[lambda_lover]

My personal bias tells me that it won't effect much: I think a lot of current city dwellers live in cities not only for jobs, but also because they like the easy access to amenities, culture, and walkability.

There's also the fact that the throughput of autonomous vehicles compares very poorly with the throughput of a decent subway or light rail system (multiple orders of magnitude).

More objectively, I suspect there are a lot of people who are only living in cities today because of job availability. But I question how many of those folks want to transition from a 30 minute walk/public transit ride to a hour+ drive in a (semi?) autonomous vehicle. Even if you can read or work in your autonomous car -- which, in itself, is a dubious proposition for anybody who needs connectivity to their team or the internet due to the price of data plans -- it's still time spent away from home, family, loved ones, etc. I'm not sure how many jobs are truly flexible enough for you to let commute time replace at-desk time: even software jobs don't all allow that.

So for many people, autonomous vehicles would just mean more time spent commuting, away from their families. And for all of that, you end up driving (autonomously!) 20+ minute to do anything on the weekends or after work. It's not a deal I would make, but maybe other people are more OK with it.