Robot Parking
Your city has the space, it's just inefficiently allocated.
Parking.
Look at the parking rules in your city. When it is street sweeping day, how many hours do you have to leave half of the street empty of parked cars? 2 hours? 4 hours? All day? I leave it as an exercise to you to figure out how much parking space is lost to your city due to street sweeping rules.
Now let us consider some very simple applications of autonomous driving. Probably one of the simplest is how to parallel park. Another very simple one is driving a vehicle very close to the curb and avoiding parked cars.
Here is the scenario. An autonomous street sweeper notifies everyone of its route. Uber has already done that. You know when a car is coming and down to the minute when it will arrive. A ‘pilot’ vehicle scans streets several blocks ahead of the street sweeper and plots the best route given where cars are not parked. It communicates that route. Those cars that are parked can be autonomously unparked a minute ahead of when the street sweeper arrives. For those cars that cannot be moved, small Roomba robots sweep under it and a small fee is assessed, say $2.00.
Instead of streets needing to be abandoned for parking half a day, you can get it down to 30 minutes. Huge amounts of parking spaces are liberated.
Over time, you track with analytics which people do and do not have autonomous parking. You can sell reasonably priced passes for everyone with older cars - or let them follow the old rules, with high priced citations. People with empty driveways can be subsidized if they let autonomously parked cars use their driveways as the street sweeper goes by. The pilot vehicles can notify drivers of parking density in the same way as navigation apps notify drivers of traffic.
In parking structures and parking lots, a driver can tell Siri “I am looking for a space”. Similarly other drivers can say “I am leaving my space”. These apps can identify how full every parking lot is, given cameras on light poles finding all empty spaces and spaces in transition.
Now. How many cities would like to do this with their fleet of street sweepers? How many real estate developers would like this capability at their malls? Which supermarket chain would want to be the first?
Lovely piece, and thought provoking, as all of yours are. The difficulties are likely in the edge cases. I also wonder if we are doomed to ever greater surveillance, however apparently innocuous. A way to remain anonymous, to live below the radar in an IoT world would be a great benefit for some, myself included.
Lorenz here, your sometimes commenter from Perth Western Australia. I think your computer managed street sweeping plan is similar to many uses of computers capacity to handle a large numbers of micro transactions - data as well as money. I like your content but don't subscribe to Substack because I'm a pensioner and know from my peak earning years a long time ago that magazine subscriptions could seriously eat into the budget. Substack goes with that 19th century subscription based model and my 20th century experience rejects it. Substack MIGHT do better out me if they worked on a pay for what you really want to read model. This is so obvious that I suspect something like the transaction charges banks and other intermediaries charge make it impossible to charge 50 cents or a dollar to read an article, but I think it is entirely doable.