Kyle Piira

Tag: urbanism

  • Rethinking Suburbs in the Age of Self-Driving Cars

    If you look at how many U.S. suburbs are built today, a clear pattern emerges. There’s the wide arterial road, often called a stroad. It’s usually six to eight lanes, built for speed. Along both sides sit strip malls, big-box stores, and standalone restaurants, each surrounded by large parking lots.

    Branching off these roads are residential subdivisions. These neighborhoods are made up of winding streets and cul-de-sacs. They’re quiet and low-traffic by design, but they’re also difficult to navigate without a car. There are few direct paths, and no real reason to pass through unless you live there.

    This layout reflects a simple assumption: everyone drives everywhere. But that assumption starts to break down once autonomous vehicles enter the picture.

    The reason commercial areas have such large parking lots is straightforward. People drive from home, park, do what they need to do, then drive back. Every destination needs enough space to store all those cars at peak times.

    Autonomous vehicles, especially shared robo-taxis, change that. Instead of parking, a car can drop you off and immediately leave to pick up someone else. The same vehicle can serve many people throughout the day. That makes parking far less necessary.

    Once you don’t need acres of parking, that land becomes available for something else. A small pick-up and drop-off area can handle the same flow of people while taking up a fraction of the space.

    The rest can be redeveloped. More shops, housing, parks, or public space. Instead of walking across a hot, empty parking lot, you step into a place designed for people. Buildings can line the street, provide shade, and create a more comfortable environment.

    This also changes how transit works along these roads. Right now, buses often run infrequently and stop in places that feel hostile. You get off and face a long walk across a parking lot. There’s little shelter, a lot of noise, and constant traffic.

    If those parking lots are replaced with actual development, the experience improves immediately. You step off the bus and you’re already close to where you want to go. There are buildings, shade, and activity right there. More people live and work along the corridor, which makes transit more useful. Higher ridership can support more frequent service and eventually better infrastructure like dedicated lanes or light rail.

    These wide arterial roads already have the space for that shift. Some lanes can be repurposed for transit, wider sidewalks, or protected bike lanes without removing cars entirely.

    Inside the subdivisions, a similar change becomes possible. Today, it’s hard to introduce small businesses into single-family neighborhoods, largely because of parking requirements. A small coffee shop, for example, would need enough parking for customers and staff, which often isn’t feasible.

    If people arrive by autonomous vehicle, bike, or on foot, that requirement shrinks or disappears. A house could be converted into a small café, a barber shop, or a studio without needing a large parking area. These kinds of businesses could serve the immediate neighborhood instead of drawing large crowds from far away.

    The street layout inside these neighborhoods can improve too. Cul-de-sacs are effective at limiting car traffic, which many residents like, but they also make walking inefficient. Two nearby points can require a long, indirect route.

    You don’t have to redesign everything to fix that. Keeping the cul-de-sacs for cars while adding pedestrian and bike paths between them can create direct connections. What used to be a long walk becomes a short one. That makes it practical to walk or bike to nearby destinations within the neighborhood.

    Taken together, these changes point to a different version of suburbia. Parking lots are replaced with housing, shops, and public space. Arterial roads become more balanced, supporting transit, walking, and biking alongside cars. Neighborhoods gain small-scale businesses. Walking and biking become more realistic options because distances shrink and routes improve.

    People can still live in single-family homes. They can still use cars when they need to. But they’re no longer locked into one way of moving through the world, and the places they go feel better when they get there.

    Autonomous vehicles don’t fix everything, but they remove one of the biggest constraints shaping suburban design: the need to store cars everywhere. Once that constraint is gone, a lot of new possibilities open up.

  • Strip Malls Could Be America’s New Main Streets

    A cozy Main Street with people walking around enjoying their day.

    I’ve never liked strip malls, but for a long time I couldn’t quite explain why. The buildings themselves aren’t especially offensive. If you strip away the context, a strip mall is not so different from a row of shops that you might find present on a quaint walkable Main Street in a small town.

