This is a great TED talk by Edward Glaeser about why it is time to embrace our cities. If you can’t see it below, click here.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILDwnzQNlGc&w=560&h=315]

The talk was filmed in 2012 – right around the time that Triumph of the City was released – but the video was published at the beginning of this year.

It is also a good add-on to yesterday’s post about transportation costs and cities. I love how passionate Glaeser gets about these topics.

There’s a significant amount of downward pressure on parking supply in most major cities. Part of this has to do with the push toward more sustainable forms of transport, which is, of course, a good thing. But it also has to do with rising construction costs, the fear of obsolescence in the wake of autonomous vehicles, and probably many other factors.

Developers, ourselves included, have responded by being cautious about the amount of parking being provided and by considering alternative future uses for the parking that is being built. I think it is also obvious that we will continue to see more, rather than less, parking stackers and other more efficient parking solutions.

So far the cost of parking in dense urban centers has continued to rise. A new parking spot in the core of Toronto priced at $100,000 would not surprise me. And Hong Kong recently set a record for what is allegedly the most expensive parking spot in the world: USD 765,000 or CAD 1 million.

But what is going to happen going forward?

Researchers at the Singapore - MIT Alliance for Research and Technology and MIT Senseable City Lab, along with Allianz, have recently tried to quantify what the impact of autonomous vehicles will mean on required parking, and on traffic, in Singapore. The study is called Unparking.

Today, they estimate the total number of parking spots in Singapore to be around 1,370,000. This is based on minimum parking requirements from the Housing Development Board and on the idea that home-work commuting consumes two parking spots: one at home and one at the office.

They model four different scenarios, but the last one is based on fully autonomous vehicles and on shared parking spaces. Holding current mobility demands and traffic volumes constant, the demand for parking in this scenario drops by 70%.

It is possible to reduce the number of parking spaces even further to 85%, but this has a negative impact on traffic congestion in their model. Fewer parking spaces means the autonomous vehicles have to drive around more picking people up. 

I also don’t know if there was any consideration given to induced demand as a result of the more affordable autonomous vehicles. Demand for transportation services is generally thought to be fairly elastic.

Whatever the case may be, numbers are made to be questioned. And Singapore is a unique city-state. But ¼ the amount of parking does not seem that far fetched to me.

Photo by Tobias Jussen on Unsplash

On Monday, John Zimmer and Logan Green, the co-founders of Lyft, published this Medium post announcing their “approach to partnering with cities to introduce bike and scooter sharing” to their platform. 

“Approach to partnering with cities” is undoubtedly a carefully chosen set of words given all the backlash going on right now around dockless scooters.

Nevertheless, this is an exciting announcement. I could have used a scooter this afternoon to get to a meeting. And this is all part of their larger goal of transforming Lyft into a multi-modal platform – one that will also support conventional public transit.

Here is an excerpt from the Medium post:

Transit, bikes, small electric vehicles, and infrastructure such as safe pedestrian paths and bike lanes, all play a large role in decoupling people’s right to mobility from car ownership. We know we can’t accomplish this alone, and we’re committed to working with cities and residents to bring these elements together in the most cohesive way to maximize a reduction in vehicle miles traveled.

The company has also set the goal that 50% of all trips on the Lyft platform will be shared rides by 2020. It is yet another example of the lines between public transit and ride sharing apps becoming blurrier. 

Full post can be found, here.