With no need to park, autonomous vehicles (AVs) will clog city streets and slow traffic to a crawl, according to a new paper by University of Santa Cruz transportation planner Adam Millard-Ball, an associate professor of environmental studies. However, a policy fix could address these problems before autonomous vehicles become commonplace, he suggests. His paper is published in the journal Transport Policy . In this paper, I identify and analyze a new channel through which AVs will have unambiguously negative environmental consequences—the removal of parking pricing, one of the most effective congestion management policies, from the urban transportation policy toolbox. AVs not only can avoid parking charges through cruising (that is, circling around while waiting for a passenger), but also have the incentive to seek out and exacerbate congestion—even gridlock—in order to minimize costs to their owners. … In this paper, I show that the parking policies that have […]