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Notes -
Following on from my previous post, one obvious implication is that self-driving cars are a game-changing technology for cities in the way that trains (enabling commuter suburbs) and cars (enabling sprawl) were. The success of Uber in cities like New York and London suggests that it is the parking problem that stops people driving into dense urban cores, not the traffic problem. What does an optimised-for-actually-existing-people downtown look like where unregulated car use gets you dense urban places linked by bumper-to-bumper queues of slow moving cars that never actually need to park? What does a sprawl suburb look like if every non-residential land use no longer needs a parking lot larger than the building? If the history of the train and the car is anything to go by, it will take 50+ years to get this right and we will make city-ruining mistakes in the interim.
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