Only about 6 percent of the country’s biggest cities are planning for or thinking about autonomous vehicles or self-driving cars in their long-range transportation plans, according to the National League of Cities.
What’s even more surprising is that only 3 percent of these cities’ transit plans are even taking into account the impact of ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft even though they already operate in 60 of the 68 largest markets in the U.S. That’s according to a content analysis of transportation planning documents from the country’s 50 most populous cities.
Self driving would eventually be here. When? I have no clue. Nevertheless, assuming it would be in our life time, how should we prepare, from RE investment perspective of course?
Long suburban short urban?
No need to stay in expensive places, stay in cheaper suburban.
Long urban short suburban?
No need cars, so stay near entertainment.
My instinct is to long exurbs. Because the first implementation of self driving will be freeways. City streets are extremely difficult to automate. Dogs can suddenly jump out, cyclists not stopping at red light etc.
what value does that add? The freeway is now a bit safer. And I guess you can zone out a bit more on the way to work, but fundamentally, this will change nothing. I don’t buy the argument that a semi-autonomous car will somehow solve all of our traffic problems. The only way to do that is get cars off the road. Drivers aren’t the problem, cars are the problem.
One is to help reduce accidents. The longer your commute is, the higher is the probability you will hit accident-induced traffic jam. Self driving software will greatly reduce human error.
Another benefit is that if my car’s software can coordinate with the car in front of me, the two cars can go more or less bumper to bumper. Roads will accommodate many more cars. In fact I expect auto-driving cars will be allowed to go on carpool lane by itself, to encourage this type of car-linking.
The last benefit is reducing human fatigue. On a 60 minute drive, if I don’t have to pay undivided attention to the road I can be far more relaxed. And that in turn makes long commute more tolerable.
If designed right, then once you get on the freeway you could work on your laptop similar to the buses companies have. Personally, I think expanding the buses is a better option. One bus can remove 20-30 cars from the road.
I keep hearing this repeated, but I can’t find any study as to whether or not it is actually true. I’d think there are two things which limit how closely one car can follow another. Reaction time and momentum (mv). The mv is important because it determines how much time it takes to safely stop, without hurting the driver. The V2V communication helps reaction time, but does nothing to the mv. I wonder if self driving cars will actually increase the amount of space between cars, because they have to leave a healthy safety margin, whereas today many drivers follow much too closely.
Either way, your points are all “nice-to-haves”. They don’t significantly change anything.
A better approach to address traffic would be to give tax incentives to companies/employees which allow working from home a couple of days a week.
Most technologies started out as toys or nice to haves. Facebook was just a way to check out girls and Twitter a way to tell people what you had for lunch. Things work in mysterical ways.
