“Human driven cars are going to be around for about 5 years” is one of the most out of touch quotes I’ve seen this month.
Also, all of this is about NIMBYism, which is about house prices being inflated to make up most of households’ wealth, which is not fixable without triggering a massive wealth redistribution. Most western societies are stuck in a very non-ideal Nash equilibrium and it is not going to be solved any time soon.
The point is the city's parking code assumes that every car has a human driver that needs to park and then exit the car. This informs the choices about how wide the spaces and how wide the aisles are.
Even if only some of the cars had the ability to park themselves - onsite or offsite - you could drastically reduce the floor space required for parking. Reducing the floor space reduces the building height, the construction cost, and the required rent.
We are going to be stuck with the choices we make now about how much space to allocate for parking for the next ~75 years or however long this building is there for. I don't think humans are going to be driving for a lot of that time.
People have been saying that self-driving cars are so imminent that we don't need to bother making any improvements to public transit for... at least 10 years, probably closer to 15 years at this point. It's still too premature to shape your entire land use planning around still largely theoretical predictions of how the technology could evolve.
Sure. One thing we could do is waive requirements about how wide parking stalls need to be, and parking aisles, and then let builders make those decisions for themselves.
25 years from now, if half the cars are then capable of autonomous nav-and-park, we could convert some of the excess parking lots to buildings. (Any lot large enough to have “aisles” will also be large enough to build on.)
It's extraordinarily difficult, and expensive, to convert parking garage space to housing - the heights are different, it's not designed with the same egresses, the floor material is concrete.
It also affects what the ground floor of buildings looks like - you can't have ten ground floor pedestrian exits or bike parking in the courtyard if the courtyard is on the third floor.
Just as you wouldn’t use the asphalt parking surface of an open parking lot as the floor of the house, there’s no obligation to use the actual garage structure.
25+ years from now, if it’s more economical to use for housing, knock it down and build high-density housing.
> “Human driven cars are going to be around for about 5 years” is one of the most out of touch quotes I’ve seen this month.
Where did you see that sentiment expressed? I couldn't find anything along those lines in the article. The closes was about parking, which I think is very different.
I'm just doing a Ctrl+F through the document, but I can't find "5 years" or "Human driven". But if it does appear somewhere, taken out of context, it could mean "no more than 5 years" or "at least 5 years". A bit of ambiguity.
“A self driven car cannot block anyone in. "Humans park their own cars" will be true for maybe five more years“
Ok “human parked”, apologies. Maybe not as out of touch but still pretty out of touch.
Thank you for the direct quote. I can envision large parking lots with two sections, one for tighter spaces and one for larger spaces. Even now you can find parking spaces labeled "compact only". It would be a way of slowly phasing out human driven/parking cars. The 2012 Ford Focus could self-parallel park.
> Maybe this building in 2026 can't assume robots are parking the cars. But we could change the city's rules now and maybe a building a year from now will be able to dedicate less space to parking.
Right, the difference is you can see from charts of miles driven by Waymo etc. that the technology is clearly ready. If it was not ready they would not have been able to raise money at a $126 billion valuation.
> If it was not ready they would not have been able to raise money at a $126 billion valuation.
Oh, in the current market, you can raise obscene amounts of money on pure hype. Look at how much money SpaceX raised on an S-1 prospectus that everyone looked at and went "this is pure fantasy."
I remember what feels like forever ago hearing that truck driving is basically solved and there won't be any human truck drivers soon. Yet now more than 10 years later trucks are still driven by humans.
lmao. Average age of a car on the road right now is 12 years. Yes, I'm sure my mexican housekeeper will be selling her 15 year old corolla for a self driving car any time now.
With respect, people who drive used cars are not renting brand new apartments in downtown Walnut Creek.
It does not make sense to mandate parking standards in new buildings that assume 100% of cars will be driven by humans who park and then need to open the door to exit the car.
It's a juxtaposition of optimistic futurism (in 5-10 years, most people will just rely on robocars and robotaxis) and anti-regulatory sentiment (critical of the requirement that elevators accommodate stretchers).
Some of the more difficult problems are hand-waved away as, "We could solve this if we just put our engineering hats on."
That said, I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It's true that other countries and cultures have very different approaches to residential development. But a big part of that is cultural differences in how people live and what they want. Cultures that are more family-oriented are naturally going to have housing that is more family-oriented.
I just spent a week in Austin and took a half dozen Waymo rides. Robotaxies are definitely here and they are awesome. There's no reason why they won't be coming for Walnut Creek.
Being against bad housing regulations is not "anti-regulatory sentiment". Some regulations just aren't good. We shouldn't valorize rules for the sake of rules.
> The global leader in self driving cars has a headquarters thirty miles from here - the city could invite someone from Waymo to give a talk on the future of onsite parking and how our codes should adapt.
