Tag Archives: Ownership Society

Driverless cars: a city of cheap robotaxis and the end of car ownership

CC image from the Museum of American History.

CC image from the Museum of American History.

To date, most of the writing about driverless cars seems to focus on technology’s potential to make driving safer by eliminating collisions between vehicles. The thinking is similar to other auto safety improvements such as air bags or anti-lock brakes. These technological advances (endorsed by the US DOT)  incrementally improve the safety of those driving – assuming that you are using a narrowly focused definition of ‘safety.’ However, an auto-centric definition of safety only works in auto-centric environments; in urban environments where cars and bikes and pedestrians are all sharing the same space, the definition of safety cannot solely focus on eliminating collisions between high-tech cars (more on this later).

Other articles predict that driverless cars mean the end of transit – an unlikely scenario that ignores the basic geometry of car-based systems and the capacity advantages of transit (imagine shutting down New York’s transit system and trying to fill that role with nothing but taxis – good luck). Furthermore, if driverless cars make vehicle automation easy, then it should also help drive down the costs for automating transit itself (among other potential uses) and unlock the benefits of automated transit.

Ownership:

The far more interesting scenario is one where autonomous vehicles completely upset the benefits of owning your own car. In the Atlantic Cities, Eric Jaffe questions the assumptions of car ownership in a world of driverless cars:

But we’re not so far away from this future that it’s too early to start considering what it might look like. As Matt Yglesias wrote at Slate in August, Google, the leaders in autonomous car technology, must have had some vision in mind to shell out $258 million for the car-slash-ridesharing service Uber: “ubiquitous taxis — summoned via smartphone or weird glasses — that are so cheap they make car ownership obsolete.”

Think about this world of shared autonomous vehicles for a moment. You wake up and get ready for work, and a few minutes before it’s time to leave you press a button and order an SAV [Shared Autonomous Vehicle]. The car has been strategically positioned to wait in high-demand areas, so you don’t have to wait long. You might share the ride with a couple travelers just as you share an elevator, or perhaps pay a premium to ride alone. Either way, you clear your inbox or read the paper during the commute, which is safer and more reliable than it used to be.

So, basically Robo-Uber. Or Auto-Car2go. Or Johnny Cab. This kind of behavior seems to be a far more likely outcome of the technology than the continued paradigm of each individual owning a car for personal use. Just as transit consultant Jarrett Walker talks about the importance of frequent transit service in providing freedom for users, the on-demand nature of the personal car is similarly freeing – but it required a) ownership of the car to ensure on-demand use, and b) the owner to actually do the driving.

Travel Behavior:

But what kind of changes in behavior can we expect from this shift away from car ownership? Writing at Greater Greater Washington, Nat Bottigheimer notes that planners haven’t even begun to address the issue. Jaffe’s article, however, cites some preliminary research from Austin on the impact of robotaxis.

Civil engineer Kara M. Kockelman of the University of Texas at Austin recently modeled the potential ownership change with grad student Daniel Fagnant…

The results offer an enticing glimpse of a world without car-ownership. Each SAV in the Austin model replaced about 11 conventional household vehicles. The roughly 20,000 people who made up this shared network, formerly owners of roughly as many cars, were now served by a mere 1,700 SAVs. Travelers waited an average of only 20 seconds for their ride to arrive, and you could literally count the number who waited more than 10 minutes on one hand (three). That’s to say nothing of personal savings in terms of cost (insurance, parking, gas) and time.

“Even when we doubled or quadrupled or halved or quartered that trip-making, we didn’t have big changes in our key variables,” says Kockelman. “This replacement rate, this eleven-to-one, those things were very stable.”

Kockelman is quick to point out the caveats. The biggest is that for all the savings in private car-ownership, vehicle-miles traveled doesn’t go down in the Austin model. In fact, it goes up about 10 percent. That’s because not only are SAVs making all the trips people used to make on their own, but they’re repositioning themselves in between trips to reduce wait times (see below). The additional wear also means manufacturers produce about the same number of cars, too, though each new fleet is no doubt a bit smaller and cleaner than the last.

