Back in January, Tesla Motors introduced "Summon," a feature that allows many of its newer vehicles to park themselves. Using a smartphone or key fob, car owners can remotely command their vehicles to open garage doors, enter, park themselves and shut down. When the cars are needed again, motorists can retrieve them in the same remote way.

Other car companies are working on similar valet technologies, and the promise of cars that can park themselves is creating a ripple effect that stretches beyond the auto industry.

Sometime later this year, excavators will start ripping into cement and construction crews will begin transforming 50 acres of an ordinary parking lot in a suburban Nashville office park into a future-minded space that brings together all the latest trends in urban planning; you can see a rendering of the development below.

Developers intend to build a mix of retail spaces and residences that incorporate things like solar panels and green roofs. But that could describe any number of developments across the country. What makes this project most notable is that it's poised to include what is believed to be the nation's first parking structure designed for an era in which cars contain valet features like Summon and can park themselves and connect with broader transportation networks.

Town Planning & Urban Design Collaborative

Motorists might not think these drab structures would need to change in that transition. But like every other aspect of transportation being upended by technology, parking garages will be no different. Within the next two to five years, experts believe these technologies will begin to alter what drivers need from a parking garage. Further out, as that transition continues, existing structures may need to be retrofitted, and new ones rethought from the ground up. In Nashville, planners are trying to get a head start.

"It's not even the clients pushing us, it's the investment group bringing the dollars to the table for the project, and they're saying, 'We need you to take this into consideration,'" said Brian Wright, founding Principal of Town Planning & Urban Design Collaborative, the company handling the Nashville project. "It really is a paradigm shift."

DW Burnett/PUPPYKNUCKLES

Autonomous cars bring the likelihood that drop-off zones will be needed for vehicle occupants at the front of the buildings. Once occupants exit cars at a designated area, the cars can park themselves. And if there's no need for humans to exit parked cars, they can fit into narrower berths that may eventually shrink from a traditional 9.0-foot width to perhaps 7.0- or even 6.5 feet wide. Squeezing vehicles into tighter spaces in turn saves millions in costs for builders, home buyers and consumers alike. But that's just the small stuff.

Connected cars add another dimension to the autonomous capabilities. Whether they're privately owned or shared vehicles, the ability to summon a ride remotely means garages may not even need to be located smack-dab in the middle of shopping districts or close to city centers. The garages can potentially be moved out of areas where real estate is at a premium. Not only does this mean big changes for parking garages, but big changes for the areas around them.

If you build too much parking, you generate traffic that congests your roadways.

"Our cities and towns really have to be at a human scale to function and be lively and vibrant, and these technologies offer us the possibility to plan at a human scale again, and not have to accommodate a two-ton automobile as the default geometry," said Russell Preston, an urban designer with the Principle Group in Boston. "People have wanted their parking—and wanted more of it—in front of a store or apartment building, but that's shifting now. We've been an auto-oriented society, but people are realizing there's a benefit to not having your car or these pestering questions about parking."

He's not the only one starting to believe that.

Reducing the Parking Footprint

Nashville might be the first American city to actually build a parking garage with an autonomous and connected future in mind, but it's not the only place where planners and others are starting to think about the implications of these technologies. In Somerville, Massachusetts, government and transportation officials believe they hold the solution to a key problem.

Situated along the Mystic River, this Boston suburb is home to approximately 80,000 residents packed into 4 square miles of space. Longtime Mayor Joseph Curtatone has a stated goal of increasing the housing stock in the city by 9000 units over the next 25 years and attracting new businesses to redeveloped areas near the Assembly Row and Union Square neighborhoods. At the same time, he wants to cut the amount of land devoted to parking in the city by 60 percent, a goal that appears at odds with the proliferation of new development

"Those are traditionally thought of as competing interests, but we have found they're not if you take a systems-based approach and look at mobility as part of an ecosystem," Curtatone said.

Should a garage reserved exclusively for self-parking vehicles be built, the space reduction could be as high as 62 percent by 2030.

Part of his plan involves evaluating and reclaiming existing space that's used for parking. In Assembly Row, a development adjacent to the river built upon a former industrial brownfield, parking takes 40 percent of the available surface space. Somerville has partnered with the Federal Realty Investment Trust and Audi's Urban Futures Initiative, which has opened a mobility lab in Somerville, to analyze how self-driving technologies might reduce that parking footprint. In an environment where self-driving cars share a garage with conventional, human-driven ones, the partners estimate a 26 percent reduction in space needs. Should a garage reserved exclusively for self-parking vehicles be built, the space reduction could be as high as 62 percent by 2030.

For developers, that's an eye-bulging number. Costs associated with parking development can make or break profitability, and those costs get passed down to home buyers and consumers. Audi estimates that roughly $100 million could be saved over the course of the Assembly Row project alone if that number could be attained. In 2017, Audi will implement live testing of piloted-parking features in a garage there to see how cars operate in a controlled environment.

Audi

"We're really going to see in a real-world sense how that works in everyday commuter use and with shoppers and those sorts of things, said Brad Stertz, Audi's director of government affairs. "They want to drastically reduce the number of cars parked, just sitting around all day taking up land, and from our standpoint, we'll look at how automated parking automated vehicles fit into that equation."

