How self-driving cars will change L.A.
Autonomous vehicles are closer than you think.
When you think about what defines the soul of a city, you don't think about apartment buildings or business centers. You think about the streets, the spaces shared by people, vehicles, and everything in between. As one of the world's car culture capitals, Los Angeles is home to millions of vehicles, and their prevalence has shaped the city since its inception. But with self-driving technology now just around the corner, city planners are already preparing for how autonomous cars are going to radically transform the urban landscape. Los Angeles is on the verge of a transportation revolution, one that will bring the city into the 21st century and convert it into a place that isn't optimized for cars, but for the people who drive them.
A city built for cars
Los Angeles has only one claim to fame when it comes to connecting its people: concrete. The sprawl of sunny Southern California is criss-crossed by intertwining highways and checkered with 200 square miles of parking lots. The 101 and I-10 act as physical barriers and divide downtown neighborhoods. A recent study found that in Los Angeles County, there are 150,000 people who commute for more than an hour and a half in each direction.
For some, the method behind the madness can be hard to understand. "Los Angeles is a contradiction because most people don't believe Los Angeles was planned, and most people don't believe Los Angeles was well-planned," David Sloane, a public policy professor at USC, told me. "What we have is a place that is very congested because we have people all over the place who often have to get to jobs in other places. There's just so much stuff going on all at once."
While most other Western cities integrated the car into their pre-existing infrastructure, Los Angeles was built to accommodate cars and has centered its design around them in subsequent decades. According to Sloane, "If you were to say to most Europeans that you were going to get in your car, drive 27 miles, have dinner, and then go home, they would look at you like you were insane."
Cities like New York and San Francisco were bound by their geography and were forced to expand by becoming vertically dense, but Los Angeles was instead able to expand horizontally. This dynamic incentivized car ownership among its earliest residents in distant suburbs and led to a lack of investment in public transportation. The feedback loop of outward expansion coupled with increased levels of car ownership encouraged residents to vote down government investments in subways and railways.
The Metro is limited when compared to other rail systems, like the New York City Subway. There are fewer lines and even fewer transfer stations, making it largely inaccessible and inefficient. (Metro Rail & Busway, metro.net. / New York City Subway Diagram, Jake Berman)
This is not a problem exclusive to Los Angeles, either. "In this country, we do not have a lot of public transportation. The transportation system has been designed and evolved around cars," Huei Peng, the director of MCity, a public-private partnership focused on advancements in transportation technology, told me. "Cities evolve based on the technologies we have, and unfortunately they have evolved in a direction that is not good for anybody other than those who collect parking fees."
However, Peng does not think the transportation situation is hopeless. He sees autonomous vehicles as a gateway to making cities "safer, greener, cheaper, and more equitable." As he put it, "Mobility systems can be more efficient if you use information and automated technologies. Autonomous vehicles can be the 'elevators' for major cities."
Peng and others in the industry like to describe self-driving cars as 'elevators.' While elevators allowed buildings to build upward and make urban environments denser, autonomous vehicles will allow city planners to shift their focus away from parking garages and traffic-jammed intersections to focus on creating better housing, business centers, and green spaces. By embracing a more democratized version of transportation, industry leaders believe that cities like Los Angeles can become both more inclusive and more efficient.
New uses for the same space
Land is precious in any urban environment, but much of that land has to be set aside to cater to the needs of cars. As of 2010, 14% of the incorporated land in Los Angeles County is being used for parking. Even more has been paved over and turned into streets and highways. The city has ceded countless acres to allow for personal vehicles at the expense of development in almost every other sector.
While finding a spot to park can be frustrating, as of 2010 there were over 18 million parking spaces in the county. That accounts for more than 3 spaces, or about 1,000 square feet, per vehicle. (Data from Chester et al, Journal of the American Planning Association, 2015 / GIF by Connor Ling)
Rent prices should be relatively low in a city with so much land and opportunity to expand, but as of this year Los Angeles has the sixth highest median rent behind New York City, Boston, and the three cities that make up the Bay Area, much more densely populated environments.
With the city's population growing every year, the need for both housing and parking is constantly increasing. New developments are hindered by the considerations developers have to make for personal vehicles. "For a new apartment building, [developers] have to build 1.5 new spaces per unit. That's an enormous cost to add. If the parking garage is underground, it costs at least $40,000-50,000 per space," said Sloane.
