i+D - March/April 2018 - 41

Curb Appeal - By Lydia Lee

A proposed concept for Wilshire
Boulevard in Los Angeles reimagines
a transformation from 10-lane car
traffic into a multi-transit space with
wider sidewalks, benches, planters,
bike lanes, dedicated bus lanes, and
lanes for shared self-driving cars.
Below: Wilshire Boulevard today.
(Images: Perkins+Will)

Unpaving Paradise
The Joni Mitchell song "Big Yellow Taxi" got it right: An
enormous amount of land is paved for parking. "Most people
don't realize the dominance of space for cars in cities today,"
notes Karlin-Resnick. A website called "What the Street?!"
breaks down the square footage designated for cars, trains,
and bicycles in 23 cities; for example, San Francisco is a city of
seven square miles, and two-thirds of a square mile is devoted
to parking-space that could ostensibly go towards parks, open
space, more housing, and other uses.
An oft-cited statistic is that the average car spends 95 percent
of its time parked and only 5 percent of its time in use. If the
future AV is a rented vehicle that is always on the go, parking
needs could be reduced as much as 90 percent, speculates
Kara Kockelman, professor of transportation engineering at
The University of Texas at Austin. Furthermore, AVs could
make more efficient use of existing roadways since they
wouldn't need to maintain the same following distance or
buffer between lanes.
To help visualize the best-case scenario, Perkins+Will and
Nelson/Nygaard were commissioned by Lyft to reimagine
a section of Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. The conceptual
design includes a lane for autonomous buses and another for
autonomous cars, along with a broad, landscaped sidewalk
and a protected bike lane. In the design team's analysis, the
utopian version would be able to move more than twice
the number of people than the current situation-going from
29,600 people to 77,000 people per hour. "This is a street
where you reclaim about 40 percent of the asphalt, and it's
actually more efficient," says Tierney. NACTO's "Blueprint
for Autonomous Urbanism" posits that roads other than
highways should have only one lane in each direction, and
that speeds should be limited to 20 miles per hour.
In a pick-up/drop-off culture, the curb becomes very
significant. In the short term, the city of San Francisco is
converting some parking spots into designated stopping areas
for Lyft and Uber in order to prevent double parking and blocked
bike lanes. In the long term, cities could manage curb use
based on real-time needs throughout the day. "When there's
much more pressure on the drop-off and pick-up area, how
do we make sure that it's not like the airport?" asks
J.F. Finn, III, a principal in Gensler's Boston office. "Lobbies
are also going to change dramatically since people are acting
in a pedestrian mode and coming through the front door
instead of driving into a garage."

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i+D - March/April 2018

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