So, a huge decrease in the total number of cars (presumably, with a corresponding decrease in parking demand, making the already-questionable logic behind zoning code parking requirements even more dubious) but an increase in the total vehicle miles traveled indicates that such technology won’t be a magic cure for congestion. It won’t spell the end of public transit in our cities. If the safety benefits accrue mostly to highway travel, it won’t change the need for safer streets where pedestrians, bikes, and cars mix.

The next question is on the impacts of driverless cars on cities and city planning.

The Unwinding: Erosion of our institutions and the concern that you picked the wrong profession

I’m working through my pile of books I collected at the end of the year. I just finished George Packer’s The Unwinding, a book telling the story of the Great Recession through the eyes of several main characters (factory worker turned organizer Tammy Thomas; civil servant turned lobbyist turned civil servant again Jeff Connaughton; truck stop owner turned biodiesel entrepreneur Dean Price) as well as vignettes of famous ones (Jay-Z, Oprah, Robert Rubin, Elizabeth Warren, among others).

The fourth main character in Packer’s story isn’t a single person, but the story of Tampa, Florida. Packer weaves several individuals together as a part of the storyline, including Mike Van Sickler. Van Sickler now writes for the Tampa Bay Times’ Tallahassee bureau, but reported extensively on foreclosures, mortgage robo-signing, and general planning and development issues in sprawling Tampa. Packer introduces Van Sickler, the journalist who once pondered a career change:

IMAG1982

When he was covering city hall at The Palm Beach Post, he’d gotten deeply interested in urban planning – for a while he even thought about switching careers, until he realized that city planners had even less clout than reporters.

I had mixed emotions reading this. It’s a shot at my chosen profession that strikes awfully close to home, but also because it speaks to the challenges facing our institutions across the board – not just those involved in planning, development, and all things urban. It’s one of those uncomfortable statements we know to be true.

Packer’s focus on narrative means telling the story from the viewpoint of the characters, rather than offering an overarching analytical framework. This approach threw off Chris Lehmann (“a chronicle of the fraying of our productive lives that shuns cogent ideological or political explanations of the causes of our present crisis in favor of a thick narrative description of its symptoms”), accusing Packer of letting Robert Rubin off too easily for his role in the unwinding.

Lehmann clearly doesn’t prefer the subtlety of Packer’s method, using the perspective of different characters to critique someone like Rubin, rather than state so explicitly. Packer isn’t trying to be Chris Hayes (another good read, by the way) and lay out a theory of institutional decline. Even for Lehmann, however, adding Van Sickler’s character to the story helped provide some critical thinking:

Van Sickler’s story led to a high-profile federal indictment of Kim on money laundering and fraud charges, but the reporter wasn’t satisfied. He pushed against the complacent truisms about the mortgage meltdown that were being retailed by the other prominent outposts of his profession: “We don’t know why, we just got really greedy, and everybody wanted a house they couldn’t afford,” he says, summing up the prevailing consensus in the mediasphere. Van Sickler adds, “I think that’s lazy journalism. That’s a talking point for politicians who want to look the other way. We’re not all to blame for this.”

After Kim pleaded guilty, the United States attorney for Florida’s Middle District announced that more indictments, of far bigger fish in the mortgage food chain, were in the offing. They never came. “Where are the big arrests?” Van Sickler wonders. “Where are the bankers, the lawyers, the real estate professionals?” Packer finishes the thought for him, in a refrain his readers by now know quite well: “Kim was just one piece of a network—what about the institutions?”

Of course, urban planning isn’t separate from the unwinding. The foreclosure crisis, sprawl, and the decline of the middle class are all linked and all have spatial consequences. And these outcomes are all shaped by our institutions, often with substantial unintended consequences. Perhaps that was part of Van Sickler’s hesitation about a career change. What does that say about the planner’s role, both operating within our institutions and outside of them?

What would change with driverless cars?

Robocar electronics - CC image from Steve Jurvetson

If we can agree that technology doesn’t change geometry, and therefore driverless cars won’t substantially change the fundamental capacity and spatial requirements of our current auto-based transportation systems, then what would they change?

