The reports of suburbia’s death have been greatly exaggerated. The emergence of driverless cars–like past innovations in transportation technology–will actually put significant pressure on our cities to expand. As this pressure increases, rich, white-collar workers will be more likely to live in prosperous areas beyond the suburbs. This shift will bring important–but familiar–policy challenges as segregation increases across our largest cities.

Will it happen? And if it does, when? The emergence of new transport technologies will put continued pressure on cities to expand outward as households seek bigger homes on bigger lots in less developed locales. This migration, however, isn’t a groundbreaking transformational shift. It’s more of history repeating itself, but it’s unlikely to happen quickly but rather over the coming decades.

New transportation technology has been driving an urban exodus for more than a hundred years: in the mid-1800s, omnibuses allowed households to move out from city centers to inner-ring suburbs; at the turn of the 20th century, streetcars paved the way for suburbs; and in the middle of 20th century, personal cars and the new interstate highway system created the vast commuter suburbs we know today.

Driverless cars will mark the beginning of society’s expansion to the exurbs. The game changer here is that driverless cars will lower the time cost of commuting (that is, the opportunity cost of not being able to do other things while driving a vehicle) rather than just the operational costs (which includes the costs of fuel, vehicle maintenance, insurance, etc.). This subtle yet important difference disproportionately benefits higher-income households–allowing them to exurbanize, leaving middle and low-income households behind.

There are three reasons that rich households will drive exurban expansion. First, high-income households have a higher opportunity cost of time: earning $100 per hour means your time cost, according to the market, is greater than someone who earns $30. This means these higher income consumers stand to reap greater financial benefits from adopting time-saving modes of transport, such as driverless cars. As such, they will likely be early and more widespread adopters of driverless cars.

Second, housing consumption is income elastic. That means as people make more money, their desire to live in larger homes with more open space and better public services increases. On average, high-income households live in homes that are 43% and 22% larger than low- and middle-income households, respectively. What’s more, this difference in home size preference by income class (inferred through the average number of rooms in a home) has persisted at least as far back as data allow us to go (1980), and likely further. In fact, their demand for larger homes has outweighed their time cost of commuting to the point that, aggregately, they’re currently willing to spend more time commuting than lower income households. As a result, there’s a strong argument that rich, white-collar workers are more likely to use driverless cars to live in areas that have larger homes, which tend to be on the urban periphery.

Last, and most importantly, high-income households are more likely to engage in knowledge work that can at least be partially done while riding in a driverless car. This last point is important. Since driverless cars theoretically allow white-collar workers to spend their commute time being productive, blue-collar workers can’t afford to waste time commuting to work (though they are often forced to). So though post-recession trends have seen a slight increase in the share of households living in cities, we think driverless cars will create a future where low- and middle-income households live in city centers surrounded by wealthy exurbs.