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November 1st, 2016 at 6:28 am

Cities Are Making Parking (and Cars) Obsolete

parking lot full of cars



San Francisco is one of seven finalists in the Department of Transportation’s $50 million Smart City Challenge, and it put together a plan that relies more on multimodal transportation options than cars. Engineers in London, meanwhile, are studying how self-driving cars could reshape the city and make it more pedestrian friendly.


parking lot turned into a pedistrian mall

The Floor Space of 120 Transamerica Pyramids
San Francisco’s Smart City proposal found that the city currently has 440,000 on-street parking spaces that take up an area equivalent to the city’s 1,000-acre Golden Gate Park, and would “still fill the floor space of 120 Transamerica Pyramids.

“Our plan,” the proposal added, “would phase in innovative technologies that allow us to repurpose public space currently under-utilized as parking into affordable housing, small parks and pedestrian amenities.”

An initial step would be to make ridesharing services such as Uber and Lyft more ubiquitous and accessible and combine them with mass transit options. This would lessen reliance on street parking since rideshare vehicles typically are in motion and don’t park as often, the city said. And since ridesharing vehicles can accommodate multiple passengers, they also take up less space on the road.

“We can move the same amount of people with a tenth of the vehicles,” Timothy Papandreou, the former head of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s Office of Innovation,” told the Washington Post. “We’re not going to need to have all that excess road space.”


  • Making transportation alternatives more affordable for low-income residents and finding ways to lower the cost of ridesharing by deploying large passenger vans similar to the Bay Area’s Chariot service, which was recently acquired by Ford.
  • Implementing self-driving electric vehicles that could be shared.

street parking turned into bike lane

London has space and affordability issues similar to San Francisco, and a recent study by two British engineering firms envisioned how the city’s streets could be entirely redesigned for self-driving cars. It takes into account that autonomous cars would be shared instead of owned, and always on the road picking up and dropping off passengers or charging/refueling/parking in a few centralized locations.

Hence, autonomous cars would require much less street parking. They can also travel in closer proximity and can much be smaller, a la Google’s robo-pod car, than human-driven vehicles. This would allow city planners to reduce the width of streets or even cut back on the number of lanes without affecting travel times. The study concluded that London could gain another 15 to 20 percent of developable area “primarily due to the removal of almost all parking spaces, but also because of road space simplification.”


Image credit & Article via: PC Magazine


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