I feel like the increase in suburbanization due to self-driving cars is probably pretty small over person-driven cars. Given the low building density that human-driven cars create (read: parking lots) there's some hope that a large change in car parking behavior would lead to lots of infill development.

If your commute is "sitting in an office doing email or taking calls" instead of "having to babysit your car through traffic" you're gonna see some significant behavioral changes.

The parking lot point is interesting, I hadn't thought about that.

But it's not obviously better to me: commuting behavior is very time-of-day determined, and the cars are gonna have to be somewhere in between rush hours. You don't want them on the road, and you can probably shift around to catch other sorts of predictable demand, but environmentally you're gonna want to minimize the total nubmer of miles driven without passengers.

EDIT: so in areas with less development and commmuters are parking their cars in surface lots all day, yeah, you don't need those surface lots for commuters + all the other lots at retail, residential, etc all at once if the cars are moving around to other uses during the day. But in denser recent-development areas where office parks predominantly have underground or garage parking it may be harder to realize infill there.

There are a lot of possible changes possible with autonomous vehicles (long term, I think it will be rare for an asset that costs tens of thousands of dollars to sit idly for 80+% of its life), but, for a simple example, imagine how many cars could fit in a perfectly packed parking lot: cars packed bumper to bumper and no need to leave space for doors to open.

I don't know. I live in the exurbs anyway and just don't go into the city much. But, if I had effectively a personal driver and I could work in the car, the bar to a 30-60 minute drive in for the evening would be a lot lower for me.