    The problem is that unlike a main street, the strip mall is sitting behind an enormous moat of parking that makes it very difficult to get to for anyone not in a car. In order to reach the shops from the street you must cross a wide, hot, unshaded expanse of asphalt which is quite unpleasant.

    They’re also usually separated from housing. Even when homes are physically close, they’re rarely connected in a way that makes walking easy. For example, take a look at this typical American strip mall located in Mint Hill, NC with a residential development less than 50 feet away. However, because there is no pedestrian connection between the two places the official walking route is nearly half a mile and requires walking along a busy road.

    So almost everyone arrives the same way: by car, which then sits in that giant parking lot until they leave.

    The assumption that every visitor must store a private vehicle on site for the duration of their visit is what drives the need for dedicating so much land to car parking.

    But that assumption may begin to change over the coming decade.

    We are seeing rapid improvements in autonomous vehicles from companies like Waymo, such that I think there is a good chance private vehicle ownership may give way to robotaxis if they can be made cheaper per mile.

    If people increasingly rely on on-demand transportation, especially autonomous vehicles, destinations won’t need to dedicate vast areas to parking. A vehicle could drop someone off and leave. The site would only need enough space to stage a limited number of robotaxis so that departures are reasonably quick. That’s very different from storing approximately one vehicle per person in the building.

    And once you stop designing around having space to store one car for every person, a lot of land becomes available for other more productive uses.

    I would suggest that we should build infill housing on disused shopping center parking lots.

    If most of the parking lot were replaced with townhomes, and perhaps a small apartment building, the character of the place would change immediately for the better. The bland soulless strip malls of modern day suburbia would be transformed into the cozy pleasant Main Streets of the past and become a place people actually want to spend time.

    Take the strip mall that I mentioned earlier from Mint Hill, it has a general store, a small hardware store, a pizza place, a nail salon, a hair cutter, a gym, and a specialty shop or two. These are everyday businesses that are actually useful to live near. Being able to walk to get a haircut or pick up a few household items would be convenient.

    Yet the layout makes living near them awkward or impossible.

    Instead of a field of parked cars, imagine a shaded street lined with homes. Doors and windows facing the shops. A small green space tucked between buildings. Paths connecting to adjacent neighborhoods that currently sit cut off by massive six lane stroads (wide, high-speed arterial roads).

    A short, direct link to the existing nearby townhome neighborhood would make the shops part of the neighborhood instead of a separate island. Residents could walk over in a few minutes instead of driving around to the main entrance.

    People coming from farther away could still arrive by car, autonomous or otherwise, or by transit. 

    This kind of infill would make bus service along arterial roads more practical. Strip malls are usually located on major corridors. If housing filled in the parking lots along those corridors, there would be more people within walking distance of each transit stop and more destinations clustered together. For transit riders, the modern-day torturous walk across an expanse of hot asphalt with the sun beaming down on you, would be replaced with a pleasant stroll through tree lined neighborhood streets with shaded sidewalks.

    By adding this infill housing we can also help alleviate the issues that many cities in the U.S. are experiencing with regard to a housing shortage in the parts of the city where people want to live. Many regions are short on homes, yet large portions of urbanized land are devoted to parking that sits partially empty much of the time. Reusing that space for housing adds units without expanding outward. It places residents close to daily needs. Some vehicle trips disappear entirely because they can be done on foot.

    The underlying strip mall structure isn’t inherently flawed. It’s adaptable. What makes it unpleasant is the dominance of parking and the lack of integration with surrounding neighborhoods.

    If the parking requirement shrinks, whether because of changing transportation patterns or different policy choices, the opportunity is straightforward. Build homes where the asphalt is. Connect surrounding neighborhoods to the shops. Let the existing storefronts function as a local town center rather than a drive-to outpost.

    The difference between a hostile shopping center and a livable neighborhood might be less about architecture and more about what we decide to store on the land in front of it.