One of the things that I try and do here on this blog is examine the intersection of design, real estate, and technology. I didn’t explicitly set out to do that, but more and more I find myself thinking that way when I’m writing and when I’m giving talks.
Part of that is because of my passions, but part of it is because there is a big and important overlap. One example of that is autonomous, self-driving cars. The tech community is enamoured with driverless cars, but everyone involved in the built environment should also be thinking about their impacts. Because it’ll be significant.
Benedict Evans – who is a venture capitalist with Andreessen Horowitz in the Valley – recently published a post called, 16 mobile theses. It’s a look at 16 topics, trends, and shifts that are happening in the tech space. (There’s also a related podcast discussion.)
If you’re involved in internet products, you absolutely need to give it a read. But I also think it’s interesting to read it through the lens of a designer or real estate person. Productivity is changing. Notions around the living room are changing. And yes, autonomous vehicles are going to have a profound impact on the urban landscape of our cities – just as cars did initially.
Below are 3 excerpts from Benedict’s post that I really enjoyed.
The first is about mobile and just how massive it is:
“The mobile ecosystem, now, is heading towards perhaps 10x the scale of the PC industry, and mobile is not just a new thing or a big thing, but that new generation, whose scale makes it the new centre of gravity of the tech industry. Almost everything else will orbit around it.”
The second is about how “networked” is quickly becoming a given:
“Our grandparents could have told you how many electric motors they owned - there was one in the car, one in the fridge and so on, and they owned maybe a dozen. In the same way, we know roughly how many devices we own with a network connection, and, again, our children won’t. Many of those uses cases will seem silly to us, just as our grandparents would laugh at the idea of a button to lower a car window, but the sheer range and cheapness of sensors and components, mostly coming out of the smartphone supply chain, will make them ubiquitous and invisible - we’ll forget about them just as we’ve forgotten about electric motors.”
And the third is about those self-driving cars:
“The move to electric and the move (if and when) to autonomous, self-driving cars fundamentally change what a car is, but also what the whole automotive system might look like. Electricity changes the mechanical complexity of cars and hence changes who might build them and what they might look like. Autonomy and on-demand services change who buys them, meaning the buying criteria will be different. But they could also change the urban landscape just as much as cars themselves did - what do mass-market retail or restaurants look like if no-one needs to park?”
Can you think of other ways in which tech will impact cities and the spaces we occupy?
As a follow-up to yesterday’s post on New Urbanism, I thought I would post an interesting video discussion between Andrés Duany and Ben Stevens.
Duany is the father of New Urbanism and Stevens runs a great blog called The Skyline Forum where he interviews notable city builders, developers, architects, planners, and so on. If you can’t see the video below, click here.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfZZ61C4YOY?rel=0&w=560&h=315]
Once again it’s a great reminder that so much of what we do and build in our cities is dictated by parking requirements. One of the ways Duany differentiates New Urbanism from “old urbanism” is that the new explicitly provides for the car.
Regrettably, I think we do that almost everywhere nowadays. But I take his point that New Urbanism happens almost as an intervention in areas where there are few or no other mobility options besides the car.
I also thought it was interesting that Duany refers to big box stores as the new noxious-use in cities, rather than industry. He describes the parking, not the stores themselves, as creating a “flume of unwalkability.”
It always seems to come down to parking.
Lately I’ve been having discussions around the future value of parking spaces in urban centers. So yesterday I tweeted out this poll:
Will parking spaces in cities become more, or less, valuable in the future? 💸 #AThisCity
— Brandon G. Donnelly (@donnelly_b)
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The sample size is very small, but for what it’s worth, there are some/many people who believe that urban parking spaces will become more valuable in the future.
This is a reasonable assumption.
Over the last couple of decades here in Toronto, I would guess that parking ratios for new multi-family developments have probably fallen by more than half. It used to be that you had to build 1 to 1.5 parking stalls for each unit and now we seem to be sitting somewhere close to 0.5. Although, there are also exceptions and some projects today are getting built with no parking.
So given that the supply side of urban parking spaces seems to be getting constrained and many cities are actively trying to encourage other forms of mobility, it’s not unreasonable to believe that parking stalls will only become more valuable. That’s why a new underground spot in Toronto might cost you $60,000 today and why some spots in New York can even fetch a $1 million.
But this assumes that the demand for parking will remain more or less the same. What if it doesn’t stay the same? What if we were to experience a tipping point that rearranged urban mobility? What if the cost of driving became so high that people stopped driving at scale? In these scenarios, the demand side of the equation would change.
If you’re a regular of this blog, you probably know what I’m going to say next. But already I can think of two innovations that would contribute to the above scenarios: Uber and driverless cars.
Uber’s goal is to continually drive down the cost of transportation and eventually get you to no longer own a car. They know very clearly that the demand for transportation services is highly elastic and that the cheaper they get the more you will use them. And the way they get cheaper is by continually increasing the utilization rate of their drivers/cars. An idle driver/car is the enemy.
Of course, the other way to drive down fares is to remove the driver all together. And once you’ve done that, there is, in theory, no reason that a car should ever sit idle – like they do today. (The utilization rate for my car is around 2%.) And if a car is never sitting idle, then why would you ever need to park it? Certainly you wouldn’t need to park it as often as you do today.
All of this isn’t going to happen tomorrow, but I believe – despite the supply constraints – that we are going to end up with excess parking spaces in our cities. And that will mean that they are going to be perceived as less valuable than they are today. I also believe that it will eventually seem silly to drive your own car.
What do you think?