This piece represents the opinion of Zillow Group Chief Analytics Officer and Chief Economist Dr. Stan Humphries.
When it comes to housing our workforce, there are substantial economic gains to be had by enabling more workers to move to growing cities for high-paying jobs, or at least by creating an efficient way to commute between areas with affordable housing and areas with good jobs.
Driverless cars promise to help us with both.
First, driverless cars will free up a lot of urban land for redevelopment. In some cities, parking lots make up about a third of the landscape, all to warehouse cars that sit idle 95 percent of the time. But with driverless cars constantly on the move or parking outside the urban core during low-demand hours, the need for dedicated parking significantly diminishes. Housing development on this newly buildable land would be less prone to the NIMBYism encountered when trying to increase density in existing residential neighborhoods. And as less affluent workers are pushed to live farther from their downtown jobs, some of this housing development could presumably help provide more desperately needed affordable housing in the hearts of our cities.
Second, potential rideshare systems using driverless cars are likely to be an affordable option – in some cases even cheaper than public transportation – laying the groundwork for more efficient transportation between where the jobs are and where the affordable housing is. We recently ran some numbers for three transit routes in each of six cities, comparing the cost of public transit to the estimated cost of a driverless car fare on the same route. The shorter the trip, the more price-competitive driverless cars were relative to public transit.
In addition, driverless cars were uniformly about 40 percent faster than public transit for the same trip. For those willing to pay slightly more in order to free up a significant chunk of their day, this time difference makes driverless cars more cost effective than public transit in our analysis (since for many, time is, literally, money). This is also undoubtedly good news to those most often dependent on public transit but living in neighborhoods with the worst access to it.
The flexibility of driverless cars also makes them ideal for addressing the pesky “first-mile, last-mile” problem inherent in transit planning, as driverless cars shuttle commuters the short distances between transit stations and work/home. This will allow local transit planners to allocate their limited resources to wider-reaching, faster-moving transit modes like rail or express buses in dedicated lanes.
Driverless cars will fundamentally reshape much of our lives, not just transit and housing. And it’s important to note that not all of the impacts will immediately be positive – automated vehicles will mean a lot of people will lose good-paying jobs in well-established industries, especially livery and trucking. These disruptions will be deeply felt, and finding innovative, fair and lasting solutions is a policy priority that needs to be addressed sooner rather than later.
But ultimately, driverless cars can and I think will provide a real and desperately needed opportunity to reimagine urban land use and transportation planning. In doing so, they will help provide greater and more equal access to the plethora of opportunities our cities provide.