I agree with pretty much everything in your article, Kevin. But I wonder whether Waymo actually has a holistic vision for how families would use their service? Do they expect people with small children to haul around a carseat or booster seat (possibly multiple) for these trips until all their kids are old enough? And spend the extra couple of minutes double parked while they install/remove it?
My sense is that parents are pretty tired of driving their kids to and from things and if it was possible for your kids to take a self driving car to school or to activities or to camp that would be a pretty attractive proposition.
The schools or daycares or camps could help figure out unloading on the other end.
the only thing I can imagine in the near-term are a subset of vehicles in the fleet which have carseats for infants and todlers which stay installed in the vehicle. We also already see vehicles from Volvo which have integrated/convertable booster seats for children 4+ and maybe the entire fleet could have these.
Integrated car seats were popular in some minivans and SUVs a number of years ago. Then they fell out of favor. I think it was because safety standards changed faster than the vehicle lifespan.
the world today is banning kids from the internet largely to prevent them from talking to strangers online. i think a scenario where the pedophiles can use waymo to snatch up kids from summer camps might encounter some resistance.
The far bigger danger to kids from an abuse perspective is the adult driver in the front seat and from a safety perspective is the poor average quality of human driving.
And a self driving car is capable of locking all the doors, identifying threats, calling 911 etc.
"Most of the apartments have a window on just one side. The interior facing rooms on the lower floors are going to have a lot of trouble getting light in. With a window on only one side, you can't ventilate your apartment by opening windows on multiple sides. This increases the demand for HVAC, which increases the cost of living."
I doubt A/C costs are anything but negligible compared to the other design decisions.
Even then, opening two windows require that the wind is blowing and in the right direction. I purchased a box fan just so I can put it in a window to get more ventilation (and it was to blow out allergens, not temperature control). Best $18 I ever spent.
This is someone who is just looking for an excuse to not like the apartment.
Walnut Creek is in PG&E territory where peak hour energy is 54 cents/kwh right now.
And the difference is A/C is paid by the renter not the building owner. If you want to address cost of living one thing we could do is make it easier to have the wind cool down apartment buildings.
You should be looking places other than California before asking this question. In my suburb of Iowa we have apartments that are very similar to this one as far as sizes but the rent is much cheaper. There are also a number of three bedroom apartments in those new buildings, for much more reasonable rent. These apartments have the large parking lots required in the U.S. They have the large elevators required in the U.S. They have the dual staircase required in the U.S. I guess they don't have windows that provide cross ventilation, but realistically in a modern building, insulation is so good you don't need those, and our climate is enough harsher than most of Europe that you will be using HVAC most of the year.
As soon as you look at comparisons like this that are also in the US but somehow managed to be much cheaper, you realize the problem isn't whatever this analysis is about. It's got to be something else.
I moved to California from Nebraska, so I'm well familiar with what you're talking about. And while that's true, it overlooks a few things:
* My salary:housing ratio is better in California than in Nebraska. I have to work fewer hours each month to pay for my home here than I use to, for roughly similar niceness.
* What is spendy is services, like paying someone to do work on the house. Those workers make more here, too.
* On a side note, anything you buy from a national retailer costs the same in both places. An iPhone or a minivan both cost $X whether you live in CA or IA, so I only have to work about 1/4th the amount of time to buy a new phone here as I use to.
Yes, the cost of living is a lot higher here. Especially for those in tech, in my experience the pay difference far outweighs the cost difference, even including housing.
I'm Googling for "Des Moines apartments" and clicking on any that I find that have double loaded corridors and so far I'm 0 for 4 on finding any that have a three bedroom apartment.
Why look at a single building and generalize a whole city?
Less bedrooms generally means more units and rent. Kids in units means much higher wear and tear. Design is highly dependent on the goals of the building developer.
Nowhere can build 3 bedroom apartments, except penthouses. It’s not only a national problem, but an international one - almost the entire west can’t build these.
The article mentions a lot of the reasons. Our building codes, especially the double stairway requirement, eliminate a lot of reasonable layouts and have downstream effects on the economics of apartment buildings. Another reason that isn't mentioned in the article is that there are different ideals for family housing, especially in suburban areas like Walnut Creek. Family apartments just aren't as desirable.
While building codes are different, those are not different enough to explain the difference. I've seen plenty of people try to propose layouts for apartment buildings that would meet the U.S. requirements and be much cheaper, but no one builds them, even though they should be legal.
The real problem is families in the US don't desire apartments and so no one builds apartments that families would desire to live in, thus perpetuating the problem.
Family apartments could be really desirable, but nobody builds them because of the building codes so people don't look for them. The point that a single-family home costs 1.5 million dollars is very applicable here, as the monthly payment on that loan is cripplingly expensive or totally out of reach. A 4-bedroom apartment for a family of 4 would be extremely desirable in that market.
I think it's really a simple, cultural bias. Most wanting 3+ bedrooms and having the means are also programmed to be inclined to want detached houses with a yard.
