parking and reallocate the space to better sidewalks, bike lanes, and loading zones for passenger and commercial AVs.

Congestion Pricing: Putting a price on the roads more accurately reflects the costs of driving, shifting costs from the public to the individual driver. Dynamic pricing technology allows prices to fluctuate with demand, number of occupants, or type of vehicle, all of which could incentivize shared rides and discourage excessive or empty AV trips. New York City is conducting a real-time, first-in-the-nation experiment with its recently introduced congestion pricing program: while traffic has already improved on the roads into the toll-gated area of Manhattan, there’s been no change within the gated area. Yellow cabs, Ubers, and Lyfts are charged a lower toll to enter the zone, where they make up most of the congestion, suggesting that the for-hire-vehicle price is still too low. Getting that price right will be important for Manhattan and other cities seeking to prevent a deluge of AVs from congesting their streets.

Zoning Reform: To fully take advantage of reclaimed urban land, prevent an urban exodus, and mitigate endless exurban sprawl, cities ought to focus on policies that support and retain their increasingly missing middle classes: safe streets, good schools, and family-friendly zoning. In particular, cities need to legalize a whole lot more housing in the places where people want to live by allowing for higher-density, mixed-use development: larger apartment buildings around transit hubs; “missing middle” housing and neighborhood commercial in residential areas, supported by AVs and micromobility.

Growth-Oriented Regulatory Regime: Cities should foster a regulatory climate that supports AV innovation, including adapting standards that reflect the disparities in safety between human and autonomous drivers, allowing new vehicle form factors, and exploring new commercial models and public-private mobility partnerships. Federal tax and regulatory policies that subsidize and incentivize large vehicles and penalize other forms should also be eliminated. As AVs become more widespread, cities should also prepare for the likelihood of job displacement of human drivers and pursue policies that facilitate, not hinder, the transition.

Nobody knows exactly what any of this will look like, but by being open to the opportunities rather than focused solely on the downsides, we will make it possible to see what it could look like. Autonomous vehicles will undoubtedly bring big changes to our cities; whether this is a promise or a threat depends on the policy choices we make. Bad land use policy around roads, parking, and zoning—i.e., more of the same—will make cities worse today and less resilient as AV technology becomes more commonplace in the future. Draconian policies will instead leave cities behind, preserved in the past, and poorer because of it. Counterintuitively, good AV policy is an opportunity to rebuild cities demolished for and made less safe by human-driven cars, benefiting cities today while helping them adapt to the arrival of AVs tomorrow.

The Waymo outside my front door tells me that autonomous vehicles are not science fiction, and they’re not only on the way—they’re already here. Let’s make the urban future with them amazing.

Further Reading

I’ve also enjoyed and learned from these articles about AVs written by other urbanist and progress writers:

• Brad Hargreaves
  on “Autonomous Vehicles Are Finally Here. Now What?” and “How Far Can the Exurbs Go?”

• Andrew Miller
  on “Progress and Public Transit: Vehicle Automation”

• Jeff Fong
  on “What self-driving cars mean for the city”