Chris Bradford takes a stab at this question, taking note of Matt Ygleisas’s prediction of reduced demand for parking. Matt cites the idea of having a driverless car drop you off at a commuter rail station in the morning in order to make use of the higher capacity rail system to enter the city (thanks to the relevant geometries of rapid transit), while the car would then return to your house – eliminating the need for more car storage at the rail station. Chris takes that one step further, noting that with a tireless ‘driver,’ the needs for vehicle storage wouldn’t need to use a set space at all, but could be accomplished through cruising.

While both ideas would reduce the need for parking spaces, they would also increase the VMT for any given trip – either through cruising for parking or for increased deadhead trips, further clogging the streets. This might not be a problem in certain cases where congestion isn’t currently an issue, but it sure wouldn’t help in places where congestion is already a problem.  Bradford notes this:

In fact, this perfectly rational practice will probably be so harmful, so patently selfish, so despised that it will be necessary to outlaw it. Which means everyone will still have to find a spot for his car, driverless or not. Which means that, despite the title of this post, we might not see a robocar apocalypse after all, or a parking bubble, either (other than the existing bubble that local governments have created with underpriced street parking and mandatory parking minimums.)

Perhaps the most interesting application, then, isn’t the need to store a car for personal use (given the issues of storage raised above), but to allow that car to be used productively by someone else.  A driverless taxi, otherwise (hence my choice for my previous post’s image of Total Recall’s Johnny Cab – I don’t know if the new version of the film this summer will depict the Johnny Cab, if it does so at all).

You can already see the convergence of different car ownership models.  A taxi is owned by an operator, they provides rides for hire, charging you for the convenience of the trip in their car and for not having to drive yourself. Compare that to the current point-to-point carsharing model like Car2Go, and the only real difference is the driver.  Both charge based on time and/or distance traveled, both offer point to point trips in a vehicle you don’t own.

While the cost of these robocars would likely come down over time, they’d still be more expensive than regular ol’ human-driven cars, meaning that the trends towards collaborative consumption would continue, and the robocars would serve their best use as taxis.  The value of owning one yourself would be limited, unless you had a ton of disposable income.

As Matt Yglesias put it, “imagine a world of cheap, ubiquitous taxis.”  The net impact would be favorable to cities and those who live in them.  The limits of the automotive geometry and capacity wouldn’t fundamentally change, so this would still be a premium service over much higher capacity mass rapid transportation.  The benefits of owning a car would continue to decline in urban areas, as would the cost of the auto-based alternatives (like taxis).

Links: The new American Dream

House for rent. CC image from Sean Dreilinger

Foreclosed sprawl – the next frontier of renting?  The New York Times looks at the practice of firms buying up foreclosed, cookie cutter sprawl housing at relatively low prices with the idea of renting these houses out to tenants.

As an inspector for the Waypoint Real Estate Group, Mr. Hladik takes about 20 minutes to walk through each home, noting worn kitchen cabinets or missing roof tiles. The blistering pace is necessary to keep up with Waypoint’s appetite: the company, which has bought about 1,200 homes since 2008 — and is now buying five to seven a day — is an early entrant in a business that some deep-pocketed investors are betting is poised to explode.

With home prices down more than a third from their peak and the market swamped with foreclosures, large investors are salivating at the opportunity to buy perhaps thousands of homes at deep discounts and fill them with tenants. Nobody has ever tried this on such a large scale, and critics worry these new investors could face big challenges managing large portfolios of dispersed rental houses. Typically, landlords tend to be individuals or small firms that own just a handful of homes.

Cities usually have more rentals, and for good reason.  Apartments have common structural elements and provide for economies of scale in managing multiple units.  Applying this to large-scale single family detached homes is a different and challenging model, but a seemingly inevitable result of the decline in home prices in these areas once built on speculation.

It’s also an example of housing market filtering in action.

This isn’t quite what the concept of filtering is about… Cap’n Transit disputes the concept of filtering, noting that such shifts are not permanent.  However, I don’t think anyone was asserting they were.  Filtering is a process, a description of the market responding to shifting demand.  It is not a description of an end state.

