Consequences of Driverless Cars on Urban Planning

In a future world where driverless cars become an unchallenged normality and we say goodbye to transport as we know it, we may be lead to question the effect this change will have on the infrastructure and day to day logistics of living in and planning for a future city.

Nowadays according to ‘Techworld’, “the average UK motorist spends a shocking 106 days of their life looking for a parking spot, and it takes 20 minutes to find a spot in London alone”, but what would happen if we no longer own the cars we travel in, and more importantly, none of which even need a driver to take responsibility for their whereabouts? As driverless cars will play an important role in city centres in the not too distant future, the need for accessible inner city parking spaces and multi-storey car parks will be reduced and thus replaced with smart waiting bays and smaller out of town smart car parks which will also be able to offer refuelling, maintenance and other car services. Furthermore the car parks need for lifts and staircases will be removed as well as the elimination of human error whilst parking the cars, thus allowing them to be parked in more confined spaces, so the area needed to house the cars in off peak times can be much smaller. These new car parks will become the “petrol stations of the future”, except that they will mainly be powering the increasingly common electric cars, whilst the removal of older car parks in the city centres and such extra space created can be used in favour of greener city schemes or to create opportunity for economic growth, as some predict that 15 years from now, driverless cars will have erased the need for up to 90% of our current parking spaces.

As the driverless cars exhibit safer driving, the current roads through city centres can be narrowed as less room is needed between such travelling cars due to the removal of human error and reaction times. According to the International Transport Forum, this frees up nearly 20% of curb-to-curb street space, such space that can be used for green areas, bike lanes or smart delivery bays/waiting bays instead. This increases mobility through cities as the transport networks expand and become safer for cyclists and pedestrians as well as an increase in accessibility to shop and business fronts as people can be dropped directly outside of their destinations.

Sarah Berry

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