Autonomous vehicles (AVs)— car, trucks, and buses that can drive themselves on public streets and highways—are being deployed for public use around the world. The widespread adoption of these vehicles could reshape our cities and communities because AVs could reduce mobility costs, improve safety, and provide access to neighborhoods that are inaccessible by public transit.
But whether AVs help or harm equity and environmental sustainability depends on how local governments prepare. Will AVs reduce car ownership and free up land for affordable housing, parks, and walkable streets? Or will they increase sprawl, traffic, and emissions—widening existing inequities in mobility and land use?
To help planners and policymakers make informed decisions in the face of uncertainty, this toolbox offers strategies, scenarios, and practical tools that link AV deployment to positive land use, equity, and sustainability outcomes for all, while mitigating potential harms from the widespread use of this technology.
How Leaders Can Use This Toolbox
The toolbox walks planners and policymakers through six steps to plan for land use and autonomous vehicles:
- Convene a diverse planning group
- Discover how Avs and land use are linked
- Identify a community type
- Learn how a community may be affected by AV rollout
- Review relevant policy options
- Choose and develop relevant metrics
This toolbox is designed to be a practical resource for city leaders, planners, and policymakers who want to anticipate and shape the impacts of autonomous vehicles on their communities. This toolbox is structured to guide local leaders through the specific decisions they will face as AVs become more widespread. It can be used in the following ways:
- Assess local conditions: Identify a community’s baseline, including current land use patterns, travel behaviors, housing pressures, and climate goals, to understand how AVs could amplify or alter existing trends.
- Explore scenarios: Walk through plausible futures for AV adoption (e.g., private ownership vs. shared fleets; rapid adoption vs. slow rollout) and examine their potential impacts on land use, equity, and environmental outcomes.
- Select strategies: Review a menu of policy and planning strategies that can steer AV adoption toward desired outcomes, including zoning reforms, pricing mechanisms, transit integration, parking management, and incentives for shared mobility.
- Apply decision tools: Use worksheets, checklists, and metrics to evaluate trade-offs, prioritize actions, and measure progress against equity and sustainability goals.
- Learn from examples: Draw lessons from case studies of cities piloting AV-related policies and infrastructure investments, with guidance on how to adapt those lessons to a specific context.
- Plan implementation: Build a road map that sequences near-term, mid-term, and long-term actions to prepare a community for the arrival of AVs at scale.
By using this toolbox, leaders can move beyond reactive approaches to set a proactive vision for integrating AVs into their housing, transportation, and climate strategies. The ultimate goal is not only to prepare for the new technology, but also to ensure that its deployment aligns with broader community values: inclusive growth, environmental sustainability, and equitable access to opportunity.
Planning for the Land Use Impacts of AVs Can Help Communities Achieve More Equitable and Environmentally Sustainable Outcomes
Policy can make the difference between AVs having positive or negative impacts on society and the environment. Proactive planning and policymaking are essential to ensuring that AV technology can help communities achieve their goals.
As with the introduction of other new transportation technologies including streetcars, the US highway system, and containerized shipping, the rise of AVs is likely to affect land use. Streetcars enabled peri-urban areas to become “streetcar suburbs,” creating communities that followed the tracks. The expansion of the US highway system made car travel cheaper and easier, spurring suburbanization, while contributing to economic decline in city neighborhoods adjacent to highways. And the adoption of container shipping altered port locations and required the construction of massive terminals.
Some researchers predict that AVs will operate more efficiently and reduce the number of accidents compared with the current human-driven automobile, truck, and bus system. The increased safety provided by AV technology could make streets easier to manage, potentially enabling streets to be transformed into places for play and recreation rather than just driving. On the other hand, AVs could be less expensive than human-driven modes, which could increase the number of miles people drive, increasing pollution. This, in turn, could increase the population in rural regions and reduce investment in historic, walkable areas.
How We Did It
To conduct this research, we reviewed research on the state of technological advancement of AVs and how these vehicles could influence land use. We evaluated secondary sources about six historical examples of transformative transportation technologies to understand how they affected land-use outcomes. Finally, we worked with a team of external stakeholders to develop a toolkit intended to help planning practitioners develop AV-related policies that can advance positive societal outcomes.
This toolbox was funded by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