It’s true that most of those buildings were not well-maintained, but the causation is more likely the other way around: the landlords didn’t put a lot of money into them because they didn’t bring in much rent. So why were the rents so cheap? I’m guessing that there were several related factors: racism, city services, crime, noise, fads and the suburban ponzi scheme.

I don’t think any of those really disproves the filtering concept.  Filtering doesn’t really describe causation, just the correlation – as demand drops (and therefore the potential rent income), so to does maintenance, and the units on the margins will filter down to more “affordable” prices. Each of those factors listed at the end could be construed, one way or another, as an influence on demand.

The rest of the Cap’ns post on the politics and emotions of gentrification and filtering up are spot on, however.

The fiscal benefits of density: While renting out old McMansions might be a challenge due to diseconomies of scale, Emily Badger looks at Asheville, NC and makes the fiscal case for density and urban infill development.

The whole idea is pretty simple. But it’s sort of baffling that we haven’t been looking at our land this way for years. Cities, Minicozzi laments, are woefully ignorant about exactly which types of neighborhoods and development put the most financial strain on public coffers and which kick in the most money. This is why Minicozzi has been deploying every metaphor he can think of – cash crops, gas tanks, french fries! – to beat home the math.

Fundamentally, this is the same concept as the Geoffrey West observation of urban agglomeration and the inherent efficiency it offers.

How to make use of the reverse commute: Perhaps someone should inform various secondary job centers along transit lines of their fiscal potential.  Alon Levy looks at what’s required to make for successful secondary CBDs along rail transit lines, and what’s wrong with our current land use around suburban stations:

But really, the kind of development that’s missing around suburban train stations in the US is twofold. First, the local development near the stations is not transit-oriented, in the sense that big job and retail centers may be inconvenient to walk to for the pedestrian. And second, the regional development does not follow the train lines, but rather arterial roads, or, in cities with rapid transit, rapid transit lines…

In both cases, what’s missing is transportation-development symbiosis. Whoever runs the trains has the most to gain from locating major office and retail development, without excessive parking, near the train stations. And whoever owns the buildings has the most to gain from running trains to them, to prop up property values. This leads to the private railroad conglomerates in Tokyo, and to the Hong Kong MTR.

Commenter Jim notes how the DC region has a decent track record in this regard with Metro, but not with commuter rail:

The experience in Washington has been that when a Metrorail station (either an extension or infill) is proposed, the planners tear up their existing plans and write new ones for the area immediately surrounding the new station. Metrorail-catalysed TOD is a well understood and appreciated phenomenon. But no-one cares about commuter rail. Planners don’t assume that commuter rail stations will change anything, so don’t change their existing plans to accommodate them.

That’s the disconnect you have to fix.

Indeed – creating that symbiosis requires solving a bit of a chicken-egg problem.  Still, some opportunities exist in the DC region.  New Carrollton jumps to mind, both for Metro access for DC reverse commutes, as well as its mid-line location on the MARC Penn line.  However, the challenge there is on the development side, not the transit service side.

Parking requirements matter: Downtown LA’s revival based on adaptive re-use might not have been possible without changes to LA’s minimum parking requirements.  Making a place built pre-requirement conform is unnecessary, and shows how influential and destructive the requirements can be.  It also speaks to the ability of changing regulations to make doing the right thing the path of least resistance:

Passed by the L.A. City Council in — yes — 1999 and at first applied only to Downtown, ARO gave the go-ahead for the conversion of historic and other older — and often under-used, under-appreciated or even abandoned — office buildings into residences. ARO was expanded in 2003 into various other parts of the city.

“[The Ordinance] provides for an expedited approval process and ensures that older and historic building are not subjected to the same zoning and code requirements that apply to new construction,” reads text on the city’s Office of Historic Resources site.

Fitting in with the econourbanist theory about reduced land use regulation allowing for the market to better address issues of supply, the response was impressive:

During an almost thirty-year period beginning in 1970, Downtown Los Angeles gained a grand total of 4,300 units in housing stock.

Then, between 1999 and 2008, Downtown gained at least 7,300 housing units just from long-term vacant buildings.

