We won’t need street parking? ParkNews.biz June 1st- 7th, 2021
We won’t need street parking? ParkNews.biz June 1st– 7th, 2021
The headline on ParkNews.biz is a piece from WSJ, the Future of Everything column. In it, everyone and his kin has a crystal ball and is predicting the future. Is remote work here to stay? Is the car ownership disappearing? Will self-driving cars take over? Or at least self-driving taxis?
“We won’t need street parking, we won’t need parking structures that much, and we certainly won’t need below-grade parking structures,” says Andy Cohen, Los Angeles-based co-CEO of Gensler, a global architecture firm.
Mr. Cohen and other experts say the demand for urban parking spaces will plummet in coming years as a result of several trends. “
“The National Parking Association envisions the parking garage of the future as a multipurpose mobility hub. A 2018 rendering from the industry group shows a garage with electric-vehicle charging stations, stacked parking for autonomous vehicles, or AVs, and separate entry lanes for shared cars driven by humans. There are shops on several levels, with pickup and drop-off zones out front.”
““It’s parking plus last-mile mobility, and it’s parking plus EV charging,” says Dan Sharplin, FlashParking’s executive chairman. “Those are the two things we think are ripe today.”
For existing garages, Mr. Sharplin sees a role as logistics hubs where delivery companies transfer truckloads of packages to smaller conveyances like robots. Ghost kitchens to prepare food for delivery would work on the ground floors, Ms. Smith says. And below-ground parking could become data centers or fitness clubs, says Mr. Cohen, whose firm has developed a concept for turning the top level of a San Jose, Calif., garage into an activity-filled park.”
Perhaps the future is not as easy to predict as we can imagine. In the past few years, the self-driving cars were predicted to be here right now already. And they were supposed to be great for environment. However, in the abstract from June 7, 2021 – A closer look at urban development under the emergence of autonomous vehicles: Traffic, land use and air quality impacts, it says: “Some locations will experience an increase in air pollution exposure and traffic congestion from changes in land-use and traffic patterns caused by the adoption of AVs.”
As far as work from home and remote work goes, in LA Times this past Sunday there was an op-ed piece addressing the issue. Read it on ParkNews.biz: June 7, 2021 – How work will change permanently after the pandemic. “Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom suggests 20% of work will be done from home even after the pandemic ends, up from 5% in 2019. Various studies also show that remote workers have been more productive — a result business executives welcome along with lower office space costs.
However, others — people at the top of the corporate ladder, leasing agents, owners of commercial office space — are already pushing people back to the cubicle. JPMorgan Chase’s CEO Jamie Dimon thinks workers should go back to the office, but this may not be so appealing to workers who have finally ditched their long commutes.”
Perhaps predicting the future is a waste of time. Perhaps it is all not binary as in all or nothing. Perhaps it is like a yogurt aisle. 50 different type of yogurt fitting the customer’s preference.
In the meantime, we here are fulling engaged in the presence and what is. And we are excited to see you in Dallas, TX on July 18th. If you haven’t registered yet, please register here: June 7, 2021 – Sign up for PIE 2021 by June 15th and you will be entered into a drawing for a $500 Visa gift card
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Astrid Ambroziak
Astrid Ambroziak
Editor, ParkNews.biz
Creative Director
Parking Today
310 390 5277 ext 9