News Flash everyone, self driving cars are coming and they will be here sooner than you think. While self driving cars will have a profound impact on how we get around, it will also have an immense impact on how we use space.
Hands Free!
Most cars sit parked or unused 95% of their lifetime and during this time all they are doing is taking up space. Garages, street parking, surface parking lots and multi-floor parking lots are large tributes to some of the most expensive, underutilized luxuries we use today.
Self driving cars changes all of that.
When cars can reliably transport people too and from destinations as effectively as humans currently do, why do you actually need to own your own car? Why can't there just be a network of cars on the road, driving themselves around, that stop and pick you up like taxis do, and take you where you need to go. You will pay a monthly subscription fee for the service and never have to worry about parking your car. Like on demand video, soon enough you will have on demand transportation.
This new technology will greatly reduce the need for parking spaces across current developments where parking ratios can sometimes exceed 10 spaces/1,000 SF of occupiable space. What then happens with this excess parking inventory? Development, lots of development.
Did you know that more than a third of land area is some US cities is dedicated to car storage? Imagine if you cut that in half, or a quarter, or by 90%. You could triple the density in some cities and still have less overall car congestion because of the lack of individual car ownership. The new abundance of available land will ease supply constraints currently being experienced by cities across the country. The influx of new development will have a serious impact on real estate values, architecture and space utilization. All of which, with the proper planning, will have a positive impact on how we use the most precious commercial real estate resource around, land.
Believe it or not, parking is the most important facet of real estate development planning. If people can't get to or stay at your property, then how do you attract tenants? By removing the need for cars from individuals lives, you can rewrite how a building is planned and developed, and provide more building space per person that was once occupied by that persons car. By concentrating on the individual's needs, rather than the individual's and the individual's cars needs, you can begin to create more and more meaningful spaces with a lot fewer resources.
The self driving future article published on Sightline.org does a great job of putting all of the ramifications of self driving cars into perspective. I encourage anyone who is interested in the future of commercial real estate development to read it.