Lyft Rethinks Street Designs With Self-Driving Cars In Mind

Lyft has big plans with the rise of the self-driving car. General Motors invested $500 million into the ride-sharing service and continues to work with the company to deploy self-driving cars.

However, Lyft believes self-driving cars won’t benefit from today’s street designs. So, it’s released how it thinks the self-driving car should operate on future city streets. The ride-sharing company worked with Perkins + Will and Nelson/Nygaard to envision the future city street, reports Curbed.

Shown in the drawing above is Los Angeles’ Wilshire Boulevard. Today, it’s a 10-lane-wide street with enormous amounts of traffic. In the future, this would go away. Instead, the street would become a “multi-transit” space with room for cyclists, pedestrians, self-driving cars and other public transport. As optimistic as a proposal this is, the firms believe such a transition would provide great benefits.

It’s estimated the current design can serve 29,000 people, while the proposed design could serve 77,000.

“Autonomous vehicles have tremendous opportunities for recreating the public realm, but if we don’t grasp those opportunities, it could go sideways,” said Gerry Tierney, an associate principal at Perkins + Will and director of the firm’s mobility research lab. “We’ve been through this before. At the start of the 20th century, people had no idea that cars were going to run over their cities. They can plead ignorance. We have an opportunity to right the wrongs. We know what a dystopia looks like.”