Unintended consequences of the autonomous vehicle

By: J. David Chapman/November 17, 2016

The 1939 World’s Fair introduced people to Futurama, a world of autonomous highways. Unlike the autonomous highways of Futurama that focused on fixed routes, today’s scientists and engineers have been focused on the driverless car. Ride sharing has already become a popular alternative to driving, and by 2030 businesses like Uber and Lyft could be primarily driverless.

The average cost of ownership for a car driven 15,000 miles per year is 59-cents per mile. Moving to purpose-built driverless ride share vehicles could further reduce the cost to 15-cents per mile. Tesla and Google are field testing driverless technologies right now, but it is Uber that really made the leap forward. Uber signed a $300 million contract with Volvo, and in September began testing their fleet of driverless cars. The cars will provide rides to actual customers with an emergency driver in place, for now.

There is mixed opinion of how this technology will affect land use and the built environment. In the U.S., there are an estimated four parking spots for every car on the streets. Parking represents roughly 150 billion square feet of real estate in the U.S. To put that in perspective, more than 62 million homes would fit in the area dedicated to parking. Reallocation of this amount of real estate could have a profound effect on urban planning and the built environment.

While there are clear advantages to the development of driverless vehicles, a report by the Rand Corp. points to a potential problem. These automobiles will free people to better use their commuting time thereby reducing the pain of longer commutes. Rand predicts that reducing the pain of the commute might encourage people to live farther out from urban cores and commute longer distances, thus greatly increasing both sprawl and congestion.

It is entirely possible that driverless cars may do more harm than good. If these vehicles are privately owned, which is entirely possible in Oklahoma, and you can summon them to pick you up and drop you off and then go park someplace, they could actually result in more trips on the streets, and therefore more congestion. I am not suggesting we can, or should, stop development, but we must try to predict the unintended consequences of this new technology.

J. David Chapman is an associate professor of finance and real estate at the University of Central Oklahoma (jchapman7@uco.edu).