How to plan for a post-parking future

Congestion pricing that imposes a fee or tax for driving in the downtown core could help prevent this future, but cities need to act fast, before self-driving cars are common, he argues.Those sweet cool gadgets?Those conclusions emerge from an analysis published in the journal Transport Policy, in which Millard-Ball used game theory and a computer model of San Francisco traffic patterns to explore the effects of autonomous vehicles on parking. But relatively few have looked specifically at parking behavior.Millard-Ball analyzed three strategies autonomous vehicle owners could instruct their cars to adopt in order to avoid paying for parking on trips to the downtown core: drive to a different part of the city with free on-street parking, drive home where a designated parking space is presumably available, or simply cruise around the streets. This, combined with the increased miles traveled due to cruising, returning home, or driving to free parking, would more than double vehicle travel to, from, and within downtown San Francisco.“Parking policies that have allowed dense, urban centers to flourish will no longer be a major curb on vehicle travel in an autonomous vehicle world,” Millard-Ball writes.What’s more, the cruising strategy has the potential to cause awful traffic jams.