How Self-Driving Cars Might Transform City Parking

Autonomous vehicles could transform parking as well as driving, new research suggests. Parking lots could house more driverless cars than human-driven ones, but autonomous vehicles could also lead to nightmarish gridlock if they slowly cruise the streets waiting for their owners, instead of paying to park. The typical vehicle spends 95 percent of its lifetime parked. The need to store parked vehicles has turned a lot of potentially valuable real estate into parking garages--for example, in the United States, roughly 6,500 square miles of land is devoted to parking, which is larger than the entire state of Connecticut. Autonomous vehicles could, in principle, transform parking lots.