Imagine a city where you don’t drive in loops looking for a parking spot because your car drops you off and scoots off to some location to wait, sort of like taxi holding pens at airports. Or maybe it is picked up by a robotic minder and carted off with other vehicles, like a row of shopping carts.
Inner-city parking lots could become parks. Traffic lights could be less common because hidden sensors in cars and streets coordinate traffic. And, yes, parking tickets could become a rarity since cars would be smart enough to know where they are not supposed to be.
via Disruptions: How Driverless Cars Could Reshape Cities - NYTimes.com
Self-driving cars are on a trajectory to common reality beyond Silicon Valley. This would impact the facts that a third of city driving dedicates fuel waste and pollution to parking spot hunting and third of urban land is wasted on parking lots. These impacts are just the tip of the iceberg on the future of driving.
There could be more car sharing with cars powered by automatic drop off and pick up capabilities. Delivery cars would require little resemblance to cars. And of course, there would be more roads with fewer immature, road-raged, dementia-disabled, drunk and texting drivers.