Anne Elizabeth Brown

Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) will impose challenges on cities that are currently difficult to fully envision yet critical to begin addressing. This research makes an incremental step toward quantifying the impacts that AVs by examining current associations between transportation network company (TNC) trips — often viewed as a harbinger of AVs — and parking revenue in Seattle. Using Uber and Lyft trip data combined with parking revenue and built environment data, this research models projected parking revenue in Seattle. Results demonstrate that total revenue generated in each census tract will continue to increase at current rates of TNC trip-making; parking revenue will, however, start to decline if or when trips levels are about 4.7 times higher than the average 2016 level. The results also indicate that per-space parking revenue is likely to increase by about 2.2 percent for each 1,000 additional TNC trips taken if no policy changes are taken. The effects on revenue will vary quite widely by neighborhood, suggesting that a one-size-fits-all policy may not be the best path forward for cities. Instead, flexible and adaptable policies that can more quickly respond (or better yet, be proactive) to changing AV demand will be better suited at managing the changes that will affect parking revenue.

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are a near future reality and the implications of AVs on city development and urban form, while potentially widespread and dramatic, are not well understood. This report describes the first order impacts, or the broad ways that the form and function of cities are already being impacted by forces of change including⁠—but not limited to⁠—AVs and related technologies.

"Ridehail services nearly eliminate the racial-ethnic differences in service quality. Policy and platform-level strategies can erase the remaining mobility gap and ensure equitable access to ridehailing and future technology-enabled mobility services."