Calthorpe: Driverless Cars Will Kill Cities

New urbanist architect Peter Calthorpe predicts that “autonomous vehicles will mean death for cities.” To which the Antiplanner responds, “good,” as in “good bye and good riddance.”

But wait — Calthorpe seems to think this is a bad thing. “AVs will only increase sprawl as private vehicles travel farther,” he warns. The reason why people will be able to drive further is because autonomous vehicles will reduce congestion. They will reduce congestion so much, he fears, that “vehicle miles traveled will double and roads will become impassable.” So which is it: will driverless cars promote sprawl by reducing congestion or will they gridlock roads? (The answer is that driverless cars will double road capacities.)

Cities are a means to an end: a place for people to meet, to bring resources together for manufacturing or transshipments, to reduce living costs. But new means of transportation and communication have steadily reduced the need for dense cities to achieve those ends.

Yesterday, the Antiplanner pointed out that dense housing is supposed to be a means to an end: saving farms, reducing air pollution, providing more affordable housing. When it turns out that density does none of those things, too many urban planners still cling to dense housing as an end in itself, a solution looking for a problem.

In the same way, for Calthorpe the idea of the city has become an end in itself. So what if cell phones and the internet mean we no longer need to meet face to face as often as we once did? So what if jet airliners and automobiles mean we no longer need to live as crowded as we once did? We still need dense cities if only because Peter Calthorpe has built his career around designing dense cities.

Calthorpe made his comments at a recent meeting of the Congress for New Urbanism. Some of the other comments made at the meeting are just as idiotic.
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Gene Tierney, who is billed as an optimist regarding driverless cars, nevertheless fears that they could create a “two-class system,” meaning those with access to driverless cars and those without. “We could imagine people playing video games in a Mercedes Benz subscription AV while those who can’t afford are then starved of transit options,” says Tierney.

But it costs four times as much to move a person a mile by transit as by driving. Driverless cars are going to make the benefits of driving accessible to more people without all of them having to pay the up-front cost of buying a car. Anyone who can afford a transit fare should easily be able to afford a driverless ride-share, and we won’t need to subsidize three-fourths of their cost. So Tierney’s fear seems to be groundless, but if he really cares, he could contribute to a charity that would give poor people transportation vouchers they can apply to any common carrier.

Calthorpe, meanwhile, thinks cities should encourage autonomous mass transit instead of autonomous personal vehicles. China is testing an autonomous trackless train that is supposed to run on batteries.

Calthorpe’s problem is he is still trying to go back to the early 1900s, when people lived in dense residential areas and worked in job-dense downtowns. Our jobs aren’t like that anymore and most people don’t live like that anymore, so — outside of New York City — we don’t have large numbers of people going from point A to point B. That means massive vehicles aren’t the transportation solution we need whereas personal-sized vehicles are.

If it were honest, Calthorpe’s group would change its name from Congress for New Urbanism to Congress for Obsolete Urbanism. The only thing new about its programs is that it is willing to use massive government regulation and interference with people’s lives and property rights in order to make people live the way architects like Calthorpe think they should live rather than how people want to live.