this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2025
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It sounds bad for the city cores though. I like cities and I especially like cities with dense cores that combine good walkable areas with great transit. Tokyo is a prime example. Some people still drive in Tokyo, but a lot of people use the amazing mass transit system there. The end result for Tokyo is that mass transit hubs become these amazing walkable areas with all kinds of interesting things to see.
If everybody except the most poor get self driving cars and move to the suburbs, the downtown cores might become robocar hells, where cars have the priority and pedestrians need to wait 5 minutes to cross a street.
Yeah, I agree. There might need to be some kind of government intervention to make sure that people have an incentive to use public transit instead of just going everywhere in self-driving cars. But, if you can make journeys robocar -> mass transit -> robocar that's still an improvement on just full robocar journeys.
As for bikes, I have spent most of my life using a bike to get around. I want Netherlands style bike highways everywhere. But, it's really hard to get any progress with bike-friendly designs in the current climate. What I think some people should do is have some very well developed bike highway plans in their back pockets, waiting for the opportunity to roll them out.
It could be that self-driving cars will take over the roads in a way that was like how cars replaced horses. If that happens, there are going to be a lot of cities that are going to have to make new laws suddenly: what happens to street parking, what do we do with existing parking lots, etc. That would be the time to pull out a big plan and say "ok, first of all, let's install all these bike highways with the room we now have".
I meant that cars would move out of the city, not people. I live in Germany where the statistics is that 57% of people own a car. In my city the percentage is 48% so that's already lower than average and in the city centre districts it's only around 30-35% of people owning a car. I would say that is a pretty normal distribution for German cities. That difference between inside and outside the city would just get bigger and I see no problem with that. The reason is already that public transport in the city is decent, people use bikes a lot, and parking is difficult and expensive (my city just increased parking prices in public resident parking zones to 360€/year). We need better public transport and better bike infrastructure and car numbers should go down in total, but I would still appreciate a shift of cars into rural areas. At least there is enough space to park them. In the city they're just taking up way, way too much valuable space. And they're loud and they smell (both getting better with electric ones, to be fair).
My city just started trialing some electric buses, man are they so much quieter than the deisel buses. One advantage to self-driving cars is that cars can drive themselves to somewhere where they can be charged, which should only make electrification easier. I'm cautiously optimistic that self-driving cars could make cities better, but we'll see.