Next City has a couple good articles about what self-driving cars may mean for land use and urban form.

How will roadways, sidewalks, intersections, signage, traffic signals, and the relationship between buildings, roadways, pedestrians, cyclists, and vehicles change?

The answer to that question is in picture form, so you have to click on the link to see it. The second article explains it in words:

There is much to recommend in this imagined world of cheap, ubiquitous drone taxis. This is a world where senior citizens, the disabled, young people and the inebriated can enjoy safer mobility and be freed from the enormous costs of owning and insuring a car. It’s also a world wherein parked cars have a smaller footprint. In 2010, researchers at the University of California, Berkley released a study on the country’s parking infrastructure. While conceding that assessments of the number of parking paces have varied significantly, they cited a series of estimates, from which we can draw a reasonable range. Following this data, current parking codes have made it so there are between three and eight parking spaces for each of the 250 million cars in America. Think about it this way: If the number of personal cars dropped and parking provisions were loosened, as many as 675 million parking spaces, particularly those in urban cores, could be turned into something else — housing, parks or a million other uses more desirable than street-deadening parking lots.

“If you could push all the land currently devoted to parking in Manhattan and Boston and other big cities 10 minutes outside the city limits,” says Anthony Townsend, author of Smart Cities, “you’re potentially talking about trillions of dollars worth of real estate that could be developed, and tens of millions of new city-dwellers who could be accommodated.”

Well, sure we can turn some of it into homes and businesses. But let’s turn some of it into parks and habitat and even farms too.