That seems like it'd do little to decrease the amount of space cars take up: It doesn't decrease the amount of traffic (actually, empty cars driving around when they would've been parked before increases traffic), so it doesn't decrease the amount of roads. It doesn't decrease the amount of people driving to businesses, so it doesn't decrease the need for non-residential parking. It probably slightly decreases the footprint of residential parking by making it higher density, though it still must exist nearby and many people are probably still going to want garage space.
It would absolutely decrease the amount of non-residential parking. You will be obliged to direct your car to off-site parking when driving to businesses in urban core. That's the main point.
It will be somewhere in the vicinity so it will only congest local roads, which would be much emptier now that they're not used for parking.
In reality, you can do both. You can also do neither. I live in a dense urban core already where it is often convenient to take a bus. But not always - there are those mysterious poles of unavailability. Upgrading it with automatic off-site parking could still free up a lot of street estate.
People want to drive without their seatbelts while drunk. Actually, this is one of the few times it's correct to truck out, "if we asked the people what they want, they'd say faster horses." Most Americans have no idea what they're missing in terms of the convenience and comfort of a good public transit system. Instead of being mad at everyone in your city for 40 minutes twice a day, you can relax for 30-45 minutes twice a day while reading a book or taking a nap. And, you can get drunk if you feel like it, and get home cheap anyway.
> But not always - there are those mysterious poles of unavailability.
A better funded public transit system wouldn't have this.
> off-site parking could still free up a lot of street estate
Offsite where? Parking lots? Consider Houston: "off site" aka out of the city is about a hundred miles from the city center. There's no "off site" for many American cities.
Give me a map and I'll find a way for an off-site carousel.
I can see a huge amount of wasted space below freeway interchanges which encircle central Houston. Just build two storey deep FSD offsites below all of these.
US is a weird outlier but many other places already have good public transit. FSD offsite parking they still can explore.
In Taiwan we turned the under-bridge areas into markets, basketball courts, concrete parks (for BBQ or whatever), and skate parks. In Japan they do one better and turned them into full blown malls and shopping areas.
No matter where you want to put a parking lot, there's something better, more beneficial to society, less environmentally damaging, more conducive to a nice place to live, and more capitalistically valuable than the parking lot that can go there instead. And if you want to start talking about drilling holes in the ground to put parking lots, great, let's make them horizontal instead and spend that money on a subway.
Cars are simply a bad solution to moving people, automated or otherwise. Ever hear the story about how they had to take realistic parking lots out of sim city, because they made the game boring? There's a reason for that.
1 per 3 people? We're at like 2.8 per 10 in Taiwan. If Taiwan had 1 car per 3 people the country would be in permanent gridlock, there's absolutely not enough road infrastructure to handle that. Taipei already experiences near gridlock every single rushhour.
We handle traffic with busses, MRT, docked bicycle rental system, and also the fact that our cities are very dense, with lots of small businesses like restaurants easily accessible from your house within a five minute walk.
I'm arguing to get rid of the cars. Taiwan should do the same, for the record. I mean, the classic image illustrates the point perfectly https://danielbowen.com/2012/09/19/road-space-photo/ there's just no way to justify private cars in a modern era with cities having multi-millions of people.
