New study reveals autonomous vehicles will lead to even more miserable traffic

Whether you like it or not, autonomous cars will drive the road to full power in the years to come. Thanks to new technologies developed by companies such as Tesla and even Uber, autonomous vehicles will become an essential part of modern culture, with nearly 10 millions Autonomous cars are expected to hit the road by 2020.

Yet, everything is not going well in the autonomous landscape. Like all new technologies, there have been slowdowns in the world of autonomous cars. Whether for accidents or defective AIs, autonomous vehicles are still in their infancy.

However, new research in the world of autonomous vehicles discovered another potential problem all along the line, parking. Anyone living in a metropolitan area will tell you that parking is always a long-term adventure. According to a new study, autonomous vehicles could pose a parking problem.

Parking in 2020 and beyond

IMagine a scenario. You and your family are dropped off by your electric car in the city center. However, as most people already know, parking in the city is expensive. Therefore, rather than park your vehicle runs in the city until you have finished.

While this may seem like a great setup and a potential benefit of owning a stand-alone vehicle, it could be detrimental to transportation in the near future.

"Parking prices are what makes people go out of their cars and use public transportation, but autonomous vehicles do not need to park at all. They can move by paying for cruising parking. They will have every interest in creating havoc, " said Adam Millard-Ball, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

A traffic jam filled with robots is a real potential problem if something is not done.

The problem of parking autonomous vehicles

Professor Millard breaks down his concerns further into his published article"The problem of autonomous vehicles". In his article, he considers that the presence of the relatively small amount of 2,000 autonomous vehicles in the San Francisco area will slow traffic to less than 2 miles per hour.

With the direction of the autonomous vehicle market, imagine what would happen if tens of thousands of vehicles had to hit the road. What is the Millard solution? Congestion regulation and pricing can ease transition in the driverless world.

Self-driving owners can be charged a lump sum enter a city or more sophisticated models could charge per miles traveled, or badign different fees to particular streets.

Although the idea proposed by Millard's attack to the problem as a whole, there are other possible solutions to the problem of traffic jams. The emergence of the smart city could be just as important for the rise of autonomous cars.

In a smart city, cars could be monitored and controlled, optimizing traffic through a IoT ecosystem. Properly addressing the challenges of this inevitable change in the automotive industry will lay the foundation for the evolution of this technology.