While Audi works through the technical challenges, Curtatone will seek a governmental solution for the challenge that threatens to derail the re-imagination of parking in Somerville—and pretty much everywhere else.

Parking Spaces Exact a High Cost

This fall, the mayor plans to go before the city's Board of Aldermen and propose alterations to the city's zoning laws. Currently, Somerville's laws mandate two parking spaces be built with regular residences and a minimum number with new commercial structures.

Those requirements reduce the amount of available space for projects, add tens of thousands of dollars in costs that get passed along to homebuyers which impact affordability. In Somerville's Assembly Row project, those surface spots cost $25,000 per space. Depending on property values and whether garages are above, at or below ground, those costs can run as high as $50,000 per space like the ones in the fledgling Nashville-area project. It's not all about price. Increasingly, the minimum parking standards are believed to contribute to congestion.

"It's truly a case of, 'if you build it, they will come,'" said Brad Rawson, Somerville's transportation director. "If you build too much parking, you generate traffic that congests your roadways with too much traffic. It's a really important part of this to understand that zoning ordinances, that's where you make traffic."

George Rose Getty Images

A 2013 study conducted by the University of Connecticut has made that more apparent. Researchers at the school analyzed the zoning policies of New Haven, Connecticut, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and determined how the land-use policies contributed to the city's overall economic well being. In the 1950s, both cities adapted minimum parking requirements similar to those in Somerville and elsewhere. But in 1981, Cambridge became the first municipality in the country to reverse course. Instead of sticking with minimum requirements, the city adopted maximum parking requirements that restricted parking-space development and encourage alternate modes of transportation and incentivized public-transit use.

In comparing the economic output of both cities, first over the 30 years when their zoning laws matched and then contrasting the cities over 30 years of opposite policies, the UConn researchers concluded "copious off-street parking has deleterious effects on urban form and function." As residents started a migration to the suburbs, the zoning requirements in New Haven intended to save cities by providing parking near storefronts instead had an impact that was "quite the opposite."

These technologies offer us the possibility to plan at a human scale again, and not have to accommodate a two-ton automobile as the default geometry.

Cambridge may have been first to recognize the contradiction, but other cities are catching on. Mandatory parking requirements led to an excess of parking in Miami, and in 2010, the city jettisoned parts of its zoning code that required a minimum number of spaces for each new unit. The change contributed to the start of new high-rise developments downtown, some of which contain no parking at all.

If private residences eliminate parking, will that increase the reliance on public or private garages elsewhere? Or decrease the need because those residents will eschew personal vehicle ownership all together? That's a worthwhile consideration. Back in Somerville, Preston is part of a group of civic and private leaders redeveloping the Union Square neighborhood. Not only are they interested in parking garages themselves and how much of their capacity is utilized, they're interested in how the parking garage fits into the overall transportation scheme of the neighborhood. He envisions one garage as a key transportation hub—it's on purpose that a garage will be located across the street from a new Green Line rail stop.

"Parking is not the most sexy thing, but it really is a central piece of architecture," Preston said. "It could be designed to handle parking and also be a venue for events. That may not be applicable everywhere, but people are starting to think about multi-functional parking garages, whether those functions are temporary or permanent. The idea a parking structure can have good ground for retail, bike sharing, or private bike parking, then it becomes a mobility hub. You connect it to a transit stop and then you're giving people all sorts of options that, depending on what they're doing, they have the right service to meet their needs."

At some point in the future, those needs might include no parking at all.

Audi

Future Retrofits are Today's Challenge

By most accounts, an era when valet services are automated enough that cars can drive several blocks to park themselves or shared cars can wait at remote lots until they're needed is at least a decade away and probably longer. When that day comes, parking garages located on prime real estate could completely be redeveloped for those other uses.

But urban planners must anticipate those needs today. Retrofitting a parking structure for residential or retail use might be downright impossible if developers don't get it right. Surfaces might be flat. Ramps must be short and relatively steep or exist in corkscrew spirals on the corners of the structures. Ceilings must be high enough to make future uses practical, a consideration that increases expenses in the short run, but could potentially pay off down the road. Open light at the core of structures today could allow for interior units later. In the Nashville development, those are the types of decisions being weighed today.

"How you build the thing becomes important," Wright said. "When you have an existing structure, it's a good opportunity to retrofit. And in the right place, you could even start to make some visual improvements to the community."

Wikimedia Commons

Discussions of autonomous technology can often focus on the technology itself or sweeping changes in the regulatory environment needed to enable autonomous operations. But the possibilities for parking garages are a reminder that the success of self-driving technology won't be on a broad national level. It will be determined one community at a time

For decades, cars have come first in planning those communities, and autonomous technology allows them now to take a back seat. That's not only something urban planners are clamoring for, it's a position even car companies understand and endorse.

"The technology is enabling a new look at how a city can function," Audi's Stertz said. "In Somerville, we can really see how all the parties can combine to make this a reality. It's a great opportunity to come together and see how you solve these future problems at a very local level. It's in how people live with this stuff that it will come to realize its full potential."

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