Autonomous vehicles and urban space management

Abstract

Discussions on how urban space would be transformed by the use of autonomous vehicles (AVs) are scarce. This study identifies the impacts caused by the shared use of AVs on urban parking and urban space management. An estimation method was formulated considering the reduction in parking demand, the possible alteration in vehicle ownership, and the reallocation of urban space. A case study was performed in a 673,220 m2 area through scenarios created by using real data of parking spaces and the results of previous studies. Results showed that parking spaces can be saved with the use of shared AVs, which would allow the reallocation of urban space to new uses (for example, implementation of around 12,000 bike-sharing docking spots, 10 km bike lanes, 7 km additional traffic lane or 140 ‘parklets’). The results contribute to revealing the positive impacts of AVs.