Parking

Parking is the concrete case study in Adam Cohen’s thinking about the long-horizon effects of autonomous vehicles on cities. Cohen’s distinctive thesis: parking structures have roughly 60-year lifespans, so even if widespread AV adoption is decades away, cities should be planning adaptable / repurposable parking now. The point connects to his broader contrarian read on AV hype — that the real levers shaping cities are land use, walkable communities, and policy, not the vehicles themselves. Parking is where that abstraction becomes a near-term design and capital decision: build rigid single-use garages today and a city is locked into them long past the moment AVs erode demand for parking.

In the wiki, parking sits inside the Transportation and The New City threads — one of the municipal land-use questions Kyle worked through in his 2018 mobility sourcing calls, alongside autonomous vehicles, City Building, and walkability.

Context: The “adaptable parking” idea — designing garages with flat floors, higher ceilings, and ramp layouts that allow later conversion to offices, housing, or retail — is a real strand of urban-planning practice anticipating reduced car ownership in an AV / ride-share future.

Where this appears

• Adam Cohen — the UC Berkeley shared-mobility researcher whose ~60-year-lifespan, plan-for-repurposing thesis on parking structures is the source of this concept.