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this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2025
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Fuck Cars
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Honestly, I want both. I live in Germany and my city has pretty decent public transit. But there are still way too many cars in the city, most streets have parking spaces on both sides, leaving only a small sidewalk. I want people to not be dependent on owning cars anymore. I want personal cars in the city to be replaced by self-driving cabs that you can just order when you need them. Imagine how cool that would be. There would be centralized (underground??) self-driving car storages and if you need a car, you just order one via an app and they just come to wherever you are autonomously and drive you wherever you want to go. You could basically get rid of all public parking spaces, it would be awesome.
I can see a lot of possible futures if self-driving cars become common.
In some, people use self-driving taxis whenever they need a car. In places like NYC where owning a car is a real hassle, self-driving cars mean you can ditch that annoyance and still enjoy the benefits of a car when you need one. That means urban living is much more popular, and high-rise building don't need to be built with obscene amounts of parking attached. Because nobody has to park their car when they're not using it, parking spaces and parking lots completely disappear. This opens up space for bike lanes or other uses. Because nobody has to worry about parking anymore, pedestrian malls are more common. People can just be dropped off and picked up in a small area nearby. In this scenario, mass transit might also be more common. People could take self-driving cabs from their homes or workplaces to the nearest transit hub, switch over to mass transit, and then get a self-driving cab on the other end to get to wherever they're going. This would be less convenient than taking a car the whole way, but if the pricing was right, and the mass transit was nice enough, people might want to save money this way. This would work especially well if you have things like express subway lines that go very quickly between two very popular spots.
Unfortunately, there's the other end of the spectrum. In this one, people decide they want to own their self-driving cars. The fact that they can get to work, working while the car drives, means they want to live out in the middle of nowhere. So, instead of reducing urban sprawl it makes it much worse. Because everyone owns their own car, you still need lots of parking for the self-driving cars to use while the owner is at work. One possible benefit of this is that you don't need the parking right next to the associated building, so at least you can do away with parking scattered everywhere, ruining cities. OTOH, you will end up with some dystopian hellscape parking structures where 10k cars wait for their owners to call.
It could get even worse too. If the rich all move deeper into the suburbs and self-driving cars make traffic more efficient, I could easily see cities passing laws that give cars much more priority even than they already have. Jaywalking might be considered an even bigger crime because not only are you interfering with the driving of one or two human drivers, you're disrupting the algorithm-optimized flow of traffic.
Very interesting thoughts, thank you. I would guess that the percentage of people owning their car would decline rather than increase, especially in the cities, but I had never considered the factor that the travel time itself will be less inconvenient and people might be okay with longer commute times. I guess it's possible that overall, these two factors more or less cancel out, and then the number of cars would stay the same but they would move more to the suburbs and rural areas, and out of the cities. That still doesn't sound so bad.
Any way, I don't think self-driving cars should replace public transport, but complement it. Politics and society need to steer development in that direction. While I personally look forward to self-driving cars, currently my energy goes into fighting for better bike infrastructure und better and cheaper public transport. If we're lucky, we'll find a way for all these modes of transportation to form an intertwined and accessible network that is efficient and sustainable. We should keep trying to make it happen.
It sounds bad for the city cores though. I like cities and I especially like cities with dense cores that combine good walkable areas with great transit. Tokyo is a prime example. Some people still drive in Tokyo, but a lot of people use the amazing mass transit system there. The end result for Tokyo is that mass transit hubs become these amazing walkable areas with all kinds of interesting things to see.
If everybody except the most poor get self driving cars and move to the suburbs, the downtown cores might become robocar hells, where cars have the priority and pedestrians need to wait 5 minutes to cross a street.
Yeah, I agree. There might need to be some kind of government intervention to make sure that people have an incentive to use public transit instead of just going everywhere in self-driving cars. But, if you can make journeys robocar -> mass transit -> robocar that's still an improvement on just full robocar journeys.
As for bikes, I have spent most of my life using a bike to get around. I want Netherlands style bike highways everywhere. But, it's really hard to get any progress with bike-friendly designs in the current climate. What I think some people should do is have some very well developed bike highway plans in their back pockets, waiting for the opportunity to roll them out.
It could be that self-driving cars will take over the roads in a way that was like how cars replaced horses. If that happens, there are going to be a lot of cities that are going to have to make new laws suddenly: what happens to street parking, what do we do with existing parking lots, etc. That would be the time to pull out a big plan and say "ok, first of all, let's install all these bike highways with the room we now have".
I meant that cars would move out of the city, not people. I live in Germany where the statistics is that 57% of people own a car. In my city the percentage is 48% so that's already lower than average and in the city centre districts it's only around 30-35% of people owning a car. I would say that is a pretty normal distribution for German cities. That difference between inside and outside the city would just get bigger and I see no problem with that. The reason is already that public transport in the city is decent, people use bikes a lot, and parking is difficult and expensive (my city just increased parking prices in public resident parking zones to 360€/year). We need better public transport and better bike infrastructure and car numbers should go down in total, but I would still appreciate a shift of cars into rural areas. At least there is enough space to park them. In the city they're just taking up way, way too much valuable space. And they're loud and they smell (both getting better with electric ones, to be fair).