The Parking Lot Isn’t Dying, It’s Getting a New Tenant.

1222 Broadway, Santa Monica.

It looks like a parking lot. Because it is one.

Since November 2024, Waymo has used it, along with a second lot at 1310 Broadway, to charge the autonomous vehicles in its robotaxi service across greater Los Angeles.

The neighbours noticed. Reverse beeping. Humming. Workers talking late at night. Flashing lights. Cars lining up in the alley.

In November 2025, the City Council voted 6-0 to declare the lots a public nuisance and shut down overnight operations. Waymo sued. The city countersued. In July 2026, a judge ordered the overnight charging to stop between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. A few weeks later, an appeals court put that order on hold while the case continues.

It still isn't settled.

Here's the detail I keep coming back to: Waymo doesn't own the land. The lots belong to a property holding company, and a charging company, Voltera, runs them.

AV companies don't want to own real estate. They want flexible space, close to riders, with a lot of power.

And that space ends up right next to people who live there.

So how will AVs change our cities?

That's the question I want to work through.

When the car drives you, does a 90-minute commute still feel long? If you can sleep, read or answer email on the way, maybe not.

Some researchers think that's exactly the risk. One UC Berkeley estimate found self-driving ride services could raise total vehicle miles travelled by up to 83%. More trips. Longer commutes. Empty cars circling between rides.

Or maybe it goes the other way. If you don't need to own a car, you don't need a garage, a driveway or a spot at work. Living in the core gets easier.

So where would you choose to live? Farther out, or back downtown?

Hold that thought. We'll come back to it.

First, look at how much room we gave cars

When you work on a site plan, you learn fast that the car sometimes takes up more room than the building.

Parking is everywhere because the rules asked for it.

A 2010 study led by Mikhail Chester at UC Berkeley estimated the US has around 800 million parking spaces, roughly three for every car. The high end of the estimate was 2 billion.

Most of those spaces sit empty most of the time. Cars spend about 95% of their lives parked. 95%!!

Downtowns aren't spared. The Parking Reform Network mapped city centres and found parking covers 26% of downtown San Antonio and 17% of downtown Austin.

So who owns all of it?

• Cities, which run garages and surface lots.
• Operators, like Metropolis, which took SP+ private in 2024 and now runs more than 4,200 locations.
• REITs and retail centres with big surface lots.
• Institutions: hospitals, universities, churches.
• A long tail of small private owners with one lot each.

Every one of them is about to get a new kind of phone call.

The four spaces AVs need

Here's the thing. An AV in a fleet doesn't go home at night. It doesn't sleep in a driveway. It goes back to the fleet.

That creates four kinds of space.

1. The depot

Home base. Cars charge overnight, get cleaned, get serviced and get checked.

Uber signed a long-term lease for a 50,000 square foot depot in Houston with 40 fast chargers and 15 maintenance bays. Lyft's Flexdrive is building an 80,000 square foot depot in Nashville for Waymo.

Power is the big one. Voltera's CEO puts an AV depot at 4 to 12 megawatts.

It has to sit inside or right next to the service area, so cars don't drive empty for 20 minutes before their first ride.

And it's the one that causes fights with neighbours, because it runs all night. Santa Monica is the example.

2. The charging pit stop

A quick top-up in the middle of a shift. Smaller, more of them, spread across the city. Think of a gas station only AVs use.

Tesla has filed plans for a charging site for its autonomous fleet at 405 E. St. Elmo Road in Austin: 48 Superchargers in phase one, with equipment for 80 wireless chargers later. Uber is also planning a dedicated charging pit stop in Houston.

Less power than a depot, but still a lot in one spot. The neighbour impact is steady traffic, all day, every day.

3. Staging

Where empty cars wait for the next ride, close to where demand peaks. Airports, stadiums, downtown at closing time.

This one barely needs power. It needs spaces.

Santa Monica (yes, the same city) is negotiating to let Zoox stage up to 150 of its AVs in the Main Library parking structure, for about $500,000 a year. In the words of a city official, there's plenty of unused parking capacity "sitting vacant at the library."

For neighbours, it's the easiest of the four. It's parking, just with no one in the car.

4. Pick-up and drop-off zones

The curb, and the edge of the lot, where riders get in and out. Today it's a row of parking stalls. Tomorrow it's a loading zone.

Small. No power. Right at the front door of busy places.

The neighbour impact is traffic: lots of short stops in one spot.

What actually decides where they go

You'd think the hard part is the car. It isn't. The hard part is the dirt under it.

Power

A depot is useless without megawatts.

Voltera's Brett Hauser told Axios the challenge is finding sites "with the right zoning and pathways to power," and that hubs of that size are "hard to find in an urban core."

