Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are a near future reality and the implications of AVs on city development and urban form, while potentially widespread and dramatic, are not well understood. Projected changes to the ease and cost of transportation, the role and future of transit, parking use, and right-of-way needs will have dramatic secondary effects on street design, development densities, land use, and urban sprawl. These changes will have profound implications on our nation. While there has been a deluge of research on technological aspects of AVs, there has been a dearth of systematic exploration of their secondary effects on city development, form, and design or potential opportunities and unintended consequences on quality of life, including significant equity and labor market impacts. The disruption to urban development and related economic, social, and environmental issues caused by the introduction of AVs has the potential to be on par with the disruptions caused by the introduction of automobiles a century ago. This Urbanism Next Planning Grant will leverage a multidisciplinary collection of national experts in the academic, public, and private sectors to define and understand how the rise of AVs will broadly impact cities beyond just technological needs or primary transportation implications. This Planning Grant will bring together collaborators from engineering, urban design, urban planning, economics, real estate, labor economics, and architecture to promote our understanding of impacts of AVs on society and advance the national health, prosperity and well-being.

Throughout the course of the grant, the research team will engage a broad national community of scholars from a range of disciplines, as well as a diverse, multi-sector group of practitioners in the Portland, Oregon region. Planning activities include monthly web-based meetings; creation of a targeted blog and web-based clearinghouse; and a two-day workshop with collaborators and stakeholders from across the country. The goal is to understand, conduct research, and then plan for: 1) the immediacy of the technology; 2) the scale of impact from these technological innovations; 3) identification of how a diverse range of issues are connected and impacted; and 4) to delineate the important policy and research questions we need to be asking related to city design and municipal administration to maximize the benefits of this new technology while minimizing the negative externalities.