By Futurist Thomas Frey
The Most Valuable Land Nobody Wants
There’s a parking lot across from where my office used to be in downtown Denver. It’s an ugly scar of asphalt covering half a city block. On a good day, it generates maybe $30,000 a year in parking fees.
The land it sits on? Worth about $15 million.
That’s a 0.2% return on asset value. Possibly the worst-performing real estate investment in the entire city. And there are thousands just like it across America.
By 2040, that parking lot will be gone. So will virtually every parking lot in downtown Denver. And Seattle. And Austin. And every other American city.
They’ll be replaced by apartment buildings, offices, parks, restaurants—anything that actually generates value from expensive urban land.
This isn’t speculation. It’s inevitable math. Driverless cars don’t need to park near their destination. They drop you off and leave—returning home, picking up another passenger, or repositioning for the next ride. Parking becomes obsolete.
And parking is just the beginning. When autonomous vehicles arrive in the late 2020s and early 2030s, they’ll trigger the largest infrastructure transformation in American history. Everything designed around human drivers—parking lots, drive-thrus, gas stations, even traffic lights—becomes instantly obsolete.
The physical landscape of America is about to change more in 20 years than it has in the previous 70.
Continue reading… “The Driverless Revolution Series Part 1: The Infrastructure Apocalypse—What Happens to Parking Lots, Drive-Thrus, and Gas Stations”