That said, it’s not like LA completely abandoned these regulations:

Shoup’s article notes that pre-ARO, developers were required per each housing unit to provide two or more parking spaces. Those spaces, Shoup emphasizes in his piece, were required to be on-site.

Post-ARO, Shoup’s piece says that the average number of on-site parking spaces fell to 0.9 in those converted, previously vacant buildings. Including off-site parking, the number was still 1.3 spaces per unit. That’s a 65% drop in required parking spaces in an area where many residents already self-select to reside in for reasons unrelated to having a multi-car garage.

Nearly one space per unit is still a lot of parking.  Granted, this is LA that we’re talking about.  The flexibility to meet that requirement off-site (flexibility likely required to make the adaptive reuse of historic buildings possible) speaks to the benefits of allowing such changes as a matter of right.

The point about residents self-selecting to live in such conditions is key, contrary to common NIMBY complaints – no one is forcing Angelenos to move in at gunpoint.

Different thoughts on transit service metrics: Jarrett Walker looks at San Francisco’s transit speed (same as it was 100 years ago, or slower) and offers thoughts on various metrics and the need to think about the reliability of the network as a whole.

My own work in this area has always advocated a stronger, more transit-specific approach that begins not with the single delayed line, but rather with the functioning of an entire network.  Don’t just ask “how fast should this line be?” which tends to degenerate into “What can we do to make those forlorn buses move a little faster without upsetting anyone?”  Instead, ask “What travel time outcomes do we need across this network?”  Or turn it around: How much of the city needs to be within 30 minutes of most people?  — a question that leads to those compelling Walkscore travel time maps, which are literally maps of individual freedom.

Weekend Reading – The Group Stage

Soccer in the Circle, from M.V. Jantzen

Soccer in the Circle, from M.V. Jantzen

The World Cup is underway.

England in Roo-ins: The cup means large gatherings of fans and sweet commercials (even the older ones).

Infrastructure: Jarrett Walker takes a look at some of the transit improvements for South Africa, building off the notion that large scale events like the World Cup can provide a kind of focus for infrastructure investments and other benefits that will last well after the conclusion of the games.  Infrastructurist looks at the stadiums.

Last week’s screening on the Mall of PBS’ documentary of Daniel Burnham focused a great deal on his role in the creation of the White City at the 1893 Columbian Exposition – another special event that focused a great deal of infrastructure investment – highlights two issues: the temporary and often fleeting nature of these kinds of events, as well as the ability to focus investments in one area.  Chicago focused on a park, Vancouver’s investments in one region – South Africa’s investments are spread across an entire country.

Ryan Avent’s post on infrastructure investments in mature cities versus growing ones also gets at the comparison between Chicago in 1893 and Vancouver in 2010.

Representative Space: Mammoth takes a look at soccer as a representation of urban space – a diagram of the strategies for using space.  Very interesting.

Framing the Issue: Cap’n Transit disagrees with the idea of framing bus operating improvements in New York as a ‘surface subway.’  This is an important tension – selling a project to various stakeholders is vitally important if you ever want to actually get something done, but overselling the benefits of some projects can dangerous.

Home Ownership and NIMBYism: Ryan Avent dissects a recent paper from the Federal Reserve on home ownership and ‘investment’ in the community, both literally and figuratively.

It’s clearly right that homeowners take an active interest in local policy in an effort to protect and enhance local services and the value of their homes. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that homeowners are generating societal benefits…

It’s also not clear that homeowners are necessarily maximizing the value of their properties. Homeownership, as I’ve mentioned before, is an undiversified, highly-leveraged, immobile, illiquid financial bet. Having made such a bet, homeowners become very risk averse. We can imagine situations in which new developments are likely to benefit local homeowners and increase the value of their properties, but have benefits uncertain enough that there is a small but real probability of a negative effect on local property values. Highly risk-averse homeowners may opt to oppose the project, despite the good chance that they’d benefit from it.

Balancing individual and collective interests is one of the key tensions in any urban environment.  That tension also illuminates the problems of pushing home ownership as the be-all and end-all for one’s living situation.

Politically Correct: Bike lanes?

Couch Criticism: Architecture critics take on forts made of couch cushions.