This post was inspired by a recent FutureAzA post. What I am thinking about in terms of landscape is really “will shopping malls return to the inner city”?
If you go to a mall you can see that the majority of the space is taken up by the parking lot. Sure, everyone drives to the mall but what if people took a cybercab to the mall instead? Two big things change:
- You don’t need a parking space — the cybercab can just go away and the next one can pick you up when you are ready to leave.
- If parking is needed somewhere for the cybercabs, parking spaces can be smaller as you no longer need to be able to open the doors and trunk while the vehicle is in the parking lot.
It could be a very big deal. Way over half of the space for a mall is the parking lot. Eliminate the need for parking and the cost of the real estate in the center of a city becomes much less of a problem. And, of course, the cost of a cybercab trip will likely be less than your cost to drive there.
This won’t be an instant transition, of course. But, it offers a path for centrally-located malls which could help us transition back to mixed-use cities rather than everyone living in the suburbs.