Autonomous vehicles provide an obvious solution. Cars are parked 95 percent of the time, but according to a study from the University of Texas, one shared self-driving car could replace up to ten privately-owned cars. By reducing the need for parking garages and extensive street parking downtown, that land can be repurposed and utilized for new development. "Instead of dedicating 15-20 percent of the downtown area to parking, hopefully the land and housing prices will come down," Peng told me.
Investing in a shared mobility system would also alleviate the price tag that comes with buying and maintaining a car. "If vehicle ownership becomes less than imperative, you can save money not only on insurance but many of the other costs associated with vehicle ownership," says Bob Passmore, a senior policy advisor with a prominent insurance trade association. Even for those who wish to remain car owners, "The hope for having lower insurance costs is that [self-driving cars] are so effective that they reduce the number of crashes."
Autonomous vehicles would also open up streets and curbs to be used more efficiently. If cars are operating on a grid and know where each other are, intersections can clear more quickly and overall speeds can increase without causing a rise in collisions. Curbs that were previously occupied by rows of parked cars can now be used as drop-off zones and allow for faster curbside deliveries.
Greener, happier, healthier
In September 2020, Los Angeles recorded multiple days with an air quality index worse than Beijing. Wildfires contributed to the single-day highs, but they only intensified existing pollution in the region. Coming off of a March in which a mandatory lockdown caused a three week stretch of smog-free days, many thought that a pronounced drop in driving would continue to make the city's air cleaner.
Unfortunately, this was wishful thinking. There were 157 days of bad air for ozone pollution in 2020, one of the worst years in decades. The effects of climate change are looming, and without substantial changes, the problems they cause will only worsen over time. Gas-guzzling cars obviously do not reduce pollution, either.
Griffith Park is one of the country's largest urban parks, but it is still difficult to access without a car. (Photo by Connor Ling)
"Cities are growing in population and density, which at some point is going to make personal transportation unsustainable," said Alice Grossman, a senior policy analyst at the Eno Center for Transportation, a think tank focusing on improving transportation systems across the country. "The goal is to increase the number of miles traveled by an individual vehicle while making those miles as efficient as possible."
By operating on a grid and connecting with other vehicles, self-driving cars are not bound by the same indecision and need to react that human drivers are, which can shave substantial amounts of time off of trips. "If your car knows where you are going, you don't have to run around searching for parking, you don't accelerate or brake unnecessarily, you avoid congested routes, you can save a lot of fuel." Peng said.
Vehicles, especially in California, have become more fuel-efficient over time by incorporating hybrid and electric technologies, but there is still room for improvement. According to Peng, "The cheapest, easiest way is to make it electrified. A lot of the autonomous vehicles you see are already either hybrids or battery-electric."
Los Angeles ranks in the bottom third of cities when it comes to park investment and access. Taking away the need for parking opens up hundreds of square miles of surface area for green space development. Beyond the environmental impact, parks act as a social gathering place and offer opportunities for exercise which directly correlate to increased levels of happiness among residents.
Tempering expectations
These improvements to the urban landscape sound great, but the conversation around them always leads to the same question: when will they actually happen?
Major players in the space such as Elon Musk say that self-driving car production will dominate the market within 15 years. While others in the industry do see this overhaul to the automobile as it is currently understood as an inevitability, they are not nearly as bullish on the timeline.
However, Los Angeles might be uniquely positioned to see a transition to self-driving technology sooner than other big cities. Southern California is a strong location for autonomous vehicles to be rolled out in their earliest stages, with no threat of snow and very few rainy days to exacerbate problems in the system. According to Peng, "These cars might only be able to drive in certain areas, like Los Angeles. You don't have snow, you don't have a lot of rain."
Disruptive technology never abides by anyone's exact projections, and those working on the legal side of the industry are quick to bat down expectations of radical changes occurring overnight. Steve Garcia, an associate with LA City Planning, said that the city is working to "provide the policy foundation for achieving a transportation system that balances the needs of all road users."
But to people who are working tirelessly on creating autonomous vehicles and transforming cities into the best versions of themselves, the sky is still the limit. "We can do it," Peng told me. "There is no reason we cannot."