[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.