Frank Reig, who now leads Voltera, was blunter: "You're literally looking at (only) a handful of sites in every market."

Utility upgrades and permits mean opening a new city can take three years or more.

When Tesla's attorney explained why they picked a lot in San Antonio, the answer was short. It "has sufficient power."

Zoning

Most codes don't have a word for this yet.

A public EV charger is usually an accessory use, tucked into a parking lot or a gas station. A fleet charging depot is something else: a 24-hour operation that looks like a parking lot and works like a light industrial site.

Codes are only starting to catch up. Los Angeles County has a draft ordinance that would define an "electric fleet charging facility" and allow it in its commercial-manufacturing and industrial zones.

In San Antonio, Tesla needed a rezoning for that Josephine Street lot near the Pearl. City staff recommended denial. The Zoning Commission approved it 8-2 anyway, and its chair said the city's development code should be updated as more autonomous vehicles arrive.

That's what it looks like when the code has no box to check.

The chargers we have are in the wrong places

The US has a lot of public charging. As of February 2026, the Department of Energy counted 77,086 public charging sites and 67,948 DC fast-charging ports.

But look at where they are on the Department of Energy's station locator: highway exits, gas stations, grocery store lots. A few fast chargers here, a few there.

That network is built for drivers who stop once and leave. An AV fleet needs the opposite: dozens of fast chargers in one place, close to riders, with staff on site.

Almost none of today's stations look like that. That gap is where the new land market is forming.

A market is forming around parking

AV companies are shopping for land, mostly as tenants.

They've leased nearly 1 million square feet of industrial space so far in 2026, compared with 830,000 square feet across 2022 to 2025 combined, according to Cushman & Wakefield data reported by Bisnow. Many of those deals are in cities where their AVs can't legally carry riders yet.

Leasing fits how they work. The technology changes fast. The service area changes fast. Nobody wants to own five acres in the wrong part of town.

Uber's head of AV infrastructure put it well. Picking the wrong location is "a mistake you're going to eat for the next 10 to 20 years."

Big money is following. EQT and BlackRock's Global Infrastructure Partners backed the merger of Revel and Voltera, treating depots like data centres and cell towers. Terawatt plans to raise up to $1.5 billion for AV charging hubs.

Then there's Metropolis.

It already runs more than 4,200 parking locations. It partnered with Joby to build 25 vertiports in parking structures, places where autonomous vehicles can also park, charge, get cleaned and head back out. Its CEO, Alex Israel, framed the mission as connecting "old world infrastructure with next-generation mobility."

That's a parking company positioning itself as the landlord of the AV era.

So what happens to the value of a parking lot?

Some go up. A lot with power, the right zoning and a location near demand becomes one of Reig's "handful of sites."

Some go sideways. Not every lot needs to become a depot to earn more. Staging and pick-up zones pay for spaces that sit empty today.

And some get stranded. A big lot, far from demand, with no power and fewer people parking in it every year.

The Josephine Street lot shows how fast the math moves. Its owner had planned a mixed-use building with 900 apartments, then dropped it when costs went up. Now the plan is to lease it to Tesla for charging.

Same lot. Very different future.

If you own a parking lot, here's what I'd check

1. Zoning. Is fleet charging, vehicle storage or parking allowed by right on your lot? With a permit? Or not mentioned at all?
2. Power. How close is the nearest substation, and how much capacity is left? Call the utility before you call a broker.
3. Location. Are you inside an AV service area, or near airports, venues and dense neighbourhoods?
4. Neighbours. Who lives next door? Santa Monica shows what a 24-hour operation next to homes can cost.
5. Your plan. Hold for an AV lease, redevelop, or sell. Decide with the first four answers in hand.

That's the kind of screening we do at Bucky: checking lots against zoning and site constraints to see what each one could become.

The upside: we get the land back

This is the part I find most exciting.

If fewer people own cars, we need fewer parking spaces. Some of that land goes to depots and staging. A lot of it doesn't need to be parking at all.

A quarter of downtown San Antonio can become something other than parking. Wide roads can give a lane back to trees and bikes. A garage can hold homes below and a park on the roof.

That's the payoff of fewer private cars. Not because cars are bad, but because they've been sitting on some of the best land in our cities for a long time.

So, where do you want to live?

Back to the question.

If an AV can take you 90 minutes out while you nap, maybe you move to the edge.

If the parking lot down the street becomes 200 homes and a park, maybe you move to the middle.

Either way, AVs need somewhere to sleep. And where they sleep will shape where we live.

The parking lot isn't dying. It's getting a new tenant.