I decided to gather together all my thoughts on how robocars will affect urban design. There are many things that might happen, though nobody knows enough urban planning to figure out just what will happen. However, I felt it worthwhile to outline the forces that might be at work so that urban geographers can speculate on what they will mean. It is hard to make firm predictions. For example, does the ability for a short pleasant trip make people want a Manhattan where everybody can get anywhere in 10 minutes, or does the ability to work or relax during trips make people not care about the duration and lead to more Sprawl? It can go either way, or both.

Read Robocar influence on the future of cities.

Masdar Video

In other notes, now that Masdar's PRT is in limited operation, there are more videos of it. Here is a CNN Report with good shots of the cars moving around. As noted before, the system is massively scaled back, and runs at ground level, underneath elevated pedestrian streets. The cars are guided by magnets but there is LIDAR to look for pedestrians and obstacles.

City of Apple

The designer of Masdar, Foster + Partners, has been retained to design the new "City of Apple" which is going to spring up literally a 5 minute walk from my house. Apple has purchased the large Cupertino tract that was a major HP facility (and which also held Tandem, which HP eventually bought) and a few other companies. This is about a mile from Apple's main HQ in Cupertino. Speculation about the plan includes a transportation system of some kind, possibly a PRT like in Masdar. However, strangely, there are talks of an underground tunnel between the buildings which makes almost no sense in this area, particularly since I can't imagine it would be too hard to run elevated guideway along the side of interstate 280 or even on the very wide Stevens Creek Boulevard.

Sadly, aside from Apple, there's not a lot for the system to visit if it's to be more than intra-company transport. The Valco mall and the Cupertino Village are popular but Cupertino doesn't really have a walkable downtown to speak of.

Of course if Apple wants to tear down all the HP buildings and put up a new massive complex, it will be hard to call that a green move. The energy and greenhouse gases involved in replacing buildings are huge. For transportation, robocars could just make use of the existing highway between the two campuses. It's not even impossible to imagine Apple building its own exits and bridges on the interstate -- much cheaper than an underground tunnel.