Are Parking Structures Going Extinct?

Joe Derhake is the CEO of Partner Engineering & Science.

LOS ANGELES—Parking structures may soon become a thing of the past, with the advent of autonomous vehicles. In the latest webinar from Partner Engineering & Science, Joe Derhake, the CEO of Partner Engineering & Science, and Brian Soublet, deputy director and chief counsel at California Department of Motor Vehicles, imagine a Los Angeles with driverless vehicles and how the new technology might affect both our roadways and the commercial real estate and development markets.

“Technological change is accelerating. If you are a developer, you know you are going to be building your project into the future, and you know that to realize a return on your product, it needs to serve society’s needs for 15 to 100 years,” Derhake says at the opening of the webinar. “How do you anticipate what society will demand from real estate for the next 50 years? When cars go driverless, it is going to change commercial real estate in a more fundamental way. It will change how civil engineers like me design buildings. The most important thing in real estate is location, but location is a derivative of transportation technologies.”