How the Robocar Trifecta Would Improve Our Cities

(draft) We need a big flip, not a slow shift.

Inspired by my friend Kevin's recent post, as well as Brad's eternal stream of interesting ideas and analysis.

I've long hoped the Robocar Trifecta would happen: electric, shared, autonomous vehicles — all in many sizes, with cabins designed for specific purposes.

We've discovered that lack of charging facilities is a hugely limiting factor for the uptake of privately owned EVs. That means there'll be a slower transition as we wire up more places to be good for recharges, a costly and inefficient process.

Why not dispense with that (mostly), by taking the least desirable urban spaces and some of the idled and unrepurposeable spaces, and turning them into robocar charging and holding spaces? Make the system super efficient for turning robocars around with full batteries.

Then when we solicit cars with our apps, we'll know our destination for that trip, and will always get a vehicle that's sized for our group and distance. Bye-bye range anxiety.

Winning back all the city space lost to parked cars will be huge for cities. Remember how cool parklet cafes and restaurants were during the Pandemic? One of the few silver linings. Also great: being able to see sidewalks and homes on residential streets, and having space for children to play more. Cities could play with blocking traffic on certain streets at will.

Previewing some benefits:

• Much quieter cities as all vehicles go electric
• Newfound urban spaces
• Imagine all the parked cars gone
• Repurposed parking structures (27% of downtown Houston Is parking structures!)
• Purpose-built robocars!
• Very little private vehicle ownership
• Easier multi-mode urban transit
• Move recharging to the least desirable spaces

Each of these deserves a post, so I'll light them up with links as I write them.

#robocars #urbanplanning #futureofcities #wishfulthinking #EVs #futureoftransportation

— Jerry Michalski

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This article is cross-posted on Substack here, Medium here and LinkedIn here. It's also here in my Brain.

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