Autonomous Vehicles

In Kyle’s notes, autonomous vehicles are framed through Adam Cohen’s contrarian research at UC Berkeley. Against the AV hype cycle, Cohen argues that legal and institutional challenges — not the technology — will be what slows adoption, and that the real levers shaping cities are land use, walkable communities, and policy rather than the vehicles themselves. He thinks especially carefully about the future of parking: parking structures have ~60-year lifespans, so cities should be planning adaptable, repurposable parking now even if AVs are decades away. This is the “AV” thread inside Kyle’s broader The New City smart-cities and mobility corpus, drawn from the May–June 2018 sourcing calls.

The framing here is deliberately demand-side and skeptical: AVs matter less as a gadget than for the second-order effects on land use and urban form. It pairs with the supply-side, infrastructure-heavy Autonomous Mobility / Autonomous Driving thread (the City of Dublin corridor pilots) to give both sides of the AV question in the wiki.

Context: Autonomous vehicles use sensors and machine learning to drive with reduced or no human control. A recurring debate in urbanism and mobility-policy circles is whether widespread AV adoption will reduce car ownership and free up parking/land, or induce more vehicle miles traveled — with the timeline gated heavily by regulation, liability, and infrastructure rather than raw technical capability.

Where this appears

• Adam Cohen — Berkeley shared-mobility researcher; his contrarian AV stance and parking-lifecycle argument.
• The New City — the smart-cities / mobility thread where AVs sit alongside land use, walkability, and policy.