[mikelitoris]

“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.

[kevinburke]

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.

[jcranmer]

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.

[kevinburke]

Sure. One thing we could do is waive requirements about how wide parking stalls need to be, and parking aisles, and how many parking spaces you need, and then let builders make those decisions for themselves.

[sokoloff]

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.)

[kevinburke]

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.

[sokoloff]

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.

[kevinburke]

The garage sits underneath the housing in this case.

[dlcarrier]

Also: The lack of three+ bedroom units means that there are going to continue to be few product types available in Walnut Creek for families.

Humanity has manage to make it this far, almost entirely without three+ bedroom units.

[andsoitis]

> “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.

[fhdkweig]

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.

[mikelitoris]

“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.

[fhdkweig]

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.

[stefan_]

Well, it's gonna be 2027!

> 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.

[winstonp]

It is ridiculous to be building infrastructure with a seventy five year lifespan under an assumption that may never come in its entire life.

[kevinburke]

When was the last time you looked at a chart of Waymo passenger miles driven?

[soperj]

pretty sure I saw this quote from Elon in like 2015.

[Gigachad]

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.

[kevinburke]

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.

[jcranmer]

> 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."

[carabiner]

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.

[kevinburke]

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.