Also, in California, "apartment" means short-term leasing and is usually full of young singles, couples, divorcees, and retirees. It is often a big building with many studio, 1, and 2 bedroom units. A similar multi-dwelling structure with individual unit ownership is referred to here as a condominium (condo). These often have slightly larger units since they are targeting the home-buying family rather than the itinerant renter.
In SF Bay Area suburbs like Walnut Creek, there are also neighborhoods with town-homes. These are like condos in ownership structure, but often only have 2-3 units per building, wrapped with a small private yard maintained by the owners. And these lots are in turn surrounded by larger common grounds, which are maintained jointly by the HOA for the whole neighborhood.
In the US the nuclear family is usually two parents and two children. The parents share one bedroom and each child gets one.
In Asia I would guess families make room for their older relatives which would mean an extra bedroom is needed. Immigrants to the US typically do that but I think it's uncommon among the rank and file Americans.
Mostly US apartments don't go beyond a certain size, after that you need a house or maybe a townhouse. Double maybe a condo, but those usually don't go bigger than apartments either.
Apartments are for dense housing, big apartments aren't dense, therefore look elsewhere for your large apartment, I guess. You could have 4 tiny bedrooms, I guess, but that's weird too.
It's nice to have an office/guest room, but if you're raising a family that needs three bedrooms in apartments, you're compromising.
Because there’s a heavy bias for people who have use for 4+ bedrooms to also not want to live in an apartment building.
The reasons vary, but I have lived in Boston/Cambridge area for 40 years and can’t think of literally any of my friends who raised a kid past the age of 3 in an apartment, despite many of them (including me) enjoying the apartment life while young and single. But, literally as soon as we could [barely] afford to, we bought a house and only then added to the family.
In the US, when you start to get to planning to have a larger family, especially the size of family that would necessitate 4 bedrooms (multiple children, or maybe having a parent live with you), most people expect to move out of an apartment building into a house anyways (maybe detached single-family home, maybe duplex, maybe condo). So there's just not the demand for 4-bedroom apartments or even 3-bedroom apartments to a large degree.
Smaller units rent for more per square foot in general, so if the building project is limited by gross-floor-area ratios, developing it into more, smaller units produces more rent than fewer, larger units.
There’s also a pretty strong effect in the US that selects towards raising 4+ person families in a house (whether rented or owner-occupied) if at all possible, so a 4 BR apartment is likely to be occupied by the (relatively) rare tenant who prefers to live in an apartment, but more likely one who is forced to by lack of option. I suspect this effect is much smaller in Asia.
2 exit stairs makes sense, so long as one of those can be a fire escape. I think a lot of places banned those though because they're "ugly".
Elevator laws make sense so long as they apply to general areas and not every single building. It would really suck for the majority of builders to decide to cost-skimp and skip elevators, effectively locking disabled people out of dense living.
Parking laws need to be removed and replaced with minimum transit requirements. Provided transit options are accommodating for disabled people (which is totally possible, all the buses around me do it) then the only thing hurt (read: no longer subsidized) by making parking optional are car manufacturers, dealers, and gas companies.
It's not the elevator requirement that is the problem, it's that they have to be very big. Can't use the small elevators that fit inside a stairwell for example.
You've got this backwards - big elevators with union labor mean that they're an expensive undertaking that only large multifamily buildings can afford.
Smaller, more affordable elevators mean that they're less of a luxury item. You could put an elevator in your house, or retrofit an older apartment with an elevator, much more easily. This is incredibly common in other countries
To me it's somehow emblematic of the situation that we can have an article that starts off talking seemingly reasonably about indoor corridors and building heights, and then halfway through pivots to arguments based on self-driving cars being an imminent game-changer.
They already don't have those parking requirements in Copenhagen, and it sure as heck ain't because they've got cars parking themselves with one inch of clearance.
Adam Sandler's "Click" has a scene explaining it (though it is about hotel there, the "forget all the niceties and maximize the profit" principle is universal) https://youtu.be/BRl2ZM-YguE?t=61
It takes the explicit will of the government (dare i equal it to the will of the people?) to force developers to build at least half decent stuff i a half decent way. Note that the market - "people would vote with their dollar" - doesn't work here due to highly constrained, in many ways by the government, supply.
I'm sorry but the assumption that robotaxis will make parking spots obsolete in 5 years is the sort of thinking that probably keeps Elon Musk a rich little boy. About 10 years ago we had conversations about autonomous driving coming by 2020 and how it would likely make auto insurance irrelevant. That hasn't materialized yet, and granted we are much further along now, but it seems like we're still a long way away from it being the norm to the point where it disrupts city building codes.
Also, all of this is about NIMBYism, which is about house prices being inflated to make up most of households’ wealth, which is not fixable without triggering a massive wealth redistribution. Most western societies are stuck in a very non-ideal Nash equilibrium and it is not going to be solved any time soon.